Carentan O Carentan

Carentan, 1944 (Photo: US Army)

“To remember a battle in which he has taken part,” wrote Louis Simpson, the American poet and World War II veteran who died last September, “a man must make himself innocent again — innocent of newspapers, books and movies. He must remember his actual life, the life of the body. Everything else is journalism.”

Simpson served in the 101st US Airborne Division of the US Army from 1943 to 1945, and experienced firsthand some of the most brutal battles of the war, including, after the invasion of France by allied forces on D-Day, the bloody battle for a small town called Carentan.

Some have described Simpson's poem describing that battle, Carentan O Carentan, as "cynical"; if so, Simpson, having endured the trials of battle and seen his compatriots fall around him, certainly earned the right to express such cynicism. But to me, Carentan is Simpson recalling something quite different, something Simpson himself pointed to above: remembrance of "his actual life, the life of the body."

It is impossible for me to read Carentan O Carentan without thinking of those men who have placed themselves in the service of their country and endured things that I will never have to endure; who walked down a sunny lane in Normandy one summer day as their enemies "aimed between the belt and boot and let the barrel climb." If we do not have to experience what these men experienced, surely it's our duty, at the very least, to listen to them, and to always remember that our freedoms are inseparable from their sacrifices. All else, as Simpson might put it, is journalism.

Buyer's remorse? Not quite. But a little bit.

The young man at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car desk did his job well last week, and sold me on an upgrade. He dangled satellite radio in front of my nose, and I bit. Was it worth it? Some thoughts:

- Brewer and Shipley? Never thought I'd hear them again.

- There's a reason some of those "Deep Tracks" are forgotten. Yeah, there's the initial rush of excitement when "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" comes on, and you say to yourself, "wow, they're playing that?!" Alas, it's fleeting. Turns out, maybe they don't play it often because it's so goddamn boring. 

- Poco? Wow, never thought I'd hear them again.

- I really dislike The Doors. Jim Morrison was insufferable. You want to hear "the scream of the butterfly," pal? I'll make it easy for you. 

- Oddly, Robin Trower lives on Sirius XM. There's no reason I, who loved English prog-rock in the 70s, wasn't a Robin Trower fan. He has pretty much everything I wanted. And the guitar sound on a lot of the songs is pretty badass. But it just didn't happen. 

- There was at least one good song on that West, Bruce, and Laing LP I bought as a cutout at Woolworth's in the 70's. I just didn't hear it, or didn't pay attention to it, until a few days ago. 

- Hearing Family's "It's Only A Movie" while driving through central Illinois is definitely novel, but not much more than that. 

- When "Whipping Post" comes on, you turn up the radio, despite the protests from the kids in the back seat. It's like you can't help it.

On balance, it was a worthwhile experiment. But, next time, I'll save my money.

A happy birthday

Twelve years ago yesterday, Violet made her way into the world. I'm supposed to say I remember it like it was yesterday, but, though 12 years isn't much in the grand scheme of things, in many ways it feels like it happened so long ago.

The details have become fuzzy over time. One thing I do remember is that she was a nine-to-five baby; I took Jenny to the hospital around nine in the morning, and Violet was born fiveish in the evening. At the time, I wondered if this was a sign that my daughter would grow up to a model of punctuality and orderliness. She has yet to manifest those qualities, but, of course, there's still a lot of growing up to be done.

Now that she's on the cusp of becoming a young woman, old mannerisms, old ways of saying things, old types of behavior -- some endearing, some vexing -- have fallen away, and new ones seem to come up, then die away, every week. She's in a constant state of becoming. She asserts her independence in new ways, and just when I think she's pulled away from me for good, she surprises me by some gesture that indicates she still needs and wants the comfort of my presence. In the midst of all this change, I'm grateful that we've always been close, and I hope and pray that, as the years roll on, that doesn't change.

Where's it all headed? I don't exactly know (who does?) But I do know that the girl who was born twelve years ago yesterday is one of the most interesting people I've met: bright, imaginative, good-natured, and full of infinite promise. So, wherever she's headed, I intend to tag along to find out. Happy birthday, Violet. Let's be companions on this journey, as much as we can.

A house in summer

Forty or so years ago, my mother, brother and I spent our first night in the house in Douglas Avenue in Springfield. It was summer, and hot, like it is today, the kind of hot that makes you break into a sweat the moment you open the door in the morning and the first breath of air wafts over you; Midwest in the summer hot. We had moved from Arizona, and a different kind of hot. The day we arrived, there was no electricity and no furniture. We slept on lawn furniture in the living room waiting for the morning, when the movers would come and someone would connect the utilities.

