In my growing list of literary works that grapple with killer epidemics, I can now add Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1923) after reading New Yorker’s Alex Ross’s review of this forgotten masterpiece. If we overlook it, Ross says, it’s because its “keen-eyed, skeptical exploration of American masculinity…went over the heads of the male-dominated literary community of her time.”
Midway through the novel, the 1918 Spanish flu breaks out amongst new American recruits being transported to the battlefield in the ship Anchises:
The section devoted to the Anchises’s voyage is a strange, hallucinatory, altogether remarkable piece of writing, and it is closely based on the diary of a doctor who made such a voyage himself. In 1919, that doctor treated Cather for the flu, and she persuaded him to let her use his diary. At the beginning, the neophyte soldiers are in boisterous high spirits, singing, cavorting, boasting. Then they begin to fall sick and die, their minds assaulted by delirious episodes that seem all too familiar in the covid-19 era. Cather shows how the ship’s close quarters make it a perfect breeding ground for contagion. “The boys lay in heaps on the deck,” she writes, “trying to keep warm by hugging each other close.”
To the spectacle of misery Cather adds a fine layer of irony. One of the soldiers is a big German-American named Fritz Tannhauser, who, when fever takes over, starts babbling in his native language. “His congested eyeballs were rolled back in his head and only the yellowish whites were visible. His mouth was open and his tongue hung out the side.” Another soldier, known mainly as the Virginian, experiences a violent nosebleed and is dead not long after. The names are chosen carefully. Tannhäuser is the hero of a Wagner opera that experienced mass popularity in America before the First World War. The Virginian was Owen Wister’s best-selling Western novel, from 1902—a founding text of cowboy iconography, and the work of an outspoken racist. Cather casts her subsidiary characters in the mold of heroes, but the flu lays waste to their bodies before they even catch sight of the battlefield
Cather’s soldiers, Ross notes, aren’t even allowed the “tough skinned bravado” that one finds in, say, Ernest Hemmingway’s Farewell to Arms. Instead of the existentialist machismo of the disillusioned Frederic Henry, Cather depicts her protagonist as a naïve or holy fool who (in her words) “died believing his country better than it is.” The book was therefore mocked by Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and others, but it sounds as though Cather anticipates the kind of soldiers that one finds in, say, Tim O’Brien’s Things Fall Apart.
If the sensitive protagonist hadn’t died on the battlefield, his mother later realizes, he may well have killed himself when confronted with the gap between his ideals and reality:
A year or two after the end of the war, Claude’s mother thinks of how some homecoming soldiers are unable to reënter reality, and die by their own hand. “Some do it in obscure lodging houses, some in their office, where they seemed to be carrying on their business like other men. Some slip over a vessel’s side and disappear into the sea.” Mrs. Wheeler takes a thin comfort in the sense that Claude might have suffered the same fate: “One she knew, who could ill bear disillusion . . . safe, safe.”
In reading Ross’s review, I’m reminded on one explanation for why the Spanish flu disappeared from historical consciousness despite having killed 50 million people worldwide (675,00 in the United States). Dying of the flu, when compared with dying on the battlefield, seemed effeminate and almost shameful. We’re seeing comparable sentiments towards sickness today from certain authoritarian strong men, such as Trump and Brazil’s Bolsonaro. Wearing masks is for sissies.
In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Katherine Porter Mansfield also has a soldier die before being shipped to the front. Fighting an illness can indeed be like fighting a war, and at one point Trump talked about becoming a wartime president in the battle against Covid. He even discussed invoking the War Powers Act, presumably with an eye toward producing personal protective equipment, tests, and testing centers.
Since then, however, he has waved the white flag of surrender, preferring to think the illness will go away if we just ignore it. He doesn’t even bother to thank frontline workers anymore. Willa Cather is never been one to indulge such men. If you want to see real heroism, check out her strong female protagonists in Song of the Lark, O Pioneers!, and My Antonia. They don’t talk big but their staying power and their toughness show us what it really takes to surmount adversity.
A recent open letter published by Harper’s and signed by a distinguished list of writers, academics, political columnists and others has me thinking of a fable my father wrote in the 1960s or 1970s. At the time, the issue was political correctness, which is why the poem seems timely. Except for the mimeograph imagery, that is.
