Birthday wishes

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I suspect that the fact of my being an American is a lot like the fact of my being male: it affords me almost incalculable unearned privilege, and, while I can (and do try to) think about it and analyze the way that it plays, subconsciously and overtly, into my thoughts and feelings and assumptions--most likely into all of them--and thereby gain some distance from and knowledge of the essence of that identity, at the same time the distance will never be such that I can say, definitively, "This is what it is like to be an American," or still less, "This is what it would be like not to be an American."

Anglophilia and analysis only take you so far, the former because, really?, the latter because rational analysis cannot always chase out such deeply woven currents of being.

So for my nation's birthday, I offer some disjointed recent gleanings to accompany the delightfully ridiculous weeklong orgy of explosives in which my neighborhood annually indulges.

First, I'll draw on a letter sent by John Keats in October 1818 to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, then resident in Louisville, Kentucky:

Dilke, whom you know to be a Godwin perfectibility man, pleases himself with the idea that America will be the country to take up the human intellect where England leaves off--I differ with him greatly. A country like the United States, whose greatest Men are Franklins and Washingtons, will never do that. They are great Men, doubtless, but how are they to be compared to those our countrymen Milton and the two Sydneys? The one is a philosophical Quaker full of mean and thrifty maxims, the other sold the very Charger who had taken him through all his battles. Those Americans are great, but they are not the sublime Man--the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime.

Oh, how much one could disagree with Keats about Franklin! Washington, fine: impressive, great, a man for whose sense of duty it's impossible not to be grateful--but at the same time always coming across as emotionally and intellectually a bit flat. Jefferson you can wrangle with, Hamilton you can joust with, Lincoln--well, it's best we not derail this with my love of Lincoln. Washington you are stuck simply admiring.

But Franklin? All the smallness and greatness of humanity in one package, endlessly inventive and endlessly humane, beguiled by the ladies, in love with France, distracted almost in almost exactly inverse proportion to the direct discipline of his maxims, embodying in his pot-bellied person the linchpin of American democracy. Oh, how not to love Franklin?

As for the sublime . . is it wrong of me to think that, at a minimum, the late Donna Summer achieved it around minute ten of a couple of her greatest disco anthems?

But in general one can't quite trust the English on the subject, can one? George III would be proud of what Jessica Mitford reports in this letter, sent on August 8, 1959 from London to civil rights activist Marge Franz:

One rather noticeable thing is the solid anti-Americanism of all sections of the population, rich & poor, right & left. I've yet to meet one person who has the least desire to go to America, or one who has been there & liked it. It is a queer mixture of ordinary English chauvinism, snobbishness, intellectual snobbishness, & disapproval of American policies. Rather well worth analyzing & cataloguing, it might make a good article. . . . Madeau Stewart, 35 year old executive at BBC, no doubt solid conservative: "Aren't Americans awfully ignorant on the whole? Don't you find it depressing not having anyone to talk to?"

Mitford's take on the attitude of the English in the Eisenhower years is corroborated by this passage from a letter sent by George Lyttelton to Rupert Hart-Davis on May 15, 1957:

It is all wrong, I know, but I cannot ever take Americans quite seriously--I mean their tastes and judgments and values, though now and then one strikes an absolutely Class I man, e. g. the late Judge Wendell Holmes. But either I always have bad luck with their novelists, or I just don't know my way about. I remember liking Steinbeck's first best-seller, but last week, seeing his name, I wasted half-a-crown on his The Wayward Bus to read in the train. Not a single character who was not either loathsome or silly.

As someone who works in publishing--and buys a ridiculous number of books--I can't help but apply Keats's epithet for Franklin's maxims, "mean," to anyone well-situated who laments the cost of a disappointing book. The time wasted, certainly, but the cost?

That said, the marketing person in me can't help but be amused by what follows:

The blurb calls it a ruthless picture, showing what people are really like, i.e. all in need of an ounce of civet. Is the whole of U.S.A. thinking of nothing but the female bosom?

An understandable question, but the answer is no: even then, there was Ray Bradbury, among the least sex-obsessed of novelists, who in his Paris Review interview said,

I like to think of myself going across America at midnight, conversing with my favorite authors.

And then there's the sublimity--unquestionable, I say--of this exchange, overheard at Mineta San Jose International Airport (ah, Mineta, a Japanese-American reminder of America's gloriously diverse essence) on Monday:

TODDLER
Making gestures representing an explosion
Boom! Boom!