The windows were open, exposing me to a world of sounds that I, who had never been in the Midwest, found very odd: the humming of crickets and the myriad of crawling creatures that populate a Midwest night. It felt like sleeping under mosquito netting in a tent in the middle of the jungle. Outside, things were growing with abandon. We had come, it seemed to me, from the desert to live in some wild, untended garden.

Another sound I wasn't used to was the sound of trains. At that time, freight trains traveled along two corridors through downtown Springfield, so there was a fair amount of traffic. The low, mournful whine was unsettling. It seemed not only unfamiliar, but a bit sinister. On that first night, when I slept fitfully because of the heat and the strange, new surroundings, the moan of the freights took on a new dimension. I had dreams that people were speaking to me, asking me why I had come to this new house. I woke with a start to hear a freight train rumbling and sounding its horn a mile away. I had translated the foreign sound of the trains into voices in my dreams. I remember getting up the next day being glad that our electricity would be turned on and we would have air conditioning that night, so we wouldn't have to sleep with the windows open and hear the trains.

It's funny to think about that night now, as I sit listening to a train in the distance on a swampy night in Springfield. The sound has retained its strangeness and mystery, but has lost its foreboding. In fact, I think a lot about those trains, particularly when I'm here. I usually hope that I'm not just hearing some short haul train shuttling cars between local freight yards. I'd rather it's a freight bound for Omaha, or Memphis, or New Orleans that will be traveling through many different localities all night long, interrupting the sleep of people like me. Or maybe the Texas Eagle is hours late out of Chicago and is just coming through, the sleepers, lounge car, and coaches full of revelers glad to be on a journey, and full of a thousand stories, a thousand secrets. They are travelers, and so am I. I can't help but hope that we will all arrive safely home.

Percy, Kierkegaard, Crawfish and Beer

In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer there's an epigram from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: ". . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair."

Yes, I know: What, exactly, does that mean? I'm still not sure. But years later, Percy, in an interview, elaborated on the subject:

Interviewer: You've lived a fairly privileged life. Why such despair? 

Percy: Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard's aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

No sir, it doesn't sound like it.

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

When I heard that Maurice Sendak died, I was taken back to the rickety old apartment on Main Street in Evanston where we lived for twelve years and our children spent the first years of their lives. It could have been any time between the year 2000, when Violet was born, and, say, 2007, when Silas and Hazel got tired of having me read to them. It was just before bedtime, or late at night, when the books came out, maybe as a matter of nightly routine, or maybe in a last-ditch effort to lull a child to sleep who had been up far too long.

I remember a rocking chair, a long day that needed to draw to a close, a drowsy child on my lap, a fervent prayer that she, or he, would go to sleep soon, and a book. That book may have been Where the Wild Things Are, or Outside Over There, or one of the Little Bear books, or a number of other Sendak offerings. (Of course, there were other books, but these, at one point at least, were regulars). I had my favorites, as did my children, but I liked them all. They carried the distinctive mark of a gifted illustrator, and, in the first two cases, a storyteller, who wanted a child to enter fully into his world, and who gave the feeling that he wanted the child to understand something about the storyteller as well.

I respect Maurice Sendak because, like the best authors, he followed E. B. White's advice never to talk down to children. In his books there is wild fantasy, and whimsy, and humor, but also fear, uncertainty, and conflict. Children know all these things from real life, and Sendak knew that, in order engage children, you had to produce stories that, though fantastic, told the truth, that had that element of comfort and risk, of going somewhere far away, having an adventure, and then coming home. The best possible tribute I can pay to him is to say that, as I read those stories over and over again to the point of memorizing them while sitting in that rocking chair, I often enjoyed the journey as much as my children did.

A colleague of mine wrote, "Thanks for the wild adventures, Mr. Sendak. May you now find peace at the end of your own." I could not have put it better.

My father's world

Freiburg, 2010

My father likes talking about his past. He tends to tell me the same things over and over again, but I see him infrequently enough that the stories don't have a chance to get old. Plus, I've always been interested in hearing about his past, and particularly about his childhood growing up in Germany before, during, and after the second World War. It reminds me that history is personal. Decisions that drive the world in one direction or another may be made in the meeting rooms of heads of state, but we all have a history. It's the drama of our own lives, the thousands of triumphs, tragedies, joys, and sorrows we've all experienced. In my father's case, his own childhood just happened to coincide with a pivotal time in the world.

