JUST SHOW: The Library of America's THE CIVIL WAR

                                     NECESSARY PREFACE   

            I have never had my own copy of Jay Leyda’s THE MELVILLE LOG though I have dipped into it over the years in libraries  and have always held it in mind when reading history and biographies. 

            So, finally I now have my own copy of a book that Leyda writes in the wish “to make this book and experience rather than a chore for the student.”  A book such as: “I have tried to hold to one main aim: to give each reader the opportunity to be his own biographer of Herman Melville, by providing him with the largest possible quantity of materials to build his own approach to this complex figure.” 

            What Leyda does is simply collect every published reference to the actual life of Melville from the moment of the public announcement of his birth to the funeral notice. Nothing could be simpler, more daring, more demanding of the reader, more suggestive… wouldn’t anyone want such a book for the life of Joyce, Tolstoy…

            Again, as in the inspiration for this blog, the ABC OF READING by Ezra Pound:::::  show do not tell.. do not explain too much--- rather show, reveal and trust the reader, of course this drives critics to distraction, drives nuts the propagandists of theory, those who seek to browbeat into belief future acolytes who will turn will do the same to their acolytes…  is there no figure more desrving of scorn and a public spitting upon than a disciple of a disciple of say  Derrida or Foucault or __________ (name your favorite tenured crank)

           

                                                                 ARGUMENT

            The fundamental appeal of the Library of America’s series of books on the American Civil War of which Year Three has just been published is the decision of  editors to trust their readers.  I am old enough to remember that when the 100th anniversary of the Civil War was celebrated it was portrayed as the triumph of the North via the books of Bruce Catton--- though always  somewhere was the great Civil War history from a more or less southern point of view by Shelby Foote---  but Catton was the most publicised historian and LIFE magazine made sure his triumphalist voice was the only popular voice.

            So as this is being written at the end of May, 2013.  Here is what we find when turning to the months of May and June 1863.

            150 years ago George Richard Browder, a Methodist minister, a slave owning farmer and secession sympathizer in Logan County, a Kentucky then occupied by the Union army reported that on May 26: 

 I went to town and took the oath of (allegiance to the United States) & as for me, I shall give no one an opportunity to convict me of violating it.  The dictates of humanity I cannot disregard. I never did & will not now encourage the rebellion but as a Christian I must be humane even if I have to feed an enemy when hungry.  Most of my old friends in town seemed very glad to see me & treated me most cordially.  For several days past the papers  have been rejoicing over the great Federal victories & the capture of great numbers of prisoners & cannon & military stores & it is believed that Vicksburg has fallen or must fall & also the greater part of the rebel army.  If this is true it is a severe blow to the rebellion & they have probably lost most more at Vicksburg than they gained at Frederickburg.  I feel like withdrawing my thoughts from all public matters & trying more to be a humble Christian & get safely out of this wicked world”

           

Note THE MELVILLE LOG is dedicated:  

                  THIS BOOK WAS BEGUN AS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR MY TEACHER SERGEI EISENSTEIN

            The advantage of reading the Library of America version of the Civil War is in the reality being shown.  A letter from Robert Gould Shaw, a 25 year old captain in a Massachusetts unit who has been sent to an island in South Carolina: 

            About noon we came in sight of Darien, a beautiful little town.  Our artillery peppered it a little, as we came up, and then our three boats made fast to the wharves, and we landed the troops,  The town was deserted, with the exception of two white women and two negroes.  (Colonel) Montgomery ordered all the furniture and movable property to be taken on board the boats.  This occupied some time; ad after the town was pretty thoroughly disemboweled, he said to me, I shall burn this town.”  He speaks always in a very low tone, and has quite a sweet smile when addressing you,  I told him, “I did not want the responsibility of it,” and he was only too happy to take it all on his shoulders; so the pretty little place was burnt to the ground, and not a shed remains standing; Montgomery firing the last buildings with his own hand… You must bear in mind, that not a shot had been fired at us from this place, and that there were evidently very few men left in it… The reasons he gave me for destroying Darien were, that the Southerners must be made to feel that this was a real war, and that they were to be swept away by the hand of God, like the Jews, of old.  In theory it might seem right to some, but when it comes to being made the instrument of the Lord’s vengeance, I myself don’t like it…

           

YET YET toward the end of the letter: 

            Today I rode to Pierce Butler’s plantation.  It is so an immense place and part of it very beautiful.  The house is small and badly built, like almost all I have seen here.  There are about ten of his slaves left there, all of them sixty or seventy years old.  He sold three hundred slaves about three years ago.  I talked with some, whose children and grandchildren were sold then, and though they said that was “a weeping day” they maintained that “mass Butler was a good massa,” and they would give anything to see him again… They said all the house servants had been taken in land by the overseers at the beginning of the war and they asked if we couldn’t get their children back to the island again.  They were all born and bred on the place and even selling away their families could not entirely efface their love for their master.  Isn’t it horrible to think of a man being able to treat such faithful creatures in such a manner?

