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Thursday
On Tuesday Julia and I visited the du Ponts’ Hagley house and former factory near Wilmington, Delaware with former colleagues Lois Stover and David Finkelman. While there I discovered an indirect connection with this blog: “Better Living through Beowulf” plays off “Better Living through Chemistry,” which used to be the Dupont marketing slogan.
I suppose most people today would not catch the allusion, but for me it is a playful way of expressing my view that literature changes lives. When I was searching for a title, I reached back to my childhood, seeking a way to be serious and light all at once, and the slogan came to mind.
During our visit we discovered that there’s a museum at the site that enthuses about American inventiveness. That’s because the du Ponts were inventers extraordinaire. Unfortunately, the invention that made their fortune was explosives, for which they found ready buyers during the War of 1812 and the Civil War. This brought to mind George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, the mini play that appears within Man and Superman.
In it we see Don Juan, now dead, engaging in a vigorous debate with the Devil about humankind. The Devil sounds very much like the Devil in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, which I wrote about last week, and at first I thought it was a direct response to Twain. Then I discovered that Twain’s novel appeared after Shaw’s play.
In any event, the Devil could be talking about the du Ponts when he makes the following argument about human evil:
In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest Ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence through which they themselves daily walk. I could give you a thousand instances; but they all come to the same thing: the power that governs the earth is not the power of Life but of Death; and the inner need that has nerved Life to the effort of organizing itself into the human being is not the need for higher life but for a more efficient engine of destruction. The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough: something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
The du Ponts themselves eventually chose to leave the destruction business, focusing instead on polyester and nylon. I can report from personal experience, however, that their evil did not end with the shift. The story requires a roundabout explanation.
When my family moved to Sewanee TN in 1954, we lived in a three-story apartment building. Shortly after we moved out seven years later, it was torn down and replaced with the Jesse Ball du Pont library, built with money donated by the third wife of A. I. dupont. I spent many happy hours in that library.
So far so good. The money, however, came with the stipulation that Sewanee remain segregated. Mrs. Ball du Pont was an ardent racist and for a long while Sewanee catered to her wishes. The college did not want to suffer Virginia Theological Seminar’s fate, as reported in Ball du Pont’s bio in Wikipedia:
Ball duPont was…a major donor to Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. However on 23 November 1951, she wrote to Dean Stanley Brown-Serman, ‘I have been told that one or more negroes are members of the student body… I do not contribute to schools in the south that take negroes as students.’ A subsequent letter stated, ‘As long as the Virginia Theological Seminary is open to negroes, I have made my last contribution to it…’
Given this history, I was startled to see one quirk when we visited the Hagley house. The dining room is wallpapered with a mural painted by a European artist who had never visited America. Much of the topography he gets wrong and so, in a Hudson River scene, he includes both an Arizona cactus and Florida Spanish moss.
Most striking, however, are groups of well-dressed African Americans and Latinos. Apparently the artist, having read “The Declaration of Independence,” assumed that all Americans were treated equally and so painted them as such. One wonders what Ball du Pont made of the scene.
Returning to Sewanee, my professor father spent his early years opposing Mrs. Dupont and the administrators currying favor with her. Only years later did he get an apology for the way they behaved toward him. Bishop Juhan, who had been the primary contact person, told my father towards the end of his life, “I was wrong,” which my father found immensely gratifying.
In these dark times, it’s important to remember that people can change. For all the evil that men and women do, there’s a counteracting force that ultimately prevails. Segregation, which as a child I thought would last forever, crumbled so that now I have five grandchildren of color. White supremacists may have the upper hand in this country at the moment, but their reactionary movement is not our future. For that, I turn again to Don Juan, who contends that the “Life Force” gets the last word:
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. That is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organization, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding.
With Shaw as with Dante, we make our own heavens and hells—they are self-chosen—and despite the Devil’s attempts at persuasion, Don Juan leaves Hell because it is dull and narrow. Hate and fear are so tiresome.
Far more exciting is the human potential that is unleashed when we embrace multicultural diversity.