DAD
Stop it.

TODDLER
Boom! Boom! BOOM!

And finally . . . well, you didn't believe me earlier when I said I would leave Lincoln out of this, did you? From the glory that is the First Inaugural:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Good god, I love that man. Enjoy the holiday, fellow patriots. Watch out for explosions, ye better angels.

Dear snooping posterity,

{Photo by rocketlass of our niece writing postcards.}

Lest you get the wrong impression from my post the other night in which I quoted Virginia Woolf writing that "the Victorian age killed the art of letter writing with kindness," I thought I should tonight state very clearly my firmly held belief that there can never be too many letters! Never! I want the letters of all my favorite authors published in multiple, handsome volumes! With rich annotations! And while we're at it, let's make them fully searchable on the Internet!

That said, a volume of selected letters is a splendid thing as well, and in a just world great glory would accrue to those patient scholars who winnow down the corpus of correspondence to meet the requirements of both the marketplace and bookbinding technology. Tempting though some of the complete sets may be--I'm looking at you, Lord Byron--a stack of Selecteds around one's laptop exudes a powerful joy of its own, because by dipping in almost at random, one can pluck such gems as this, from a letter Gustave Flaubert sent to Louise Colet on Easter of 1853:

The impression that my travel notes made upon you has prompted me, dear Muse, into strange reflections on the hearts of men and women. Decidedly, they are not the same, whatever people say.

On our side there is candour, if not delicacy; we are in the wrong even so, for this candour is a kind of hard-heartedness. If I had omitted my impressions of women, then you would not have found anything to cause you distress! Women keep everything to themselves. They never confide in your unequivocally. The most they can manage is to set you guessing, and, when they tell you things, it comes with such quantities of sauce that the meat disappears beneath it. But if we allow ourselves two or three delinquent little ejaculations, even though our hearts are not really in it, they start moaning and groaning!

Or this, from a letter Barbara Pym sent to Philip Larkin on September 14, 1964:

Our library has been made slightly more interesting--in a macabre way--by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn't come in till 10:35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don't have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.

As a nod to friends who have recently wrestled with book proofs, I'll pass along this opening to a letter sent by the aforementioned Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray:

Dear Sir--I have received & return by this post under cover--the first proof of "Don Juan."--Before the second can arrive it is probably that I may have left Venice--and the length of my absence is so uncertain--that you had better proceed to the publication without boring me with more proofs--I sent by the last post an addition--and a new copy of "Julia's letter," perceiving or supposing the former one in Winter did not arrive.--Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy--there is no indelicacy--if he wants that, let him read Swift--his great Idol--but his imagination must be a dunghill with a Viper's nest in the middle--to engender such a supposition about this poem.--For my part I think you are all crazed.

The next time a deadline looms, you might consider seeing if you can put over that closing line.

Staying with the publishing theme, here's Jessica Mitford, getting right to the point in a letter to a literary agent friend in 1990:

Thanks SO much for yr letter, what a pleasure to get it. PUBLISHING: Too ghastly here, too, as I'm sure you know.

Here's a more circumspect passage from a letter E. B. White sent his editor on May 24, 1952, after first seeing the jacket design for Charlotte's Web:

Thanks for the dummy cuts and the jacket design. I like everything. The group on the jacket is charming. My only complaint is that the goose looks, for some reason, a bit snakelike. Perhaps this is because its beak is open, or perhaps because the eye is round like a snake's. You sound so rushed that I presume you don't want to make any revisions, and I would be satisfied have the jacket go as is, if it seems right to you. But no goose-lover in this house is satisfied.

The web effect is OK for the purposes of jacket design but that type of rather mussy Charles Addams attic web is not right for the illustrations. I'm sure that Garth realizes that. Charlotte weaves quite an orderly, symmetrical web.

Closing this batch of publishing correspondence is Herman Melville, who, in writing to his editor about Moby-Dick, not unsurprisingly brings the spooky:

It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship's cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.

I've only just begun to flip through the new collection of Noel Coward's letters, but I've already found great pleasures, like this installment, sent from New Jersey in November of 1926, of his weekly letters to his doting mother:

The play, dear, has all the earmarks of being a failure! Gladys and Jack and I sat grandly in a box on the First Night and watched it falling flatter and flatter. And I must admit we got bad giggles! They were all expecting something very dirty indeed after the English Censor banning it and they were bitterly disappointed.

Francine Larrimore was very good an A. E. Matthews, too, tho' he forgot most of his lines.