The Harper’s letter worries that rightwing intolerance is leading to leftwing intolerance. The following excerpt sums up the concerns:
The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
“The Recalcitrant Sheet of Mimeograph Paper” is about a piece of paper that remains blank rather than surrender to the operator’s agenda. It refuses to allow its backside to be “tattooed” with “the decadent artifacts of a worn-out bureaucracy.” Consider it a member of the Trump Resistance.
In its rebellion, however, it falls into a different kind of conformity so that, by the end, it is citing the famous finale of The Communist Manifesto. Its threat sounds no less “sheeplike” and bureaucratic than the docile conformists and blank imbeciles who were its former compatriots.
Before proceeding with any discussion of cancel culture, caution is required. The right is far more likely to use force when it exerts pressure. Trump’s cancellations, backed up by federal power, are far more severe than any virtue shaming that we see on the left, and there have been far too many instances of police literally canceling black lives that made white people uncomfortable.
For that matter, look at all the Republicans who have been driven from the party for voicing doubts about Trump. Look also at those who sell their souls or remain silent to avoid such a fate. Nothing close to this is happening on the left.
We should remind ourselves that “political correctness,” while weaponized by the right, was initially used by liberals to call out their own excesses. In other words, they were willing to engage in self-criticism in the way that the right seldom is. It was in this spirit of introspection that Barack Obama recently called out those leftists who self-righteously excoriate others to prove how woke they are. This is not how you build effective coalitions and bring about needed political change, he warned.
Both the Harper’s letter and Scott Bates’s poem should be read in this light. It’s okay to be “muddied” by allies who are less enlightened than you. It’s okay to vote for the lesser of two evils. The stakes in the upcoming election are too serious to be sidetracked by purity battles.
The Recalcitrant Piece of Mimeograph Paper By Scott Bates
A Sheet of Mimeograph Paper refused to go through the machine No no it cried Set me apart Must I serve as fodder for a Mimeograph Moloch Reduced To the docile conformity and blank imbecility of my sheeplike compatriots My purity sullied My innocence destroyed
Will you track up my candor with your muddy feet No no I protest I refuse Let me be crumpled into cabbage
Peeled into carrot strips Abandoned with the used kleenices holey hermit sacks outcast chewing gum wrappers and all the other paper pariahs of your so-called civilization Before you tattoo my backside with the decadent artifacts of a worn-out bureaucracy
They fed it through the machine It came out blank They fed it through again Inexorably
At last it spoke Dear Sirs it said Pursuant to your request of long standing And in full cognizance of the numerous difficulties involved I am authorized to inform you at this time You have nothing to lose but your chains
As I’ve looked at different countries coping with coronavirus, a passage from an Ursula Le Guin science fiction story comes to mind. In “Nine Lives” she suggests that culture helps explain why some countries respond better to catastrophe than others.
Since the three countries responding the worst to the Covid pandemic have been democracies with authoritarian leaders—or in America’s case, a wannabe authoritarian leader—mismanagement may explain more than culture. (The other two countries are Russia and Brazil.) Nevertheless, let’s try applying Le Guin’s theory.
In “Nine Lives,” resource depletion has led to world-wide famines, forcing humankind to mine for uranium on far distant planets. Amongst those sent into the mines include two engineers (a Welshman and an Argentine) and a “tenclone”—which is to say, ten men and women who have all been cloned from scientific genius John Chow. Working as a team, the clones are far more efficient than regular human beings.
The story explains how the Welshman survived the famine:
The United Kingdom had come through the Great Famines well, losing less than half its population: a record achieved by rigorous food control. Black marketeers and hoarders had been executed. Crumbs had been shared. Where in richer lands most had died and a few had thriven, in Britain fewer died and none throve. They all got lean. Their sons were lean, their grandsons lean, small, brittle-boned, easily infected. When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue, and so had replaced the survival of the fittest with the survival of the fair-minded. Owen Pugh was a scrawny little man. All the same, he was there.
It’s ironic, in light of this observation, that U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson initially opted for a survival of the fittest response to Covid, banking on the country developing herd immunity rather than working to minimize deaths. I believe that, after catching the coronavirus himself, he backed off of this policy.
Europe’s other social democracies have taken the fair-minded approach and watched their Covid rates go steadily down. Brazil, Russia and America, by contrast, have opted for Social Darwinism. Trump’s latest announcement that “we need to live with it” would mean accepting, as inevitable, hundreds of thousands more deaths. (Trump doesn’t mention this consequence of his approach.) As the president sees it, real Americans don’t get sick. In fact, if they make his reelection harder, they’re not real Americans.