            YET  YET  war finally is about killing and being killed.

            Later in the month from a letter dated 11 June 1863, a 28 year old Major in Pennsylvania cavalry, Henry C Whelan writes home about what came to be seen as the largest cavalry battle of the war.  Notice the word cut.

            …we dashed on, driving the Rebels into and through the woods, our men fighting with the sabre alone, whilst they used principally pistols.  Our brave fellows cut them out of the saddle and fought like tigers, until I discovered they were on both flanks, pouring a cross fire of carbines and pistols on us, and then tried to rally my men and make them return the fire with their carbines…

            …one officer rode close up on my right side and leveled his pistol, I stooped under his arm on “Lancer’s” neck as he fired, and gave him a hissing cut with my sabre as I flew by--- I then dropped my sabre on my wrist and drew my pistol and fired at all who came to close--- I passed a dismounted Rebel officer so close I could have cut his head off.  An Irishman, of Company K who was splendidly mounted stuck to me like a leech and called out from behind:  Major, there’s an officer--- shall I cut him down?”  I saw his horse was killed and he himself stood defenseless, so I told the man to let him alone.  That Irishman cried out, when I cut the rebel who has fired his pistol at me:  “Good for you, Major’, and gave a regular Irish whoop.

            Whelan’s horse Lancer is shot out from under him. 

            In a moment my orderly, Ward, of Company C, rode up to me, sprung to the ground and said, “Major take my horse—I have a carbine and can get back safely on foot.”  I mounted and rode back whilst Ward turned and shot a Rebel who was robbing “Lancer” of his saddle blanket.  Lieut. Lennig was lost at that place, whether killed, wounded or taken prisoner, we don’t know.  How I escaped through all I can’t imagine.  I was only grazed on the left wrist and didn’t know it till I saw my wrist bathed in blood.  The shot which killed “Lancer” passed close by my thigh through the saddle bag piercing Bulwer’s “What will he do with it”, which was strapped to the saddle bag.  I will send this book to you by mail.  It has some of Lancer’s blood on it.

            Of course next month, July, 150 years ago, Gettysburg. 

            I took my wife, Anna Saar and daughter, Elizabeth, to Gettysburg ten years ago toward the end of July and we talked the field across which Pickett’s charge marched… in the heat… the Library of America version of the Civil War is like that experience via words read, one never forgets the visceral feeling of the heat and with a little imagination… supplied by words read

THE WAR OF 1812: THIS APOLOGY OF DECAY

This apology of decay      

The nastiness of history. 

            The nightmare always associated with Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

            So of course the schools now avoid all the bad news by packaging history up as problems, pro and con, possible solutions… sometimes they call in over-looked voices, witnesses but always contaminated with the myth of critical thinking and the so-called uncovering the secret suppressed history and the inevitable conspiracy of some sort is urged into being so as to  nudge nudge their students into the know…

            An absence of any sense of chronological history sticks young people and most people in a constant present so that they can be  shaped by whatever is the current powers-to-be… to be set in a present moment when to have any thoughts of the past is to be forbidden under the pain of being thought old-fashioned, out of touch… so yes it was boring for teachers to listen to students reciting the list of presidents, the monarchs of England, the wars of the various countries…  but not boring for a young person as he or she would always be aware that whoever is the current rascal in charge is just that… the current one, no better and no worse than what has gone before… and so the inevitable hesitation before responding to the well crafted campaigns to sway, to give up thinking, to give up memory…

            Now, the sad reality constant disillusion to be replaced by a fake revival of some recent fashion while waiting for the next “new” enthusiasm

            Which might all be throat clearing for the pleasures of reading the new Library of America:  THE WAR OF 1812  Writings from America’s Second War of Independence.  You might know which one:  the Battle of New Orleans and Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British after the treaty of peace had been signed… yeah, the writing of the Star Spangled Banner… some naval battles… and as Bob Dylan sings in his song “Narrow Way”  on his latest CD: Ever since the British burned the White House down…

            Of course the Library of America has been doing some strategic planning of its own:  the really complex wars, the nastiest with still unsettled consequences:  the Mexican American War, the Spanish American War, the Korean War and the First World War…

            Just reciting the list:  I leave out the more than a hundred years war against the Indians…  allow me the old-fashioned word… that war which could never be resolved as to being either a simple war of conquest or of extermination.. but a hundred years war… that was something that happened in Europe…yet it continues on today, of course

            Such are the thoughts and why these LOA books are so important..

