THE CARLETON

O my America! (Gettysburg, Detroit, Alexandria) —Allen Tate, Erling Larsen and John Wain Michel Butor — Kimon Lolos and poems by Stafford, Sward Hoffman, Bates, Black Finkel, Turco, Strand Kroll, Lucas, Tagliabue Anderson, Dejong Petersen, Coxe

Summer 1963 $1 THE CARLETON MISCELLANY Volume IV, Number 3 Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota Published by Carleton College Editor: Reed Whittemore Associate Editors: Wayne Carver and Erling Larsen Managing Editor: Ruth MacKenzie Editor, Department of American: Wayne Booth Ifl 11 THE CARLETON Vol. IV, No. 3 Summer 1963 Miscellany

CONTENTS

The Superior Country by Erling Larsen 3 The Battle of Gettysburg: Why It Was Fought by Allen Tate 32 Wildtrack, a poem in progress, by John Wain 45 Poems by Robert Sward, Jack Anderson, Charles Black, John Tagliabue, Mark Strand, Donald Finkel, Scott Bates, Louis O. Coxe, Lewis Turco 69 Mule No. 095, a story by Kimon Lolos 81 Poems by William Stafford, Daniel Hoffman, Donald Petersen, Ernest Kroll, John Lucas, David Cornell Dejong 91 A Sampling of the Writings of Michel Butor, edited by Donald Schier Peregrination 100 Growing Pains in Science Fiction 113 Excerpt from Passage de Milan. 121

The Carleton Miscellany is published in Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. Rates are as follows: $1.00 a copy; $3.50 a year; $6.00 for two years. It is distributed to newsstands and bookstores by B. De Boer, 188 High Street, Nutley, New Jersey. Manuscripts should be submitted to The Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfleld, Minnesota, as should subscriptions. Manuscripts are submitted at the author's risk, and will not be returned unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. Member of the Association of Literary Magazines of America Copyright, 1963, by Carleton College Second-class postage paid at Northfleld, Minnesota Notes on Contributors . . . JACK ANDERSON has published poems recently in the Antioch, San Francisco and Massachusetts Reviews. Formerly assistant drama critic of the Oakland, Calif. Tribune, he is "currently on the performer's side of the footlights, acting in the San Francisco premiere of Strindberg's The Dream Play." . . . ROBERT SWARD, an editor of Epoch, has a new book of poems, Kissing the Dancer, coming out this year. . . . MARK STRAND writes as follows: "I was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I'm 28 years old. I teach in the Poetry Work­ shop of the State U. of Iowa with Donald Justice. Poems of mine have appeared and will appear in The New Yorker, Atlantic, The Nation, The Yale Review, etc. I'm married and my wife's name is Antonia." . . . DONALD PETERSEN has taught at the State University of Iowa and now teaches in the State University of New York. Formerly on the staff of The Western Review, he has published verse in little magazines since 1950. . . . LEWIS TURCO of Fenn College has had poems in recent issues of Poetry, Antioch Review and Genesis West. His chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, was published in 1962. . . . The poems by JOHN TAGLIABUE printed here are part of a larger group on Shake­ spearean subjects written, he says, while re-reading the Falstaff plays. . . . WILLIAM STAFFORD who teaches at Lewis and Clark College won the National Book Award this year for his poems, Travelling Through the Dark. . . . KIMON LOLOS' second book has just been published by Harper & Row. . . . JOHN LUCAS, formerly of the English Dept. at Carleton, now lives in Rome and lectures throughout Italy on literature, music and art. . . . ERLING LARSEN, one of The Miscellany's editors, has been on leave this year from Carleton. . . . DANIEL HOFFMAN teaches at Swarthmore, SCOTT BATES at the University of the South, DONALD FINKEL at Washington University, LOUIS O. COXE at Bowdoin, and DONALD SCHIER at Carleton. . . . CHARLES BLACK of New Haven, ERNEST KROLL of Wash­ ington, and DAVID CORNEL DE JONG of Providence are all old contributors to The Miscellany, as is ALLEN TATE, who participated in the symposium on foundations in our Spring issue. . . . JOHN WAIN's poetry is not as well known in this country as his prose, but a small selection of it may be found in the anthology, New Poets of Eng­ land and America. Mr. Wain reports that other sections of the long poem, "Wildtrack," of which the first part is printed here, are now in the works. ... A biographical note on MICHEL BUTOR appears on page 100. Erling Larsen

The Superior Country

REMEMBERING SIGRID who also liked it and who lived in it for twenty-two years less four days

I When I first came out into this country I had trouble deciding what it looked like, what it was. I was young and this was all new to me, but, more important, I was going to be a writer and was sure I would not see the country in any satisfactory way until I could describe it. I had paid close attention to Hemingway's account of the bull fight in which he tells first of his reactions and then of going back to the hotel to think about the fight in an effort to decide what had caused his reactions. The need to solve this entire pressing problem, the self-conscious attempt to see a new country, together with the attempt to understand and apply what was for me a new way of seeing it, made my future and still nebulous liter­ ary career look very complicated indeed. But I began the writing. My short stories would go out to the little magazines and come back and go out again and finally some of them began to stick and stay away until they returned mimeo­ graphed or printed on very rough paper sometimes in magazines without covers and sometimes in rich magazines with Edward Wes­ ton photographs for frontispieces. I admired these photographs, and those of Walker Evans and Paul Strand which were beginning at that time to be pretty widely reproduced, almost as much as I did "The End of Something." I liked the sharply-focused and precise

3 The Carleton Miscellany attention to detail, the finely-draw grain of the old wooden fence posts and the patterns of shadow in peeling paint, and I saw in these pictures evidence of eyes that operated as I thought Hemingway's did. But I could still see that the Weston solution to the literary problem or the seeing problem was much simpler than the Heming­ way one even though in Hemingway's work was much of the Wes­ ton sharpness; it was, I thought, much easier to decide where to stand your camera than to decide what had moved you to stand it there. I suppose as a result of my struggles with this argument, and perhaps even as a result of my confusion, I had a story in a maga­ zine called, yes, The Dubuque Dial, all orange-covered and green- printed, and I proudly sent a copy off to an old friend of the fam­ ily, a big-city corporation lawyer who, I thought not characteristi­ cally, had a consuming interest in literature and had converted the attic of his enormous old house into a library stuffed with first edi­ tions of books I thought were very new and very important and with complete files of transition and This Quarter. He wrote back that he had enjoyed my "pastiche of Stein and Hemingway" and made certain suggestions which, lest they cause a return of my de­ flation and depression, I shall not reproduce here. I should point out, however, that among other pejorative words he used I perhaps longest remembered "surface." I thought about that word a long time even though in one part of the letter he had tried to make it easier for me by writing "finished surface." That word sent me into a re-examining of my own work and a re-reading of Hemingway's during which, perhaps in an uncon­ scious attempt to recapture some part of my lost self-assurance, I spent a couple of days feeling a little superior to Hemingway be­ cause I thought I had discovered him in a rhetorical impasse. The way I remember it, now that I am back in the hotel to make up my mind, is this. Somewhere I found him writing about Africa or Wy­ oming and describing the hills as looking like Spain. And I asked myself, with this feeling of superiority, What good can a writer accomplish by describing one country his reader has not seen in terms of another he has not seen either? Also I asked myself, What good will it be when in another place he writes about the Wyoming- looking hills of still another country? A man writing that way, I thought, can go in some pretty vicious circles. And he can lead his reader down some pretty vicious blind alleys and allow him to emerge while still, or consequently, uncertain about where he has been or what has happened to him. The writer will have described Erling Larsen

Africa in Spanish terms and Spain in Wyoming terms and Wyoming finally in African terms and he will have made his circle, all right, but the whole business will not have added up to a true Aristotelean metaphor. For both terms of each of the equations will be unknowns and none will add to the knowledge which Aristotle says a meta­ phor is supposed to give a reader. The writer may of course have made the surface, even the finished surface, but he will have left his reader as ignorant as he found him. I am unable now, remembering all this, to find the phrase on which I had built my rhetorical argument. I remember it as "the Spanish-looking hills." But I can find the passages which I used in proving to myself that I was wrong. The first one is in "Wine of Wyoming" where it stands out sharply in a short descriptive pas­ sage between pieces of dialogue. It reads: "It looked like Spain, but it was Wyoming." This, I thought as I argued with myself about description as seeing, might not be an attempt at description at all; it might only be Hemingway's manner of saying that things are never what they seem, and it might, further, be his way of saying something like "The people with whom we have been dealing and some of the things which have been happening make me think of Spain but I know perfectly well I am not in Spain." And it could be even more. In the story, the narrator and his friend are driving away from the house of a man to whom they have been unkind in a small thoughtless way and they are becoming increasingly aware that the smallness was not small at all if seen from that man's view­ point, and it is here that the country begins to look like Spain. Then, as they drive farther, still remembering and talking, "the mountains . . . looked more like Spain than ever." "Spain" in this passage is obviously not intended to describe the country but to relay the mood of foreignness, estrangement, loss, and, if we remember other Hemingway writings, perhaps even spiritual aridity and death. It is a word here descriptive not of country but of feeling. A similar juxtaposition of geographies and landscapes occurs in The Green Hills of Africa: "The country was so much like Aragon that I could not believe we were not in Spain until, instead of mules with saddle bags, we met a dozen natives bare-legged and bare­ headed dressed in white cotton cloth they wore gathered over the shoulder like a toga; but when they were past, the high trees beside the track over those rocks was Spain and I had followed this same route following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the flies scuttling around his crupper. They were the same camel flies we found here on the lions." Some purists might question the The Carleton Miscellany nomenclature which puts camel flies to tormenting horses and lions, but around Lake Superior we don't mind that kind of imprecision; we know that our deer flies are a painful nuisance to dogs and cows and men. But if non-Superior people can be persuaded to ignore that part of the quotation I think they will see that this too is not primarily a description of the country but an attempt to recreate that familiar feeling of being in two places at once or of having been in this one place before, which is always a fleeting mood and always dominates in the mind the mere matter of actual location. Perhaps this kind of argument leads to the theory that no writer ever does or can "describe country." And that no literary descrip­ tion can even be, in mood or manner or final effect, anything like a Weston photograph. Something like this was my conclusion as I began to feel that the "north country" into which southern Minne- sotans flee from the pressure of Rotary and PTA was very like some of the country "described" in the early Michigan stories. I was then putting a literary memory into a real landscape, being in two places at once, and I have since had the Hemingway feeling not only in Minnesota but in Wisconsin as well as in Michigan where, at least theoretically, it belongs. If this is a misunderstanding of Hemingway I am in good or at least expensive company, for this last summer a movie outfit set on making some kind of film based on the Nick Adams stories decided to photograph its outdoor scenes in Wis­ consin. At any rate, I put this "two places at once" theory to work. Al­ though I had not got entirely rid of the depression my writing some­ times still makes me feel, I had lost some of the arrogance and some of the sense of superiority I had in my ignorance acquired on dis­ covering what I had at first thought was a rhetorical blind alley. And I went on to write "descriptions" of southern Minnesota in which I compared it with the Catskill Mountains. Thanks to this investigation I came to believe that it is people that make "country" and that our memories of country and feeling for country depend on the people we have known in that country, and indeed in others, and that some­ times and perhaps by extension of the earlier theory that always the people are ourselves. Probably Hemingway's subtlest statement of this comes when he writes about how it "was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was glad to rest my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoi's SevastapoV He tells then of how this book reminded him of the war and of Paris and James Joyce and finally sums it all up in a short paragraph. "All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. Erling Larsen We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already." We had an experience like this last night. It was a night of heavy blizzard. The wind was from the northwest at forty miles an hour. The temperature was well below zero. Snow clouded so thickly across the roads and fields that we could not see the lights of the neighbor's house a quarter mile away even though we knew he was at home and we had a moment before seen his car on the road and watched it fade away up his driveway as if slowly obscured behind successively falling voile curtains or, sinking, slowly lost to sight in the deep pool of a milky-watered mountain stream. We had seen many storms like this and always with the same strangely exciting struggle to make up our minds whether it would be more fun to watch them from the warm house or to walk or drive out into them to feel them closely, whether the greater satisfaction would lie in defeating them by retreating behind warmth and wall or by moving through them simply to prove that movement was possible. Last night we resolved this by deciding to drive to town to get enough cigarettes to last until the storm was over and to return and wait inside for the first snow plow, having thus the fun of both possible solutions. During the first part of the drive the isolation was what we felt. And this was caused by memories of I don't know how many trips and vacations started either in snow or in heavy rain with the two of us moving through darkness and heavy storm alone and sheltered, isolated in the small car, sealed in from the weather almost as effec­ tively as we might be were we at home but still out in it and fighting it. And immediately we were in the past and in another part of the country, remembering an early spring drive around the north side of Lake Superior, at night and in curtaining rain, with the car's lights a funnel widening into darkness and rushing the storm in toward us and focusing it on us, with the isolation and the desolation made ob­ vious by signs reading "Sixty-five miles to next gasolene." So we talked about how it might feel to make that same drive now in this kind of snow with those miles to go not only to the next gasolene perhaps but to the next telephone and of what we could do were we stalled in cold like this on a road like that and of what we would have to carry with us in the car in order to be reasonably safe from freez­ ing to death or being buried forever under the drifts. But we were not in Spain or on the north shore of Lake Superior nor for that mat­ ter, thinking as we were, were we here in Dakota County, for we were in two countries at once and we were lonesome for them both, for the steep granite hills and the orange cliffs and the dark pines of The Carleton Miscellany the north and for the easy loamy slopes and the yellow fields and the fluff-blowing cottonwoods of the south. And when we had come home safely through the snow and the memories, we garaged the car and went into the house again to sit remembering again with hot whiskey toddies. When we looked at the black windows we saw no country; we could only hear the wind high in the trees of the grove, and the snow sifting dry and hard against the sides of the house, and when we thought of the invisible country we thought of ourselves and of our past. And of others. For the drink and the darkness and the sound of the country lying wide about us brought memories of the night Sigrid had come home for a New Year's Eve celebration on just such a night as this for just such a drink as this. She had driven a hundred miles alone in a small canvas-topped sports car she had just bought and she came into the house, her face bright with cold and adventure, to com­ plain about the temperature but to argue proudly that in such a car as hers she really felt the weather and the country and had had a mar­ velous time. In the morning we went out to look at the car and dis­ covered that it had a heater she had not known how to run and that she had come all the way in all the storm without using the fan that might have kept her warmer. And feeling less adventurous. Last night this country was indeed people, ourselves here and in another country, ourselves then young and now wondering, and other people too, both the living and the dead.

II Writers of local history and of tourist brochures dealing with this Superior country sometimes think it wise to begin with refer­ ences to what they call the "first settlers" or the "first Americans" or even the "first White Men." By "first settlers" they usually mean the local pharmacist's or Methodist preacher's great-grandfather and -grandmother; in any ordinary County Historical Society museum you may see the cradles and quilts and rakes and ox-shoes made by these people. By "first American" they usually mean some kind of Indian; this definition is used in the brochures of historians who live near a reservation or "trading post," a kind of antidote to those other more common works in which Indians appear as "firsts" only in the manner of natural phenomena, standing like granite ridges or icy streams or blizzards or tornadoes in the way of or impeding the prog­ ress of but inevitably and naturally failing to stop or defeat those "firsts" with whom the historian is sympathetic. All this is pretty clear cut. One might almost generalize about it: in the fishing and Erling Larsen hunting country the "first Americans" were Indians, in the farming country the "first settlers" were Indian-killers. In the matter of the "first white man" we find a more partisan dif­ ference of opinion. If we allow the expression "local historian" to stand for the tavern-talkers and for the resort-owners relaxing in conversation on the dock (out here "dock" is something you stand on and "pier" is something you drive into the mud to hold the dock up) and if we listen to these historians argue among themselves, we will learn that the expression "white man" can cause some pretty heavy wrangling. Even when these people talk about the problem of "who discovered America" and someone mentions Columbus, we see that the proper definition of the term becomes very important, for in parts of this country the feeling is frequently obvious and occasion­ ally very strong that no Wop free-lancer in the pay of a Spik king and queen could qualify as a White Man in our meaning of the term. This attitude of course is usually called a "kidding" one, particularly if the historian happens to be talking to a Wop, but we must remem­ ber that such kidding can be very serious in a state like Minnesota which has had two governors named Anderson, as well as others bearing names like Olson and Johnson and Christianson, and this de­ spite the existence of German and Finnish and Bohemian and French and, yes, even Italian, communities in the state. Also, we must keep in mind that Minnesota sports fans gather around television sets in places like the Viking Room of the oddly-named Radisson Hotel and in a variety of Viking Motels and Norseman Rooms to cheer Minne­ sota's own professional football team, the Vikings themselves. Indeed, in the summer of 1962, Alexandria, a small resort town in northern Minnesota, celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary of the arrival near what is now Kensington, a neighboring but much smaller and less progressive or aggressive town, of an exploring Vi­ king band which was apparently destroyed by those rival "first Americans." What some people think we know is that ten of these Vikings were killed by Indians and that the survivors recorded this slaughter in medieval runes on a stone which they left on a small island from which they then proceeded to their own supposed even­ tual death. The story cut into the stone, the now famous Kensington Runestone, is usually translated either with or without the addition of certain pronouns and auxiliary verbs, about like this: "We are eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland throughout the west. We had a camp beside two skerries one day's journey north of this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood The Carleton Miscellany and dead. AVM deliver us from evil. We have ten men by the sea to look after our ship fourteen days journey from this island. Year 1362." In the celebration not much was made of the disappearance of this band or of what might have happened to it, and certainly no important mention was made of the doubts which some scholars have cast over the entire narrative. The greatest Chamber-of-Com- merce emphasis fell on the "They were here" theme. The whole matter of this exploration, of this "first," is a mysteri­ ous one. And scholars and advertising men and editors line them­ selves up behind one or the other of two main present-day con­ tenders who advocate on the one hand the view that the stone is a modern fraud and on the other that it is a document actually writ­ ten, or carved, in 1362 and detailing an historic event. The one prin­ cipal contender is Erik Wahlgren, Professor of Scandinavian Lan­ guages at UCLA, who has written a book which bears the subtitle "A Mystery Solved" and which advances the argument that the stone is a hoax or fraud perpetrated near the turn of the century by a Norwegian settler with a sense of frontier humor and the same kind of imagination which inspired Ignatius Donnely, another Min- nesotan, at about the same time to write his 998 page book proving that Frances Bacon was the author of the plays ordinarily attributed to William Shakespeare. And the other is Hjalmar Rued Holand, fruit-grower and non-academic historian who lives at Ephraim, Wis­ consin, six hundred miles on the other side of Alexandria from Wahlgren, and who has written a half dozen books in which he tells and re-tells what he calls the true explanation of something which was never a mystery and certainly is no hoax but remains a fact which he might call "as plain as the over-busy nose on the face of a martini-drinking professor." To anyone superstitious about words and the naming of things, it might seem that a part of the mystery lies in the runes themselves. One dictionary, for instance, says that "rune" as we know it derives from the Middle English word used in the sense of "counsel" which in turn derives from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning "mystery" or "secret." And the manner of using the word today opens up other possibilities. One common definition is "any of the characters of an alphabet used by ancient Scandinavians and other ancient Germanic peoples," but another is "any similar . . . mark having some mys­ terious meaning or magical powers attributed to it" and still another is simply "any poem, verse or song." Clearly, Professor Wahlgren is on the side of those who would have the Kensington Runestone a work of the imagination and therefore not mysterious at all. But

10 Erling Larsen among the more than 140 titles which Wahlgren lists in his "in no sense exhaustive" bibliography are as many Holand-oriented as hoax- proving works. For the people of Alexandria to celebrate the "event" of 1362 was obviously in order; they own or think they own what might or might not be the original stone about which all these books and articles have been written. And they live in the center of a country in which a pretty exciting "poem" was either lived or created. For the purposes of this narrative I shall say always that the Vi­ kings did penetrate into the swampland between Alexandria and Kensington, but I shall be thus positive only because to be negative or in doubt would unduly complicate my syntax and because, fur­ ther, even the negative view would be non-existent had not the posi­ tive one been first put forth and subsequently vigorously prosecuted. I shall relate what "happened" and allow the reader whenever I write "happened" or "came" or "camped" to insert his own "might have" or "couldn't have" or "perhaps." Indeed, if the reader please, he may enter where he pleases, with or without parentheses: "All this is obviously a lie, for the simple reason that Holand and all his adherents are the victims of a hoax which as a result of their own protestations and obfuscations has grown to the proportions of a downright fraud." But the story. It begins in the Norway of the ninth century, when Harald Hairfair united all the petty kingdoms of the country under his own rule and then began to limit the manner in which his subjects might hold land and thus gave impetus to the first in a long series of westward migrations made by men fleeing tyranny and seeking new horizons and new opportunities or, if you please, new fields for Viking exploitation and ravagement. It is a long story and one of the sources for it is in the Heimskringla of Snorre Sturlason, the great Icelandic entrepreneur-politician and poet-historian who died in 1241, and who himself acknowledges that among his sources were the songs of the scalds "as well as the songs about all the kings who were in Norway" after "Harald Hairfair was king" and "Ice­ land was settled." Of these songs Snorre writes that "we find the best evidence in the poems which were offered to the kings them­ selves or to their sons; we take everything for true which is found in their poems about their journeys or battles." The song, or poem, or hoax, idea began early. The version of Snorre's work which I now have is "Edited with notes by Erling Monsen and translated into English with the assist­ ance of A. H. Smith" and printed in Great Britain without date but The Carleton Miscellany with a preface written in 1931. It is a big book measuring about 1 1 6 /4x9 /4 inches and containing almost 800 pages, larger than the Norwegian version I pored over as a child visiting at my grand­ father's house and which I remember as being printed in very heavy type like something designed by William Morris and bound in brown cloth carrying an intricate design in black and titled on the spine very boldly with the one word "SNORRE." One of the rea­ sons for my spending as much time as I did with Snorre was that my grandfather's library contained mostly philosophic and religious works in Norwegian and German, and Greek and Latin. This multi- linguality was all right for grandfather who, I am told, taught Ho­ meric Greek by lecturing in Norwegian to students using a gram­ mar written in German, but it did cut down on the size of the children's corner in his library, unless of course it was assumed that all children were like his and not like his grandson. And it certainly cut down on the number of illustrated books available for any future lookers at Life who might call on him. But the SNORRE was illus­ trated with line drawings and I found it early and loved looking at it and now I am happy to have those drawings reproduced in my English version of the book. One of these I remember well shows Gyda, a proud long-haired blonde wearing a plain shift-like white dress with a wide woven belt and standing in an open porch with her hands spread before her on the rail. The whole picture has a wide-angle Leica perspec­ tive. The foreground is filled with the helmeted heads of bearded men and the heads of three horses from which the men have ap­ parently just dismounted, and the left half of the picture, balancing the queenly figure of Gyda, represents a long wooded valley through which a river winds away to a horizon of snowy mountain peaks. It was Gyda, this large-jawed and obviously heavily-sexed and ambitious woman, who really was the cause of Norway's uniting, for Snorre tells that Harald Hairfair "wished to take her as his mistress" and sent messengers informing her of this, only to have his messengers return without the girl but with an answer saying that "she would only become his wife when he had first for her sake laid under himself all Norway and ruled over the kingdom as freely as King Eric in Sweden or King Gorm in Denmark." Harald was not annoyed by this rejection. In fact, when his men, perhaps to protect themselves from possible punishment for what they considered a failure, called Gyda "very bold and witless" and even suggested that the king "send many men for her and dishonour her," he rebuked them and even expressed gratitude to Gyda. He