Under Trump we’ve gotten the worst of all possible worlds. First we opted for fair-minded (everyone was to settle in place) and then for survival of the fittest (much of America opened up too soon). We squandered the sacrifices under Option A by moving too quickly to Option B.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Joe Biden—pretty much any semi-competent president—would have done a better job. All would have listened to the science and developed national strategies for providing personal protective equipment, mandating masks and social distancing, and setting up widespread testing and tracing. We therefore can’t entirely blame American culture for its status as the world’s top coronavirus hot spot. Trump and his GOP enablers have a lot to answer for.
Nevertheless, culture enters in, both America’s libertarian streak and its penchant to dream. There are indeed ways in which the American Dream has been predicated on a denial of reality: hopeful immigrants threw themselves into impossible projects and occasionally (but far from always) triumphed. It is our glory and, in this instance, our downfall.
Through the clones, who see themselves as a community rather than as individuals, we may get insight into communitarian East Asia’s effective response to Covid. People there have no difficulty following mask orders or social distancing orders.
To be sure, the always fair-minded Le Guin also sees problems with communitarian responses. In the story, a mining accident kills nine of the ten clones. This leads the other two engineers to reflecting upon cloning—or, for our purposes, upon collectivism:
Pugh nodded. “It might be wiser to separate the clones and bring them up with others. But they make such a grand team this way.”
“Do they? I don’t know. If this lot had been ten average inefficient E.T. engineers, would they all have got killed? What if, when the quake came and things started caving in, what if all those kids ran the same way, farther into the mine, maybe, to save the one who was farthest in? Even Kaph [the one survivor] was outside and went in. . . . It’s hypothetical. But I keep thinking, out of ten ordinary confused guys, more might have got out.”
In other words, individualism has its advantages. Then again, those who regard wearing masks as a dictatorial imposition imperil us all.
In “Nine Lives,” the surviving clone must learn to form a new kind of community. In this way, he provides a good lesson for America today that goes beyond culture: while we feel far more comfortable within our own tribes, we must learn to work with people unlike us if we are to survive and flourish. America’s culture of “e pluribus unum”—out of many, one—has never been an instinctive part of who we are but it is foundational to our hopes as a nation.
Kaph begins exploring this other way of being once he learns that a “twelveclone” will be showing up—which is to say, a self-sufficient group that will not include him as a member. Is joining the Welshman and the Argentine an option?
“Do you love Martin?”
Pugh looked up with angry eyes: “Martin is my friend. We’ve worked together, he’s a good man.” He stopped. After a while he said, “Yes, I love him. Why did you ask that?”
Kaph said nothing, but he looked at the other man. His face was changed, as if he were glimpsing something he had not seen before; his voice too was changed. “How can you . . . How do you . . .
But Pugh could not tell him. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s practice, partly. I don’t know. We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
By the end of the story, Owen invites Kaph to join a new kind of community:
Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the absolute, closed self-sufficiency of the clone of twelve; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure. Pugh put a hand on his shoulder in passing. “The chief won’t ask you to stay here with a clone. You can go home. Or since you’re Far Out maybe you’ll come on farther out with us. We could use you. No hurry deciding. You’ll make out all right.”
Pugh’s quiet voice trailed off. He stood unbuttoning his coat, stooped a little with fatigue. Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.
Regardless of our culture, we’re all in the dark during this pandemic. What can we do about it other than hold our hands to strangers?
I have an interesting tennis situation that is reminding me of Daniel Keyes’s science fiction novel Flowers for Algernon. To understand why, a plot reminder is useful.
Charles Gordon, who has an IQ of 85, works in a plastic box company until he is selected for special surgery that will make him smarter. When his IQ rises to 185, he realizes, by studying the progress of a mouse that has undergone the same surgery, that the change is only temporary and he will revert back to his initial state. The novel is a tour de force in point of view so that we see Gordon’s prose change with his intelligence, progressing and then regressing in a bell curve.
Tennis has been my sports passion since I was 11, when I received lessons from Sewanee coach Gordon Warden. Over the subsequent years, however, I took few lessons because I was comfortable with my tennis community. If I got too good, I figured, I would outstrip my partners. (Also, for many years I could not afford lessons.) For those who know tennis, I was at a 3.5 level, although I was competitive with 4.0 players.