Speaking of parenting, Lord Chesterfield's cynical letters to his son always reward a browse; here's an entertaining bit from a particularly long one, sent on January 8, 1750:

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly: these people deal in the marvellous; they have seen some things that never existed; they have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. Has anything remarkable been said or done in any place, or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves, unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. Thy are always the heroes of their own fables; and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention, by it. Whereas, in truth, all they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust: for one must naturally conclude, that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity, will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt, for one minute, of my veracity.

Note that Lord Chesterfield, as is his wont, is not objecting to lying, per se, but to lying for no reason.

I'll close with some top-shelf cruel wit, from some masters of the art. First, a few lines from Nancy Mitford, writing from Paris to Evelyn Waugh on August 20, 1952:

Here we are obsessed by the fate of Sire Jacques Drumont, an English millionaire who has been murdered with his wife & small child while camping out. Though all are very sorry for Sire Jacques, & Lady Ann his wife, it is rather hoped that this will cure English millionaires of their mania for camping, they are a bore & start forest fires everywhere.

Finally, there's this comment from Waugh to Mitford from April 8, 1951:

Everyone I met in London was in debt & despair & either much too fat or much too thin.

Note to today's writers: put down those iPhones and write more letters! I'll want to read them when you're dead and I'm old!

It's so nice to go trav'ling . . . ?

[Photo by rocketlass]

Because it seems I've been doing more than my share of traveling lately, I offer up some notes on getting around.

From Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War for Independence (2007), by John Ferling:

Little time passed before it was evident that the leadership had grossly underestimated the difficulties that would be confronted in the wilds of Maine. Within the initial three days--over a fifty-mile stretch that drew the army well beyond Maine's last settlement--the soldiery came on a succession of churning rapids and disquieting falls, including some "very bad rips," as one soldier noted, which resulted in far more portaging than had been anticipated. . . . The men were wet constantly--"you would have taken" them for "amphibious Animals," [Benedict] Arnold wrote to Washington--and the night temperatures routinely plummeted below freezing. Each morning the men awakened, said one, to find their clothing "frozen a pane of glass thick." Before he had been in the interior of Maine a week, Arnold reported the "great Fatigue" of his men and quietly worried over whether he had brought along a sufficient supply of food and blankets. The men grew concerned as well, not only about the dwindling supplies. They "most dreaded" the cold, fearing not only disease, but anxious at their fate should they fall on ice and fracture a leg or hip while deep in the wilderness.

Well, maybe it's better if one keeps out of the wilderness (let alone the Continental army), sticking to cities instead?

From Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007), by Emily Cockayne:

In a few cases [of deadly road accident] the driver was found guilty of causing an accident by failing to pay due care and attention. The attitudes of the carters and coachmen were questioned. In particular, commentators complained about the lackadaisical way the drivers positioned themselves on their vehicles so that they could not easily see the road ahead. It was recorded in 1692 that "most of the carters, Carmen, and draymen that pass and repass with their several carts, carriages, and drays through the public streets, lanes and places [of London and Middlesex] . . . make it their common and usual practice to ride negligently on their several carts." Often nobody guided the horse, "so that oftentimes their horses, carts, carriages, and drays run over young children and other their Majesties' subjects, passing in the streets about their lawful occasions, whereby many lose their lives."

It seems that at least one recognizable type of driver-for-hire has persisted through the centuries; imagine how much more imperiled the lives of those seventeenth-century Londoners would have been had their draymen had cellphones on which to chatter away throughout their shifts.

Speaking of which, Stacey saw a cabbie yesterday who would, I think, have done well in the rough-and-tumble of seventeenth-century London: after his running of a red light led to his cab blocking an intersection, he was verbally assailed by a stuck motorist--which he took as an occasion to, after shouting to his far, "Hold on!", get out of his cab and go fight the other motorist. The last Stacey saw of the incident was some police cars heading that way, lights flashing.

So maybe a train would be a better idea?

