Thoreau appears constantly in Emerson's journals. To the end of his life, Emerson regarded Thoreau as his best friend. Even when Alzheimer's disease hThoreau appears constantly in Emerson's journals. To the end of his life, Emerson regarded Thoreau as his best friend. Even when Alzheimer's disease had set in and memory disintegrated before wit (unable to call up the word "umbrella," he would say "the thing visitors carry away"), affection too outlived memory. "What was the name of my best friend?" he once had to ask. Emerson also wrote what is still the best single short piece ever done on Thoreau, but Thoreau was never able to do the same thing for Emerson. Perhaps he felt that Emerson, unlike Channing and Alcott, didn't need his good opinion. When Emerson's mother died in November of 1853, Thoreau helped in a major way with the funeral arrangements, and in a journal note a few days later, there is this admission: "If there is any one with whom we have a quarrel, it is most likely [with] that one [who] makes some just demand on us which we disappoint." In his current draft of Walden, after the glowing testimonials to Channing and Alcott, Thoreau writes, "There is one other with whom I had 'solid seasons,' long to be remembered, at his house in the village and who looked in upon me from time to time." It is the saddest sentence in the book, because of what it does not, will not say. Perhaps it is merely the ultrasimple truth of Cordelia, but the most important friendship of Thoreau's life is buried in that flat sentence with no further attempt at a public marker.
Just as sad - no simpler word exists - is the fact that however esteemed and even loved Thoreau was, he was often severely misunderstood by those closest to him. Emerson came to be so out of touch with Thoreau's reading and writing as to think that the man who wanted to create new Vedas lacked ambition. Sophia was so far from understanding what he was after in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that she could be reported as having found "parts of it that sounded to me very much like blasphemy," and Channing once admitted that "I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life."
The whole matter - whether the Roman and Venetian residence of certain American artists of the 1850s was a severe academy of greatness or a cloudy batThe whole matter - whether the Roman and Venetian residence of certain American artists of the 1850s was a severe academy of greatness or a cloudy bath of sociable dilettantism - is rather phantasmagoric; the artist-life, in the romantic conditions and in the romantic good faith, is a thing of the past. Is it? James goes on to say that Italy as of his writing - 1903 - is too touristic to be a site of pure artistic pilgrimage. I can't believe that Henry James, of all people, would sound so final on so rich a question, even if he was feeling old - and so on to volume 2!...more
“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old ‘individualist’ tradition ‘that made this country great’ is only a painless way to get around seein“To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old ‘individualist’ tradition ‘that made this country great’ is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are - not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future...The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment, and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insist on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity...”
“The Angels’ collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. They insist and seem to believe that the swastika fetish is no more than an anti-social joke, a guaranteed gimmick to bug the squares...if they wanted to be artful about bugging the squares they would drop the swastikas and decorate their bikes with the hammer and sickle. That would really raise hell on the highways...”
“He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary.” (A brilliant politician with a moral compass and the ability to imagine the judgements o“He was that rarest of men: a supremely realistic visionary.” (A brilliant politician with a moral compass and the ability to imagine the judgements of posterity.) Like Lincoln, like Grant - and the three are companions on an old Cuban cigar box lid, “Los Inmortales.” To me Washington seems a heroic template for Lincoln and Grant, showing how one disciplines “a truly monumental personal ego” and “a massive personal agenda” - and, in Grant’s case, a primal ease in violence - to larger national interests, to themes of the common good. All three saw their opportunity in failing systems and were quick to pounce; they used their opportunity to establish and restore the United States; none established dynasties - Washington very purposefully so, sterile, he minced his estate among many heirs and freed his slaves.
“Washington’s powers of judgement derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions”; cue, for contrast, Jefferson and his fatuous self-deception, his agile intellectual masturbation; “the self Washington made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental,” the education of “an adventurer and soldier.” “Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal.”...more
A "just the facts, ma'am" kind of book. Not much media history or cultural criticism. Nor much wit. (I had to refresh myself with Wayne Koestenbaum's A "just the facts, ma'am" kind of book. Not much media history or cultural criticism. Nor much wit. (I had to refresh myself with Wayne Koestenbaum's Jackie Under My Skin from time to time.) I imagine the ideal Jackie book as a novel, a "maximalist" juggle of different styles and forms: part verse (pastiches of Millay for youth, Plath for childbirth and caked blood, Cavafy for age), part epistolary (Sévigné, intimate gossip), part casual social-political chronicle (Saint-Simon's court memoirs, the Goncourt Journal) studded with acidic portraits, and everything pierced through with a lonesome lyricism, like Salter's Light Years, with the enigmatic, essentially solitary wife Nedra.
Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see....more
I found the chapter on Ralph Ellison especially interesting. I wish there'd been a full chapter on John Berryman - he's on the cover, and some of his I found the chapter on Ralph Ellison especially interesting. I wish there'd been a full chapter on John Berryman - he's on the cover, and some of his lines haunt the text. ...more
His career is a striking example of the “American Way of War” – pre-World War II. That way being: grudgingly educate a skeleton cadre of poorly paid mHis career is a striking example of the “American Way of War” – pre-World War II. That way being: grudgingly educate a skeleton cadre of poorly paid military professionals that in “peacetime” polices the frontier – policing, for the indigenous people, having a spectrum of meanings, from sympathetic mediation to pitiless massacre – and build canals, dams, roads and bridges. But when a big war starts up, they have to slap into shape sudden levees of volunteers and/or draftees.
Of all American generals, it seems Pershing had to build the greatest army in the shortest time – two million men and women in nineteen months – the rather modestly titled “American Expeditionary Force” – and ship it across the U-Boated Atlantic, and fight for prestige in Allied councils whose leading members looked down on him, and wished to feed his divisions into German guns under their tattered banners, instead of under his own blessed Stars and Stripes. His wife and two daughters died in a fire, a few years before his arrival in France, so there was that in the mix, somewhere behind the soldierly scowl.
He got the job done. He staffed and trained an independent army and slotted it into the Allied line, in time for the final go. He then conducted a “vast campaign that was a hideous disaster in every respect save one – it worked,” to borrow William McFeely’s description of Grant’s Wilderness battles. Hindenburg later said, “The American infantry in the Argonne [forest] decided the war.” Woodland fighting is what Americans knew, or had to remember. “Indian War” was the army’s traditional phrase for an ambiguous ordeal of sniping, ambush, and infiltration, over rugged ground. Riflemen popped their sticks in the gloom of trees. I think of Winslow Homer’s Skirmish in the Wilderness, and Private Witt’s jungle death sprint in Malick’s The Thin Red Line. But I’m getting picturesque. They also threw grenades, stuck knives, swung their rifles as clubs, and cleared trenches with pump shotguns, “trench brooms” (in Swiss meetings, the Germans, having perfected the flamethrower at Verdun, decried the American pump shotguns). Anyway, that American infantry decided the war, but at horrifying cost. Interwar “isolationism” can be heard as a slur on the American communities that lost sons and were barely told why.
What I like about the officer intelligentsia, call it that, is their realistic, no-bullshit understanding that the United States was on the course of empire, bent on expansion, and that markets open markets, wars make wars, and you must kill or frighten lots of of people. They have their own philosophic tone, a pessimism borne of the practical, of handling masses of men. Sherman is a phrasemaker I group with Benn and Cioran. Grant is a shrewd monk come down to lead armies. I picked up this book with a negative impression of Pershing – but he comes off looking pretty good next to his civilian chief, the village preacher Woodrow Wilson.
They also understood that the nation’s large-scale wars were spasms of expansion, volatile compounds of oligarchic scheming and public sentiment; the motley of citizens is more or less herded, but they can be powerfully whimsical. America’s best generals have always been courtiers and politicians, and their political-media performances make for an interesting gallery of characters. High command reveals how strength and weakness – or say shrewdness and folly – adaptability and cussedness – ambition and indifference – are mixed within each man. Patton was Pershing’s protégé, but they were entirely different men, when it came to sniffing political winds, not to mention tank theory.
Their greatest challenge, aside from combat, was the civilian, and therefore Congressional delusion that American democracy was guaranteed by the public refusal to fund an expensive standing army and its attendant bogey, an arrogant and parasitic officer class. That conceit is amusing because America’s first president was a general – though a theatrically humble one – and notable military managers have always contended for or been proposed for the presidency; and Americans have often elected them. Jackson, Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower. Scott tried in 1852 but lost – so did McClellan in 1864. Pershing went through the exploratory motions in 1920, but in Lacey’s account his heart wasn’t in it.
An anecdote: teenage Ulysses S. Grant didn’t want to go to West Point, and on his long, dallying journey there from Ohio, he was heartened by news that the Congressmen were then debating the abolition of the Academy, lest it become a nest of aristocracy. Four years later Grant, clad in the sharpest blue, rode home through Cincinnati – fitting place-name! A grimy scamp barked from the gutter: “Soldier! Will you work? No, sir—ee; I’ll sell my shirt first!” The incident gave him, he said, “a distaste for military uniform that I never recovered from,” and it is one of the reasons why, at the capitulation of Lee, in the hour of triumph, Grant was mudspattered and swordless, in his “travelling suit,” his finery in baggage far behind. He then got back to Washington as fast as possible, to cancel the war contracts – the real parasites.
But back to Pershing. What a life! When age three – 1863 – Confederate-allied guerillas burned his father’s store in Missouri. Missouri, of the famous Compromise that staved off civil war for one last generation; a middle-border arena of partisan militias, divided families, volunteer mobs, and finally of the flagless Jesse James, continuing the war in outlawry; a state where Grant’s slaveholding in-laws held a shabby country seat, and put on plantation airs. Pershing remembered his mother holding him to the floor during the raid. He went to West Point opportunistically, like so many in those days – industrious young provincials looking for a free college education, not a life in the profession of arms. “A man who graduates from here is set for life,” scribbled teen Grant to home. At West Point Pershing glimpsed Grant, and developed a cult of the old man. As Captain of Cadets his senior year – 1885 – Pershing marched the Corps of Cadets down to the tracks, where they presented arms as Grant’s funeral train passed.
