XX, page 6
two blankets, an overcoat,
a broken umbrella, and a bundle of books.
In our haste to escape, our beloved son, Xiao Mao,
was left behind with local peasants, to be lost forever,
and then, amid the night calls of wild geese,
He Zizhen gave birth once more in her litter carried by soldiers,
a daughter we did not bother to name in our worry
to catch up with our comrades, retreating in small boats
by moonlight across the River of Golden Sand.
Such was the suffering of the Long March,
after which came the invasion of the Japanese,
militaristic dwarfs from the Land of the Grey Dragon.
The Party’s new sanctuary was established in the far northwest,
at Yan’an, where turbaned Moslem cavalry patrol the steppe,
and camel trains arrive at the West Gate
from the fastnesses of Central Asia as they have for centuries,
and the market is always full of peddlers and good vegetables,
Mongolian herders come to trade ponies and furs,
woodcutters wheeling oxcarts of fresh-sawn boards
smelling of spring grass, herbalists proffering
jars of powdered lion’s teeth.
There He Zizhen abandoned our marriage bed
and neither threat nor flattery could coax her back.
New enemies assail us, yet the Red Army endures.
Their blood is my ink, their weapons
the pen and brush of my poetry,
their triumphs great odes to the Chinese soul.
Yet the goal is not victory in this or that battle
but the realization of the Revolution
and so the deaths of soldiers, officers, entire regiments,
even the sacrifice of Party leaders, remain irrelevant.
Those who most loudly protest their loyalty
often tolerate the most severe tortures
but confession is inevitable and mercy a bourgeois affectation.
We must mobilize the great sea of the people
in which to allow the enemy,
swimming far from shore, to drown.
So the path of Revolution gains clarity
even as the nature of women continues to elude me.
The tigress is a fierce and graceful animal
but do not free her from the cage
unless you know which way she will leap.
The Atomic Clock (1939)
The clock is ticking. The century is getting old, the century
is coming apart at the seams. Eagle-taloned century,
century of steel & Kodachrome, of caesium-137 & Zyklon B.
In January the achievement of nuclear fission is confirmed
in Naturwissenschaften magazine. In August Einstein
and Leo Szilard post their urgent request to President Roosevelt
to develop atomic weapons in advance of the Nazis.
The Manhattan Project is born; the atomic clock has been wound;
the future, from now on, will be measured in half-lives.
Nationalist troops enter Madrid, the Spanish Republic collapses,
Franco will control the country until his death in 1975.
The Grapes of Wrath is published, Mein Kampf is published.
William Butler Yeats dies, Seamus Heaney is born.
Nylon stockings go on sale, Siam becomes Thailand.
Hollywood’s Golden Age reaches its apogee with
The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach & Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Martin Luther King Jr. sings with his church choir
at the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind; he is ten.
Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit” for Commodore Records.
Charlie Parker rides a freight train from Kansas City to Chicago
and then to New York but fails to land a steady gig,
washing dishes midnight to eight at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack
in Harlem; bebop is not yet a term in the jazz lexicon.
Francis Ford Coppola is born. RKO Pictures signs the boy wonder,
Orson Welles, to Hollywood’s most lucrative contract
then turns down his peculiar adaptation of Heart of Darkness;
Herman Mankiewicz is dispatched to Victorville to write Citizen Kane.
The movie’s release in 1941 will be overshadowed by Pearl Harbor
and William Randolph Hearst’s vitriolic publicity attacks.
Mankiewicz dies in 1953, on the same day as Joseph Stalin.
Century of invention, immiseration, liberation & terror,
century of cube & sphere, of Speer and Le Corbusier,
of Mississippi juke joints and Weimar cabarets.
Ernest Hemingway is drinking rum in Havana,
Gandhi is fasting against British rule in Gujarat,
from his jail cell Nazim Hikmet writes poems about Istanbul
and hazelnuts and joy and beautiful women, about
my miserable, shameful century, my daring, great, heroic century.
William Eggleston is born. Ansel Adams photographs Yosemite,
the moon has not yet risen over Hernandez, New Mexico.
Neil Armstrong is a nine-year-old Cub Scout in Ohio.
Elvis Presley is five, alone with his mama in Tupelo, Mississippi,
while his daddy Vernon serves eight months in county jail.
John Lennon will be born next year, Bob Dylan the year after.
Rock and roll is not a term in any cultural dictionary.
There are no cultural dictionaries, except perhaps the notebooks
of Walter Benjamin, cornered now by Hitler’s shadow,
abandoned, in his final hour, by the angel of history.
“As flowers turn toward the sun,” he writes in his last essay,
“by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn
toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.”
Century of wraiths & indeterminacy, century of jackals
& executioners, thirty thousand in a day at Babi Yar.
“Nothing which has ever happened should be regarded as lost
for history,” Benjamin writes as the darkness closes in.