             

           But the nightmare…  Hannah Green in her singularly visionary book THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE has a theme: the history of Ohio and while she is now herself long gone I can imagine sharing with her this description of the aftermath of a battle between the Americans, the English and their Indian allies.  A sixteen year old Englishman John Richardson  reporting later in life on what he saw in an Indian village:             …were to be seen the scalps of the slain drying in the sun, stained on the fleshy side with vermilion dyes, and dangling in air they hung suspended from the poles to which they were attached together with hoops of various sizes, on which were stretched portions of human skin taken from various parts of the body, principally the hand and foot, and yet covered with the nails of those parts, while scattered along the ground were visible the members from which they had been separated and serving as nutriment to the wolf-dogs by which the savages are accompanied… stopping at the entrance of a tent occupied by a part of the Minoumini tribe we observed them seated round a large fire, over which was suspended a kettle containing their meal.  Each warrior had a piece of string hanging over the edge of the vessel and to this was suspended a food, which it will be presumed we heard not without loathing, consisted of part of an American… Any expression of our feelings as we declined the invitation they gave us to join in their repast, would have been resented by the Indians without much ceremony.

            

          Later in that year the same Richardson saw:  A tall powerful man--- a chief whom I  well knew… when within  twelve or fifteen paces  of the rifleman, he raised and threw his tomahawk, and with such precision and force that it immediately opened the skull, and extended him motionless on the earth.  Laying down his rifle, he drew forth his knife, and after having removed the hatchet from the brain, proceeded to make a circular incision throughout the scalp.  This done, he grasped the bloody instrument between his teeth and placing his knees on the back of the victim, while at the same times he fastened his fingers in the hair, the scalp was torn off without much apparent difficulty and thrust, still bleeding, into his bosom.  The warrior then arose, and after having wiped his knife on the clothes of the unhappy man returned it to its sheath, grasping at the same time the arms he had abandoned, and hastening to rejoin his comrades.  All this was the work of a few minutes.

             

        And here is Shadrach Byfield--- what a wonderful Biblical name---Shadrach-- how few are the names now available in the current moment of this blog… describes the result of being wounded at the age 25:  After a few days our doctor informed me that my arm must be taken off, as mortification had taken place. I consented and asked one of my comrades who has lately gone through a like operation: “Bill, how is to have an arm taken off?”  He replied, “Thee woo’t know, when it’s done.”  They prepared to blind me, and had men to hold me, but I told them there was no need of that.  The operation was tedious and painful, but I was enabled to bear it pretty well.  I had it dressed, and went to bed.  They brought me some mulled wine and I drank it.  I was then informed that the orderly had thrown my hand to the dung heap.  I arose, went to him and felt a disposition to strike him., My hand was taken up and a few boards nailed together for a coffin, my hand was put into it and buried on the ramparts.  The stump of my arm soon healed and three days after I was able to play a game of fives for a quart of rum.

             

           But that sort of glib comment of Stephen’s.. a comment I have known, chewed upon, used and heard used:  John Lukacs writes about Gyula Krudy,   He knew something that the psychiatrists of this century do not yet know, which is that on our dreams we really don’t think differently, we merely remember differently.

           

             And the last selection in the book is a memoir of the life of an American prisoner in Dartmoor.  It is said 20,000 Americans were held as prisoners.  Of course there were incidents and Lewis Peter Clover recounts the result of one of those incidents when their English guards turned on the prisoners:            On the floor opposite where I messed lay a handsome youth, of about fifteen years of age stiff, and sold as marble, pierced through the heart by a bayonet.  A few yards farther on, lay another: a ball had entered his forehead, and passed out at the back of his head.  I examined the spot the next morning and saw part of his brains which had been dashed against the wall nearly opposite the prison door. Among the wounded… another had a most miraculous escape with his life; a musket ball had passed through his mouth from side to side, taking out nearly the whole of his teeth.  I saw him after he had go well: he could take no food except with a spoon.