12 Erling Larsen said, "She has reminded me of those things which it now seems strange I have not thought of before." And he then and there vowed that he would neither cut nor comb his hair until he possessed all Norway in scot. Careful historians like Karen Larsen, in her A History of Norway, think the Snorre version of his achieving it a little too simple, but it is certain that Harald united Norway at least as far as his own ambitions were concerned, financially and militarily that is, and that he attained this goal by drawing to him the small kings who soon learned that as Harald's earls and bearing him allegiance in some feudal manner they could fare better than as free enterprisers. And Snorre then forgets all about Gyda the catalyst and goes on to tell that Harald married Asa, daughter of Jarl Hacon Grjotgard- son, and that "Hacon then had much to say in the king's affairs." It may appear that, despite her political intelligence Gyda did not wield or have access to enough political power to make it worth­ while for Harald to marry her, and that Harald had meant what he said when he asked her to be his mistress and had quickly for­ gotten her after receiving her historic reply and noting that she had changed the word "mistress" to "wife." But of course the career must have been demanding of time and energy, and Snorre points out besides that Harald did not marry until "winter." This reading may also be too simple, as was Snorre's account of the repression of the old free-holders who, as Karen Larsen points out, may actually have been allowed to retain more of their heredi­ tary rights than Snorre says they were, but the bald Snorre facts do indicate something of the character and strength of Harald and do offer a kind of explanation of some of the deeply historic rea­ sons for the coming of that Viking band to Kensington in 1362, for we know that during Harald's reign so many men were leaving Norway that Harald, fearing a reduction in his income, decided that the least he could do would be to tax emigration itself. But this did not stop the moving. It is obvious that men who held land which had been in their families for generations, and held it without paying taxes and with the right to pass it on to their children, would object to and either evade or flee from any restriction on what they had come to consider their absolute rights. They were tough men. They left Norway in their own ships, ships they had built themselves, and crossed oceans which had never been crossed before, sailing through ice and storm along the track which the Titantic later made famous. In the course of their prog­ ress from Norway to Iceland to Greenland to North America and

J3 The Carleton Miscellany Kensington they sailed sometimes alone and sometimes in large fleets. The great emigration of Eric the Red and his followers from Ice­ land to Greenland was embarked in a fleet of thirty-five vessels of which only fourteen reached port. And in these ships, the largest of which were only seventy-five feet long and which with a single square sail could move only with great difficulty in any direction but before the wind, these men carried not only their wives and children but their servants and their furnishings and tools and even their livestock. Some of them carried also the large posts which had supported the "high seats" in their ancestral homes and, upon near- ing land, threw these posts over the side and watched them drift ashore, watched sentimentally perhaps or from a belief in some kind of magic or from a pilot's desire to know about inshore currents. At any rate, they built their new houses at the places where the great seat-posts beached. Between 870 and 930 they settled so thickly in Iceland that they took up all the "useable land" and made the further moves to Greenland and North America inevitable. Of course more than the desire for new land was cause for all this moving about. Not only were these men economic and political rebels but they frequently were social outcasts and makers of their own private laws. Eric the Red first left Norway for Iceland with his father who had been outlawed for manslaughter and came asking for help. He himself was outlawed from Iceland after killing two men in a quar­ rel about the killing of some of his slaves, and when he left, exiled and without property, he did not return to Norway but went west and discovered Greenland where he eventually became a real-estate promoter and political power. The first large result of his promo­ tions was that voyage by the ill-fated fleet bearing the first settlers, perhaps nearly a thousand in number, of whom less than half reach­ ed their promised green land. But Eric persisted and lived to see two large settlements on Greenland. And Leif Ericsson, on an early voyage from Iceland to Norway, fell becalmed in the Hebrides where he got a child whose prospec­ tive mother he abandoned in favor of his larger missions. As parting gifts he left her a gold ring, a woolen cloak and a belt decorated with walrus ivory. Upon arriving in Norway Leif fell under the spell of Olav Tryggvasson, the king who could juggle three swords at once and who was busily using that and related skills to browbeat the Viking world into accepting Christianity. Leif, intelligent and with an eye to the main chance, was converted together with all his men and returned to Greenland as a proselyter. Later, after dis-

x4 Erling Larsen covering and spending a year or more in North America, he be­ came, upon the death of Eric, the leader of the Greenland settle­ ments and there outlawed his half-sister Freydis, Eric's illegitimate daughter. Leif's reasons are obscure. And some of the stories about Freydis are suspect. But their existence proves that even the women of these early Vikings were or could be, or perhaps had to be, ruthless and unforgiving to others and to themselves. At one time when a Green­ land settlement was under attack by savages Freydis routed the besiegers by running out toward them beating her bared breasts with the flat of her sword. And when she later spent a winter in Leif's houses in North America she quarreled with the men she had brought with her and by a trick, by getting back into bed early one morning with her feet cold and wet with dew, persuaded her husband to kill them. The problem of the men's wives, five in num­ ber, she solved also by the simple device of killing them herself, with an axe, after her husband boggled at the idea. What she got out of all this was a larger ship which she needed for her commer­ cial enterprises. It seems doubtful that she hoped for a more enter­ prising husband; that was something she did not need. Freydis was engaged in the same kind of venture which had brought Leif to North America in the first place, the shipping back to Greenland of timber and vines. The Greenland communities never became self-sustaining; the climate was rigorous and the soil poor and treeless. Some of the first houses were built with timbers torn from the ships which had brought the settlers to the island, and it may very well be that valuable driftwood coming in from the west was one of the reasons for the first searching for whatever land it might be that lay beyond those unknown seas and that un­ crossed horizon. At any rate, Leif's fortune was based on the timber and the vines he carried back to Greenland with him, timber for building houses and ships, fibrous vines for weaving into fences and hawsers. But even the traffic with North America was not enough to keep the Greenland settlements alive. They endured only into the fourteenth century. Their Christi­ anity was supervised by bishops sent out from the homeland. They sent tithes to Rome. They traded with Europe, exchanging peltries and walrus tusks and eiderdown for flour and other necessities. They bred cattle and sheep and fished in the sea. But in time they failed. Partly the failure was caused by a formal union with Norway and subsequent economic exploitation and then neglect. And partly it was brought about by the attacks of Eskimos or Indians. The rea-

l5 The Carleton Miscellany sons for failure remain in some degree vague and undetermined, but we do know that the "Western settlement" disappeared in 1342 and later investigators, although they found buildings unharmed and herds of cattle running wild, discovered no living people either Vi­ king or Eskimo. One theory is that the entire population had emi­ grated again, this time to North America. This view is supported by people like Vilhjalmur Stefansson who think that a group of blond Eskimos found in Laborador and photographed for The Na­ tional Geographic Magazine were descendants of these lost Norsemen. We are getting finally to the Kensington story. The Viking band that left its runestone in what is now Minnesota was in search of the lost Greenland colonists. They were searching because a zealot Norwegian king, Magnus Erickson, had heard or suspected that the colonies had defected from Christianity and wanted to do some­ thing about it. Whether the falling-off of tithes increased his zeal we can not say; his letter ordering the expedition urges that it be undertaken "for the honor of God and for our predecessors, who in Greenland established Christianity and have maintained it until this time." Magnus was a politician; he spoke of things which were not as if they were. But he was a forceful man too. He said of Chris­ tianity: "We will not let it perish in our days." And he appointed to lead his expedition Paul Knutson, a member of the Royal Council, business manager of the Queen Dowager's estates, and one-time Judge of Gulathing. Knutson, as ordered, made up his crew from members of the King's Bodyguard, who were Goths, and from his own retainers and those of men going with him, Norwegians. He went first to Greenland for such clues as he could find and sailed from there to Newport where he built a large watchtower, complete with altar and loop-holes. He sent from that place thirty or forty of his men to carry more widely the search for the lost Greenlanders. They went up the coast of North America and around to Hudson Bay where they soon discovered they were in a nearly blind alley. Leav­ ing ten men to guard their large ship they took a small boat and proceeded up the Nelson River to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River of the North. Their plan was to find an overland route back to the east coast and their base camp. If they made it, or if they were destroyed, the men at the Hudson Bay camp were authorized to return home. This they finally did and in gratitude to God for their safe return they hung in the Cathedral at Nidaros three skin boats taken from Eskimos who had attacked them. Paul Knutson himself did not return to Norway, however. Pre- 16 Erling Larsen sumably, after remaining at the Newport base with the largest part of his expedition, he was lost at sea while on his way back home. And the fate of a part of the overland expedition is also in doubt. After the affair at Kensington, the survivors traveled to Lake Osakis and the Sauk River and disappeared from history. Up to that point their route is marked by campsites and discarded axes and fire-steels. The campsites are identified by mooring-holes chiseled into rocks. The Vikings were used to making mooring-holes. In the rocky fjords of Norway such a system for handling boats was common, and it adapted itself well to an unfriendly country. In the fjords it was of course inadvisable to moor boats alongside the straight rocky walls, for at night or during a storm they would be in danger of dashing or grinding to pieces. Therefore the sterns of the boats were anchored in deep water out from the shore and the bows were moored to ringbolts set into the stone. An improvement on this sys­ tem was used during the Minnesota expedition. Into the mooring- holes were placed not permanent ringbolts but temporary bolts or wooden stakes which could in the event of attack from shore be loosened with a flip of the line fastened to it and the boat then pulled away from shore by the anchor rope. To spend the night in the open boats was thus made safe. Or, we should say, relatively safe. For these men lived constantly with danger, with imminent death. The sea voyage from Norway had been one thing. But the trip from Hudson Bay to Kensington must have been more dangerous and more difficult, with the Indians always harassing and with the route itself almost impossible to traverse. From the placement of the campsites we know this little band had made many false starts up watercourses or through small chains of lakes which led no­ where. They had camped one night on a lake known to this day as Stinking Lake, and found it floating thick with dead fish. They had been in the process of making mooring-holes when Indians attacked and made sudden flight imperative. They had dragged their boats through swamps and up small rocky channels. They had been alder-whipped and leech-bitten. They had lived off the land and the lakes and one day had been so low in provisions that half the band had taken the boats for fishing and left the other half to guard the campsite and the gear. Those ten men, the guard, were sur­ prised by Indians and later found by their friends "red with blood and dead." They had come a long and difficult way to their death. Descendants or relatives of the first Vikings who had started the westward movement through the cold north Atlantic nearly five

17 The Carleton Miscellany hundred years before, separated from their homeland by half a world and from Eric and Leif and Freydis by generations of blood­ shed and failure, they died in a desolate swampland farther west and closer to the Pacific than Europeans were to attain for other hundreds of years. Perhaps they were not "first." Certainly of their firstness we have no historic results, no established institutions, no political heritage and no continuing traditions — unless it be what we sometimes call the pioneer tradition, that which demands we keep moving even if we don't know where we are going. Ill To tell wholly the story of the discovery of the Kensington Runestone, of its subsequent travels and the travels of those con­ cerned with it, of the scholarly and press-agent arguments about it, would require a kind of Kenneth Patchen typography, say the print­ ing in roman type of whatever it can be found that all hands agree about and then in italics or perhaps solid upper case all the loaded rhetorical gambits, perhaps with the Wahlgren kind of argument in red and the Holand in green, depending on which of the two men we decide is jealous and which angry or embarrassed, a decision al­ most impossible to reach I fear, or it might require the kind of double column printing Patchen used in parts of The Journal of Albion Moonlight, with the "facts" in fairly large type down one side of the page and with the arguments of the great arguers down the other in smaller type, necessarily smaller because the arguments far outweigh and would certainly much out-galley the story itself. But to do this would be "excessive" as in "zeal" or "devotion" or even as in "attention to minutiae." So let us simply sample or savor the rhetoric and get on with Hjalmar Holand's story, which is what we really started out to tell. Hear the arguments and the innuendos. Wahlgren without defin­ ing "best" writes that "according to the best information available, the Smithsonian has never guaranteed the authenticity of the runic inscription . . ." but goes on in a footnote to quote certain state­ ments by officials of the Institution who think the stone genuine and a letter from the Smithsonian's secretary to the effect that ". . . the Institution makes no official pronouncement though our staff mem­ bers as individuals have their own personal opinions." When he finds Holand stating what Holand thinks is a fact, Wahlgren writes, "We are told." "Assertedly," he says, the stone was found. And when he summarizes scholarly arguments, the men favoring the stone are listed coolly, the most enthusiastic comment being that so- 18 Erling Larsen and-so's "dissertation on the stone is well known," while the men opposing the stone are "This brilliant quintet, together with their distinguished pupils and successors." And when the circumstances of the finding of the stone are "reported" we are told that the tree, under which the stone is said to have been found, "was never to our certain knowledge seen by anybody." And that the man who found the stone, or said he found it or was reported to have said he was reported to have found it, has been made by Holand to ap­ pear "a primitive rustic" and was "compromised hopelessly." In fact, the Wahlgren book puts the entire matter of the stone into doubt and we are confronted now, according to him, with a double mys­ tery, that of the story the stone purports to tell and the greater one of the stone itself. The year of the reported finding is now so far in the past that historians like Wahlgren cannot determine exactly or with certainty who found the stone or where, or indeed whether the stone in the Alexandria tourist museum is the stone about which all the fighting goes on. More, once the hoax or fraud argument is introduced, nothing is sacred, nothing can be "proved." And, for that matter, perhaps nothing should be sacred. But the whole business is pretty sacred to Holand, even if by "sacred" we mean only that he has had an interest in and a commitment to a stone and a theory about a stone with which he has concerned him­ self for over fifty years, even though we say, as has been said, that he has "attempted to . . . coin money from his discovery." Now what Holand has done with the money he has coined, or what he has not done with the money he has only attempted to coin is, as a scholar might say, "anybody's guess." But it is obvious that he has had a good time with it or in the attempt. Holand has a good time, for one thing, with his rhetoric. He is an anti-professor in the way an abandoned illegitimate son of a bishop might be an anti-cleric. He writes that the University of Chicago Press was well-nigh committed, by two of its editors, to publish his first full-length book on the stone when the plan was vetoed by one member of the publication committee, "a professor of history with a withered and petrified mind who had heard some unnamed person say that this inscription was a fraud." And he is anti-professor or non-professor in his method sometimes too. He writes, for instance, that one manuscript used in re-plotting the Vi­ king voyages is obviously "defective" because "the sailing directions are very confusing," but that this does not bother him. "As long as the main trend of the narrative is intelligible, minor errors in distance and direction are immaterial." At other times he rejects

J9 The Carleton Miscellany certain manuscripts simply because they are "highly romantic and unrealistic." And all of this infuriates the entrenched academicians who feel besides that a private scholar without a doctor's degree should not stake out any claims in the world of historic research. Sometimes the quarreling about the stone reads like a series of "letters to the editor" about a proposal to put fluoride into a small town's water supply. What the professors dislike about Holand is that he has made up his mind about the stone and is bent on proving himself right; what Holand dislikes about the professors is that they have made up their mind that Holand is either a hoaxer or the vic­ tim of a hoax and are bent on proving themselves right. This makes it difficult for an "impartial observor" to believe that the major con­ cern in the squabble is "methodology." The major concern again is people, their likes and their dislikes, their hates and their loves. And Holand, as does Wahlgren, simply likes some people better than he likes others. I sometimes think that the people he likes best are the Norwegian immigrants and settlers who came to America in the last half of the nineteenth century; about them he has written a book also, in Norwegian, published with borrowed money and at his own expense, the 1912 edition of which carries the announce­ ment "Tenth Thousand," and which in all editions here and in Nor­ way has sold over seventeen thousand copies. These numbers Holand gave me when I last talked to him at his farm in Door County. I drove over to see him in December of 1961, he then in the ninetieth year of his life and I, by the time I arrived over snow-packed roads which turned icy and finally slushy, feeling about the same age. The way lay east across the Mississippi River and through the central part of Wisconsin to the Fox River and Green Bay where, long after the Vikings had come to Kensington, Pere Marquette landed wearing gaudy clothes and firing shots into the air in order to awe or terrify the local Indians into proper non­ violent behaviour. From Green Bay the track led north on the pen­ insula which extends into Lake Michigan, to Door County, to Stur­ geon Bay and Fish Creek and a small frame house set back from the road between a pizza restaurant and a drive-in theatre. We are still not in the Superior Country but we are in the country in which the first explorers and the later settlers moved because the Superior Country was too rough, to difficult to traverse, and for anyone but a fur-trader too unfriendly to settle. But even here, along the penin­ sula, can be seen country very like that immediately surrounding Lake Superior; the rocky, pine-grown "thumb of Wisconsin" lies sometimes on solid rock two hundred feet straight up above the

20 Erling Larsen lake. The day I was there, after snow and thaw, the air was full of haze and the lake lay mysteriously fading away into whiteness, and sometimes approaching the top of a ridge and pointing the car to­ ward the lake would feel like approaching the sudden edge of a flat earth, at speed, and expecting nothing, nothing solid, beneath the wheels at the moment of reaching the top. But at the last the road curved down and away into thick pines along a small stream and into a fishing village, Fish Creek, between which town and the next one, Ephraim, Holand lives. I had made an appointment but was not sure where to go, or how to find the house. I had a week before tried to call Holand but had been told by the operator that no Hjalmar Holand was listed either at Fish Creek or Ephraim. "But," she had said, "we do have an Ivar Holand." And when I agreed to talk to Mrs. Ivar Holand I learned that the old man lived alone without a telephone but that she, his daughter-in-law, stopped frequently at his house to see how he was getting on, and would tell him I was coming. She was sure he would be at home. But today I could not follow the directions she had given me. So I stopped to ask help of an elderly woman walking along the road which was the main street of Fish Creek. No traffic moved through the town and very few cars were parked by the small white houses under the trees. But when I stopped, in the middle of the road, the woman said, "Yes of course," and gave me directions and then, maybe remembering that I had asked about Hjalmar Holand, she said very precisely, "Mister Holand lives right there." But when I found the house I was still not sure. The driveway had been shoveled out and a small blue car was parked in it right by the road. I stopped on the highway and got out. The black-top was wet with melted snow and gritty with spread sand and salt. Between me and the house the plows had piled six feet of dirty snow through which no path had been cut. I walked up the drive and found no path away from it. The way into the house, which was built on a small hillside, was through garage doors set into the stone foundation. I rapped on the silver-grey weathered wood but got no answer. I walked around the house through two feet of wet packed thawing snow, my feet sinking through the crusts formed by the alternate thaws and freezes of the sudden heavy November snows, and finally went up on a small snow-covered porch and knocked on a door. I waited, looking at the thick pines across the road and at the ranked cherry and apple trees stretching away behind the house to the dark woods.