My decision changed when I retired and saw how much better my game could become. I have therefore been taking lessons every other week with Sewanee’s current coach, John Shackelford, who upon first seeing my game informed me that I had a Ken Rosewall forehand. It took me two years to unlearn this 1960s style and develop a topspin more in accord with modern tennis practice and new racquet technology. Every lesson I am excited to learn new things, from swinging volleys to violently sliced second serves to attacking strategies at the net. I generally play once or twice a day (following Covid protocols, of course) and can report significant improvement.
In Keyes’s novel, however, not everything goes well. As Gordon becomes more intelligent, he outstrips his special ed teacher, with whom he has fallen in love. He experiences such scenes as the following:
I am very disturbed. I saw Miss Kinnian last night for the first time in over a week. I tried to avoid all discussions of intellectual concepts and to keep the conversation on a simple, everyday level, but she just stared at me blankly and asked me what I meant about the mathematical variance equivalent in Dorbermann’s Fifth Concerto.
When I tried to explain she stopped me and laughed. I guess I got angry, but I suspect I’m approaching her on the wrong level. No matter what I try to discuss with her, I am unable to communicate. I must review Vrostadt’s equations on Levels of Semantic Progression. I find that I don’t communicate with people much anymore. Thank God for books and music and things I can think about. I am alone in my apartment at Mrs. Flynn’s boardinghouse most of the time and seldom speak to anyone.
Nothing so extreme is happening with me, of course. For one reason, I’m not improving that much. I can’t hold a candle to members of Sewanee’s championship tennis teams, either the men or the women, and I have plenty of partners who are at my new level. Sewanee, because it has indoor as well as outdoor courts (although Covid has currently closed the athletic center) is a tennis Mecca.
And yet, there are groups of friends who no longer ask me to play doubles with them—and with good reason, given how I skew the results. I no longer play in a Monday Night mixed doubles league set up by a long-time friend.
Will I decline like Charles Gordon? Aging will take its own toll (I am 69), and as I regress I can imagine some of my new partners—those currently in their forties—looking around for other competition. In Flowers for Algernon, Gordon starts panicking once he realizes that decline is on the way. My goal is to age gracefully.
Indeed, one aim of my lessons is to learn how to put less wear and tear on my body. I have always been a quick and energetic player—I run constantly, reluctant to give up on any ball—but with better racquet work, decision making, and placement, I can play a more sedate game. I am gradually learning the wisdom of a defensive lob. I am also learning (though it pains me to do so) that’s it’s okay to concede certain points, say a wicked drop shot when I am on the back line.
I’ve always seen tennis as a metaphor for life. Keyes’s novel, while it focuses on an individual with special needs, touches on how even the healthiest of us are only temporarily abled. As his IQ plummets back to its original 68, Gordon chooses not to return to his old workplace because he doesn’t want to experience the pity of his fellow workers. One could say that he rages against the dying of the light.
I’m hoping that I will accept the inevitable decline, enjoying tennis at whatever level is available to me. I’ll report back from time to time on how I’m doing.
For today’s post, I look back at my posts about Covid-19, beginning in February 16. I am neither a medical doctor nor a scientist, but literature made it plain to me where we were headed. Given that I knew many of these works well, I fault myself for not having written about the virus earlier.
May 8, 2020 – Some in the GOP have expressed a willingness to write off old people as the cost of doing business during the pandemic. As an old person, I cite Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Mary Oliver in my desire to stay alive. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/choose-life-over-needless-sacrifice/
June 29, 2020 – The spy/scout in M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions about the British in 19th century Afghanistan has the same success in warning the British army about impending disaster as our scientists and health care workers have been with Donald Trump. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/our-embattled-health-care-workers/
This July 4th weekend, marked on the one hand by Donald Trump’s celebration of the Confederacy and on the other by tens of thousands protesting racism, seems an appropriate time to revisit some of American history’s most influential song lyrics. In “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julie Ward Howe declares the cause of abolition to be a sacred cause, with the Union allied with Christ (“the Hero, born of woman”) to crush the Satanic forces of slavery (the serpent).
To convey that it is an apocalyptic struggle, Howe draws on Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Book of Revelations. I borrow from a very useful blog post by one Monsignor Charles Pope for the Biblical allusions.