                                                  A PROPOSAL

From ABC OF READING by Ezra Pound:  Teaching. The problem of education.  If I could acquire a PhD, a fancy sober sounding name for a corporation, the ability to say what follows in say 200 pages I’d be a millionaire, as now:  

       The teacher or lecturer is a danger.  He very seldom recognizes his nature or his position.  The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

       France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes.

       I also have lectured.   The lecturer’s first problem is to have enough words to fill forty or sixty minutes.  The professor is paid for his time, his results are almost impossible to estimate.

       The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words.  The economic problem of the teacher (of violin or of language or anything else) is how to string it out so as to be paid for more lessons.

This apology of decay is from Gottfried Benn… that the prose books of Gottfried Benn are not available in English is a constant proof of the sheer incompetence of all these presses devoted to translation and the same goes for their failure to translate the famous three pamphlets of Celine… which remain un-translated for entirely different reasons as does the continued failure to translate the Diaries of Ernst Junger and his various collections of essays…

THE IMMATURITY OF CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN LITERATURE

How dare you!

Who do you think you are?

You’re not an expert.

You’re not a professor.

You’re not even Bulgarian.

                                         

                                         7

THE OCCASION.    Open Letter Books has now published three Bulgarian works of fiction:  A Short Tale of Shame by Angel Igov, 18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev and Thrown into Nature by Milen Ruskov.  Dalkey Archive Press some years ago published Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov and Northwestern University Press published a collection of his stories, And Other Stories. 

                                                      9

I WOULD suggest that the only connection these books has with Bulgaria occurs on the title page: “Translated from the Bulgarian.”  If I had the energy or inclination I could tease out the models primarily in American or English literature for these books but what is fundamentally missing from these novels and stories is any acknowledgement of the actual human experience in a county called Bulgaria. 

                                                               45

AND THEN I would go on to generalize and state that the reason for this is that Bulgaria is a psychologically damaged country that has not come to grips in any meaningful way with the devastation: moral, political, and historical, which was the result of both importation and imposition of the communist system starting on 9 September 1944.

                                                     3

            AS FAR  as anyone knows only Georgi Markov has attempted to describe the devastating consequences for the Bulgarian people of the communism and for this he was murdered by that regime for writing from his own experience within the ruling elites.

                                                           3h

            IMRE KERTESZ writing (in DOSSIER K) from within the awfulness of communist Hungary:  “that cheap conformity that undermined every moral and intellectual stand, that petit-bourgeois police state that called itself socialist but which regarded  that docile and corrupt, simpering and authoritarian, mind-numbing, semi-feudal, semi Asiatic, militaristic Horthyite society, governed from the handsomely built dictator’s waistcoat pocket as its true model.”  Do I need to remind anyone of Markov writing of how the communist bosses complained about how pathetic the palaces of the Tsars were and where they now had to live… and how accurately Kertesz is when applied to the so-called royal family of Bulgaria!  And of course Kertesz also reminds us that the communist regimes pioneered Holocaust denial but it had not been so named…

 

                                                                        9

            AN OBJECTION  is often raised:  how can you compare Bulgaria to… don’t you know… but I would reply  it is well known that there was no samizdat or underground literature in Bulgaria during the communism.  It was often repeated: we Bulgarians were too smart to do that.  And then the conversation goes on to talk about the obscurity of Bulgaria, the isolation, the history…

                                                            72

HOWEVER, here is a simple sentence ripped out of context describing Valeri Petrov to whose name is always added: he did much loved translations of Shakespear into Bulgarian--- I guess we are supposed to think of Pasternak while forgetting that Pasternak also wrote Doctor Zhivago--- but the sentence:  Petrov is a lifelong believing communist who came from a very left family.  

                For days I have been thinking about that sentence and I was trying to imagine a young German or Austrian describing some controversial but worthy figure as: a lifelong believing Nazi who came from a very right family or say a young Italian  to make it a bit more palatable: …a lifelong believing fascist who came from a very right family.  AND I well know that Petrov refused to sign the letter condemning Solzhenitsyn but it seems he has never realized the abyss that is the center of communist ideology with the necessity of murder in the service of ideology.

                                                                        69

            AND SO NOW we come to my point:::  only when writers begin to write books--- do I have to rehearse the names of those who did:  Uwe Johnson, Gunter Grass, Thomas Bernhard, Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Boll---  which do take up the simple question: mom, dad, grandpa, ma.. what did you do from 9 September 1944 until yesterday? 