21 The Carleton Miscellany Then the door opened. What I remember most sharply are his blue eyes, faded perhaps by age but a pale pure blue without a trace of green or brown, a flat blue, I thought, as in cornflowers or in the eastern sky at sunset just above the lifting shadow of the earth, an empty cold blue. On this grey hazy day, I thought, under blank skies, in this landscape made of the absolute white of snow without sun and of the absolute black of tree-trunks damp with thaw, those blue eyes were the only color. And behind them was the darkness of what looked like an empty house. "You are Mr. Holand?" I asked him. He opened the door wider and asked me to come in. We were in a big dark room like what in farm-houses used to be called sum­ mer kitchens. A wooden bench ran along one wall. An old hand­ made wooden hay-rake leaned in a corner by a box filled with fire­ wood. In the sudden embarrassment of this sudden arrival in a stranger's house, an arrival prompted by an intruding curiosity, I leaned over to take off my overshoes. Then, as if because I was no longer looking at him, he began to explain. "My wife died two years ago and I live here alone and I don't shovel snow except to the garage and my children don't like me to be alone winters so I usually go to Green Bay or Waukegan for the winter and I'm supposed to go now next week but meanwhile I'm here." And I said, straightening, "It's a beautiful country. I don't blame you for not wanting to leave." "It's sixty years since I built my first house here. Come in." And we went out of the cold damp closed-in air into a modern kitchen with a breakfast-nook littered with books and papers and maps and then into the large room with the fire-place and warmth and windows looking out at the forest and the orchard. We sat down, I by a window toward the road, he in a large wooden chair by the fire-place. I told him of my curiosity and he told me his story. I asked almost no questions. And when he was done he said, "All this is in my book, My First Eighty Years." I asked where I could get a copy. He told me he had some in the house and went to get one for me and signed it, "Sincerely yours, Hjalmar R. Hol­ and," because he could not remember my name and did not want to ask me again what it was. But he remembered the price of the book. His memory was one of the things he spoke about. At one point he said he could "remember everything about the Kensington stone" but, pretending I did not know he had already forgotten it, that by tomorrow he would probably forget my name. He said the usual

22 Erling Larsen things about getting old and living in the past and he recalled the names of people who had been kind to him fifty years ago. And the names of old enemies? Yes, those too. But mostly he was con­ cerned with friends. Even Olof Ohman, the farmer who first found the stone, he thought of as a friend. "He was a sturdy, honest, solid, responsible man," he said. "Like most of the immigrants." Holand was himself an immigrant, and an orphan at that. He worked his way through college and through an M.A. at the Uni­ versity of Wisconsin by selling books and maps to farmers in Wis­ consin and Minnesota. The book, symbolically perhaps called King's Handbook of the United States, he sold by making a speech which, he writes, went this way: "It takes up each state in succession and is the most comprehensive single volume I have seen about the re­ sources and development of our country. It has hundreds of illus­ trations." Holand walked through the country, stopping at farm houses, sleeping in barns, selling his books, and, believe it or not, getting his money in advance by promising to come back later and deliver the volumes. At one time he told a customer, "I'll come around in about a month and deliver it. I have many orders so I shall hire a horse and buggy." What really led Holand to the Kensington stone was this book­ selling. He tells that the evenings in the country were long and lonely. And one time he talked to a customer about this, explaining that he wished he knew more about farming so that he could pass the long evenings by helping the farmers in the field. But the woman said that the farmers were interested in other things than plowing and milking cows, and that many of them loved to talk about their careers in this country and about the settlement of Minnesota and Wisconsin. She was simply telling him that he didn't need to work but could sit around and talk. And she gave Holand the idea for collecting the information which he later wrote into his first large book, History of the Norwegian Settlements. Later, when he began his fight for the Kensington Stone, unkind people might have sug­ gested that he did so only in order to fill out and make bigger his settlement story or to make possible another one of those recurring revisions. Anyway, Holand looks back on those book-selling, data-gather­ ing trips as happy times. He walked mostly, through the forests and along the streams and down the dusty roads of Wisconsin and Min­ nesota. Sometimes he was given lifts by farmers moving farther west, in wagons loaded with children and cooking-pots and bed­ steads. But he needed little money; those rides cost him nothing, he

23 The Carleton Miscellany

rarely had to pay for food, and few settlers were far enough re­ moved from their own wanderings to think it honorable to charge a man for sleeping in a hay-mow. Holand says he was always wel­ comed, sometimes as a bringer of news from the outside world, much more frequently as a receiver of news, as a man who would listen to what another had had small opportunity to say before, as a confessor then perhaps. But always as a human being, a fellow man. The only major difficulty, he recalls now, was that the largest item in the settlers' diet was salt pork, a food which Holand at that time could not abide. Now, however, he tells me that he likes it and can eat as much of it as he pleases and, rubbing his hand down his plaid wool shirt-front, it does not make him fat. Using what he learned from these pioneers, Holand began to write newspaper stories and magazine articles. Soon he acquired a kind of reputation as an historian, or journalist. And when in Min­ neapolis a number of people with similar interests decided to form a society for the preservation of the history of the Norwegian pio­ neers, Holand attended their first meeting and was appointed or elected the new society's archivist and historian. And salesman, for another part of his job was to travel throughout the new settle­ ments and sell membership in the society to the settlers themselves. Thus the whole settlement-history idea snowballed; Holand trav­ elled more widely than before, gathered more information, and even began to give lectures on the settlements to the settlers. Even though he was paid no salary by his Society, he took up collections at these lectures and so supported himself in a new affluence during these expeditions, on one of which he first heard about the Kensington stone. Holand writes that he "discovered" the Norwegian settlement at Kensington and that when he arrived there he began to question the people about their historic past but found that all they wanted to talk about was a strange stone which had been found on the Olaf Ohman farm some years before. He says that at first he thought this stone was simply one of the Indian pictograph things like others he had seen about in the country, but that when people told him the inscription on the stone was not painted but chiselled his curi­ osity was aroused and he went out to talk to Ohman about what he had been reported as having found. The story, and let us not argue about how to read "story," is that Ohman was out one day grubbing trees from a small knoll on his farm and discovered beneath the roots of a popple, the roots growing over and around it and becoming flattened in the process,

24 Erling Larsen the stone bearing the strange device about which the farmers around Kensington had been talking. Ohman hauled the stone into Kensing­ ton, where it was put on display in the window of the bank. A copy of the inscription was sent to a professor of Scandinavian languages at the University of Minnesota, O. J. Breda, who after two months returned the inscription with a letter saying that in his opinion it was a fraud. The story might have ended there; Ohman took the stone from the bank and laid it as a step before the door of the granary on his farm, where it remained for about ten years. But then Holand came along, and, as he says, "found" it, and re-opened the argument about its authenticity. Holand tells that after some haggling Ohman gave him the stone. Holand hired a neighboring farm-boy to haul it to town, where a hardware merchant crated it for him, and then he shipped it to his home at Ephraim where he set out upon the task of translating the runes, which task he says was not very difficult. And from then on Holand has been fighting the case in books and in magazine articles. Whether the story the stone tells is true or not perhaps will never be finally proved. It is now even impossible, according to some crit­ ics, to decide whether Holand ever had the original stone or whether Ohman or someone else found or made the stone. Affividats describing the stone and its discovery, which Holand obtained in Kensington, were lost in a fire which destroyed the first house Hol­ and built at Ephraim. And the originals of some of the historic docu­ ments on which Holand bases his argument about the Paul Knutson expedition were lost in a fire which destroyed the library at Copen­ hagen. So perhaps all we have is a story about fifty years in the life of H. R. Holand. And it is a story which Holand delights to tell. I think of him sitting in that tall straight-backed chair by the fire­ place in his house among the fruit trees, nursing a scarred black pipe, thinking back over those real or imaginary six hundred years. I, for one, have no desire to try to "solve the mystery" either of the runestone or of the relative probity or acuteness or scholarly accuracy of Holand and Wahlgren. Many of the mysteries with which those two men have been concerning themselves can prob­ ably not be solved at all. At least they can not be solved by any Wahlgren-Holand debate in print or otherwise, for the two men live in worlds as different in mind and spirit as are Ephraim and Berkeley separated by miles. The argument of the burned affidavits for instance, is to Holand no argument at all —he knew the men and got their word and that is that —but to Wahlgren in the first place it can not be proved that the affidavits existed at all, for he

25 The Carleton Miscellany never saw them and then if he had seen them he would not have known whether they were forgeries or not, and in the second place if they did exist and if Holand did copy them accurately it is to Wahlgren obvious that they are illegal, for the dates of signing and notarizing are earlier than the date on which the notary's "certifi­ cate" was recorded by the Clerk of District Court, and it is to Wahlgren obvious also that their having "little or no standing as legal documents . . . should suffice to divest them or any remain­ ing shred of the magic with which Holand has striven to invest them." Although the non sequitur here is interesting enough, as is the near Madison Avenue magic worked by the use of "magic," what in this account shows most clearly the nature of the basic quarrel between Wahlgren and Holand is Wahlgren's telling us that the investigation of the court records was made by a man who in another part of the book is described as "J. A. Holvik (born 1878), Professor Emeritus of Norse at Concordia College, Moor- head, Minnesota" who "has a vast file on the Kensington question, which he has studied continuously [sic] since 1908, and during the course of which he has made several discoveries of great impor­ tance." * But I said I had no desire to try to solve these mysteries. True, I did spend a morning hunting through some of the files of the Norwegian-American for those early Holand articles which are supposed to differ so terribly from the later ones that they prove beyond doubt that Holand did indeed change his mind about some things during these last fifty years. And I found myself spending less time in hunting for Holand than in reading Teddy Roosevelt's accounts of his hunting trips in North Dakota and Africa, in dis­ covering that Thomas Alva Edison in 1909 was informing the world that "The dirigible balloon is a farce and the aeroplane impracti­ cable," and that Andrew Carnegie was arguing that the "emperor of Germany . . . has it in his power to abolish war among civilized nations." Obviously history, if I dare use the word, is often a matter of analagous situations. Peace, in any man's time, is always up to the other man. Inventors distrust all inventors but themselves. And the people reading the newspapers during the time of the early squabbles about the Kensington stone were either skeptics like Edi­ son or believers like Carnegie. While Holand, then as now, was

* Even if the reader can ignore the syntax here he should not miss what Wal- gren implies about non-professor Holand, nor, if he goes to the dictionary for "continous," should he miss the further implications of its Jowett quotation: "The power of . . . continuous thought is very rare." 26 Erling Larsen caught up in the romance and adventure of his search for the true stone and its true story. In November of 1909 he wrote an article describing a walk out to Pelican Lake near Ashby. "A howling Northeaster was blowing with drifting snow and slush underneath

None of this of course proved that the true stone ever was found. But whatever stone we are talking about has had, itself, a remarkable career, in describing which, of course, we must again before every statement put the word "maybe." The stone was shipped to Evanston for examination and was carried by Holand to European universities for exhibition and further examination. It was almost bought by the Minnesota Historical Society and has been on show at the Smithsonian Institution. And now the Alex­ andria Chamber of Commerce says it has the stone on display in its Runestone Museum. Who actually owns the stone has been a matter of dispute. Wahlgren writes about a lawsuit, and Holand never says he sold the stone but does say he "conveyed" it. The Alexandria newspapers are, so far as I and a helper could determine in three hours of dusty work in a hot cellar, silent on the matter of any purchase of the stone. All we learned in those hours, from the Alexandria Citizen News file for 1928, the year in which the stone is supposed to have returned to Alexandria, is that in exist­ ence at one time was an organization called the Kensington Rune- stone Foundation Corporation of Minnesota and that on May 17th a Runestone Rally was held at Ortonville, Minnesota, with Con­ stant Larson, Hjalmar Holand and the governor of Minnesota named, yes, Christianson, in attendance. Larson is one of the men listed on a plaque commemorating the return of the stone to Alex­ andria. I wrote Holand about this and his reply was that "Some time after the Minn. Historical Society neglected to acquire the K. Stone, I had a letter from Mr. Constant Larson, a lawyer in Alexandria, saying that he was one of ten men in Alexandria who each would give 250.00 to pay my traveling expenses in Europe. This offer was accepted by me and I sent him a deed conveying the stone —not to the ten men, but to Douglas County where it was found. "In 1947 it was sent to the Smithsonian Institution at its request but with the proviso that it was to be returned to Minnesota for exhibition in its territorial centennial (1949). However, at the end of that year the Chamber of Commerce which had temporary pos­ session voted to keep the stone in Alexandria. Most of the leading

27 The Carleton Miscellany men in Alexandria are now in favor of returning the stone to the Smithsonian, but action is deferred for the sake of local peace." And, peaceful or not, the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce in April of 1962, when I visited their town, was preparing to celebrate the six-hundredth anniversary of something, perhaps of the date which someone says is cut into a stone which is on show at the Mu­ seum. Anyway a celebration. And perhaps a celebration less of the anniversary of the stone, or the date, than a celebration, in another sense of the importance of Alexandria. I remember that almost the brightest thing in the room I had at the Viking Motel was the shocking-pink cover of the telephone directory which lay on the writing table. In the center of the cover was a large white circle within which was an almost blank map, in dark red, of North Amer­ ica. The only geographic details on this map were in white —the outlines of Minnesota, the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River — and in the center of the Minnesota map was a large black star, Alex­ andria, obviously very much the heart of everything. Surrounding the circle were small illustrations detailing the reasons for this cen- trality. Alexandria manufactures airplanes, builds boats, has a radio station and a TV station, and has the "Kensington Runestone, evi­ dence of Viking expedition in 1362." Looking through the telephone book, I learned that in Alexandria R.E.A. stands not for Rural Elec­ trification Administration but for Runestone Electric Association, and that when you call a cab in Alexandria what you get is a Viking. A club of ham radio operators is called the Runestone Radio Club. And, learning this, I paraphrased in my mind a line from Gulliver's Travels: The metropolis called in their language Runestone, or Pride of the Universe. Except for the large celebration, which is divided into three parts, with the Viking Days coming in June and the Dairy Days later in that month and with almost a week in July devoted to the Runestone Festival, all of these celebrations being filled with appearances by radio personalities and television stars and with the coronation of a queen and with a kiddies parade and a Kiwanis pancake day, the big Runestone attraction at Alexandria is the museum. In the mu­ seum is of course the Stone. But other things are there for the edifi­ cation of the tourist. One end of the large room devoted to the dis­ play is filled with a collection of glass cases containing stuffed native animals, and along the sides are pioneer implements, quilts, old books, old telephones and spinning wheels. Emphasis is on the past and on the people who made the past. Above a reed organ is the following inscription: "Worldly toil and strife has left the brother

28 Erling Larsen and sister some-what feeble and grey, for you see they have helped to hugh a path and smoothen the way, so that you and I may have the comforts of this day." The man who has done the most to collect this material is Henry D. Moen who when he was nine years old was taken by his father, a shoe-store owner in Kensington, to the Ohman farm to see the stone on the day after Ohman found it. About this event in his life Moen wrote, for the Park Region Echo of January 2, 1962, an ac­ count which contains this description of Ohman: "His word was as good as his bond. . . . Ohman never attended church services. But he knew more about the Bible and its contents than most people who do go to church regularly. ... A man of . . . character and stand­ ing in the community." Wahlgren would question this. And perhaps he is right. Perhaps the whole business of the stone began simply as a joke and was turned into a "promotion." At least we have promotion at work now in Alexandria, in the Festival and in the Museum. And it is easy to make jokes about "jokes" and about promotions; it is easy to re­ ply "Why not?" to Harvey Hammergren, manager of the Alexan­ dria Chamber of Commerce, when he refers to all the work he is doing about the Festival and says, "You can't stand still." But these Festivals are in a tradition which Holand loves, that old Norwegian student tradition of staging torch-light processions to the homes of poets and professors on the anniversaries of their births or of their first publications or appointments. And to those students and to Holand the Festivals are no joke. Nor, I think, is scholarship a joke to Holand. For I have a letter from him which makes comment obliquely on both my and his abil­ ities as accurate historians. It begins, "Thank you for your letter dated the 21st and mailed the 20th." Facts, he believes, are facts. And, he believes too, "you can't stand still." Witness to this is a letter he wrote in reply to a small note I had sent him after hearing that he was seriously ill, in the hospital and about to die. April 3, 1962 Dear Professor Larsen: Thank you for your letter of the 29th which I received this morning. Yes, it is true that 1 had an operation and am now a temporary invalid. It was not pre-meditated, but 1 had been invited to Minne­ apolis where the Sons of Norway wanted to show me a little honor. On my return I passed through La Crosse and stopped in at the Gunderson Clinic to see if there was anything wrong in my

29 The Carleton Miscellany

physique. Yes, the doctor said I was in a most serious condition. It called for an immediate operation or death would soon follow. This was difficult to believe because I felt tip top except for a "minor" ailment. But the doctor was very earnest about it. So they laid me out, applied 40.00 worth of drugs and fancy treat­ ment and cut me up. The operation was "successful" and I have been slowly recovering here in my daughter's house. Moral, if you pass a clinic, look the other way. In a couple of weeks, then, I shall return to my home in peaceful Ephraim. I shall look forward to your next visit. Sincerely yours, H. R. Holand In peaceful Ephraim he lives, lives I suppose as he never lived anywhere else. For he has written a history of the town and the county, and in his autobiography he devotes almost as much space to his own discovery of Door County as to the discovery of the runestone. There, on the rocky slopes he built his first log house, cleared his first acres, planted his first fruit trees because he believed a theory advocated by a professor friend that the surrounding water would give the county a climate suited to their growth and stimu­ lating to their productivity, and there, he told me, in each of two succeeding years he profited from his trees to the tune of ten thou­ sand dollars. Not, he said, that this was typical or constant, but it was pretty good for the time. The dollar, he carefully explained, was once too worth a great deal more than it is now.

IV Of all the discrepancies and difficulties and pieces of outright non­ sense which critics have seen in the story which Holand for fifty Kensington years has publicized and defended, perhaps the favorite has to do with the enormous difficulty of that trip from Greenland. Not only has the sea voyage itself been called well-nigh impossible but the route from Hudson Bay to Kensington has been called both impossible and impassable. Why, the question goes, did not the Vi­ kings travel by the later and popular route through the Gulf and River of Saint Lawrence rather than through that cold ice-floating Hudson Bay? After all, the questioner says, anyone who has seen Hudson Bay or tried to find the river running into it from Lake Winnipeg, or anyone who in Lake Winnipeg has ever tried to find the Red River of the North, knows that all that northern coun­ try is a waste of waters and wild swamps, a puzzle of islands and inlets, a nest of false clues and blind alleys. And perhaps all these

30 Erling Larsen would be fair questions or relevant arguments — if we assumed that the Vikings knew where they were going. Clearly, they knew what they were hunting for, but they could not by any stretch of the imagination know what route to take or in what township they expected finally to arrive. Surely they were behaving much in the manner of their forefathers who had thrown the high seats from the ships in order to follow the track of their drifting to safe harbor. In other words, they took the obvious and open route which seemed the only route possibly taken by the men for whom they searched. And we must certainly also keep in mind the often forgotten fact that they never found what they were seeking. They got lost. And they got killed. As critics of Holand and as gossipers about our fellow men we fall daily into this trap. Because as critics and gossips we live by hindsight we assume that the people we criticize and gossip about ought to be living and thinking the same way. Of course, and alas, many of us do. But had the Vikings done this they would never have reached Kensington or, for that matter, the Hebrides. And had Sigrid done this she would never have had the adventure of driving home for that New Year's Eve party —she would have been in a warm garage waiting for the snow and wind to stop and for that mechanic who always understands only Buicks to come back from his coffee break and explain that no one has ever made a heater on a small foreign car that ever kept anyone warm. And had James Joyce done this, he would never have written Ulysses. It is silly to put a book of regional memories into the category of Ulysses, of course, but now that Mandeville and Hakluyt and Joyce and Carl Carmer have written and all the stars have long since fallen that ever will fall on Alabama, even a personal memoir of a country in which my mind has lived becomes subject to the hindsight criti­ cism. I have a note from an otherwise intelligent editor who explains why no contract for this (if ever completed) book can be offered by saying that it "is such a mixture of . . . personal experience, profile, history that wanders too far afield and too far back . . . that what we have seen is unclassifiable . . . too far off the track for us. . . ." As were, and as would be today, those poor bloody Vikings. The essence of the anti-Holand argument is that the Vikings were too far off the track that we now in our wisdom know to be the best one, or if not the best at least the one we have beaten and beaten. The Vikings, obviously, should simply have been as smart as we are. Implicit, actually, is the argument that they were as smart, or as

31 The Carleton Miscellany hindsighted, or as stupid, as we and therefore could not have done something we would not do today. We know it is silly to explore new tracks; they certainly must have known it too. All this is trite. My own argument is trite. And more than likely the problem, editorially or otherwise, is not as simple as I make it. The hindsight is certainly necessary. Joyce knew that Leopold Bloom could not be understood by anyone who did not already know something about Odysseus. Hemingway knew that Wyoming was a country which included Spain and was bounded by Africa. And I am convinced that the heavy-breasted Gyda stands behind more than one modern Minnesota Norwegian fortune. Hindsight is indeed important but only because it illuminates the dark future, the even darker present, for any attempt to live in any country, to live with any people, with any person, is a fight with a darkness into which we must turn every available light, even the light of history which wanders too far back. Every such attempt is unique, unclassi­ fiable. When I first came to Minnesota, for instance

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG:

Why It Was Fought

By Allen Tate A Lecture delivered at the Northrop Memorial Auditorium, The University of Minnesota, February 14, 1963.

Although the centenary of the Battle of Gettysburg is six months away, it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of its significance, if we are prepared to understand it, in the week of Abraham Lin­ coln's birthday. It may be said that in a very real sense he won the battle, for if he had not replaced, four days before the fighting, General Joseph Hooker, who had been badly defeated two months before at Chancellorsville, with General George G. Meade, it is probable that Robert E. Lee, with his hitherto victorious Army of Northern Virginia, would have won. And at the dedication of the

32 Allen Tate

Cemetery at Gettysburg some months later, Lincoln made his most famous speech. My intention is not to reproduce the battle. I am concerned with human beings, with how they fought, how the men of both sides looked, and how they felt about each other, how the two sides differed in character and in what subtle qualities they were alike. For we must not forget that they were all Americans. The Southerners were no doubt Southerners first, or they wouldn't have marched into Pennsylvania; but in a real if somewhat irrational sense they felt that they were even more American than the blue-clad hordes that two years ago had moved south to force them into alien ways. Unacknowledged prejudice has been one of the blights of Amer­ ican political and social life; so I had better confess, before I go further, where I stand as I speak to you this morning. I intend a quite literal meaning of the word stand. I cannot imagine any en­ lightened Southerner — such as one usually imagines oneself to be — rejoicing in the defeat of the South. Can defeat ever be a good thing for the defeated? On July 22, 1961 (not 18) The New York Herald Tribune ran photographs of the reenactment of the first Battle of Manassas (or as you know it, Bull Run); one of the pictures showed the charge of the 17th Virginia Infantry. As I gazed at it I felt after a few seconds a kind of physical nausea overcoming me. Here were men dressed up in Gray and Blue playing out like children an epi­ sode of the great tragedy of American history. As I kept on staring, I knew why I felt faintly sick. My maternal grandfather was Captain of Company D of the 17 th Virginia, and there was something revolt­ ing in the infantile antics of these Civil War "Buffs." When I was a small boy we of course "played" Civil War; but we could not find any Yankees to oppose us; the enemy was imaginary and invisible; and we always won. So, just as I cannot imagine the abstract en­ lightened Southerner rejoicing in defeat, I find it even more difficult to regret the restoration of the Union, as some of my friends "down there" still do, if pressed, late at night, for their real views. But as I look back and try to imagine myself, either as a participant or as a spectator, I cannot see myself facing south behind the Union lines, but always facing north, perhaps on Clark's Mountain in Virginia, so that I can see the gray columns advancing to Manassas, or to Sharpsburg, or to the quiet Cumberland Valley of Pennsylvania. And who, so placed, would not want the gray columns to win? Well, win what? To win that particular battle and even the war, if not what was then called Southern Independence, and certainly not In­ dependence if it meant the perpetuation of slavery. Our loyalties are

33 The Carleton Miscellany never simple, and our retrospective loyalties are inextricably com­ plex because we cannot know just what they might have been in any historical situation of the past. Is it not easy to say that at a certain moment in the past, for a Southerner of 1963, perhaps the moment of choice in 1861 between secession and union,— is it not easy to say that this modern Southerner, with the advantage of hind­ sight, would have voted, in anticipation of the verdict of history, against secession, knowing that he was preserving the lives of more than 600,000 of the best Americans, and preventing a rift in the American mind that has not to this day been closed? I like to think that I should have taken that position, but an uneasy sense of his­ torical reality tells me that I would not have taken it. Lost in the enclosed contemporaneity of 1861, in a position not unlike that of the "trapped spectator" of a Henry James novel, I am fairly sure that I should have been facing north, I hope not behind the Confed­ erate lines, but in them, up front, along with three men whose pres­ ence at Gettysburg has from boyhood given the battle a direct im­ pact upon my imagination, such as no other action of that war could give. First, there was General Lewis A. Armistead who at the head of his brigade momentarily broke the Union line and, before he fell mortally wounded, reached the "high-water mark": he was my maternal grandmother's second cousin. There was Colonel Rob­ ert Allen, commander of the 28th Virginia Infantry of Garnett's Brigade, Pickett's Division; he was a first cousin of my great-grand­ father, who was also Robert Allen; and he was killed in the great charge. That he was there explains the display of the flag of the 28th Virginia on this platform.* (I shall return in a moment to what I consider an improbable coincidence.) The third man, also in Pickett's Division, was my maternal grandfather, who obviously survived or I should not be here today. I confess that the announced title of this discourse was deliber­ ately misleading. Has anybody since July 3, 1863 been able to ex­ plain why the Battle of Gettysburg was fought? Military historians have entertained the ifs and might-have-beens: IF Lee had not em­ ployed Napoleonic tactics on the second and third days, might he have won? IF Meade had pursued Lee on July 4th, would the war have ended then? Vicksburg had fallen on that very day, and the Confederacy might have collapsed almost two years before Appo­ mattox. But these speculations are not what I mean when I ask why

*The flags of the 28th Virginia Infantry and the 1st Minnesota Infantry were displayed on the platform during this lecture.