The opening image comes directly from the Book of Revelation:
An] angel came out of the temple, crying out in a loud voice to the one sitting on the cloud [Jesus], “Use your sickle and reap the harvest, for the time to reap has come, because the earth’s harvest is fully ripe.” So the one who was sitting on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested. Then another angel came out of the temple in heaven who also had a sharp sickle……“Use your sharp sickle and cut the clusters from the earth’s vines, for its grapes are ripe.” So the angel swung his sickle over the earth and cut the earth’s vintage. He threw it into the great wine press of God’s wrath. (Rev 14:14-19)
Jeremiah also uses the image of crushing grapes:
God will thunder from his holy dwelling and roar mightily against his land. He will shout like those who tread the grapes, shout against all who live on the earth. The tumult will resound to the ends of the earth, for the LORD will bring charges against the nations; he will bring judgment on all mankind and put the wicked to the sword,’” declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 25:30-31)
Msgr. Pope also finds allusions to Isaiah and to Luke:
Yet again Scripture is alluded to by the hymn in reference to the terrible swift sword which is from Isaiah: In that day the LORD will take his terrible, swift sword and punish Leviathan, the swiftly moving serpent, the coiling, writhing serpent. He will kill the dragon of the sea (Isaiah 27:1). And the Book of Revelation 19:15 also speaks of the word coming forth from the Lord’s mouth like a sword: Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. And in the fateful lightning the hymn alludes to Luke 17:24 For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.
Yes, the Lord is coming in judgment on and for his people. Injustice will be avenged and holiness disclosed.
My favorite image–“the beauty of the lillies”–Msgr. Pope traces to the Song of Songs:
The lily is a symbol of purity in the Scriptures. In the Song of Songs is the beautiful praise by the Bride for her groom: I am my lover’s and my lover is mine; he browses among the lilies (Song of songs 6:3). A sea a clear and calm as glass is described as surrounding the throne in heaven (Rev 4:6; 15:2). We are transfigured by Christ’s glory for we are made members of his body (Eph 5:30). Hence, when the Father sees Christ he also sees us, transfigured as it were in Christ’s glory.
We too are called to walk in Christ’s footsteps. We are to carry our cross as he did (eg. Lk 9:23) and if necessary to die for others. As his cross made us holy, our cross can help to make others free. Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church (Col 1:24). Clearly Howe is appealing here to Northern Soldiers to be willing to die in order to free the slaves.
Anyone feeling anxious about invoking God to help you crush your foes has legitimate reasons for concern. God has been yolked to any number of causes, some of dubious righteousness (Islamic and Christian terrorists, for instance). An interesting article in Atlanticnotes Americans have used the song for good and for ill:
The totemic poem has guided the United States through many military trials. The “Battle Hymn” epitomizes the strengths of this nation: its optimism, and its moral courage. It’s a song of agency, of action, a call to sacrifice together for the cause. The soldiers who march to the “Battle Hymn” have helped to liberate millions.
But there is a dark side to the “Battle Hymn” and the American way of war. The righteous zeal of America’s war effort can excuse almost any sins—like killing hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians. When Americans loose the fateful lightning, they have no moral guilt, for they are the tools of God.
And in conclusion:
The “Battle Hymn” is America. Its words are carved into the narrative arc of the American story. Nowhere is this truer than in wartime. The heat of idealism and wrath forges how we fight, inspiring our better angels, and condoning our gravest acts.
I therefore share Howe’s lyrics with the caution that poetry designed to spur people to action often bypasses the process of introspection, which is one of literature’s strengths. I can’t argue with the specific cause in this instance—slavery might have continued for decades without the Civil War—and people going into battle need all the strengthening they can get. Just don’t look for subtlety and nuance.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps: His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave, He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave, So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave, Our God is marching on.
To understand the urge behind the Black Lives Matter movement, check out Langston Hughes’s response to Walt Whitman. Although Whitman himself would have thoroughly embraced Hughes, too many people only see white people when they read “I Hear America Singing”:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear, Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong, The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam, The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck, The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands, The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown, The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing, Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
Hughes reminds us that people of color are also part of this chorus. I think of my own brown-skinned grandchildren when I read it and hope that others too will see how beautiful they are. Although America no longer segregates them to the kitchen, I worry that far to many of my fellow citizens will see only their own fears when they look at them.