                                                                       

                                                            69r

And that writer will be very rare indeed as he or she will have to deal with the privileges they received as a result of what dad, mom, grandpa/ma…did.  And they will have to find a form adequate to the purpose of revelation and not evasion.

                                                       83

OF COURSE this might be a long time coming as courage is not easily acquired or valued.  After the so-called changes the psychoanalyst George Kamen returned to Bulgaria and one of his projects was to talk with both former prisoners and guards of the communist concentration camps in Bulgaria.  He discovered that both groups of people were embarrassed by his questions and both denied at first that they had even been in the camps… and of course George also noted that there was no real genuine attempt to make a full and complete accounting for the crimes and thievery of the communist regime. 

                                                 

                                                      8

BULGARIA had not—looking back--- that good fortune to be really forced to account as did Germany… well, West Germany mostly.  Austria continued in its oral oblivion as it escaped this reckoning by being the first victim of fascism…

                                                                      99      

              THE SAD academics in the universities escaped any confrontation in Bulgaria with the recent past by falling into the forgetful incomprehensible arms of French critical theory and I most enjoyed the bizarre avoidance, the bizarre refusal to mature in Maria Todorova’s BONES OF CONTENTION in which she asserts she is going to describe a normal historical debate as an example of just how normal Bulgaria was back then though mentioning without irony the necessary presence of communist party representatives in each of the academic departments of the university but of course in her world of the high nomenklatura such party figures were always at the dinner table…

                                                                        91

            BUT WHAT HAVE YOU done is surely being muttered:  THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV is my answer…published and well-reviewed in the US and it even appeared in Bulgarian translation in ZVREMIK back in 1991… and I can only understand that it has not appeared as a book because its very content, the manner of presentation is a direct challenge to the failure of Bulgarian writers to imaginatively deal with the felt reality of their country and its long blighted history.  I continued my description of Bulgaria in the middle section of GOING TO PATCHOGUE in pages set in Bulgaria 1984 and FORGET THE FUTURE  I have described Bulgaria in the summer of 1990, in EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS I describe the useless death of an American academic who failed to write her thesis about Bulgarian women in the Nineteenth Century and about this pivots is both a description of even more recent times in Bulgaria and of the near past of 1967 in Sofia and in the far past at the Battle of Varna in 1444… 

                                                            35

My life changed when I got off the train in Sofia in 1967.  I am waiting for that Bulgarian novel that I can put on the shelf next to EXTINCTION or CORRECTION by Thomas Bernhard, PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas, PARADISO by Jose Lezama Lima, CHRIST VERSUS ARIZONA by Camilo Jose Cela, BRECHT AT NIGHT by Mati Unt, THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS by Herta Muller…

                                  

                                                   35a

ZIFT by Vladislav Todorov comes close to being a first step toward a refusal to forget but he is of late distracted by movie making… understandable of course but…

                                     

                                                     35b

TIME OF PARTING by Anton Donchev was the only Bulgarian novel to be widely published abroad  in English translation…  people are a little embarrassed by this but its uniqueness is in its depiction of humiliation… the taking away of Bulgarian young men for service in the Janissaries…  but to be scrupulous I did find in Oxford in 1990  a copy of Blaga Dimitrova’s JOURNEY TO ONESELF  which was published by Cassell in 1969… and even signed to English visitor in 1970, in Sofia… a novel as an act of repentance for the narrator being born into the wrong sort of family (Royalist) and subjecting herself to hard physical labor in the countryside…

                                         35c

NO POETS are mentioned as I was thinking in homage to Flann O’Brien that both during the communism and whatever you want to call what came after: the Standing Army of Bulgarian Poets is ever at the ready though one does know that to date none has come along to move over those statues in the garden where we find Montale, Eliot, Mandelstam, Rilke and I would throw in Gottfried Benn and Yeats and…  you get the picture…

                                                35d

Four books written outside Bulgaria do provide a more complex version of Bulgarian reality and I have been grateful for them:  VOICE FROM THE GULAG and THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS by Tzvetan Todorov, THE PORCUPINE by Julian Barnes  and THE ‘THAW” in BULGARIAN LITERATURE and WITH THE PRECISION OF BATS by Atanas Slavov…  In no way do they undermine the truth of my brief essay  (nit pickers to your job) which I well know is a provocation but one that can only be answered by the appearance of actual evidence.