34 Allen Tate

Gettysburg was fought. What I am asking is why was the Civil War or, as it was called in my part of the country, the War Between the States, fought at all? When the question becomes as large and diffuse as this, it is unanswerable, and may be dismissed as a rhetorical ques­ tion. But perhaps not quite dismissed. Let me put the question into a different perspective. Why were 160,000 young Americans willing to shoot into one another's faces for three consecutive days near the little town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July a century ago? There was an inflammatory patriotism on both sides, but no historian has ever discovered that the young men hated each other. When the wedge of Pickett's assault, led by General Lewis A. Armistead, had been chewed off by enveloping flank attacks, the Union soldiers, who had captured the remnant of Armistead's and Garnett's bri­ gades, spontaneously lifted their caps and bowed to the enemies who a moment ago had done their best to kill them. Why did they do this? Less than half an hour earlier, as Pickett's men were advancing towards the famous clump of trees, they overran a nest of Union sharpshooters. A Confederate captain shouted: "Lie down, you fool Yanks. We don't want to shoot you." The Confederate wave rolled over them, and five or six young lives were saved. Why did the Confederates do this? If we could understand why the Union and Confederate boys were capable of these acts of humanity and courtesy, we might be­ gin to understand the mystery of that great and terrible war. For I think there is no doubt that terrible as it was, it was also mysterious as no other war that we know anything about was mysterious. It is well-known that wars are fought by boys. But we tend, as we try to imagine what they looked like in the Civil War, to see them with the black beards (soon to turn grey on those who sur­ vived) of the men, not the boys, of that era. It has been estimated that at Gettysburg the average age, for all ranks, of the Army of Northern Virginia was nineteen. Allowing for the higher age of field officers, the average for the Confederate private must have been a fraction under eighteen. There are no figures for the Army of the Potomac, but it, too, was composed of boys. What did these boys look like? What, as we should say today, motivated them? The offi­ cial answers are never satisfactory. The brilliant historian of Pickett's Charge, Professor George Stewart, has written: "But to write of Gettysburg in terms of the Somme or of Monte Cassino would be a painful falsification of history. Nothing is more striking in the sources generally than the absence of gloom." There seems to have

35 The Carleton Miscellany been neither shell-shock nor war-neurosis. The long intervals be­ tween the great pitched battles might explain the absence of perma­ nent damage to the nervous system; yet the in-fighting in the Civil War was more deadly than that of either of the two World Wars because of the outmoded brigade-front attack and the vastly im­ proved small-arms. But we cannot blame either side for the useless slaughter, resulting from the failure to adjust tactics to the new fire­ power, when we remember that the Germans, invading Belgium in 1914, had not learned the lesson. As the great armies are approaching Gettysburg, let us look at one of them through the eyes of a citizen of Chambersburg, Penn­ sylvania. There are many eye-witness descriptions of the Army of the Potomac, as well as the great photographs of Brady and Gard­ ner. (If there be a man living who doubts that war is hell, let him look at the Brady photograph, taken about July 5th, of the human corpses and of the dead artillery horses near the Trostle farmhouse at Gettysburg.) The citizen of Chambersburg gave us the only de­ scription of a large Confederate army on record. Except at Gettys­ burg, the great battles were all fought in the South, and Southerners saw no reason to describe what they assumed that everybody knew. But Jacob Hoke, our friend in Chambersburg, had never seen a large body of troops of either side, and it is doubtful whether he had seen any Confederates at all. So his impression of the character, the com­ position, and the morale of Lee's army is of inestimable value to those of us who like to bring back the "direct impression of life" (a favorite phrase of Henry James) from the thickets of statistics and abstract reports of positions and numbers. On Wednesday June 24, 1863, Jacob Hoke had placed himself at a second story window above his dry-goods store in the public square of Chambersburg. This is what he saw: About nine o'clock in the forenoon, the sound of music was heard up Main Street. Rodes' division of infantry proceeded by a band of mu­ sicians playing The Bonnie Blue Flag, made its appearance on the brow of the hill by the Reformed Church. These were the first Con­ federate infantry that had ever penetrated a free state . . . Through­ out this entire day long columns of infantry and artillery, with the usual accompaniments of immense trains of wagons and droves of cattle and ambulances, streamed through the streets . . . About half- past ten, a carriage drawn by two horses and accompanied by several horsemen, was observed coming down the street. It was stopped in front of the Franklin Hotel. One of the occupants of this carriage was a thin sallow-faced man, with strongly marked Southern features, and a head and physiognomy which strongly indicated culture, refinement and genius . . . This intellectual-looking and crippled man was Lieu-

36 Allen Tate

tenant-General R. S. Ewell, commander of the 2nd Army Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. Two days later Hoke saw this: About nine o'clock General A. P. Hill, commander of the 3rd Corps, attended by one or two of his staff, dismounted and hitched his horse in front of a grocery store. He was a man of splendid physique . . . his dress was the ordinary Confederate gray, plain and without orna­ ment except the stars of his collar designating his rank . . . He spoke to a citizen who gave him whatever information he could and then asked General Hill when he expected General Lee. Hill replied, "I am expecting him every moment." Casting his eyes up the Main Street, he said, "There he comes now." . . . Returning to the second storey of my dwelling ... I saw a group of about 15 or 20 finely mounted men coming over the brow of the hill. A man nearby suddenly exclaimed, "That's General Lee and his staff." . . . Lee and his staff stopped directly in front of where I stood. General Hill, upon perceiving the approach of General Lee, mounted his horse and riding slowly towards him, held his hat gracefully above his head. The two generals — Lee and Hill — then rode a short distance away from the group, and held a short, whispered consultation. All the Confederate high command but James Longstreet were shrewdly observed by this modest storekeeper, to whom chance and astute powers of observation had given the opportunity of preserv­ ing a unique moment in the annals of the Civil War. For more than a week, up to June 30th, Hoke and his fellow citizens, watched and even tried to count the "vast host" as it passed through the narrow square of Chambersburg. Hoke tells us that his "heart sank" as the host day after day passed under his eyes on its way to Gettysburg. And well his heart might sink. But he did not know that the other vast host, slowly moving towards Pennsylvania east of the Blue Ridge to protect Washington, was even more vast. He sums up his impression of the size of Lee's army: The great preponderating impression which was made upon the mind by looking upon an army like that which passed through here on its way to Gettysburg was its immenseness. No idea of its magnitude can be formed by any description which can be given. Had all the troops, wagon trains, artillery, herds of cattle "been placed in usual marching order, it would have extended from Cham­ bersburg to Harrisburg — fifty miles." And yet Hoke saw only about two-thirds of the Army of Northern Virginia, some 51,000 men. When they first began to appear he could not believe that they were an army. They looked like a tatterdemalion mob; many wore no shoes, few wore hats, and instead of uniforms they wore odds and 37 The Carleton Miscellany ends of pants and shirts, dirty gray or butternut; but a second look disclosed certain features of this armed mob that had much to do with his sinking of the heart. They did not march; they moved rap­ idly, ranks well closed, in a kind of shuffling trot; and there was no straggling. They were all perfectly armed with the great English Enfield rifle, the barrels gleaming in the sun, which threw a cone- shaped lead slug with surprising accuracy some 500 yards. We have been for the last few minutes in the Confederate "fog of war," at the side of Jacob Hoke, and we do not know what is happening to the east and south of Chambersburg, the direction in which the butternut host has been disappearing and in which the great blue host is cautiously moving north from the Rappahannock towards the Potomac on a line parallel to that of the gray host. And we have no way of knowing that the Federal General Joseph Hooker is about to be replaced, on June 28th, by General George G. Meade, a scholarly, somewhat irascible Pennsylvanian who had com­ manded a corps but not an army — an unknown quantity, but a risk no greater than Hooker would be in another pitched battle. Had not Lee, with less than half of Hooker's numbers, overwhelmed Hook­ er's army seven weeks ago at Chancellorsville? I have said that it is no part of my purpose on this occasion to reproduce the entire Battle of Gettysburg. That has never been done successfully by any historian. The argument about what happened and where, continues after a century, and will continue until Amer­ icans lose all historical sense. That I am speaking today to a Minne­ sota audience is an historical accident which suggests the focus of my speech, the direction towards which my simplified narrative is moving. I am not trying to dazzle this audience with an extravagant conceit when I say that you and I have met before, on July 3, 1863, at a low stone wall just south of an umbrella clump of trees. Let us place ourselves there somewhat more rapidly, and with less apprehension, than we did almost a hundred years ago. On July 1st we are not even there. You are some fifteen or twenty miles from Gettysburg, on the Taneytown Road in Maryland. Your com­ mander is General Winfield Scott Hancock, a great soldier and a great gentleman. His troops are the famous 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac. You are in the Division of General John Gibbon, a North Carolinian who might conceivably have been opposing, in­ stead of leading you. And you are in the brigade of General William Harrow, and your regiment is the 1st Minnesota. But you are arriv­ ing at Gettysburg in the evening of July 1st, under the direct com­ mand of General Gibbon, for General Hancock has been ordered

38 Allen Tate by General Meade to go to the front, survey the field, and decide whether the Union army shall be concentrated there to receive the further attacks of General Lee. That first day had gone badly for the Union. General Harry Heth, commander of a division of Hill's Confederate Corps, had heard that shoes might be requisitioned in Gettysburg, which he was approaching from the west. But the Union cavalry general, John Buford —a Kentuckian, alas —had got there first. An argument over shoes brought on a great battle at a place where neither side wanted it. Two Union Corps were knocked out; General Reynolds was killed; and 5,000 Federal prisoners were taken by Hill's men, who crushed the advance of the Union Army with overwhelming numbers. I shall not arrive on the field until the morning of July 3rd; but you are in line on Cemetery Ridge at the Union centre on the morn­ ing of July 2nd. Some of the Union corps are not yet up but they are moving fast from the south. On that second day your line is a fishhook, the barb on a high hill called Culp's Hill a little southeast of Gettysburg, then running westward it suddenly turns due south from Cemetery Hill along Cemetery Ridge to two rocky, wooded hills: Little Round Top and Round Top. From the barb to the end of the shank, the fishhook line is about four miles long. Conforming to this line on the north and west, the Confederate army is concen­ trated, all but the three brigades of General George E. Pickett's Di­ vision, which has been guarding the trains back on the Cashtown- Chambersburg road. I am with this Division, and at the moment it seems unlikely that we shall meet. How many men confronted one another on the morning of July 2nd we do not know, after the bloody struggle of the preceding day. But, as the armies approached each other, Meade had about 84,000 of all arms, Lee about 76,000; so if we subtract the cavalry, which played little part in the battle, Meade is left with some 73,000 infantry and artillery, and Lee with 67,000. Lee occupied the "exterior line," which was about seven miles long, while the Union line was a little more than half that. In short, Meade could concentrate for the defense more than two for one of the offense; for Lee was committed by his great success of the first day to the offensive. He was so committed also by his "headlong combativeness" and by his belief, amply confirmed (or so it seemed), by his success in six great pitched battles, in the invinci­ bility of the Confederate infantry. This is not the place to recall the disagreement of Lee and Long- street which resulted in the delayed and piecemeal, if powerful, at­ tacks of the second day. We are heading towards the first action of 39 The Carleton Miscellany the i st Minnesota on this field. At about half past three Longstreet, with his two divisions on the field, Hood's and McLaws', probably the best fighting men in Lee's army, totalling about 14,000 men, struck the Federal left. This was a salient occupied by the Federal 3rd Corps, under General Daniel E. Sickles, who without orders had advanced to this position, known as the Peach Orchard. After some two hours of terrific fighting, with heavy losses on both sides, the salient was wiped out, and Sickles' Corps was in effect destroyed. Meanwhile the assault of McLaws and Hood was to be supported on the left by Anderson's division, and a part of Pender's, of the 3rd Confederate Corps of A. P. Hill. The supporting attack was not coordinated, so that Hill's brigades, though they won some local successes, Wright's brigade even piercing briefly the Union line and taking some twenty guns, were driven back, defeated in detail. Had the attacks on the Union centre been as successful as Longstreet's defeat of Sickles, there might not have been a third day. At this point the 1st Minnesota appears. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the part played by this regiment turned the tide of battle. This fact has been obscured by the more spectacular incident of the third day, known as Pickett's charge; for after Pickett, Lee no longer had the strength in reserve to deliver another Napoleonic assault. Turned the tide of the Battle of Gettysburg? This battle has offered greater temptations to IFS and MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS than any other battle fought on this continent. What did the 1st Minnesota do? What did it do which had it not been done might have given Lee the victory? I daresay all battles are full of such incidents. Which is the crucial incident can never be decided. A metaphor drawn from modern psychol­ ogy may illustrate this difficulty. A battle is a gestalt situation in which a single line of cause and effect cannot be discerned. Only the total situation may be described, and the rolling masses, giv­ ing here, advancing there, are like two tidal waves meeting head on; a slight pressure, scarcely visible at the time, may shift the entire seething configuration in the one direction or the other. The action of the 1 st Minnesota in the late afternoon of July 2nd was one of these countless pressures, without which, at that moment, all that followed might have been different. What happened was briefly this. Barksdale's and Wofford's bri­ gades of McLaws' Confederate Division were putting tremendous pressure upon the Union left centre, and just to their left the bri­ gades of Wilcox and Perry, of Anderson's Division, were within two hundred yards of the Union centre. Worse still, for the Union

40 Allen Tate

army, Wright, as I have indicated, had almost reached the stone wall by the clump of trees. Just before he reached it, General Hancock shifted far to the left and south certain units of his 2nd Corps, in­ cluding parts of Gibbon's Division. From these units the 1st Minne­ sota was completely detached and placed nearly half a mile to the south, where it struck Wilcox's brigade in the flank, breaking up his attack and thus removing the support that Wright had expected in order to complete his victory at the stone wall. Wright fell back with great losses. The 1st Minnesota went in with 262 men; at the end of the action there were 47. All the field officers, Colonel Wil­ liam Colville, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles P. Adams, and Major Mark Downey were killed or wounded. Captain Henry C. Coates com­ manded the regiment on the third day. The loss of 82% in one ac­ tion remained a record in the Union army. When the firing had ceased along the Union centre — though there was still sporadic action farther south — and darkness had set­ tled upon the field, Hancock brought his men back, and Gibbon's Division resumed its position behind the stone wall, by the clump of trees. This wall began about five hundred feet north of Gibbon, run­ ning due south, then made an angle to the west, and after about 300 feet turned, at another angle, due south again for 500 feet. At the western angle rested Gibbon's right, held by Webb's brigade. At the extreme left and south Harrow's brigade, composed of the 82 nd New York, the 19th Maine, and the remnant of the 1st Minnesota, lay behind a shallow earthwork, thrown up with bayonets and tin plates. A detached company of the 1st Minnesota had rejoined dur­ ing the night, bringing the regiment up to about 80 men. I shall not attempt to describe the famous third day at Gettys­ burg. Professor George R. Stewart's Pickett's Charge, published in 1959, is probably the definitive account. The ex-Confederates tried over some fifty years to explain the Confederate defeat, for which the Virginians blamed both Pettigrew's North Carolinians, and Gen­ eral Longstreet, who was a South Carolinian. If these soldiers were not to blame, then Robert E. Lee, who was blameless, was to blame; and that was unthinkable. It seems at this distance that he was to blame; that is, he was to blame if we assume that the best-organized and best-delivered attacks could have overcome the best-led Union army that Lee had faced. This has always been the Confederate as­ sumption, but in 1963 we may decide that it is irrelevant. From the evening of the first day to four o'clock of the third, everything Con­ federate had gone wrong. A total breakdown of communications and the chain of command, and the failure of at least half of the

4i The Carleton Miscellany brigade commanders to know what was expected of them, would have spelled defeat had Meade been as vacillating as McClellan or as stupid as Pope. That the Army of Northern Virginia, in spite of the failures of its generals, almost won, is to be attributed to what a Northern writer called the "reckless valor of the Confederate infantry." But here towards the end of this meditation one must put aside all the IFS, and try to see how you and I met on a less friendly occasion on July 3, 1863. If Mr. Stewart's book is the definitive history of the third day, Lieutenant Frank Haskell's description of the charge is surely the greatest eye-witness account of any battle of the Civil War, perhaps of any in the world. Haskell was an officer on Gibbon's staff, and after Gibbon had been wounded he performed according to General Gibbon himself, the work of a general. At the climax of the battle he saw "poor Captain Farrell of the 1st Minnesota dying upon the ground where he had fallen." But now the attack is beginning. Let us see it through Haskell's eyes:

We dozed in the heat and lolled upon the ground, with half-open eyes. Our horses were hitched to the trees munching some oats. A great lull rests upon all the field. The time was heavy and for want of something better to do, I yawned, and looked at my watch. It was five minutes before one o'clock. I returned my watch to my pocket and thought that I might go to sleep, and stretched myself upon the ground . . . Ex uno disce ornnes. My attitude and purpose were those of the Gen­ eral and the rest of the staff. What sound was that? There was no mistaking it. The distinct sharp sound of one of the enemy's guns, square over to the front, caused us to open our eyes, when we saw directly above the crest of Cemetery Hill the smoke of a bursting shell, and heard its noise . . . We sprang to our feet. In briefest time the whole Rebel line to the West was pouring out its thunder and its iron upon our devoted crest ... I had time to see one of the horses of our mess wagon struck and torn by a shell . . . Two mules close at hand, packed with boxes of ammunition, are knocked all to pieces by a shell. General Gibbon's groom has just mounted his horse and is starting to take the General's to him, when the flying iron meets him and tears open his breast. . . . The men of the infantry have seized their arms, and behind their works, behind every rock, in every ditch, wherever there is any shel­ ter, they hug the ground, silent, quiet, unterrified, little harmed. Who can describe the conflict that is now raging around us? To say that it is like a summer storm with the flash of thunder, the glare of lightning, the shrieking of the wind, and the clatter of hailstones would be weak. The thunder and lightning of these two hundred and fifty guns and their shells, whose smoke darkens the sky, are incessant,

42 Allen Tate

all pervading, in the air above our heads, on the ground at our feet — and these hailstones are massy iron, charged with exploding fire. We went down front of the line about two hundred yards. No in­ fantry was in sight, save the skirmishers, and they stood silent and motionless — a row of gray posts through the field on one side con­ fronted by another in blue . . . On either crest we could see the great flaky streams of fire, of the opposing guns, and their white banks of swift convolving smoke . . . Half past two o'clock, an hour and a half since the commencement, and still the cannonade did not in the least abate; but soon thereafter some signs of weariness and a little slacking of fire began to be apparent on both sides ... In a moment after­ wards we met Captain Wessels and the orderlies who had our horses . . . Captain Wessels was pale, and he said, excited: "General, they say the enemy's infantry is advancing." We sprang to our saddles . . . To say that men grew pale and held their breath at what we saw, would not be true. Might not six thousand men be brave and without shade of fear, and yet, before a hostile eighteen thousand, armed, and not five minutes march away, turn ashy white? None on that crest now need be told that the enemy is advancing. Every eye could see his legions, an overwhelming resistless tide of an ocean of armed men sweeping upon us! Regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade move from the woods and rapidly take their places in the lines forming the assault. Pickett's proud division hold their right; Pettigrew's their left. The first line at short interval is fol­ lowed by a second, and that a third succeeds; and columns between support the lines. More than half a mile their front extends; more than a thousand yards the dull gray masses deploy, man touching man, rank pressing rank, and line supporting line. The red flags wave, their horse­ men gallop up and down; the arms of 18,000 * men, barrel and bayonet, gleaming in the sun, a sloping forest of slashing steel. Right on they move, as with one soul, in perfect order, without impediment of ditch, or wall or stream, through orchard and meadow, and cornfield, mag­ nificent, grim, irresistible.

They were magnificent and grim, but not, as they turned out to be in less than an hour, irresistible. For it seems that Lieutenant Haskell's literary talent was not greater than his military. (They were both great indeed; for what writer on war, either novelist or historian, before Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, could create as Haskell did the "direct impression" of the scene?) On the gray lines came; towards the Union right moved Petti­ grew's brigades, which fought as hard as Pickett's; but since neither your forbears and cousins nor my forbears and cousins had anything to do with them, we shall heartlessly leave them to their fate. To­ wards the Union left, came Pickett's brigades of Kemper, Garnett,

* Until Mr. Stewart's book appeared, the assaulting force was usually estimated at 14,000. Mr. Stewart puts it at only 10,000.