He, “the last European,” will survive the year, but barely,
contemplating the ruins of the civilization he exalted.
Hitler invades Poland, Stalin invades Finland,
Italy invades Albania and King Zog—name like a golem
from some long-forgotten fable—King Zog flees into exile.
Every truth, every quotation, every aesthetic certainty,
every meticulously harvested grain of cultural knowledge
is torn from Benjamin’s grasp by the whirlwind.
“This storm,” he writes, “is what we call progress.”
BOOK THREE
Virginia Woolf: Four Fragments (1940)
The way a terrier’s ear flops over when scratched,
dogs and old men walking country lanes,
children catching moths with treacle—
this is England,
flowers turning towards the sun,
great milky English flowers in Charles Darwin’s garden.
It was Darwin who decoded the murals of the great temple
at last, gospels and vedas of discredited holy men.
Religion and its inadequacies: an umbrella shorn of fabric.
Class and its entitlements: a skeleton cleansed by maggots.
The humiliation of servants—the pathetic hypocrisy
of our co-dependency—our helplessness and their servility,
heaped coal bins and larders full of geese and tins
while the poor the poor the hanged
the Irish . . .
Often the beauty of the countryside seizes me
like a deluge—osier thickets along the riverbank,
bare branches of an apple tree against the sky.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to belong
to the clouds, to belong to the citizenry of the sea
instead of this islanded, oddly inward people.
A thunderhead over the green waters
of the North Atlantic.
A prawn, a jellyfish, a whale.
*
War, war, war—again and always, the wearisome war of existence,
and then the German bombs, and then our dull, internal British wars—
against art and culture, against freedom, against women.
In the war of myself against myself the battle goes rather poorly.
No reinforcements to the trenches, no reserves to plug the line.
Leonard is distracted and one must seize the initiative while opportunity offers.
Into the breach, boys, this time it shall be all or nothing!
*
Planes overhead quite often these days—three raiders came in barely above the trees, the swastikas clearly visible; we were playing bowls on the lawn and dove for cover beneath the hedge. And the other week one of them shot down, a tower of smoke arising from the meadows along the river; in Lewes the enraged townsfolk crushed the skulls of four dead German flyers in the mud, or so they say in the village. Invasion is expected any moment. News comes by radio and it is all quite awful. James Joyce has died: we were the same age precisely. Dr. Freud as well, several months past—I recall our conversation in Hampstead two years ago, how sickly he seemed, how exhausted. When he spoke of his escape from Austria I recalled driving through Germany with Leonard in 1935, coming into one city or another on an afternoon when Reichsmarschall Goering was anticipated, the roadway lined for miles with people offering the Nazi salute as we passed in our motorcar, thinking we might be he—we, a Jew and a woman writer, liberal British aesthetes—so becoming aware of what Fascism really meant and that our lives might be in actual danger (not that we cared), but saved from implicit violence by the vast delight the people took in Mitzi, our marmoset, the crowd’s deranged intensity pivoting in an instant from raving nationalism to oafish delight at the glimpse of a capering monkey. The house in Tavistock Square has been bombed and all the sodden papers are here with us now, most of our earthly possessions destroyed. Thank heaven one does not really care, in the end, about earthly possessions. Guns and bombs, barbarity, and then Persian rugs amidst the rubble. Civilization like a bandage pasted on a bleeding carcass. Freud’s thinking about the savagery of human nature is quite profound and I regret not having read his works more fully until this late moment. At the end of our conversation he gave me, with great politesse, a single blossoming narcissus.
*
To oppose the gleaming armies of men
what have we been vouchsafed
but the pencil nibs of schoolgirls,
the knitting needles of grandmothers?
To oppose the sea, what can we muster
but a handful of useless metaphors—
turn the tide, swim against the current—
sandcastles against a coming flood.
To oppose the body what have I got
but pockets full of stones?
Woody Guthrie: Twentieth-Century Blues (1941)
Los Angeles in nineteen thirty-eight was a city I never did see the like of again for violet-hued beauty and thirsty-sapling sprawl,
sugar-rich colors unlike the sad and tattered country left behind,
smell of soil and ocean fog and orange blossoms, miles of high-rise banks and displaced plainsmen looking for a slice of paradise, a new-hatched metropolis far-spread from coastline to hills and up the sides of canyons and back again,
a city of automobiles and hungry desperation and westward-looking American hope run smack into the cold blue waters of the Pacific.
By this time I was a bit of a local radio star, partnered up first with my cousin Jack, a fancy-dan cowboy and western singer.
We broke the bank for a while at seventy-five dollars a week playing XELO out of Tia Juana, Mexico, whose unregulated border transmitter blasted our music so far and wide my wife could pick it up some nights back in Texas,
a rosy-spectacled life until I grew restless with success and bored of sticking in one place and hit the rails again, headed north up the Central Valley, following the call of those “Tired of Easy Pickings Blues.”