From a letter from E. B. White to Henry Allen of 22 February, 1955 telling about White's attempt to catch a 6:30 train,collected in Letters of E. B. White (1977, 2006):

I looked at my watch again and it said 6:31. We screamed into the station yard, jumped out, and the engineer saw us coming and I guess he took pity on me. They had the train all locked up, ready to go, the bell was ringing for the start. The taxi driver grabbed my bags and whirled down the platform, and I trotted behind , carrying my fish pole and the Freethy lunch box. The trainman saw this strange apparition appearing, and he opened up the coach door. I plunged on board and the driver threw the bags on, and away we went. I had no ticket, no Pullman receipt for my room, just a fish pole. For the next hour or two, I was known all through the train as "that man." But the porter got interested in my case, the way porters do, and he stuck me in the only empty bedroom and told me to sit there till we got to Waterville. The conductor stopped by, every few minutes, to needle me, and between visits I would close the door and eat a sandwich and mix myself a whiskey-and-milk, in an attempt to recuperate from my ordeal. At Waterville, the conductor charged in and said: "Put on your hat and follow me!" Then he dashed away, with me after him. He jumped off the train and disappeared into the darkness. When I located him in the waiting room he looked sternly at me and said, "Are you the man?"

"I'm the man," I replied.

"Well," he said, "go back and sit in the room."

Then planes, and luxury travel--being met at the airport and whisked away to a spa and all that instead.

From a letter from Jessica Mitford to Robert Truehaft of November 15, 1965, collected in Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford (2006):

I arrived more dead than alive, the plane being 2 hours late in the end. Shall draw a veil over that. Was met by a gliding lady (they all glide here, rather than walk) and driver. The latter drove me here, the glider having to leave and fetch another arriving flower. As you can imagine, I was pretty well sloshed by the time the plane finally downed.

Ultimately, perhaps the key is not to care about the mode, but just to set oneself into motion and hope for the best. I'll leave that for James Laughlin, who in the following note from his sort-of-autobiography, The Way It Wasn't (2006), seems not much to care about the details of his upcoming trip--and while I suppose such blithe unconcern is easier for a wealthy heir than for the rest of us, his approach does seem likely to be satisfying.

I am going to see Gertrude Stein for a few days on Friday and then I am going to Lausanne -- Basel -- Freiburg -- Strassbourg -- Stutgart (H. Baines) -- Wurzburg -- Erfurt -- Leipzig -- Dresden -- Prague -- Brunn -- Bratislava -- Budapest -- Vienna -- Linz -- Salzburg -- Ljubljana -- Zagreb -- Dubrovnik. What all this will add up to is not known, but if I write a poem in each place, I shall have had some practice in this matter.

Or I suppose you could travel by not traveling at all, as seems one explanation of an image featured in a show that Luc Sante's currently curating at apexart, The Museum of Crime and the Museum of God. It's an old black-and-white print that incorporates two photos, the larger one showing a black man in clerical robes waist-deep in a wide, muddy stream, an "x" scratched into the print near him.. The caption, apparently typed on it at the time the photo was printed, reads:

Reverend C. H. Parrish, D.O., standing in the River Jordan, April 13, '04, a short distance from the place where John the Baptist baptized the Saviour. See cross-mark.

The inset photo shows the same man in the same robes standing under a tall, thick, knobbly tree, and the caption reads:

Dr. Parrish standing under the Oldest Olive Tree (1800 years old) in the Garden of Gethsemane, April 16, '04.

Meanwhile, the print itself is captioned thus:

Photographed while attending the World's Fourth Sunday-School Convention, held at Jerusalem, April 18, '04.

All of which would be fine except that the two photos are obvious fakes: the man, who is exactly the same in both photos, has been cut from a different photo and pasted in place. In the river photo, he's been cut in half to show that he's partially submerged, while the olive tree photo presents him whole.

Now, perhaps there's a reason for this fakery. Perhaps the Reverend Parrish's photos from the Sunday-School conference simply didn't turn out, and he felt that a little cut-and-paste work would be more likely to draw his parishioners closer to holiness than seeing nothing at all from his trip. But what if that's not the case?

What if the Reverend Parrish didn't go to Jerusalem at all? Presuming that his parishioners paid for his trip, just what, this hundred years on, do we think he actually did with the money? Did it go to a lady friend in dire need of mink? Was it laid on a can't-miss horse? Or did it support a trip to some lesser locale than Jerusalem--someplace far less exotic, historical, and sacred, but for all that far more congenial, hospitable, and fun? Someplace like Atlantic City?

Oh, that's probably enough speculation for a lovely summer Saturday. I'll let Sammy Cahn close it out, with the end of his "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling":

It's very nice to be footloose
With just a toothbrush and comb
It's oh so nice to be footloose
But your heart starts singin' when you're homeward wingin' across the foam.

It's very nice to go trav'ling
But it's oh so nice to come home.

As Frank himself might say, ain't that the truth.