43 The Carleton Miscellany and Armistead. As Haskell saw them coming, Garnett was to his right, Kemper to his left, and Armistead as a second line in the rear. A highly complicated manoeuvre was completed, so that both Petti- grew and Pickett formed a single front moving with perfect order, planned by Longstreet, towards the umbrella clump of trees. Within 250 yards of the trees Armistead passed round the left of Garnett and then Garnett drifted to the left, so that the two bri­ gades were coalesced in a huge mass as they struck the stone wall behind which stood the trees. At this point Webb's Federal brigade, which occupied the angle of the wall, broke to the rear, and over the wall into the clump of trees and about a hundred yards beyond, Armistead led his men. Haskell, observing imminent defeat and act­ ing for General Gibbon, called on Hall's and Harrow's brigades, some two hundred yards to his left, to move towards the centre. They moved at once —Harrow, of course, with the 1st Minnesota; took Garnett in the flank; and filled in the gap made by Webb's withdrawal. Armistead was mortally wounded. It must have been at about this time that Colonel Robert Allen was killed by one of your kinsmen, and by one of your kinsmen also the flag of his regi­ ment, the 28th Virginia, captured. It was a grievous wrong to have killed my cousin, but the capture of his flag is unforgivable. And you had killed Armistead, but spared my grandfather. We had killed some 240 of your kinsmen. General Lee said at Fredericks­ burg, "It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it." It is well that war is anonymous or we should not, even after a century, have grown fond of one another. Within ten minutes after the incidents that I have described, the "magnificent, grim, irresistible" ocean had been rolled back. And the sequel to that? It might have been better, as Abraham Lincoln believed, if Meade had counter-attacked, and ended the war at a stroke, as he could probably have done. There would have been no sequel of blood, of the useless slaughter of some 300,000 more men from Gettysburg to Appomattox. And one can be almost cer­ tain that under Lincoln's sway there would not have been Recon­ struction. We should have today a nation not only indivisible, but a nation undivided. I am not, here at the end of this causerie, indulg­ ing in paradox. Only one of the war aims of the Federal Govern­ ment was achieved: the perpetual Union. The other, the freedom of the Negro, was only half achieved, and that divides us today. You, my friends of the 1st Minnesota, and your friends throughout the Northern states, collaborated with the Southerners from 1876 to 1954 in a tacit understanding that the complete freedom of the

44 John Wain

Negro could be indefinitely delayed. You were to run the Federal Government under the Republican Party; we were to run our own affairs: qualification for the vote, bi-racial education, and race- relations. Thus one aim, the restored Union, was achieved; the other aim, the release of the Negro from chattel slavery and his elevation to citizenship, was only half achieved when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation; for the Freedman is not yet a full citi­ zen. If we see the war-aims of the Federal Government in two equal parts which should have been a whole, we may conclude that three-quarters of a whole program was achieved. It must be said that Gettysburg was fought by the Federal army at least one-fourth in vain. And what of the Confederates, more than three-fourths of whom either did not believe in slavery or had no interest in it? These three-fourths were fighting for something which, to them, was ir­ relevant; and when at Gettysburg they lost that other thing, Inde­ pendence, which they thought they were fighting for, it may be said that they fought wholly in vain. Why did either side fight? This unanswerable question contains the tragedy of Gettysburg, and of the War.

John Wain

Excerpt from W1LDTRACK a poem in progress

to sing? to build a house in speech? Even to blueprint what a song might be?

Why not. Much is broken. Those whose realism it is to inhabit the ruins, who crouch bitterly in broken doorways: I fear them for their sad, distrustful eyes. They quiz the sun with eyeballs of hard stone.

45 I write this in a month of death and winter. The frozen time falls like a butcher's chopper. People wander lonely under a blank sky. Loss is habitual. The more reason to build up walls and a roof, of whatever kind. A warmed and lighted place for the fugitive mind.

Unanimity shall be our subject. Khasan Israelov and his mountain courage we shall celebrate: and that bruised wanderer in the forests of truth, Samuel Johnson of Lichfield. Likewise the kings who wove one garment of all the people's dreams. (On the third day, the noose and the two razors.) We shall demonstrate that no one is alone.

My lungs work like a Chinaman's. Plato spoke Greek, and imagined a commonwealth on supermarket lines (please take a basket), but his metabolism worked like mine.

'AH human bodies are the same.' Untrue, of course. The difference between one girl's shape and another's can change a life. Cleopatra's nose, etc. Still, they are the same as compared with the bodies of fish or bird. Minds likewise. Plato, Hitler, or the oaf who slumps beside me on the bus have minds as different from my mind as their bodies. And as similar.

Where do we meet? In dream and superstition. Where do we separate? in custom and skill. The day-self chooses. The night-self is chosen.

Watch how a field of sunflowers turn to their master. 46 Attentive, rustling, turning their broad faces they confess their anxiety in plant language, their worship in the idiom of the vegetable.

In their case, the instinctual life is public, as with human children. Later, we learn to reverse the behaviour of sunflowers: we turn our roots, and keep our faces still.

No one is alone. We are doubly grappled. The day-self finds equals in reason and skill. The night-self finds them in dream and superstition. The day-self moves in a broad shaft. The night-self is secret and daft.

The day-self joins with eager others. The night-self has no friends, only brothers.

The day-self is poltroon or hero: The night-self is picaro, pierrot.

The day-self can choose to tell lies. The night-self speaks truth, or he dies.

ADVENTURES OF THE DAY-SELF IN THE AGE OF MACHINES

The wheels turn. 'History is bunk.' Homogenize! Identical objects spooling from a band. Ford's little jokes: Any colour, so long as it's black. The cold grin makes taste a whim, and memory an encumbrance. In the Ford Museum, at Detroit, they have no record of Ford's original techniques. This is Chronos devouring his sons. The last maker of history swallows all previous history down.

47 How they hated him, the clever ones!

How they wanted to kick back and hurt!

Henry Ford, who threatened all they lived by, with his long spanner and his hard contempt.

Aldous Huxley put him in the centre of Brave New World, like Dante putting people into Hell.

C. S. Lewis bluffly called him 'an ignorant mechanic'

Edmund Wilson blew the gaff on Henry's little game.

'When the market for his cars was booming and his payroll was at its thickest, he used often to drop into his factories and chat with his employees; he is said today never to visit them unac­ companied by a guard of twenty men.' The American Earthquake How they hated him, minds to whom the past was rich with meaning! And yet, why should he care about the past? Nothing occurred in Dearborn, Michigan, where he was born, till locomotives ran. Before that, weather. And the skies were vast. Nothing but motion could seem important there, where men and cattle had been frozen down so many winters, and the roofs of town sweated all summer in the stagnant air. Legs were no use in that enormous plain. Only the wheel could make dead Dearborn live. He dreamed of wheels as sailors dream of girls. 48 Cars were his logic. Who can own a train? The wind of the great roads was his to give, and petrol pumps as elegant as pearls. When God made the earth, why did he make so much of it? And why put Dearborn in the very middle of it? Young Henry never believed what the schoolmarm told him, that the earth was round. Henry knew it was flat, AND there was too damn much of it. Looking out from Dearborn, you can SEE it's flat. History? That stuff was made in small countries. They didn't understand the enemy was distance, was the earth itself. History meant centuries without railroads. History was Europe with its kings and priests. High ships waiting for a wind. Cathedrals. Stupid old Europe with a gabble of languages breeding misunderstanding, frontiers and bullets.

Worse still, this ravening history had stepped in quickly, before Henry came, and dropped foul traces on American soil.

History meant slave-ships and covered wagons. Lincoln was shot by history at the theatre. Come to that, the theatre was history, and art, and poetry: bunk, all bunk. It had never stopped a war or filled a belly.

History was Union and Confederate guns roaring at each other in the one language. History meant sobs of pain and howls of anger, in American voices. A thing intolerable.

This history must be stopped, and that immediately. So: he did it.

49 Henry is my darling, my darling, my darling, Henry is my darling, And I'm his model T. I'll let him devise me, revise me, disguise me, And I'll let him surprise me, For I'm his model T. I'll let him lay me on his line And standardize each part: I'll double his production with The love that's in my heart: O, Henry is my new man, my true man, my coo man, He's my much ado man, He's my black and blue man, He's my bolt and screw man and I'm his model T! The only enemy is the earth itself, the flat, dusty earth of which God made too much. The only ally, motion. Move! Keep those men and materials rolling, always rolling!

Those colonels with their moustaches and their manners, those coal-black mammies, all the unseen throats that poured free music out on the enslaved air, those naked feet slapping the naked earth,

why, all they needed was the Model T! Swing low, sweet Model T, was what they meant!

Yankees, you should have waited. Henry was coming. 5° The red badge of courage was bunk like all the rest. A radiator badge would have done the job.

For, see: frontier meets frontier. Ideas growl at ideas. Tradition sticks out its tongue at tradition. One culture shakes its fist in another culture's face.

And BUNK! cries the boy from Dearborn. Stand aside! I'll show you how to deal with history!

This is the dance of massproduction weaving the pattern of the future treading the past into oblivion fingers of immigrant and native muscles of german and kalian polish and Jewish eyes in focus sinews of negro and armenian dancing the dance of massproduction speeding components on to wholeness engines to couple with transmission gearbox and tyres and rims uniting building the model-T together making the one out of the many speaking the language of tomorrow grammar of time and motion study syntax of orchestrated effort

WHERE NOW IS HISTORY THE OGRE? faded like moonlight in the morning still there but faded in the morning

History had nailed Dearborn to the earth,

51 the flat dusty earth of which God made too much. And so, the boy from Dearborn broke it up, plucked up nailed Dearborn, mounted it on wheels, started America moving. Frontiers, where ideas tear each other's bellies out, That's history. We get dragged in too. So what? This is the last time round. History is dead, now no one has to stay in the same place from birth to death, now common men can move, roll up this dusty earth which held them apart and gave them different languages and names.

The Model T is born. History dies. Fortunate boys and girls, homogenize!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch-house: the good old Russian and Ukrainian ranch-house, the fight is on.

Bills are posted. Meetings are held. All must hear the word from Moscow, the word of power. Josef Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili is giving the orders: and they turn out to be the same as Henry Ford's: homogenize!

Twenty-five million peasant holdings must be crunched together into one flat shape: the shape of the future, the immense kolkhoz.

The kulaks have refused to collectivize.

Question time. Raise your right hand and swear.

Who is Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili? The man in the Kremlin. He gives the orders. Why do the peasants wish to oppose his will? Instinctively they fear the great machine. 52 What will he do when they oppose his will? He will destroy them. Five million will die, the rest will live in slavery and fear.

How will the five million die? Of hunger. When they have killed their beasts and left their grain to rot. These actions are their gesture. Now they wait.

Do they expect to die? No. They believe no ruler would let so many people starve.

And what does Vassarionovich Dzhugashvili say? He gives them leave to lie in their huts and die.

Has he no mercy, then, this Vassarionovich? He has invented a nature for himself. He has abandoned his limpid Georgian name and commanded that they call him Stalin, steel.

Have the peasants, then, no chance? No chance at all. It is the nature of steel to beat them down: it is the nature of steel to chew their flesh, to flatten them, to cut them into shapes that can be fitted to the great machine.

Hymn to Steel FEIGNED To BE CHANTED BY FIVE MILLION HUMAN BEINGS

Great cutting edge, indifferent to tissue Great stamping mass, indifferent to the cry of crushed bones, Grant us your hardness: We would be as prompt to suffer As you to inflict our suffering! 53 Light flashes out from your whirling blades Heads bow to the earth before your harvesting: Heads of grain, heads of men and women. Grant us your hardness and bright surface. Be with us in the hour of our processing.

In you is our strength therefore destroy us In you is our hope therefore destroy us From you we have the unanswerable word that we have become our own enemies if our enemies live we must surely perish therefore destroy us.

Bite through the soft tendons of our children Bite through the dried flesh of our elders: Drink the strength of our men the fertility of our women and stamp all tears into the mud.

This we ask in the sacred name the surgical, liturgical name (ever to be praised by the dazed ever to be acclaimed by the maimed unceasingly to be said by the dead) name of STEEL

I believe that the fundamental need of the Russian soul is a thirst for suffering, a constant thirst in everything and from all time. Dostoievsky, Diary of an Author

Ah, Henry with his guard of twenty men! If Stalin had walked down any village street

54 in the early days of hunger, the first days, when the children had just begun to die, when hunger had not yet turned to lead within the bones: when peasant sinews still could swing an axe, would twenty men have shielded him from death?

No, nor twenty regiments. For this is Russia, where the Orient begins. Here, no one says that history is bunk. History is a giant who eats men by the bushel, without salt. And Henry Ford who wanted Dearborn to be free to move, who used money and factories as his arguments, and in bad times had a guard of twenty men, seems, in comparison with Dzhugashvili, Red Riding Hood to the wolf. But wolf or girl, the forces are at work, they cannot stop.

Five million die. The rest homogenize.

Khasan Israelov, dead in an unknown grave, I speak in a voice that wishes it were yours.

The Chechen-Ingush, a mountain people in the northern Cau­ casus, resisted domination by Catherine the Great of Russia, and were not finally subdued till 1859; they revolted against the Czars in 1867, 1877 and 1905, and after the Soviets came to power they continued to resist absorption and collectivization. They rebelled in 1930, and were crushed. In 1941, the Chechen- Ingush struck for their freedom one last time, under the leader­ ship of a young poet, Khasan Israelov. Stalin's answer was to obliterate the entire nation by execution and mass deportation on February 23, 1944. Under the direction of General Serov, the entire operation, whereby 500,000 people were swept off to death or slavery, took just twenty-four hours.

55 I. All those who knew you are dispersed or dead five hundred thousand people wiped away corpses or prisoners to the last one. But listen, Khasan Israelov, where you lie. I speak in a voice that wishes it were yours. Listen, Khasan, with your mud-stopped ear.

2. I saw your mountains once, not far away. In the cold Caucasus I saw them lie as the eagle sees them, high-shining, one by one. They know you, Khasan, still, though you are dead. The wind whose tunes put magic in your ear whirls in the crannies where the wild goats lie.

3- Eryri or Wicklow, half a world away I tread on hill-paths that were never yours and pluck the fragrant heather where I lie. Mountains are many, but their voice is one, still crying freedom! into the world's ear, though by each bluff stiffen the defiant dead.

4- Climb with me, Khasan, till bitterness is dead. I have not the strength to face an end like yours. But take this homage, do not turn away. I hear your mountain music, though my ear is dulled with cowardice: you are the one to guide me where the quiet heroes lie.

5- Khasan, your written chronicle is a brief one. Such sagas are banned from the captive ear. Soldiers have killed, now bureaucrats must lie. Five hundred thousand truths to sponge away. If your name lives, the victory will be yours. Your strength cannot be tamed now you are dead. 56 6. The wild chamois is your symbol, if you need one: Who, chased to the final edge where the hunt stops dead, Leaps down, with a delicate madness much like yours. May its gentle ghost be welcome where your bones lie, Who thought rather to throw life steeply away than make a story pleasant to the huntsman's ear!

Khasan, only courage like yours can burn hatred away. Unstop your ear: pity me from where you lie: Climb with me, turbulent one, till bitterness is dead!

Homage to the Irreducible I

Under eternal house arrest, the dissenter Calmly preserving the verities from decay Has made his home in the impregnable centre. Watched by police who never move away who remain alert and in touch with headquarters at his ironic window he sits all day. Threatened with tear-gas, badgered by reporters waiting to photograph his leap to suicide, he listens to the surf of distant waters, observes the sky where clouds bunch and divide, idly notes the numbers of passing cars: the truly proud one who never thinks of pride. His name occurs in hushed dialogues in bars. The police order him through megaphones to come down. He receives code messages from the outer stars. His house is magic. The staircase dissolves in splinters at the touch of a trooper's foot. His front door is cemented up. Hence no visitor enters, yet voices laughing and singing, and what is more inexplicable, feminine sounds of pleasure can often be heard. Gift-bundles for the poor

57 parachute from his window, or sway at leisure from coloured balloons which patiently deflate, lowering to children's hands their holiday treasure. No wonder the chief of police has to work late. If they try to dismantle the house, its bewildering walls turn to mist. Then resume at will their firmness and weight. So the man never comes down and the house never falls.

Attitude of Humanity Towards the Irreducible I

They pin their faith entirely on this indestructible wraith who, ages upon ages, has coolly survived the fury of outrages. In the stone pinnacle of the fortress they construct from dream and miracle tangible and assertive, he comforts those whose happiness is abortive. Knight without armour, high chanticleer, spirit's alarmer, secret soothsayer, he reveals the strategies of Time the betrayer. Because he is one, his children and lovers are never entirely alone: because he is single their multiple faces are free to shuttle and mingle. Neither god nor idol he wishes no one to feel weak or suicidal: he asks no prayers: he fulfils his own nature in fulfilling theirs. His terms are simple: he has no metaphysical crust and no temple.

58 He is part of creation: a figure, like us, in God's difficult equation. We know him well, there is no need to prove him. Our cold curses follow those who would remove him. We are still human while none is set above him. Therefore, we love him.

So sang, briefly in unison, night-self and day-self. Choosing to be human is all they concur in. Meanwhile, back at the bone-house:

ADVENTURES OF THE NIGHT-SELF IN THE AGE OF THE MACHINES

Sonnet FEIGNED To BE SPOKEN BY THE MANIAC AMONG THE TOMBS (St. Mark, Chapter 5) If now I roar, and gash myself with stones, it is to draw him to the fight. I hoard in these mad cells those that must call him lord. I tempt the fiends to pasture in these bones.

Two thousand beasts could not contain my sins. Not one but many devils claw my sides. It is my ribs the foul night-hag bestrides, through whose dry lips all lust and hatred grins.

Because my name is Legion, and my brain is swarming with the maggots of despair, he hears the trumpet of my sufferings: they will do battle on this narrow plain. Already, through the dark death-smelling air, I hear the clapping of their furious wings.

59 See now, the reverent burlesques begin.

Man worships by parody. The outward miracles of Christ, the inward miracles of the Buddha: on the fourth day, the noose and the two razors.

If Christ's touch could heal, Christ's spittle mix with dust to make new tissue, plastic surgery performed with the spit glands only, why then!

men who were near to heaven could channel down the healing energies of Christ. And who was nearer to heaven than a saintly king?

The holy parody makes a bright symbol. Look how Edward the Confessor stalks across Macbeth, throwing a holy shadow. Shakespeare knew he need not give him lines to say or even bring him on to the stage. The king who heals will dominate the cursing king who strikes.

Malcolm. Comes the King forth I pray you? Doctor. I sir: there are a crew of wretched Soules That stay his Cure: their malady convinces The great assay of Art. But at his touch, Such sanctity hath Heauen giuen his hand, They presently amend. Worship by parody! Crazed with their sufferings, skeletal or bloated arms raised to pull down mercy on their matted heads, the sick jostle and crane. Will the king come? Will the anointed palm press on this aching flesh?

Theirs is a sweating faith. A crew of wretched Soules. Bless thy people. Will the king come? His touch bind up the rents and pockholes in their pitiful skin?

60 On the fourth day, the noose and the two razors.

Bless thy people. Bless thy people. Rolled in the dirt by a conqueror they never challenged, poison-splashed, stamped on by unseen boots, they hold up their hands to majesty, not their eyes. In the bright face of heaven they dare not look.

The king is their best magic.

It is a fundamental article of the Shilluk creed that the spirit of the divine or semi-divine Nyakang is incarnate in the reigning king, who is accordingly himself invested to some extent with the character of a divinity. But while the Shilluk hold their kings in high, indeed religious reverence and take every precau­ tion against their accidental death, nevertheless they cherish "the conviction that the king must not be allowed to become ill or senile, lest with his diminishing vigour the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the fields, and man, stricken with disease, would die in ever- increasing numbers." To prevent these calamities it used to be the regular custom with the Shilluk to put the king to death whenever he showed signs of ill-health or failing strength. Frazer, Golden Bough. XXIV

Do not feare our person: There's such Diuinity doth hedge a King, That Treason can but peepe to what it would, Acts little of his will. But what is treason? To the king's body, or to the king's soul? The piety of the Shilluk teaches how to disregard the flesh. If the king's soul leaks out through mouth or nostril, it wanders unattended. A sorcerer might trick and imprison it. And even without sorcerers, how can the people be sure the soul that keeps them safe will be transferred to the rightful body of the king's successor?

61 In some tribes of Fazoql the king had to administer justice daily under a certain tree. If from sickness or any other cause he was unable to discharge this duty for three whole days, he was hanged on the tree in a noose, which contained two razors so arranged that when the noose was drawn tight by the weight of the king's body they cut his throat. Frazer, ibid.

On the fourth day, the noose and the two razors.

Primitives, of course. The seventeenth century looking back on the tenth. Edwardian Cambridge comparing the field notes of anthropologists.

It is said that Frazer was allowed to keep his Cambridge fellowship just so long as he drew no conclusions from his evidence.

On the fourth day, the noose and the two razors.

So here, dry reeds swayed by the wind of hope, the sick jostle and crane outside the palace. Mediaeval devotion. A burning, half-shut eye. Did the scrofulous never recover? Did no healed man skip home to his village in the fens or mountains shouting the evidence of a miracle?

Something kept the belief alive. If not results, then the inherent likeliness of its truth. For surely God would heal through a good king's hand?

Watch the scene. The cowls and cross-garters vanish. The Henrys, Mary, Elizabeth, come and go. London burns down. St. Paul's balloons in marble. Handel, Galileo, Milton. The neo-classic pillar.

And still they limp or are carried to the palace. Bless thy people. A crew of wretched Soules That stay his Cure.

62 And then that day in March, 1712: the coach from Lichfield jolting into town. After three days on the road, grimy and worn, the passengers alight. One Sarah Johnson bookseller's wife, forty-two years old, clutches her large, pale child of thirty months.

Sam is big, but Sam is very ill. One eye is blind already, with the king's evil. His arm suppurates. They keep it open with a knife. First-born of old parents, not expected to live.

No gutter-jostling now. Two hundred sufferers are to be touched this day: no more, no less. Admission is by ticket and ticket is by influence. This is the eighteenth century. Sarah goes to the office in Whitehall to pick up her tickets: the following day, at the appointed hour, to St. James's Palace. Bless thy people. Scrofula is tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Touch little crying Sam with royal fingers.

'What do you remember?' 'An old lady in black, wearing diamonds.' What should he remember? The royal soul was safe within her body. Faith surged in that March morning like a river.

Gently, Sarah, lift your son (Thirty months old, and like to die) To where the springs of pity run: Her pale hand on his paler face Transmits an ancient dogged grace Illumined by her royal eye.

63 An ancient dogged grace still lives In faith that flowers out of pain. Here God still judges and forgives. Gently, Sarah, lift your child Pain and sadness have defiled: Bathe him in that magic rain.

Do not speak: she knows your fear. Her well of grace now brims afresh. Love and pity brought you here. Let the Lichfield women know Sarah's child will live and grow: Love and pity healed his flesh.

She hangs a token round his neck (Thirty months old, and like to die.) Cleanse his soul from spot and speck. Sarah, take his hand in yours: Lead him through those solemn doors Out where London hurries by.

Money, barter, and techniques Flood the eager merchant's mind. After Romans, Spaniards, Greeks, England clambers to the heights. Blasting forges, probing lights, Leave the rustic past behind.

But Sarah's child will always keep In the darkness of his brain Images that channel deep Where the springs of pity flow. Images that live and know Deep within the human grain.

So this child's inheritance (Thirty months old, and like to die) Shall be to know the secret dance

64 Of dream and reason, day and night: And with his bookish urban sight To read the language of the sky.

There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws. We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little of their original character ... a longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose curiosity pants for savage virtues and barbarous grandeur. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775

What drew him to the Hebrides? And why did he so question those with second sight? Was he not satisfied with Reason's light, who made his home beneath a city sky?