In other words, America still has considerable work to live up to its founding promise.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.
Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—
Attempts to demonize Black Lives Matter take me back to 1968, when the Black Panthers were similarly demonized. Their response to murderous cops was to arm themselves, which was the last time that Republicans supported significant gun control legislation. It also led to some shootouts and to the police assassination of Fred Hampton and a fellow Panther. (Chicago eventually had to pay out $1.85 million to the victims’ families.)
At the time, my father wrote the following poem, which seems only too relevant today. I’m thinking that the poem’s last line refers to the pre-dawn raid on Hampton’s apartment, cued up by the race-obsessed J. Edgar Hoover. The color symbolism in the first refrain may be to Union blue and Confederate gray. White cat claims the purity of the flowering dogwood but is actually “blacker than a cat can be.”
By couching race relations as a sing-song animal ballad, Bates approaches 1960s race issues in a way that is easier to hear and absorb. We appear to be revisiting the era as our current president labels protesters “thugs,” calls for law and order, and targets the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Donald Trump is still “living in a hell of a rage.”
The Black Cat Bluesfor the Panthers 1968
By Scott Bates
Black cat’s black as a cat can be
White cat’s whiter than a dogwood tree
Hey hey
Who do you say
Black is blue and white is gray
Black cat’s living in an old cat cage
White cat’s living in a hell of a rage
Hi hi
Mud in your eye
Twenty million black cats baked in a pie
Black cat’s rotting in an old cat jail
White cat’s chasing his fat cat tail
Hey hey
What do you play
Here we go murdering cats in May
Black cat’s fighting for the day he’ll be free
White cat’s blacker than a cat can be
Ho ho
What do you know
Three to get ready and here we go
Further thought: The Black Panthers had a mixed record, doing a fair amount of good (for instance, their children’s breakfast program) but also engaging in some questionable practices. They were locked in a battle with Martin Luther King over the direction of the Civil Rights movement when I heard King speak in 1967. King understood that practicing non-violence stood a better chance of success than brandishing weapons, an insight that history has borne out and that the Black Lives Matter movement shares.
It’s clear George Floyd’s murder has had an impact when certain professors start listening to their students and rethinking the literary canon. That, at any rate, is what I carried away from an American Scholar article by University of Houston history professor Robert Zaretsky.
While Zaretsky has long championed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he’s now prepared to throw it out of the canon altogether. Given that American Scholar tends to lean conservative, it’s a startling declaration, and even though Zaretsky concludes his article somewhat timidly, I see such declarations as a sea change. Many white Americans are now thinking, “So this is what African Americans have been so upset about all this time.”
Zaretsky begins by setting forth the vision that he is now questioning:
In 1994, the [humanities] industry was given a shot of adrenalin by the publication of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. In his uncompromising defense of the great literary works of Western civilization, Bloom denied any political or ideological purpose. Instead, all the canon can teach “is the proper use of one’s own solitude.” As for what he called “the School of Resentment”—the motley crowd of feminists, African-Americanists and the like responsible, in his view, for the “Balkanization” of literary studies—Bloom devoted much of his own solitude to denounce them.
Bloom’s book appeared shortly after I started my career as a university professor. As part of my teaching load, I participated in a team-taught course devoted to the Western canon. Though I did not read Bloom’s book, I found myself teaching many of the same authors that constitute his 26 immortals. From Dante, Shakespeare, and Montaigne through Goethe, Austen, and Dickinson to Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett, our teams have lectured on the works written by Bloom’s “happy few.” These writers, we believed, took on universal themes in uniquely powerful fashion.
To be sure, Zaretsky did not slavishly follow Bloom but worked to “expand” the canon (as did Bloom himself) by adding such authors as Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Such professors saw themselves as “reformers—big tent canonists dedicated to diversity and intent on inclusion.”
Zaretsky did not reject Heart of Darkness, however. That occurred only when, following the Floyd murder, he started listening to his students in a new way.
He begins his article by noting how Kurtz’s dying words–“The horror! The horror!”–came to him as he watched tapes of Floyd’s murder. Kurtz, who at one time is regarded as the man who will introduce Christianity and Western Civilization into barbaric Africa, is horrified in the end at how he has descended to the level of a savage. Marlow applauds him for this honest self-assessment.