After graduation, Pershing was assigned to a regiment of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” the all-black Tenth US Cavalry, and saw service in the desert Southwest, and in Cuba, where he led his company in the mixed-unit multiracial charge up San Juan Hill that the media attributed solely to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. He was for a time an instructor at West Point, where he was something of a martinet. Lacey calls the teaching stint Pershing’s only “failure of leadership.” The cadets hated him and called him “Nigger Jack” for his service with the Tenth. The nickname stuck, in army circles. The newspapers of 1917 genteeled it to “Black Jack.”
After the Spanish-American War, Pershing served two stints in the newly annexed Philippines, among the Muslim Moros of Mindanao. In Lacey’s telling Pershing was a tactful master of counterinsurgency – “prestige” before “body count.” He studied Moro dialects and tribal rivalries, and made himself fearsome, but eased off when diplomatically appropriate, alternately fighting and befriending the tribal chiefs, or sultans, as they styled themselves. In one instance he disdained to give battle to an ambush he sensed to be harmlessly demonstrative, and so shamed the band into something like allegiance, or temporary placidity.
I want to read more about his march around Lake Lanao, a feat that astonished the Moros, and lived on in a sort of legend, as the Spanish had never been able to do such a thing; to my ear, the march echoes Sherman’s through Georgia, and Sherman’s aphorism that a feebly opposed stomp through an enemy’s inner country provides the essence of humiliation. Lacey says that Pershing besieged many Moro strongholds, but always left an obvious path of escape through his lines, for the fighters who didn’t want to die the next day. That is the way of Grant, who after the fall of Vicksburg wisely paroled his prisoners, rather than carting them North. Deserters and the dispirited make a shadow army. Send them home, where they will spread stories of your power. In 1944, when Pershing was a permanent resident of the Walter Reed Army Hospital, he was told that
when MacArthur and his senior commanders came ashore on the Philippine island of Jolo the first person to greet them was the old sultan of Jolo. He told MacArthur that he had submitted to Pershing as a warrior in 1905 and had stayed loyal to the United States ever since. He also informed MacArthur that he and other Moros had proven their loyalty by killing any Japanese soldier who ventured away from their camp.
That may have been bullshit, but Pershing’s name is lodged in it, and bullshit always means something. ...more
Epic poems are wearisome, Poe said. This is a work of genius - but I'm relieved to be done. Epic poems are wearisome, Poe said. This is a work of genius - but I'm relieved to be done. ...more
Read this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narRead this for the superbly nasty Warren Bogart, a villain righteous in his contempt, critically intricate in his abuse, and for that worthy of the narrator's single sympathetic glance his way. Charlotte Douglas, his ex-wife, is the kind of female character Didion is known for: numb, baffled, drifting in and out. I don't find characters like Charlotte very interesting, but Didion does milk a kind of poetry from their stunting and disappointment, their air of unfulfillment; and Didion's portraits have at least a documentary value, as we're littered with Charlottes, women who had an illusion of an idea of themselves at, say, age 19, but who soon hit a rock, and in the subsequent years allow their spouses and lovers to talk over them, talk for them, while she warbles ineffectually over the souvenirs of youth. ...more
On February 6, 1874, their new house - the commander's house, largest in the fort - caught fire in the middle of the night...LibbiMy favorite odd bit:
On February 6, 1874, their new house - the commander's house, largest in the fort - caught fire in the middle of the night...Libbie lost her most valuable dresses and many sentimental items, including a wig made from her husband's famous long hair, cut when they married a decade ago.
Grisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining throuGrisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining through white deck awnings - into labyrinthine tombs, zones of industrial disaster, poison pockets of chemical menace. Also, as sites of mass carnage, these wrecks shat on the democratic conceit of individuated sailors as sons of families and hopeful citizens - "Join the Navy, Learn a Trade"- and the religious conceit of a named headstone over identified remains. Raymer and the other divers worked in total darkness, felt their way in an oily murk; they were guided by topside tenders explaining the lucid ship's plans through the helmet phones; they risked their lives in every descent to make working, personal surveys of the collapsed decks, the bubbles of explosive gases, the jagged traumas of metal, the clusters of bloated bodies being eaten by crabs, and the absurdly comical bricolage of debris. And, of course, they recovered tons upon tons of shells and still-usable equipment, and righted and dewatered the salvageable ships (there's a war on, you know, and every bullet counts). Raymer is often funny, ribald; he doesn't pretend he and his team weren't also twenty-one year olds thinking of pussy and booze. He describes youthful insouciance and antic shore liberty with nice dirty immediacy, but also describes the daily work so finely that the shadows of later reflection fall just where they should....more