It was the approach of death that whipped his mind. A man may cry to heaven and still burn. His brain grasped out for something still to learn. These islanders the world had left behind,

had they perhaps a wisdom, handed on through blood and custom? His old bones were sore, but through the autumn weather he must ride,

still hoping to be touched and healed once more. Too late, too late! That ancient world was gone: Progressive Boswell chattered by his side.

Theirs was the century of madness, the lid screwed tight: the stately wig, lice crawling on the scalp: The great controlled art, a shout from under the stairs.

'And China's earth receives the smoking tide' poised in the balance of a pirouette above that other smoking tide of blood.

65 These were not prudes. Their sombre art searched that darkness to its heart.

But their dignity and grace combed agony, and washed its face.

Mozart and Fragonard ignore the breath of the gin-sleeping whore.

Gulliver never travelled where The London sewers stun the air.

Their general names for evil masked every actual devil.

The balance is difficult. The classic portico slips sideways into the mud. There is so much that must be stamped down out of sight. The heavy pillars are only just heavy enough.

Everyone sees it coming, the last day of this classic truce. Each sunrise shows new cracks in the facade. Time has a bomb planted for this Augustan world. They hear its ticking, but they cannot bend their backs to grope for it under the polished floor.

Soon it will come. Everyone knows that. The signs are everywhere. Wild stories are taken as gospel. The swell of groans and curses drowns couplet and epigram. This civilization is not single enough.

But when it came, when the marble finally cracked apart, and the world stood naked at last in the mistral of rebellion, 66 England survived as one. Bruised, torn, I grant. But one. What held that unity? A thin gold circle. Droll, that such a toy could hold together men so overpressed, so full of the impulse to destroy each other.

The thin gold circle of a foolish crown! When the voices out of Bedlam were proved right, when hell boiled over in a smoking tide, this folly made men feel they shared a country.

Political stability from a nursery rhyme! A people ransomed by an old wives' tale!

Sonnet: Rousseau Outside the Gates of Geneva

The punctual Genevese had rung the bells, waited the allotted time, then closed the gate. He stared. The walls stared back. Their stolid weight Pressed on his mind. He must be someone else:

It was too difficult to be Jean-Jacques, Apprentice, of Geneva. But what name, What nature could be his? A sudden shame Clung to his shoulders like a heavy pack.

A moment, and the hesitation passed. Reckless, a sun flared out behind his eyes, And by its light he saw the coming age, Peopled with serious monsters. Lone, aghast, He watched them rearing, heard their first blind cries: Then shrugged, and started on his pilgrimage.

67 In France, the magic did not hold. Above a choppy sea of gazers King Louis bowed his head. It rolled. This was the noose and the two razors.

Guillotine shaved the anointed head: The single rivet had shaken loose. 'We are all statesmen,' Robespierre said. This was the two razors and the noose.

Sonnet FEIGNED TO BE SPOKEN BY THE WITCH OF ENDOR (Samuel, I, xxviii)

Great kings are strong. I am alone, and old. And yet they creep to me at night, disguised. Death they can bear, but not to be surprised: and stubborn ghosts ignore their blood and gold.

King Saul resents the present like a cage. I gave my being to this cruel art for the same reason, long ago. My heart was flaming with the same forbidden rage.

Altar and priest have failed. My magic brings Stern Samuel to break his holy sleep. Saul, God is your enemy. You are to die.

This Saul was merciful. Now see him weep. He finds no pardon, who could not satisfy the vengeful hunger of the King of Kings.

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[email protected] Jack Anderson

A MAN WHOSE HABIT IS HOPE

The millennium is always almost about to be hatched by chain-smoking men with bad coughs in a third-floor lodge hall vacated by the Elks sometime during the McKinley administration.

They never change much. You could show me a picture taken twenty years ago and I'd say, "That's how they are now. Yes, that's exactly how they are." Only the causes change a bit. It used to be how to remake the world; today it's how to keep that world preserved in one piece. In this I detect a little backsliding on the part of the world. Things are not looking up.

They never were. Sometimes I think they never will be, though we continue marching strong (marching strong — the eight of us). As years and head colds file by between the meeting hall's spittoons and our own lost causes, I begin to think I should have gone with the Elks. But hope at last becomes a habit.

It has to be to survive the boredom of our pronouncements, the drabness of our premises. We have not made enough of a joyful noise. We drone and mope too much. No wonder we fail. So I keep afloat on a raft of habit, clutching my own forlorn little joy: I've stuck it out — just like the world; our joint daily petitions for one more day are daily granted. (Knock on — slightly wormeaten — wood.) Somehow, so far, we've survived. Knock again. Pure luck.

And I go on hoping for the day a knock on wood may open gates with a triumph of leaves and an end of mumbling and we at last give back our hall to the Elks.

71 Charles Black

TOWARD A BIOGRAPHY I. First invoked then adored by the red sun Underground, he took it at its word and became That sun. His fingers curled in running rock. He was hot then. The sound he made escaping from fissures Lingered, a stress to his voice in after days, Deceptively cool, hard in earnest. He endured Being bored by rain while he could, then he entered rain. He splashed in that pranking spirit that disposes the mind To toss a dead horse over the garden wall Among gossipy women. He splashed with the iteration Of voices after madness, the clacking rhythm Mindless street-cars make grinding on sandy tracks. He lived awhile in air, but he could not be sated With less than ultimate ravishment. He became Air, folding clouds and hawks in his ample bosom. The moon was a bite, stars were his tricked-out tidbits On a tray turned upside down. The sun's circle brought him Full circle. Then sun was his own elect mode of burning.

II. In the hurting age-long pressures of his sojourn Gems were made known. He could not take in their gleam. He grasped, it was gone. The mysteriousness of colors Played within and yet was not his great air body. They were not of him at all. Their manner of not being his Danced beyond reach. He could wrap them close about For eons. They would be nothing. But when he withdrew They leapt up again freshborn. He threw his hammer, But the fist of their destruction always unclenched. He saw that he was everything. Yet he could not Clutch what anything seemed, or enclose what anything did. (He moved himself. He was not the way he moved.)

72 III. "I will contrive." Decisively, in stealth, He involved himself, mostly (so far as purpose Defines what is) in organs for knowing color. Eyes saw blue and the slower tickle that was yellow, All hues, from saturation to slightest tint, Ranged on a rack constructed after possibility. He had happened and been and moved. Seeing now, He laughed at the metaphors implied in seeing. He wept At their inexactitude. Seeing is blindness. "This is all there is. I cast the net, myself, Over all, yet it covers neither perfect darkness Nor light entirely. I have fished and caught myself." He never spoke idly. He lived from then till dawn In fear lest the ground move. He watched my lord sun rise Dreading the portent to come in his white noon flaming.

A LADY IN SORROW When tears break your face I cannot invite you to the sunshine Of things gone, I cannot reprove Even this sorrow that visits so suddenly.

In a flash of flowers Our children burst out of rain, Their private speech is a wandering Over low guarded hills,

But all about the city Shadows move the clock of too late, Silent as the mind's valley Just before the flood of shock,

And I take your hand But I cannot take from your eyes This sorrow, this bird that circles Crying, above where the waters were.

73 John Tagliabue

PISTOL ON THE TOWN AGAIN

Swaggering Ancient Pistol enters his invisible plumes waving like imaginary epics, he speaks like fountains of ancient actors imagined tearing the air to shreds as cocks fly about in feathery flight, a dilapidated thin admiral as wet as a leek, as boisterous as a stew, as sententious as a canary, as crowing as a cockeyed raven, as mellifluous as old armor falling down the stairs as histrionic as legends as bow legged as an old rider on a contrived and burning Pegasus, some smoke going into the air; Doll Tearsheet screams; Mistress Quickly throws a bucket of water; the fire department sits down after the Bazaar and plays a game of cards. Henry IV

(PISTOL ENTERS)

Ancient Pistol Sputtering like old fireworks, dilapidated prancing Pistol, rags of mythologies, patched Pegasus, silly and swaggering sonorizer, moth eaten Marlowe, marvellous off shoot of a broken storm tossed mossy tree or theater with quartos like leaves or

74 shreds of small tempests, fountains now and then surprising everyone on a holiday go off, go up, go sideways; Pistol prances with his props, several scripts collide, he is held up like the tattered wall of an old opera and he announces himself; Falstaff like a full house applauds. Several mythologies in rags cavort on the stage. (Pistol exists) HIV/Pt2

Mark Strand

A KIND OF WEAKNESS

It grows on you. Slowly. Piecemeal. So that you hardly notice it at first. Eventually, of course, you can't miss it. It blossoms. You take to it as you would any natural part of your self. It begins to look beautiful and you spend hours absorbed in the idea of it.

It gets so bad that you spend whole days before one mirror and then another, turning this way and that, getting just the right angle, letting the light fall just so, heightening the effect. You have your friends come in and look. "Love me, love this," you say. And you point.

Everyone talks about it. Gradually it gets out of hand and you can no longer find a way to show it to advantage. You feel fooled. You hate yourself. You cover your mirrors with dark curtains. You refuse to see your friends. Nothing works. It stays. It eats you.

75 Donald Finkel

THE WITCH IN THE WOOD I am neither as innocent nor as untrusting as an animal; the irascible bear, and the chipmunk, scrambling a dozen times back before stealing my crusts, have managed to penetrate this deeper than I have.

I know all poisons by name, I can draw meat safely out of the most delicate snare; my brain is an attic of unusable antidotes. I am prepared, in short, for anything but wisdom.

You, who confuse ignorance with concentration, who worship distance and length, who cry out nightly to the great blond creator of mountains and frescoes, you will fail, I know, to appreciate my condition.

You are not insensible, it's true, insolence touches you; murder, lust, sloth, in sufficient degree, sets one taut string whining like a mosquito. I dream of setting fire to your museums.

The bluejay screams, twice, and then twice again; a storm is brewing, chipmunk and bear return to their separate darkness, my crusts lie in the door.

And now the first whispers, electric distractions; laughing in the mountains through his red beard, your insolent giant begins to rattle his lumber.

76 Scott Bates

FABLE OF THE CONTENTED WEED A weed I know Lives happily Persuaded of Her liberty

Each morning When the sun is low She says to herself I choose to grow

Each evening When the moon is bright She says to herself I choose the night

Each time she bows Before the wind She says to herself I choose to bend

And when at last She wilts and dies I know she'll choose To fertilize

FABLE OF THE HICKORY TREES AND THE SQUIRRELS

The hickory trees said Every year You autumn squirrels Get in our hair

77 Without they said A seed of sense You wreck our summer Permanents

What do you think We are they said A big trapeze

Nuts said the squirrels To the hickory trees

Louis O. Coxe

THE NAKED SNACK, OR ME TARZAN, YOU JANE They'll flood the Allegash country to peak power For the capital long gainers, the private eyes. Over again, the old story, a bore before And after, romance — the pack of lies Dealt by the travelling sharper to the poor.

Old Wordsworth knew his Nature's lease short-term And banked on learning and art to take up slack; Knowing so little of men and their will for harm He called on vision — but man's new skill is wreck, His vision nightmare given living form.

They're right, the beats and hipsters, killers of cops, Trigger-happy, hair-trigger-orgasm priests, Right to join what licked them, beard to crotch, To roll together in turd as though two beasts Concupiscently coupling redeemed botch.

78 Fun to be crazy half time, the other half drunk, Be rid of the pain of manhood — sure, let's flip And after the drugs and doctors and nurses have shrunk The soul to a bladder, fall out and pump it up With fumes from a California septic tank.

A little hate, please — straight, with no damn pity. Is anyone sober and listening? A little sorrow To cut the phlegm, in case you're feeling guilty Over bombs and father and the special fall of a sparrow: Swear off sex or wash if you feel dirty.

Stop being bored. Your boredom bores me stiff — So much to do, find, touch, desire and hold. Go kill yourself a cop or a fatted calf And sit yourself down to dinner — if you're called, Because no one chose you, not even you yourself.

FOLKSONG

The 'night of the long knives,' Guadalajara, Pearl, Bataan: all have names Our children learn in school.

We learnt them breathing in, Died by them breathing out; From war and hunger and pain We grew up to a cloud.

Men care less what they do Than they care for the raw skill: Will our children know they knew That clouds let go and fall?

Rebel, beaten, angry Children come here to believe, As real as death and as hungry They eat man alive.

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Ernest Kroll

from AMERICAN PANELS

Do IT YOURSELF To lay a drain, dress a stone, Plaster a crack in a Wall — every man his own Deus ex machina.

Rus ET URBS The city, on the fast and loose, Outpaces streets and curbs. In consequence, the rus Is turning into urbs. 97 SUBURBIA The talk is sports; The drink is bourbon; The dress is shorts; The job is urban.

SUPERMARKET A temple, Greek, complete With pediment and plinth; No god, but a labyrinth Of miles of things to eat.

John Lucas

NEVER WHICH TWAIN (For Kenneth Clark)

Ten centuries, two continents, and ninety degrees of attitude separate Maillol's river spirit from the tree divinity Vrikshaka. Yet in form, in feeling, east and west are seldom so opposed as north and south. Across a sumptuous room in the Galleria Borghese antipodal contemporaries confront each other still. Deep in the black forest the man from Kronach's Venus models cinquecento millinery for the pleasing of her son. Meanwhile in broad Tuscan daylight the man from Vinci's Leda voluptuously accedes to the pleading of her swan. 98 David Cornel Dejong

MARTYR

Tear me apart here and there, turn back the flaps of my skin and muscles, to reveal a recent supper of smelts. Or even shake me out by my ankles to see remnants of fathers, cousins, teachers, textbooks come fluttering out. Ruffle my arteries, make pancakes of my pancreas on this holiday for saints of which I am an incumbent, for dancing around the square, trailed by dogs, envied by moppets, talked about with small bundles of wisdom old men shape from their detritus.

Once I was too a terror of flesh and pop, a hellion of cigarettes — all tobacco to the very middle. But I am rutting more now but enjoying it less. The old men will say so, as for myself, halfway between self and another me I growl backstage thunder, click-clack about with matters polemic, summon forth a cardiac disturbance. On the other hand I warn you my soul is the mauve butterfly that escaped your nets, and what you find discarded here is hardly more than my word made flesh.

99 a sampling of the writings of Michel Butor Edited by Donald Schier

>» Although he was born in a suburb of Lille (September 14, 1926), Michel Butor has been a Parisian since the age of three. Having opted for an academic career, he concentrated in philosophy; but his teaching has been mostly outside of Trance in England, Greece, Egypt, Switzerland, and the United States. He was a Visiting Professor at Bryn Mawr in i960 and at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1962-1963. M. Butor was married in 1958. His first novel, Passage de Milan (1954) of which the conclusion appears in this section, and his second, L'Emploi du temps (Passing Time) (1956) did not attract much attention; but La Modification (A Change of Heart) (1951) was awarded an important literary prize. Since then he has published a long and complicated novel called Degres (Degrees) (i960). An essay, Le Genie du lieu (1958) and a collection of articles entitled Repertoire (i960) from which we have chosen to translate the essay on science fiction, round out the important items in his bibliography to date. There has been considerable critical discussion of his work in France, nota­ bly in the special issue of Esprit on the unew novel" (July-August, 1958). In English the best starting point for an acquaintanceship with the movement gen­ erally considered to include Butor is The French New Novel by Laurent Le Sage (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962) which includes a perceptive essay on the new novel by way of introduction to the selections from various authors, together with bibliographical and critical references. «<

PEREGRINATION

Gel clair Les tubulures enf ouies Resserrent leurs echarpes de chanvre

Mais deja les enseignes entr'ouvrent Leurs paupieres de Vouvray Et le marteau du coq Detache dans l'aventure diffuse Une perle de triangle

100 Prends garde 6 voyageur Encore tout embue Des souvenirs de tes usines Prends garde car tous ces divers Meandres tentateurs Pourraient bien t'entrainer Vers les periples ordinaires D'une Seine infime Agreables detours de l'oubli Distractions

Detourne-toi evite Ne prends pas sur toi pour l'instant D'extraire De leur torpeur d'encens et de tabac Les cranes plats dont les lombrics Ont fait leurs pretentieux manoirs Glisse entre les rangees de portes

Delaisse toute sonnerie Toute interrogation tandis Que tu penetreras car Voyageur Souviens-toi Que tu n'es pas seulement Cette couronne de pissenlit qu'on imagine Scandant de preches Le temps des campagnols Au-dessus des prairies de lacets

Hard freeze Buried conduits draw close their hempen wrappings But al­ ready the electric signs raise their wine-red eyelids and the cockcrow like a hammer detaches from diffuse, haphazard reality a pearl of triangle-sound Take care, traveler, still misty with the memories of your factories Take care for all these various, tempting meanders might lead you into ordinary voyages around a lowly Seine and into agreeable detours of forgetfulness and distrac­ tions Turn aside Avoid Do not undertake for the moment to free from their in­ cense and tobacco-steeped torpor flat skulls of which the worms have made their pretentious manors Slide between the rows of doors Omit all ringing, all questioning as you push in, for, traveler, remember that you are not only that crown of dandelions imagined as punctuating with sermons the season of the field voles above prairies set with snares To be sure the magnet of the

IOI Certes L'aimant des tilleuls T'attire bien A son seuil de faience Et de talc vieilli Les voix de ta fatigue Te fraieront un delicieux passage Au travers des lieux de commerce A la paupiere de fer tombee Mais si tu veux parvenir A ce dont toutes les collines du regard Charment la gloire De premiere mince neige Alors Au detour du labyrinthe modeste Sache deviner Passant chercheur d'enigmes Dans une fenetre qui s'ouvre Avant que tout citron de jour N'ait tranche le nceud Des carrefours scelles La route des tableaux Dont je ne pourrai t'indiquer Qu'une des multiples successions

Appelle a ton secours L'ombre scolaire elle-meme Car tu sens bien que la faim commence A diviser les organes de ton ventre Et que le froid de ces rails detournes Delie sournoisement Les jointures de tes vertebres linden trees does draw you to its threshold of pottery and old talc The voices of your weariness will open a delicious passage for you through shops whose iron shutters are closed But if you want to reach that by which all the hills cast a spell with their stare, the glory of the first thin snow, then, at the turning of the modest labyrinth be sure to note, oh passer-by, searcher for puz­ zles, in an opening window before the lemon-yellow daylight has cut the knot of the sealed street-crossings, the road seen in pictures of which I shall be able to point out to you only one of the many occurrences Call to your aid the very shadow of the school for you can indeed feel that hunger is beginning to divide the organs of your belly and that the cold of these diverted tracks is craftily undoing the joints of your vertebrae Stock-

I02 Immobile mesure ton souffle Efforce-toi de rassembler Dans une respiration soigneuse L'armure des puissances Que l'air t'avait promises Autrefois Lointaines annees Qui ne se reveillent Que dans les alarmes

Ces deux soeurs jumelles Troyes et Tonnerre Te salueront au hasard des plaques Par leurs noms soudain porteurs De purifications et de nourritures

Maisons habituees Societe de verre Quel incendie bien oublie bien efface Rallume la lecture de ces syllabes abandonnees Comme les inscriptions d'une langue Que Ton ne connait plus Sur les facades des laitiers Et des vendeurs de poivre

Regarde-toi Ressens toute ton indignite Pour cette metamorphose Que tu vas tenter d'entreprendre Pour cette recuperation perilleuse still regulate your breathing, try to summon up by painstaking respiration the armor of the powers which the air had promised you earlier Far-off years which awaken only in alarms Those two twin sisters Troyes and Tonnerre will greet you as the enameled signs happen to present themselves, their names suddenly revealed as laden with purification and nourishment Accustomed houses Glass society What conflagration completely forgotten and erased is relighted by the reading of these abandoned syllables which are like the inscriptions of a language now unknown on the shop-fronts of dairy- stores and pepper-sellers Look at yourself, feel all your unworthiness for that metamorphosis which you are going to try to undertake, your unworthiness for that dangerous rescue

103 Les images se riront de toi et de ton audace Les demons fermeront leurs mains a ton approche Les enfants eux-memes En t'apercevant Auront peine a ne pas te saluer de sarcasmes Une pitie quasi honteuse les retiendra Et tu seras pour eux comme cet etranger perdu Qui ne sait plus retrouver l'usage de la parole Et murmure quelques mots incertains

Tes jambes ne sont pas suffisamment droites Et s'entourent De fourreaux couleur d'ecureuil malade

Le vent transforme tes cheveux En une couronne de plumes de corbeaux Et les pans de ton manteau de f euilles mortes Selovent Comme les circonvolutions autour d'une pierre Qui s'engloutit dans un etang

Pour toute cette ville qui se retourne Entre ses draps Tu es un noye tranquille et bizarre Que reviens-tu chercher dans ce peuple Qui ne te connait pas L'enfant (Edipe Tu te souviens Comme il rayonnait de confiance

Reflections will laugh at you and at your boldness, the devils will close their hands at your approach, the very children, when they see you, will find it hard not to greet you with sarcasms A pity that may be shameful will restrain them and you will be for them like that lost stranger who cannot recover the gift of speech and murmurs a few uncertain words Your legs are insufficently straight and are wrapped in fur the color of a sick squirrel The wind changes your hair into a crown of rook's feathers And the segments of your cloak of dead leaves curl like the rings around a stone sinking in a pond For this whole town turning over between its sheets you are one, calm and tranquil, who has drowned What are you coming back to seek among these people who do not know you You remember how the child Oedipus glowed with confidence upon turning aside from burrows and olive trees All the salt- 104 A son detour de terriers et d'oliviers Tout le salpetre des cavernes Huilait ses articulations Et toutes les legendes Gaufrees de jeunes gens souriants Avaient delie les muscles de sa langue Et pourtant il est bien mort II a jete des yeux Dont il avait perdu l'usage Sur les perrons des terrasses de sa famille Ce fut une journee de hurlements bien memorables Et les marches sous la terre ont conserve Les traces de son sang

Appelle a ton secours ce vieillard qui s'eloigne Apres bien des passages du soc de la bielle Dans ton humus perclus de tombes et de feves II filera pour toi la soie des vanesses de Sens

II est aveugle II f aut que tu sois son chien II n'a plus de filles Tu as des pieds humides comme les siens Vous vous entendrez Est-il plus f antome que toi Lui du moins a l'experience des epreuves