But what if the horror really lies in Marlow’s racism. Zaretsky doesn’t exactly say this, but following Black Lives Matter he starts hearing his students when they voice dissatisfaction:
One student, looking down at her hands, declared, “I am so tired of reading books filled with the n-word.” Another student, also African American, sighed: “I’m tired of being told the classics are good for me.” Yet other students of Arabic, Hispanic, or Asian backgrounds aired their anger not just at the story, but at its author.
While Zaretsky put forth the defenses many of us have used in teaching the work–that Marlow is horrified by Belgian colonialism, that his view isn’t necessarily the author’s (although it comes pretty close)—he began to realize that the racist depictions of Africans outweigh the book’s positive attributes. As I noted in a recent post, Michael Dyson believes that the book should be removed from reading lists altogether because of the negative stereotypes of Africa it perpetuates.
In other words, dislike of the work can’t be attributed only to schools of resentment or the Balkanization of literary studies.
As I argued in my post, Heart of Darkness is very good at capturing the existential crisis of colonialist Europe and perhaps should be retained for that reason, even if demoted from its former lofty status. But after a while, if a work speaks only to white men—and not even to all of them—then it probably should be relegated to historical document status. It now is obvious to Zaretsky that people of color bridle at being depicted as a howling mob and women object to being portrayed as either mantel piece ornaments or African sex goddesses. The “fascination of the abomination,” which provides the novella’s underlying drama and which relies on the horrifying realization that civilized whites might have something in common with African savages, is less fascinating and less abominable when Africans are given faces, names, and complex cultures.
Zaretsky’s awakening leads him to conclude that
we must treat writings by marginalized and oppressed minorities not as supplements to a white canon, but instead as essential representations of our political, social, and cultural traditions.
I don’t hold it against Zaretsky how long it has taken him to arrive at a position that those of us who pay close attention to student responses reached years ago. Life is complex and the paths to awareness take many twists and turns for all of us. I just want for Zaretsky to do more than conclude his article with tentative questions. His literary allusion in the following passage is to Gieussep Tomassi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, “in which the young aristocrat Tancredi, facing the revolutionary tumult of the Italian Risorgimento, tells his uncle Don Fabrizio, ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’”
As 21st-century America begins its own Risorgimento, one leading to national unification based on a truer understanding of equality, do we have a role to play? If so, do we believe that falling back on gestures of change—a modern-day Tancredi, no doubt working as a marketing consultant, would advise deans to reaffirm their commitment to “diversity and inclusion”—is enough? Finally, should we continue to profess what we always thought to be true about the canon when our students tell us they are tired of being told that certain texts, though riddled with the n-word, are good for them?
Let’s try answering these questions in a more robust way. First, Bloom must be rejected forcefully. What he called “School of Resentment” was people drawn to different works than he was—and being drawn to the same works for different reasons. Bloom may have been very smart, but he was guided by internal narratives no less than the rest of us. That he saw resentment in angry women and people of color says more about him than them.
Second, all authors must be put to the test all the time. Literature teachers play a key role in that process, especially those who listen to their students. As I tell my classes continually, their responses help us see who is worth keeping and who is not. Each generation must interpret the classics anew.
A note: Their feedback can be hard for older generations to accept. I chose the British 18th century as my field of expertise because I was in love with Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and I still consider it a comic masterpiece. But after 30 years of teaching it, I began having reservations comparable to those that Zaretsky has with Heart of Darkness. There’s too something a bit too entitled about Fielding—fellow novelist Tobias Smollett picked up on this right away—and his old maid jokes also fall flat. He’s still worth reading, but he doesn’t shimmer quite so brightly in my firmament as he once did. My students helped me see this.
Finally—and this is a proposal that Zaretsky does in fact make—universities must hire more diverse faculty. Otherwise, we too often foist our own dramas upon our students—and upon the reading public—rather than honor emerging perspectives. Women academics rediscovered Aphra Behn, not because they were resentful, but because she spoke to them as many canonical authors did not. When college faculties diversify, new life is pumped into literary studies.
Canon defenders need not panic. Most of Bloom’s immortals will not disappear from humanities courses for the simple fact that most of them still find ways to speak to core parts of ourselves. As I can testify from having taught a “Representative Masterpieces” class this past semester, however, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare look very different now than they did 45 years ago when I entered graduate school. They’re still great, only in different ways.
For that matter, the 17th century preferred Virgil, the 18th century Homer. Literary revaluations are nothing new.