A frequent topic of his reminiscences is his mother, my Oma, a strong, indomitable, but loving and gracious woman who lived in Germany all her life and endured not one, but two world wars. Her husband-to-be went off to war, and returned without his legs, having lost them at Verdun. She married him. She saw the gradual falling apart of her country once again during World War II, but kept her family together, as battered as it was, and remembered that dreadful and chaotic era to me only with the words, "that was the worst time." She had about her an air of dogged perseverance, tenaciousness, that I will always remember and admire, a quality that stayed with her throughout her life, even when times got better for her and her country. 

Oma taught my father to fend for himself, probably because she knew, from experience, that there would be times when there would be no one else you could depend on. If something broke, you didn't throw it away, you fixed it. If your socks got ripped, you darned them. Who else would do it for you? She taught him to sew, and he has been grateful for it all his life. And, to this day, if my father gets a rip in his socks, he doesn't throw them out and go get another pair. He takes out a needle and thread, and carefully sews them up. And, when he's done, he says, out loud, to no one -- but, of course, to someone -- "thank you, mama."

I've always liked this story because it makes me think about the many ways people from our past continue to be present in our lives, even when they've traveled on to other things. It comes to mind when I think about what I'm giving to my own children, and especially now, as my father sits in a hospital in Germany, recovering from an ailment that was nearly fatal. It looks like he's marshaled all the reserves of his legendary stubbornness and will live to fight another day. Whatever problems I've had in the past with my father, I'm glad for that. Get well, Papa. There are still socks to be mended.

Writing for children

E.B. White, on not writing down to children:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.

Zoot Sims in Sweden

In 1984, someone invited Zoot Sims, the great tenor saxophonist, to Sweden, and filmed him. They brought him together with one of his old compatriots, the bassist Red Mitchell, and the Swedish guitarist, Rune Gustafsson. They met in a what looks more like a living room than a studio, talked over old times, and played music.

A few months after this was filmed, Zoot was dead from cancer. Whatever the ills he was suffering at this time so close to his death, here his playing is gorgeous, relaxed and beautiful. I would like to have been party to the entire conversation between him and Red Mitchell as well. The night when Zoot fell off the stage at the Onyx Club while playing Brew Moore's horn ... that's the kind of night I want to hear more about, mostly because I wish I had been there myself, but I was born too late, and in the wrong place.

At one point Zoot says, dragging on a cigarette, "Y'know, music keeps people sane, I think." I can't argue. When he said this I thought of the number of times that music -- making music, or simply listening to it -- has helped keep me on something close to an even keel when it could easily have been otherwise had there been no one to sing with, no records to listen to.

Zoot Sims' own music has played a small but meaningful part in my life, as has the music of Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington ... so many others. I wonder if they know that now. I hope so.

What's Opera, Doc?

Nearly every Saturday morning of my childhood, from about age seven or eight on, I watched the Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner show. It was the best time of the weekend, I think, sitting on the couch eating cereal in front of the TV. You didn't know what the weekend held, but you didn't have to think about it too much. You had everything you wanted right there.

One of the many cartoons I watched, and loved, time and again, was this. Elmer Fudd sings Wagner. I knew it was from an opera, but I didn't really understand what opera was, and didn't care to learn much more. But the melody stuck with me, for some reason, and hearing Elmer sing "Bwoom Hilda, be my wove!" was funny. I was aware, dimly, that I was watching a parody of something that was meant to be tragic; "What did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?" Bugs says at the end.

Then, not long ago, I watched this. I had not even heard the prelude to Wagner's great opera in its entirety before. And, strangely, even as my appreciation for this music has unfolded as I never expected it to, the old Bugs Bunny cartoon seems funnier, better, more spot-on than ever, mostly because it seems to understand so well the greatness of the thing it is parodying.

Sometimes great art and popular culture collide, and both win. Take fifteen minutes and watch this. Beauty, sublimity, grandeur. Stunning. You won't be sorry, doc.

The Great Gatsby

Our writing instructor tells us that it's valuable, when you encounter a piece of prose that you find to be especially beautiful or memorable, just to write it down, longhand, in a notebook. The idea is that by writing it down you're being forced to pay attention to it; to think about why you find it beautiful or memorable. You're studying and thinking about the construction of the sentences, the choice of words, the ideas that are being expressed and how they're being expressed, and you're (hopefully) learning from your observations. I haven't been following his advice as often as I should, but when I have I've found it to be a productive exercise.

So, here's a passage, lovely and elegiac, one that I've read time and again and wrote down the other day, from The Great Gatsby. The best thing I can say about it is that every time I walk through the great waiting room at Union Station in Chicago -- a place I've walked through with many different people in many different circumstances over the course of 30 plus years -- I think of it, and Gatsby, and Nick Carraway, and the myriad of comings and goings, the innumerable greetings and goodbyes, that have happened there over time. Not bad.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: "Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?" and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.