II est mort il est bien mort II n'y a que toi qui sois la! peter of the caverns lubricated his joints and all the legends goffered with smil­ ing young men had loosed the muscles of his tongue And yet he is certainly dead He has cast his now useless eyes upon the door­ steps of his family's terraces That was a day of memorable cries and the buried steps have preserved the traces of his blood Call to your aid that old man who is disappearing in the distance after many trips with the plowshare and its drive-rod through your humus thick-sown with tombs and beans He will spin for you the silk of Sens butterflies He is blind You must be his dog He has no more daughters You have feet wet like his You will understand each other Is he more of a ghost than you? He at least has had the experience of trials He is dead he is very dead Only 105 Les mains gluantes et brunes Dans les rues que tu as choisies Sont decidement Pleines de peril et d'etonnement Cette ile si mince En qui tu avais mis ta confiance Voici qu'elle aussi s'est etendue Elle resonne de voix que tu ne reconnais pas Mes filles mes filles serait-ce vous

Mais dans le silence S'allume Une corne interminable S'ecrase Une sonnerie interminable C'est l'heure Ce n'est que l'heure Et le camion a frole ton oreille Comme un enorme vol de mouches

Glissez murs de moire Glissez berges couleur de cornee Une couche se souleve Puis l'autre Le sang des bceufs seche sur ses carreaux Toute la region reflechie par des plaques d'email Laisse deviner des reserves de teintures transfigurantes Les meules et le tuf retrouvent leur brutalite premiere Tout se lave A l'eveil de cette cuisine musicale you are there! Hands, sticky and brown in the streets you have preferred, are certainly full of danger and astonishment This so narrow island in which you reposed your confidence is revealed now as having grown It resounds with voices you do not recognize My daughters my daughters could that be you? But in the silence flares up an endless horn and an endless ringing is squashed It is the hour It is only the hour And the truck has tickled your ear like an enormous swarm of flies Slide, watered-silk walls Slide cornea-pale banks One layer rises then another The blood of cattle dries on the cobbles The whole region reflected by the enameled sign implies reserves of transfiguring colors Millstones and tuff stone recover their original brutality Everything is washed off At the awakening 106 Ou voici que nous sommes convies Comme de jeunes demons candides Laches dans un jar din de femmes

Je t'avais recherche longtemps voyageur vieil CEdipe J'avais interroge sur ton sort bien des oracles Toi seul pouvais sauver le long desir de mon errance Nous nous sommes retrouves dans cette petite gare Et je ne t'avais pas reconnu

J'ai pretendu te servir de guide Mais c'etait ton hesitation meme Qui me faisait choisir Tangle et Failure Et je ne m'etais pas apercu Que j'etais aveugle

Regions de myrtilles et de beignets Vosges de ma douzieme annee Je vous ai bien depassees semble-t-il Dans un bain de lave comparable A cet epais nickel liquide Interieur a notre chataigne mere M'est apparu le timide age d'homme Voyez notre seul vetement desormais Semble etre ce noir et cette boue Dont nous sommes restes couverts Au sortir de l'humeur torride

Et soudain devant un velours de houilles et de prunes of that musical cookery to which we are now invited like honest young devils let loose into a woman-filled garden I had sought for you a long time, traveler, old Oedipus I had asked many ora­ cles about your fate You alone could save the long desire of my wandering We met in that little station And I did not recognize you I wanted to serve you as a guide But it was your very hesitation which forced me to choose the angle and the gait And I had not noticed that I was blind Regions of huckleberries and fritters Vosges of my twelfth year I have gone far beyond you, it seems, into a lava bath comparable to that thick, liquid nickel inside our chestnut mother There appeared to me the timid age of ma­ turity See, our only garment seems henceforth to be this darkness and this mud with which we have been covered ever since our emergence from the torrid humor 107 Le lion entoure de la dentelle des huitres Fixe la f ournaise des lichens urbains

II est la cathedrale Noyau de cette peche aux convulsions secretes Ou tels des fourims Nous cherchons a decouvrir la subsistance

L'onyx de sa stature Poli comme une source Abrite les duels les plus sombres Et des ravages de villages en quantite Sous le ciel d'eucalyptus et de beurre

De ses naseaux brillants Comme le goudron liquide S'echappe une vapeur d'avoine

Le sol est constelle de briques Et d'ecorces de hetres

Les fissures de la laine des platanes S'enflamment avec timidite Dans l'ambre et l'argent battu Deja si tard Courtes journees Le clocher est devenu Couleur de poisson frais peche

And suddenly before a coal-black or plum-covered velvet the lion swathed in oyster-lace stares at the fiery furnace of urban lichens He is the cathedral Pit of that peach with hidden convulsions where like ants we try to discover sustenance The onyx of his height, polished like a spring of water, shelters the darkest duels and numerous sackings of villages under a sky of eucalyptus and butter From his shining muzzle, like liquid tar, steams an oaty vapor The ground has constellations of bricks and beech-bark The cracks in the fuzz of the plane-trees flame up timidly in amber and beaten silver So late already Short days The steeple has taken on the color of a fresh- caught fish Cold shiver whose flavor is scattered by the bells in the fog 108 Tremblement froid Dont les cloches de la brume Repandent la saveur

Imperieuses comme des taches de sang Sur un drap de sinople ou de fourrure d'abeilles Les armes de la ville Jaillissent a la naissance De la fleche de moutarde

Damas d'yeux d'anguilles Elle fremit a la voix trainee Des montagnes d'ocre L'etalon de ses vitres hennit Comme le jus des mures ou de la vigne Et sur le lac imaginaire Dans lequel on a precipite les machines d'antan Escaliers de prisons et treuils Commencent a s'elever De minces sagittaires de rouilles Devant lesquels se deplacent lentement Les gradations de la groseille blanche de la houle Des troupeaux de bores et de silicates

Le matelas du sol lui-meme s'enfoncera Sous le poids du sommeil des cailloux Et les volets crieront leurs derniers anathemes Avant de se chauffer Comme des papillons funebres Au foie des lampes

Commanding as blood-spots on a cloth of vert or armorial furs the city's coat of arms flashes at the base of the mustard steeple Damask of eels' eyes the steeple trembles at the halting voice from the ochre hills The stallion in its windows whinnies Like mulberry or grape-juice and on the imaginary lake into which have been thrown the machines of yesteryear, prison staircases and winches, there begin to rise slender bowmen of blight before which the white currant shades of the flocks of boron and silicates slowly retreat The mattress of the ground itself will sink under the weight of the sleep of pebbles and the shutters will squeak their last anathemas before warming up like funereal moths at the lamps' liver

109 Alors l'immobile animal Au milieu de son temple ouvert Agitera lentement ses ailes de gneiss Les yeux tout envahis De l'immense approche du nord

II etait bien inutile vieux sphinx De pousser ce cri de vautour Je savais bien que la question N'etait pas ma possession Mais mon element Elle est ma terre Et le fruit meme de l'arbre Ou Ton m'a depose des ma naissance Je n'en suis nullement l'origine Mais la victime Et le resultat Vois comme Page A maintenant multiplie l'ombre Dans cet antre des vents las Ou nous sommes abandonnes l'un a l'autre Qui pourrait trouver une seule herbe Tu sais bien que le spectacle qui s'offre a moi N'est plus celui de mon enfance Mais le champ des yeux morts Et le mystere de ta face Ou mes mains cherchent en vain des precisions

lis sont partis terrible aveugle des longtemps Aventureux enfants ou nous reconnaissons

Then the motionless animal within its open temple will slowly flap its gneissic wings its eyes invaded by the immense approach of the north There was no use old sphynx in uttering that vulture's cry I knew that the question was not my possession but my element The question is my land and the very fruit of the tree where I was laid at my birth I am in no sense its origin but its victim and its result See how age has now multiplied the shadow In that cave of weary winds where we are abandoned to one another who would be able to find a single blade of grass You know that the scene which is before me is no longer that of my childhood but the field of dead eyes and the mystery of your face where my hands in vain seek exactitude They have gone long ago, terrible blind man, the adventurous children in whom we recognize those whom we did not succeed in being The thrush was no Ceux que nous ne reussimes pas a etre La grive lissait encore ses plumes Au dessus du charnier que tu gardes Ce f ut un instant tel Que les f antomes sentaient le sang du printemps Reagiter leurs detours et leurs tombes Et la respiration parcourut a nouveau Tes colonnes d'enigmes

Le feu doux des portes S'est referme sur leur passage Les pinces des mantes Se sont resserrees plus f ortement La grotte du gres S'est figee de tentures d'email L'aile de la caverne teinte S'est mise a trembler Au dessus des lointaines oscillations De plus en plus perceptibles Du miroir de lin C'etait le temps du soulagement alors Et la fete battait son plein

Glaieul de cobalt Sacrificateur au visage de f oudre Midi dans l'eau faisait sonner sa fissure

L'iris des femmes enceintes ficartait ses valves d'orange still preening above the charnel-house you watch over It was a moment such that the ghosts felt the blood of spring stir up anew their hiding-places and their tombs And breathing ran once more over your enigmatic pillars The gentle fire of the gateway has closed again after their passing The pincers of the mantises have tightened more closely about each other The sandstone grotto has congealed with enameled colors The wing of the painted cavern has begun to tremble above the distant oscillations, which are gradually becom­ ing more perceptible, of the flaxen mirror It was a time of relief then and the party was at its height Cobalt gladiolus Sacrificer with thunderous face Mid-day was making its fis­ sure ring in the water The flower of pregnant women was opening its orange valves and sugar crys- in Et les cristaux de sucre Se deposaient sur les fils tendus Qui dechiraient les couches de l'air feutre Lourd labour Fasse que la rememoration ne soit pas vaine

Dans les egouts s'eveille un enfant Au poil soyeux Qui nage dans l'obscurite En machant une feuille de menthe Et quand il parviendra au jour Les draps battant La ville entiere deviendra jacinthe et houle d'ambre La lumiere frisante detachant les grains de poussiere Sur toutes les pages Sur toutes les places Ou nous pourrons nous reposer un instant dans la verite

Peregrination First published in Tel Quel

tals were settling on the tight-strung webs which were tearing the layers of felted air Heavy task Grant that remembrance be not in vain A child with silky hair awakens in the sewers a child who swims in darkness chewing a mint-leaf and when he shall reach the open air, sheets flapping, the whole town will turn hyacynthine and amber-waved The glancing light fling­ ing the grains of dust On all the pages On all the places Where we shall be able to rest a moment in the truth.

VVWWWVVWW\WWIVWVWVWVVWVVWWVVWVV£ NOTE: The editor acknowledges with thanks the help of Mrs. Jacqueline | Thibault Schaefer and of Prof. Charles A. Messner, Jr., in the preparation | of the English version of "Peregrination." |

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112 growing *^PainA

IN SCIENCE FICTION by Michel Butor I If science fiction as a genre is rather difficult to delimit — and this is rendered excessively obvious by quarrels among the experts — the thing itself is, at least, one of the easiest to designate. It is enough to say, "You know, one of those stories about interplanetary rockets," and the least experienced in the group will understand at once what is being referred to. This does not imply that such a gadget must appear in any S.F. story; it can be replaced by other accessories which play a comparable role. But it is the most usual, the typical example, like the magic wand in fairy stories. Two points can be made right off: i. At the moment no interplanetary rocket exists. Whether one will ever exist is unknown to the ordinary reader. A story which contains this mechanism is therefore a tale of fantasy. 2. But we all firmly believe that such mechanisms will soon exist, that this is only a matter of a few years of finishing touches. Such a mechanism is possible. This notion is fundamental and re­ quires some clarification. It can be maintained that for the Arab story-tellers, who believed in the power of magicians, flying carpets were also "possible." But for most of us, the possible existence of rockets is of an entirely dif­ ferent order. That possibility is guaranteed by what can be generally called "modern science," a collection of doctrines whose validity is not seriously questioned by anyone in the western world. If the author of a story has taken the trouble to write about some such mechanism, the reason is that he wants to depart from reality only up to a certain point; he wants to broaden reality, to extend it, but not to leave it. He wants to give us an impression of realism, he wants to insert the imaginary into the real by anticipating accom­ plished facts. A story of this kind will naturally have its action in the future. Starting from modern science, not only other mechanisms, but techniques of all kinds, psychological, pedagogical, social and so forth are easily imagined. The scientific guarantee may become pro­ gressively more lax but nevertheless constitutes the distinguishing 113 The Carleton Miscellany characteristic of S.F. which may be defined as a literature which explores the field of the possible as science gives us to glimpse the possible. It is fantasy framed by a kind of realism. The works of Jules Verne are the best example of S.F. of the first degree, which is based upon accomplished facts and which antici­ pates only their applications. Wells * begins S.F. of the second de­ gree which is much bolder but much less convincing and which an­ ticipates the facts themselves. He allows us to guess that Cavor's machine, which is to take the first men to the moon, can be ac­ counted for by an explanation of the scientific type, in conformity with a possible science which is supposed to have developed from the science of his own time. II Like a tourist agency, S.F. purposes for its clients three main kinds of sights: life in the future, unknown worlds, and unexpected visitors. /. Life in the Future We begin with the world as we know it and with the society which surrounds us. Certain changes are introduced whose conse­ quences the story attempts to predict. Projection into the future unravels the complexity of the present and certain of its still-hidden aspects are revealed. S.F. of this type is a remarkable instrument for methodical investigation in the tradition of Swift. It frequently has a satirical side. There are excellent examples in the works of Huxley (Brave New World), Orwell (1984), Werfel (Stern der Ungebo- rene), Hesse (Das Glasperlenspiel), Bradbury, etc. 2. Unknown Worlds The mere mention of the name of Ray Bradbury, whose best known work is entitled in the American edition The Martian Chron­ icles, shows that an entirely different element slips in almost inev­ itably. Technical progress has not only the goal of transforming our daily life but also that of satisfying our curiosity. New instruments and new sciences must allow us to discover domains of reality which today are hidden from us. Included in the scientific map of the world are huge regions which the imagination is free to fill with landscapes and to people with strange beings as it pleases, subject to the limitations of certain very broad restrictions. We can project our dreams into these regions. * The French text has Welles, but clearly H. G. Wells is meant. 114 Michel Butor

This aspect of S.F. is connected to a very respectable tradition. Dante, when he located his hell at the core of the globe, his purga­ tory at the antipodes and his paradise among the stars was only pro­ jecting his theology, and much else besides, into the empty spaces which medieval cosmology admitted of. Thus Verne carefully inventoried the gaps in the geography of his time and filled them with myths inscribed in the prolongation of known facts, thus achieving a synthesis which seems naive to us but which in its fullness and harmony goes far beyond all that his suc­ cessors have attempted. When an eighteenth century author wanted to give the appear­ ance of reality to a fable he was provided with a well-established locale in which to set it: the Pacific islands. (Cf Diderot, Supple­ ment au Voyage de Bougainville). Today, when the exploration of the earth's surface is well advanced, writers prefer to locate their islands in the sky. But even when nothing was known, of course, about archipelagos which had not yet been discovered, it was pos­ sible to be completely certain that, aside from certain remarkable qualities, they could not be very different from lands already known. The scene was still the same Earth with its same general conditions. On the other hand, the little known today about the islands of the sky indicates that everything must be very different there. We know that gravity is stronger on Venus and weaker on Mars than it is on the Earth and so forth. These few data force the writer who respects them to make an immense imaginative effort; they force him to in­ vent something really new. Unfortunately, the creation of another "nature," even if the writer bases himself only on elementary facts, is so arduous a task that up to the present no one has tried to carry it out methodically. So as not to admit defeat writers go beyond the facts. Instead of describing what might be supposed to happen on Mars and Venus, they make a great leap to the third planet of the epsilon system of Cygnus, or even, since there is really no reason not to stop where you want to, to the planet n of the star n of n galaxy. At first the reader is impressed by these cascades of light-years; the solar system was decidedly a cramped village, and now he is launched into the vast universe. But he soon notices that these ultra-remote planets resemble the earth more closely than do its neighbors. In the im­ mense number of stars which people the spaces it is always permis­ sible to imagine that there is one where the conditions of life are very close to those we know. Our authors have rediscovered the

Il5 The Carleton Miscellany eighteenth century islands. They write in a quasi-scientific jargon and decorate the heavens with charming fantasies; the trick is turned. This infinite freedom is a false freedom. If one travels indefinitely far into space or time one will come upon a region where everything is possible and where the imagination will not need even to make an effort at coordination. The result will be an impoverished redupli­ cation of ordinary reality. We hear of an immense war between galactic civilizations, but we soon see that the league of democratic planets strangely resembles the UN and the Empire of the Andro­ meda Nebula resembles the Soviet Union as a student of the 'Reader's Digest may imagine it, and so forth. The author need only translate into S.F. language an article from last night's paper. If he had stayed on the planet Mars he would have had to invent something. In its best moments the S.F. which describes unknown worlds can be an extremely supple instrument by means of which all kinds of political and moral fables, fairy tales and myths can be transposed and adapted for modern readers. Anticipation has created a language by means of which everything, in theory, can be expressed. 5. Unexpected Visitors The description of unknown worlds in S.F. necessarily includes a dream of the future, however rudimentary this may be; it is nat­ ural that the dream should be influenced by the description. It is not so much by the improvement of commercial relations that the inven­ tion of the compass transformed the ancient world, but by the dis­ covery of America. The description of worlds and beings unknown brings about the description of their intervention into the future history of humanity. One may easily imagine that the inhabitants of other planets have a civilization in advance of our own, that they have a radius of ac­ tion greater than ours, that they are ahead of us in discoveries. All of space becomes threatening; strange beings may intervene in our lives even before we know of them. The greater part of the pre-Columbian populations of America in no way expected that a deadly invasion would come from the east. In The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells we encounter this theme for the first time, and its innumerable imitators have not added much to it. It is a profoundly modern theme (no sixteenth century man imagined that Europe might be discovered in its turn) and extremely powerful (certain famous radio broadcasts are evi­ dence of this). By means of this idea of intervention S.F. can include those as- 116 Michel Butor pects of the fantastic which at first sight seem completely opposed to it — everything that can be collected under the heading "Super­ stitions." In The Divine Comedy Beatrice transports Dante from planet to planet; in the Iter Extaticum of Father Kircher the agent is an angel; we have not yet reached S.F. which presupposes that the voyage will be undertaken by means of a technique developed by man. But that technique will allow us to enter into contact with beings who we may suppose have knowledge that we do not have, and tech­ niques that we do not understand. Of course the fantasy might seize one of them to come to the earth, to carry off one of us and to trans­ port him elsewhere by means which there is no need whatever to explain. The difference between such a being and Kircher's angel approaches the minimal; only the language has changed. Indeed, so that the reader may be carried away by a sufficient belief, it is essen­ tial today to describe the being in the same way as one which man might find on another planet. Thus S.F. can include all the stories of ghosts and demons, all the old myths which tell of higher beings intervening in the life of men. Certain stories of H. P. Lovecraft illustrate this possibility. C. S. Lewis began his curious antimodern trilogy by a novel which has all the characteristics of S.F.: Out of the Silent Planet. Two wicked scientists transport a young philologist to the planet Mars by means of a space ship of the very latest model. In the sec­ ond volume, Perelandra, the author raises his mask: an angel takes the philologist to Venus; as to the scientists, they are the accom­ plices of Satan.

Ill We thus see that the S.F. label covers all kinds of merchandise and that all kinds of merchandise feel the need of that label. It ap­ pears then that S.F. is the normal form for mythology in our time; a form which is not only capable of revealing profoundly new themes but one which is also capable of including all the themes of the older literature. Despite a few fine successes, one cannot but think that S.F. has badly fulfilled its promises. The fact is that S.F. as it broadens its scope becomes denatured; it loses its distinguishing characteristic. It is based on an element of credibility which is peculiar to it; this element is progressively weak­ ened when it is used without discernment. S.F. is brittle, and the 117 The Carleton Miscellany widespread popularity which it has achieved in recent times only makes it the more so. We have already seen that flight to ultra-remote planets and epochs, which at first sight seems a victory, in reality hides the ina­ bility of authors to invent closer planets and epochs in a coherent way and in agreement with the demands of "science." Likewise the intuitive perception of some future science brings with it, no doubt, a great freedom, but it soon becomes apparent that this is a compen­ sation which authors arrogate to themselves because they are unable to master the whole of contemporary science. The time is past when an Aristotle might be the leading researcher of his age in all fields, or when a Pico della Mirandola might venture to defend a thesis De onmi re scibili; but the time is also past when a Jules Verne could easily manipulate the ideas implicit in all the technical advances of his time and anticipate other applications while remaining perfectly understandable to the secondary-schoolboys who made up his public. Today the ideas implicit in gadgets as ordinary as the radio or the atomic bomb far surpass the level of scientific understanding of the ordinary reader. He makes use of them without understanding them; he accepts without asking for explanations; and the writer profits from this although in so doing he often piles up howlers, for usually he does not understand either in sufficient depth the ideas he is forced to use unless he is to be classified as behind the times; and this last is a serious accusation against a man who claims to unveil the mysteries of the year 200,000. The result is that S.F., whose greatest claim to consideration ought to be its precision, remains vague. The story does not achieve form. And when scientists take it into their heads to write they often show their ignorance of disciplines which are not their own and their ina­ bility to communicate their specialty to the public. S.F. is distinguished from other forms of the fantastic tale by the special kind of plausibility which it introduces. This plausibility is in direct proportion to the number of solid scientific elements which the author uses. If they are lacking, S.F. becomes a dead form, a mere formula. IV It is thus understandable that few authors take the risk of giving precision to their image of a transformed world. This enterprise pre­ supposes, indeed, not only a scientific knowledge far beyond the average, but also a knowledge of present reality comparable to that 118 Michel Butor required for a realistic novel, and demands, moreover, a very broad effort at coordination. The author is usually satisfied to suggest "in general" a future world by the wide use of plastics, television and atomic-powered rockets. In this setting he develops briefly an often ingenious idea. In another story he will use the same background to develop another idea without taking the trouble to coordinate them. What results is an infinite number of sketched-out futures, all inde­ pendent of each other and for the most part self-contradictory. In the same way there will be an an infinity of planets Mars, each one diminishing the plausibility of the others. Monotony is the direct result of this scattering of effort, for since the authors do not try to construct systematically, they can only describe in a rudimentary way and so cannot get far from banality. It seems as though S.F. has eaten its cake. It was all too easy. Mere mention of Martians was enough to excite the reader. But the time is not far off when the reader will see that most of these monsters, despite their antennae, their scales, their tentacles are much less dif­ ferent from the average American than an ordinary Mexican. S.F. has cut the ground out from under its own feet; it has spoiled thou­ sands of ideas. All the doors were opened for the great escape, and now it appears that authors were merely circling the house. If they do no more than make a feint at composing their works, the reason is that they know that a serious effort to do better would lead them to a dead end. S.F. stories derive their power from a great dream that we all have in common, but they cannot at present give it a unified form. They are the repository of a scattered, impotent mythology, in­ capable of directing our actions in any exact way.

