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"I Take My Stance with Care in Such a World" Pacifism, Quakerism, And

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"I TAKE MY STANCE WITH CARE IN SUCH A WORLD": PACIFISM, QUAKERISM, AND HISTORY IN THE WORKS OF WILLIAM STAFFORD By DONALD BALL A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1996 DEDICATION I wish to dedicate this dissertation to my son Matthew and my daughter Caitlin, hoping that they might also one day believe in and work for peace. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my chair, Dr. Brandon Kershner, for his empathy and sure guidance through a difficult project. Words cannot convey my debt. Dr. Donald Justice, Dr. Alistair Duckworth, Dr. Andrew Gordon, and Dr. Samuel Hill also claim my deepest gratitude for their help and understanding in completing this dissertation. I wish to thank as well my great friend Bob Bateman, my Men's Center group, and especially my mother and family for their persistent help and belief. Finally, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to William Stafford himself who, before his death, offered generous responses to my numerous questions. May he rest in the peace he so believed in. PREFACE Learning about the poetry of William Stafford, his pacifism, and his spiritual beliefs has been a profound experience. My own personal biases and involvement in this project are complex. In 1971 at 19, I found myself sailing across the Atlantic standing precariously on the deck of the USS Shreveport. A Naval Academy midshipman at the time, I remember a moment of revelation on that deck in which I wondered what must have been obvious to others: why would people devote so much time, energy, and money to building a ship whose sole purpose was to kill other people? Yet my father had been a naval officer in World War II, and from my own voracious (bloodthirsty) reading of military history, defending my country seemed a noble, morally sanctioned pursuit. Still, Vietnam had disillusioned the whole nation, and I grew increasingly doubtful about my military future. I resigned and became a tentative pacifist. Like Stafford marching off to his first CO camp, when I left the Naval Academy, I also, in effect, left mainstream America. My study of Stafford, pacifism in America, and Quakerism has deepened my distaste for the boyish ideals of military heroism that I was raised with, ideals I believe our culture still looks to blindly. Bill Clinton is iv apparently genuinely hated by the World War II generation of George Bush and Bob Dole because they can only conceive of heroism, of service, in terms of military service. Ironically, though Clinton has managed to employ military force thus far in the service of "peacekeeping” (excluding, perhaps, his adventures in Iraq) , he has stated more than once that he wishes he had served in the military. One imagines that he might be boyishly eager to lead the nation into a real shooting war. The partisan, competitive nature of American politics, business, media, and sports—which worsens yearly—reinforces the flag waving militarism which, despite the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, still controls our culture and political course. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I attempt to show, through a review of Stafford criticism, that few critics have taken Stafford's pacifist beliefs as a starting point in their criticism. By Stafford's own admission, however, becoming a conscientious objector during World War II was the crucible of his young manhood. Out of the fire of this experience, I argue, comes some of Stafford's most important poetry. Chapter Two maps the often hazy boundaries of the American pacifist subculture by applying a New Historicist perspective to Stafford's central autobiographical prose work Down in Mv Heart (1947) . Chapter Three explains how Stafford's adult identification with Quakerism resulted V naturally from his pacifist world view and provided him with a method of terminology to pursue intertwined moral and aesthetic goals. Chapter Four examines Stafford's continuing protest against literary elitism as part of his general challenge to unexamined tradition and the power of authority. Part of what Stafford terms his "pacifist protest" against Modernism and New Criticism involves his uniquely negative reaction to the status and politics of Robert Frost. The last chapter of this dissertation is a reading of representative poems through the cultural prism of Stafford's pacifism and Quakerism. Much of this analysis is an examination of the relation of power to tradition and history. Stafford's pacifist poems, particularly, gently rebuke an American culture that too often seeks to overcome and coerce its members instead of setting them free. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii PREFACE iv ABSTRACT vlli CHAPTERS 1 "THE INDEPENDENT RIVER” 1 A Survey of Stafford Criticism 3 A Pacifist's Upbringing 20 Poetic Themes and the Major Books 30 2 DOWN IN MY HEART ; A PACIFIST'S WAR 40 3 THE CHURCH OF THE BRETHREN AND THE QUAKER WAY 113 The Church of the Brethren 113 The Society of Friends 115 4 MODERNISM, ANTI -INTELLECTUAL! SM, AND ROBERT FROST 149 Modernist Complaints 149 Anti-Intellectualism 151 Stafford and Frost 153 Politics and Heroism 179 5 THE RIVER OF HISTORY 188 The Hero in History 190 Nuclear Apocalypse 194 Vietnam Protester 204 Hunting and War: "I Hold the Duck Head” 208 The Reagan Years 211 "What Ever Happened to the Beats?” 216 Ground Zero 219 Help from History 225 WORKS CITED 234 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 240 vii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy "I TAKE MY STANCE WITH CARE IN SUCH A WORLD": PACIFISM, QUAKERISM, AND HISTORY IN THE WORKS OF WILLIAM STAFFORD By Donald Ball December 1996 Chair: Dr. R. Brandon Kershner Major Department: English William Stafford, who died in 1993, enjoyed a fifty-year career in poetry and is regarded by many critics as a major poet. There is nothing approaching consensus, however, on how to read his work. He is seen variously as a regional is a metaphysical poet —though which region disputed— , as nature poet in the vein of Robert Frost, and as a 1960s protest poet. Stafford resolutely rejected critical labels and especially literary source studies as being fundamentally incomplete, preferring instead to talk about writing from a "tradition of total experience." This dissertation attempts to locate William Stafford in the little-recognized American Christian pacifist culture. His anti-war poems are, perhaps, his most enduring literary contribution, and they flow naturally from the beliefs and assumptions of this culture. By closely examining Stafford's viii pacifist memoir Down in My Heart and contrasting its pacifist stand with the 1940s American war culture, one can better understand his later suspicion of and quiet rebellion against both governmental propaganda and literary tradition. Through a New Historical approach to Stafford's theory of history, with special emphasis on the Marxist ideas of Michel Foucault, I trace the roots and the effects of this profound clash of war and peace cultures in Stafford's essays, letters, and poetry. IX — CHAPTER 1 "THE INDEPENDENT RIVER” William Stafford lived through violent times. The year of his birth, 1914, marked stalemate and profitless bloodletting in the trenches of Europe in World War I, a war that effectively ended illusions about peace and "moral progress" in Western Civilization. Subsequent twentieth century conflagrations, particularly the Holocaust, would mock the idea of civilization and challenge the very existence of a divine order. By the time Stafford died at 79 in late August 1993, he had lived through a time period encompassing two World Wars, the Great Depression, Korea, Vietnam, and countless other smaller historical traumas through most of the violent, difficult history of this most horrifying of centuries. His life began with the threat of war in Serbia and ended seventy-nine years later during a new outbreak of that old conflict. As a pacifist by upbringing who later embraced Quakerism, Stafford might have appreciated this cyclical "Halley's comet" of war and would have wondered at, but not have been surprised by, the enduring power of ethnic and religious bigotry over generations of otherwise peaceful individuals. 1 , 2 On the day of William Stafford's death on August 28, 1993, the front page headlines of The Washington Post present a typical list of domestic and international violence in our century. The August 28th headlines include "Aspin Lists Goals in Somalia” (the Secretary of Defense groping for achievable military objectives) , "Desperate Muslims Hold Aid Givers Hostage" (dateline Mostar, Bosnia) "Pentagon Nominee's Father Served as Nazi SS Officer," and "The Curious Continue Waco Siege" (four months after the botched ATF raid) . These stories demonstrate in microcosm that violent force is an accepted tool of political policy around the world and that, as a matter of record, politics and martial force are inseparably linked. On the Post 's inside pages, the developing stories, while uniformly grim, are cushioned, incongruously, by Labor Day Sale advertisements adorned by smiling young models in breezy fall colors. Stafford's America, our America, is a place of murderous violence and holiday sales, a collage of fractured experiences in a culture both produced and made trivial by capitalism. Many thoughtful Americans of this century have despaired of a culture of deceptive advertising and consumer self-indulgence. Interestingly, William Stafford, who consistently challenged American tradition in whatever form—and paid a severe personal price as a result—never gave in to cynicism or despair, or to the irony and satire — 3 such reactions often provoke. This willful innocence in the face of hximan cruelty, stupidity, and tragedy has amazed and sometimes repelled—Stafford readers who do not understand its political and spiritual sources.
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