The famous Hooverville among oak groves along the Sacramento River is where the scales fell from my eyes.
Suddenly I understood that these hungry and homeless Okies and Arkies dying of typhoid and smallpox, infected with rickets and ringworm, that these were not just fine people but my brothers and sisters, and that my duty was to speak on their behalf,
and that the fight for social justice was a political struggle and music could be a lethal weapon in that war,
and while I never did join the Communist Party, and I would upon hearing the words dialectical materialism fall into a deep and restful slumber, I did sing those “Fellow Traveler Blues” and walked that road so far as it led towards equality for the working class.
I suppose about as much happened to me in nineteen thirty-nine and forty as is reasonable for any single lifetime—
battling vigilantes in the Kern County cotton patch and recording my songs at the Library of Congress, writing a column in the Daily Worker and putting out my own record album on RCA Victor, meeting John Steinbeck and a bunch of movie stars and stewing in the Reno County jail on a vagrancy charge,
and when I arrived in New York City after nearly freezing to death during the worst winter of snow in forty years it was only a matter of months before I hit the big time as a regular on the major CBS radio shows, singing songs with Pete Seeger and Huddie Ledbetter, making more money than I ever dreamed,
but wouldn’t you figure that no measure of it left me satisfied, and nothing in New York or Washington scratched the itch I felt, so I packed my family into a dinged-up Plymouth and headed out once again for California.
Nineteen forty-one was the year I learned to sing the “Top to Bottom Blues” for real and true, drunk and depressed, tossing beer bottles through the windows of my own rented house in Pasadena, stirring up the dark water I always knew was in me, the troubled soul that hooted like a barn owl so many nights,
when out of the blue the Department of the Interior hired me to come up to Oregon and write some songs about the Grand Coulee Dam they were building five hundred and fifty feet tall across the mighty Columbia River
in that magnificent country of apples and wheat and salmon, everything pale green and tan and silver,
and the boys getting paychecks off honest construction work, and the local towns ready to hook into the electricity it would generate, and the irrigation that would make the scrubland blossom so maybe even those dusty migrants might someday settle here to farm.
Even after the finance company repossessed my car it was almost enough to make me believe in our government, enough to convince me that FDR was doing for the American people in fact what Communism only claimed to do in fiction,
though I never did set eyes on Joe Stalin or the pie-in-the-sky paradise of the Soviet Union.
Anyhow, they paid me two hundred and sixty-six dollars for the month, and I wrote them twenty-six songs, and with all that happened afterwards—
going to war and getting torpedoed on a merchant marine not once but twice, years of Red hunts and Joe McCarthy, leaving one family and starting another, writing Bound for Glory, cutting records,
just trying to keep my head above water while singing those pernicious “Twentieth-Century Blues”—
with all that happened I didn’t often think back upon the Coulee Dam until the government issued me a citation in nineteen sixty-four in recognition of the fine work you have done to make our people aware of their heritage and their land,
by which time I’d been living mostly in the Brooklyn State Hospital for a dozen years,
wasting away with Huntington’s disease, which my mother died of and passed to me in her genes, and I passed along to my daughters, Gwendolyn and Sue, and young Bill killed in a car crash, Cathy in a fire, of my eight children only three escaped the curse of an early death,
and only Arlo taking up music, and only Jack Eliott and young Bobby Zimmerman come to play for me,
and of all the thousands of songs I wrote I do believe those Columbia River tunes were among my finest, which on the one hand demonstrates the continuing exploitation of the workingman, but on the other constitutes the best value Uncle Sam has ever got for his money.
Guadalcanal (1942)
In his diary, Second Lieutenant Yasuo Ko’o, color bearer of the 124th Infantry, Japanese Imperial Army, recorded an unfailing formula with which he calibrated the life expectancy of his fellows in the last days of 1942:
Those who can stand—30 days
Those who can sit up—3 weeks
Those who cannot sit up—1 week
Those who urinate lying down—3 days
Those who have stopped speaking—2 days
Those who have stopped blinking—tomorrow
—RICHARD B. FRANK, GUADALCANAL
Awakened from dreams of rice cakes and candy
by a small frog jumping onto my face.
These creatures are known to be poisonous,
else we would certainly eat them,
if any of us remain strong enough to catch one.
Not Bashō’s frog, this strange citizen of the jungle—
watching his slim body swell with each breath
what I feel is not curiosity but envy.
When I climb to my feet my head swims
as if drunk on New Year’s whiskey,
I hold to a tree hoping these currents will subside
but there is no respite from this symptom,
hardly the worst of our afflictions.
These rugged cliffs resemble ink drawings
by some ancient Chinese master.
Was it another lifetime in which I sat sketching
mountains along the Kikuchi River?
Yet the discipline of tanka, I discover, perseveres
even in the face of starvation and disease.
Gentle brother frog,
your jungle shows no mercy
to weary soldiers
fighting for the Emperor