V But the last word has not been said, and it is possible that S.F. may overcome these growing pains. It has the power to command our belief in an entirely new way, and it can bring a marvelous precision to the description of the pos­ sible. But to take advantage of its full strength it must undergo a fundamental change; it must achieve unity. It must become a collec­ tive work like that science which is its indispensable basis. We all dream of clean, bright cities, so when an author sets a story in a place like that he is sure to touch a nerve. But in the pres­ ent state of S.F. we have before us an immense variety of sketchily- 119 The Carleton Miscellany described cities of the future among which the imagination falters, unsatisfied. Heraclitus says in a well known fragment: "Those who are awake are in a common world, but those who are asleep are each in his own world." The dreamers' worlds are without intercommunication but at the same time strikingly similar. The classical mythologies gathered the common elements of these dreams together into unique and public myths. Let us now suppose that a certain number of writers, instead of describing hastily and at random different cities more or less inter­ changeable, begin to use as a setting for their stories a single city, named and located precisely in space and future time; and that each takes account of the descriptions given by the others in introducing his new ideas. This city would become common property as long- gone ancient cities have done; little by little all readers would give its name to the city of their dreams and would model their dreams upon its image. If S.F. could be limited and unified it could acquire a constricting power over the individual imagination comparable to that of any of the classical mythologies. Soon all writers would be obliged to take account of the predicted city, readers would organize their actions about its imminent existence, and might even find themselves forced to build it. Then S.F. would come true in so far as it might take physical form. It is obvious what a prodigious instrument of liberation or of oppression it could then become.

(1953)

Passage de Milan is Butor's first novel. The title has a double meaning for it refers both to the address of the apartment-house which is the scene of the action (Passage de Milan) and also to the passage of the milan, the kite, a bird of prey. In the house live nine families or individuals who are important to the plot, and the time-span of the novel runs from seven o'clock in the evening to seven o'clock the following morning. The passage translated here is the conclusion of the novel after Louis Lecuyer has killed Angele Vertigues. He is befriended by Samuel Leonard, while his great aunt Virginie and one of his two uncles who are priests (Alexis and Jean Ralon) have been awakened by the discoverers of the crime, an artist and his wife named de Vere. Louis has hidden himself in the cellar of the building.

120 two chapters from Passage de Milan

by Michel Butor

XI The cone of light, held by a careful but weary hand, (at his right a puddle of water, on the left a dry subsidence) plumbs, listens, wavers clings to the folds of materials, zig-zags. A shoe. As the circle grows smaller it becomes intenser, dissolving the shadow of a frail, irridescent fringe. His hand, his pocket the raising of his shoulder up to his neck (how deeply he is breathing it's like crying in your sleep) his nose pressed into the dust while one nostril dilates then relaxes, his closed eye squints and then loosens up, the raucous sound and his breath in which the odor of alcohol has rotted. Dead-drunk? What is the meaning of the tieless collar and the blood clotted on his hand? The beam of the lamp, as though attracted to it, comes back to his face and strikes straight into his right eye. His head twists, seeking the shadow. His clothes, his skin and the muscles beneath contract slowly as from the effect of a burn, and his shoes scrape the ground. A pitiful picture of myself; was he wearing this jacket when he came for her? His mouth and eyes open; his forehead is barred with lines. Seeks a way out, fascinated. "Come on," the light-source said to him in a heavy voice. "Who are you? What do you want with me?" He has spoken softly but the sound echoes in the cellar. A drop of water falls onto the surface of a puddle. Sensitive as the one on a mirror galvanometer, the beam of light oscillates, then comes to rest on Louis again. "Come on," wearily.

121 "I haven't done anything." "I haven't got anything against you. Come on." Wild with rage against that trembling light which is making an inspection of him, he rushes forward head first. The torch drops to the ground summoning from the shadow a fragment of wall. "Pick up what you made me drop." Louis obeys. He shines the light on the feet, then on the trousers of that other man who has him in his grip. "Let's go up to my apartment. You first, please."

[Virginie Ralon] And at the hour of our death. My head. My poor head and my stomach doesn't feel right; the minutes are going to be long until it's every body else's morning. I ought to have some more hot coffee, but Charlotte will not be happy if I up­ set her kitchen. I'm old and going crazy. What could he have to do with all that? What time would he wake up? Not before eight o'clock; I'll go, I'll see for myself. What a thing; I'm alone in the world; in my fright I thought I saw his face going past; a kind of nightmare. The man looked surprised for a minute; I thought he had seen him too, but no, I was imagining things. But could that be Louis, that fright­ ful face? It was Louis I thought I saw, but so changed, looking, no, I can't say it . . . I don't know whether I cried out. Heavens, if I weren't dressed at this unlikely hour —my watch has stopped but it can't be six o'clock yet, the sun is far from being up —in the midst of saying my rosary, I would assume that all this is a dream, a long and heavy bad dream, but only Louis' face was a dream, all the rest was real: they were there; they rang; they woke us up and I went to open the door; they told us their story; the young wife was trembling and all upset. Alexis would have seen him as I did, and I remember he did not budge; unless he didn't want to appear to have seen be­ cause he himself was wondering whether it might be only excite­ ment, the time of night, and weariness; and even if he really didn't see anything that wouldn't mean there was nothing to see in reality because he was not looking in that direction and he was foggy with sleep. Hail, Mary, full of grace . . . But the last words catch as in a notch and the two fingers remain on the rosary-bead as though paralysed.

He hates me; he wanted to turn me in himself; he watched every-

122 thing; he arranged everything; and he came to get me in the trap that he had set for me. A pool of cold ashes has made its way into the stair-way. They swim along; all their movements are as though they were weighted down with diving-suits. Louis tries to get away. Suddenly he is stopped by the sight of Leonard's greenish face and by his whispered words: "Come on, don't act like a child." "What is the matter M. Leonard? Are you ill? What time is it?" He lets himself be guided like a blind-man by a man with one eye.

The alarm-lock rings in Charlotte Tenant's room. It is still dark but insecurely so; behind the curtains the beginning of dawn presses against the windows. Five fifteen.

But, said Virginie Ralon getting up suddenly, what do they know about it? Painters; this is almost the first time we've spoken to them. We've been living in the same house for years, we're used to their looks and their name, yet if some event brings us together we're likely to forget we don't know them from Adam and that we have no idea how much faith to put in their word, especially at five o'clock in the morning. What an idea, to come and wake up Alexis, as if he could do something, whereas he will only mix things up. And her poor parents who are still sleeping according to what they say. What they need is a doctor. Silly woman, I'm sorry for her children, she didn't even think about that, and if they start to spread this rumor, the fools, and naturally mix­ ing up Louis in their tale, when there may be nothing to it and anyhow he has nothing to do with it, and if he did get mixed up with it it's not his fault, and he mustn't start thinking he's responsi­ ble, and the first thing would be to erase every trace of his passage before the doctor gets there, and even before the parents wake up if there's still time because they left the door open for Alexis, they said, as if it were proper for him to enter stealthily like a thief — I must tell him to wait —and if I can get in without disturbing any­ body that will be better, for I shall see that she has regained con­ sciousness or else is sound asleep. She goes into her son's room. He has got back under the covers. Leans down, speaks very softly, very maternally: "Listen, Alexis, those painters looked to me all excited and the 123 woman is almost ill; the whole story seems to me pretty dubious and I'm going to try to find out something. Trust me, I'll wake up the parents if necessary, and if a doctor is needed they surely have a telephone, since he's a businessman. Of course I'll come down and get you as soon as your being there would be of some use. If this were just some absurd misunderstanding, you see, you'd be covered with ridicule, while for an old woman like me that has no impor­ tance. I insist. No noise, no noise; especially don't wake Jean up; that would be too silly. I'll be as quiet as a mouse." Kisses him, spreads the blanket over his shoulders. Doesn't move, doesn't understand, looks at the time. What about Louis?

"Your niece Henriette . . . "Come in, come in, what do you mean, my niece? No, we won't wake her up. She's been to an evening party which wore her out." The red curtain drops back into place. The blue fox, forerunner of morning, like the last fragrance of mint before winter, digs all the prickles of his fur into the frosty air. Asked me to escort her. "Sit down in that arm-chair." There were some people here too when I came in for the first time. "You're shaking; I'll light the heater." His right hand hurts a little. Welcome, flower of warmth. Sam­ uel's tall silhouette, pouring, is outlined by the window. "You've already had a good deal to drink tonight. So have I if it comes to that. I hope this will do us some good anyway." "Thanks." Sits down opposite, stretches out his legs, stares at the other, hunched over and dirty from head to foot. "What are you going to do now, can you tell me that?" "How much do you know?" "Actually, not much. Please, be calm; I assure you I have noth­ ing against you. But I have a sort of impression that you're in a fine mess." "Why are you awake? Why did you spy? What have I done to you? It has nothing to do with your Henriette. Why didn't you let me sleep in peace?" Anger flowed through the muscles of his fingers. After this out­ break the tension drops abruptly. The glass falls. "Get hold of yourself. Here is what I know: I find myself awake; 124 I have heard a strange disturbance which was the de Veres going down to your cousins and yourself going in and then out again (I didn't know then that it was you), I lit the light and saw you go into the cellar. The de Veres came back up and I waited out of curiosity because it was all very odd as you must admit; then I went to hunt you up; I was concerned. Henriette had a certain lik­ ing for you; poor girl, she sees very few young men; I can't say I attached a great deal of importance to the thing nor did you either; you were taking advantage of it, that's all; don't protest, I beg of you; it's a case of to the pure all things are pure; unfortunately I had begun to be afraid that she, in her innocence, might take the thing rather more seriously; I was ambitious for her, and you did not seem to me a, how shall I say? a very promising catch; let's agree that I was unjust and stupid; I had never looked at you carefully; you were a shadow that I met sometimes and which seemed to me timid and pale; then I thought you might have a lot of prejudices because of your family; I'm sorry to talk like this; I don't intend to be harsh, and I can see that in playing the hand I acted in a petty and reckless way; since she's an orphan obsessed by the idea of marriage, in her imagination she organized her future life around you; she did not talk to me about you because she saw that for me the affair was closed before I had even taken the trouble to see how the land lay; I was so sure it was my job to arrange a good mar­ riage for her. In the meantime you were joking about her with an­ other girl; tell the truth: you were bored when you went with her while she would have done anything for you; she would have left me for you, she would have gone anywhere, blindly; you knew that and you liked it; you liked it, didn't you; if only you had loved her as she deserved to be loved; I was trying my best to keep things going in the right direction and then they all fell apart. I was ready to listen if you had come to talk to me about her; I would have done everything I could; how eloquently I would have pleaded your case before my earlier, unregenerate self; but I'm afraid all that is just another dream; tell me, what have you done tonight?" The cold makes his toes curl up painfully inside his shoes while the heater almost burns the cloth covering his knees. And the words force their way out without his having any control over them. "Don't believe what they say —they didn't see anything; they're painters, I think; that's why he wears a sweater in summer; they heard, they came looking frightened, her especially; I could have sworn her teeth were chattering; I was in the shadow and I saw them better than I can see you, both of them in bathrobes; they didn't know I was hiding there, how could they have suspected it?

125 Because it was all over when they got there and they just made sure she was dead; they tried to get her to drink something, but it was no go, see; she probably died instantaneously, without suffering. "I was alone then; everybody was still asleep in the house; I heard the noise of the door which I had forgotten to close; they hesitated; I had just time enough to hide; if they had seen me I would have realized it from their gestures and their faces, and at one time I thought she was looking at me with her eyes too wide open, but she turned her head without saying anything. Excuse me, I'm very thirsty. Thanks, not too much brandy —put in lots of water . . ." His hands turn in the warmth. The daylight begins to go through the thick glass of the bottle. "Because they're going to tell stories, you know what people are; and they'll spread rumors about me." Handing him the glass, almost indifferently: "How can they if they really didn't see you?" "They couldn't keep it to themselves; they had to tell everybody what they had found; they went to my cousins; God knows what they may have said to them. And I did something foolish . . ." Stares at the contents of the glass, sets it down. "Because appearances are against me. There was light in Alexis' room and I tried to find out why that door was open too because I wanted to see Alexis right then, and I couldn't stop myself; I stuck my head in and saw him talking and my aunt recognized me. "You think I'm making things look better than they are, and you'll tell the story too in your own way, and naturally they'll all listen to you especially when you say the same thing as the painters, and I'm pretty stupid to go on giving you weapons to use against me, and you're lying while you listen to me because you're only trying to get back at me for the kindness your niece showed me, you old spy, how I hate you; stop looking at my hands; you're absolutely and entirely wrong, that's a burn; and anyhow I'm telling you it's the blow that killed her and there was no wound, and all the blood there is on her comes from the filthy thing I did to her." Almost sitting up; he slumps back shaken by a nervous laugh. Little by little the pinkish glow shines on Samuel's cheeks. "Excuse me. "I don't know what you're going to think of me. "I heard her cry out, and I came down to see what was happening like everybody else. "The door was already open, but I was on the back stairs; I had to go through the window; that's when I broke the glass.

126 "And I lighted the light, and I saw a man kissing her and she was turning her head and looking at me while she laughed. "And he saw everything, and he saw when I went for his face and ran away laughing out loud and they were all there laughing out loud. Then I was alone with her again and with her dress, her beauti­ ful white dress, which looked a little yellow in the artificial light. So dirty. And I didn't know she was dead, and I wanted to say something to her, but she had fallen into such a terrible position. And then they came and I hid. How can you think I did it when I wanted her to dance with me so much and was so angry because she enjoyed herself with all those empty-headed boys? Still, I didn't beg her; she certainly suspected, that's all, like any young girl on the watch for things like that, scorning me for noth­ ing, because I was badly dressed and timid and cousin to the priests, as you scorned me; if she invited me, it was out of pity not friend­ ship, and really she didn't invite me —she let me come with your niece out of pity, and if you are listening to me now I know that's out of pity too. But there must be something else in your case; mere pity wouldn't give you the patience to listen to all these dull, silly stories at this hour." Stops abruptly. He looks down; the designs on the oriental rug, birds in a tri­ angle, are becoming visible. Samuel waits, thinking that perhaps he will start to talk again.

Lizards of paradise, herons and among the tenderest ferns, the mango. The whole wall between the window and the clothes-press was dedicated to piety. She would have liked to paint the saints and angels, but she had always retreated before the human figure and it was not at her age that she would introduce such an innovation into her art. Holy Virgin, I'm tired this morning; the fact is, I'm already old. How they stamped their feet and how loud they played the music. In the past people had to have a piano or an orchestra; we danced too; there were sunny squares and doorways when it rained; Au- gustin is travelling in your archipelago. I'm only an old, German peasant-woman, not very pious; I only go to mass on Sundays, but I give you a truthful report and I have

127 great confidence in you. I pray for Louis Lecuyer who is more to be pitied than Alexis or Jean. Almost day under the skylight. If only they left the door open, otherwise . . . What a pity. I was sure of it. Here's the button of their buzzer, and since I'm here I'll have to start that clockwork noise. My old heart. And day is coming like a snake. Jean is asleep, Alexis in bed, Augustin in his grave, and I hope Louis is in his room near darling old Charlotte, who's probably waking up despite her short night because she has alway been an early riser. What are they doing? I'll make their old sistrum buzz like a swarm of metallic flies on a stormy day until they come and free me of this doubt and the ten­ sion slacks again. Their footsteps. The boards in their floor creak and the noise comes from under the door. But if the light is lit and the arrangement of the room is like ours, since all the inside doors are probably still open, they'll see her, just as the painters saw her; if he got up alone he will go and awaken his wife, and when she sees her daughter lying motionless and bleeding (as he said) she won't be able to keep from crying out. When they open up, what shall I say? A wind of madness has blown through this house and I have breathed so much of it that my actions are broken up into bits and have no coherence. Probably there's no more hope and the doctor will only confirm her death since her body must be stiff already; that's why I don't hear anything more. And the voice of Lydia Vertigues who is screaming and which is covered by the buzzer which Virginie presses as if the sawing and filing noise could wear through the partition; the door opens violently; the furious head of a man in his wrinkled pajamas: "Oh. Excuse me, madame." "I know. May I come in?" "But . . ." "I can see what you're going to say; it's the painters; it's all very complicated." "What painters?" The confused swarm of suspicions; he stares at her with a kind of repulsion.

128 Oh roses of Germany and Rhodes, protect me against this ava­ lanche of funeral flowers.

"I think it must have been an accident." Time passes. "Have you any money?" Blank. "No. Why?" "You must go." "Where do you want me to go?" "Look, maybe we can get the police to think it was an accident, but if all the people in the house . . ." Louis takes out his wallet. "Five thousand, two hundred francs; I would have had to borrow from my cousin before the end of the month." "I'll lend you some. I'll explain things to your aunt. I can offer you one chance. Here, you can't go out like that; take a bath; my suits will be too big for you; I'll try to brush yours off while you're washing; I'll hunt you up a tie. The subway is running now; you can go and catch the first train for Marseilles. Have you got your passport with you? Because you'll need a visa. I'll send it to a friend whose address I'll give you, and then you can take ship for Alex­ andria. I hope they won't be after you; I'll fix it so that the de Veres keep quiet. Anyhow you've got time; you can go and sleep the whole day in a hotel, if you've got the courage for that. I'll write some notes, I'll give you recommendations for some people and maybe you'll make a life out there . . ."

"Martin . . ." "Let me alone." "Martin . . ." "The parents are awake; the priest must be with them." "Martin ..." "Sure they are. Go back to bed, forget all that." "How can you sleep here when those poor people . . ." "We'd only be in the way. Oh, I knew I couldn't stop you . . ." Bursts into tears. It's bright enough to see in the room; daylight is coming through the shutters. The three children wake up and begin to howl.

XII The roar of the subway and of the distant trains leaving for the 129 suburbs, for the provinces, for vacations. Around the house the im­ pression of an empty city, the pane of morning scratched by the first bicyclists. Show your outside, you big pile of slumbers and vigils, you are now caught up in your daily round, an unnoticed feature of the street. Any building is a warehouse with its levels and its businesses, furniture being moved in or out, people who have their attachments there to relatives or possessions, and those who will not come back again. Just as every head is a warehouse where sleep the images of gods and demons of all sizes and all ages, whose inventory is never drawn

A new day which rings clear and cold like the color of the sea is beginning for all those whom the night had pitched together in a common misfortune and for those for whom nothing is changed, because old Elizabeth has already trotted off to mass, the amorous saleswoman and her handsome clerk have just broken their embrace, and all, one after the other, have wakened up again except Angele, as if they had all fallen asleep except Louis, and even Samuel Leon­ ard has collapsed on his bed without undressing. "This is the morning furniture," said Charlotte, "always at your service as soon as you come in, but not really awake; furniture needs human beings to help it live. Night has dropped a thin layer of dust all over it; that's the dew that falls inside houses." In the downstairs hall which is bathed in pink light Louis Lecuyer is going away, taking one step, then another; a new shirt, a new tie, new shoes, too big for him; no valise, no brief-case, no overcoat on his arm; his feet do not lift; he's going but he doesn't know where; money in his pocket? Yes, and letters and Leonard's telephone num­ ber. What has happened? At the hotel; he will wait; how will he find a hotel? The train, the ship . . . Slips out. And the doctor brushes past him with his little instrument-bag. Alexis, upset because his mother has not come down again, is ringing the bell on the Vertigues' landing. The first noisy automobile. And his brother Jean: Already there's daylight on my desk; I've forgotten again to close the shutters. I've missed everything*, the hawk, phoenix of hell, which hangs above the scarab serpent leaving behind the green body

* What follows is Jean's reminiscence of a dream he has had during the night. l3° of its shadow, the gods who function as stars to sing their hymns and bring to the sun in his ship his new face, and the great com­ pany of hours and stars who accompany him in his ascent from the waters. Blind, abandoned, the closed door cutting me off from all light, I have mixed my tears and my fears with those of all the in­ habitants of those naphtha swamps. Upstairs the Monge couple are side by side. Frederic caresses the face of Julie who is still asleep. "I must go wake up Felix; he'll be late for school." The de Vere children are calming down; their parents are trying to comfort them. Clara Grumeaux slips away. Father Jean: "Now I'll get up and wash and put on my cassock, and I'll have to say mass as I do every day in my vestments: alb, stole, chasuble, and when I mount towards the crucifix while the dreary altar-boy rings his little bell, holding the chalice and the paten in their little brocade tent, I shall have a hard time facing it; it will say with its brass lips: your dreams are more sincere than your prayers; go join those gods who torment you, and do not perpetuate the lie of con­ secrating my body and my blood with words which come only from the surface of your heart. "In my protest the very sound of my voice will give me the lie." The second noisy automobile. The doctor climbs the stairs. Sam­ uel Leonard breathes noisily. Lucie is getting a bottle ready. In Louis' room the blue alcohol flame is about to go out; the water has evaporated from the pan. All the houses were asleep. Why have you given me up to those old warlocks who laugh at my ignorance? I accuse you; I had bound myself to you forever, and here I am, in spite of myself and however I twist and turn, unavoidably an apostate. At least Alexis was smart enough not to attach himself to such beautiful demons, who profit from nocturnal fissures to invade my life; but where is he, tense, nervous, lost? And the chains which attach him to you are perhaps as heavy for him as they are for me. Subway, a bell which a bicyclist makes sound against his tire, the third noisy automobile; hail, plowshares, turning the young day for a harvest of words in these houses. The doctor rings at the Vertigues' landing; Virginie, rosary in hand, opens the door. She is still haunted by the same apparition of a face, Augustin, Louis. Nothing has been moved. Blessed sources of the day. Morning thoughts, thoughts which will fade.

!3i You have supplanted them all, crown of thorns, but after cen­ turies of waiting and strain, they have taken you away with them. Guardian, you have betrayed us; what have you done without vigi­ lance? They get into our advertising, our machines; hidden, they laugh at us, being nourished on our hidden thoughts, because they have us in their hands like sea-shells to be broken or the page of a book to be crumpled and burned for amusement. You have made us forget their names, and the names would have helped us to take account of their efficacity, for it is not a question of beseeching but of honoring them; is there a single one of them who did not in the end abandon his faithful to their complaints? Gertrude, pasty-faced, finds the kitchen door open. What a risk. Lord, if madame knew — if there had been a thief. She laughs and, curious, turns towards the debris left by the party. Hallowed be the reflections of the brass, said Charlotte, for they warm all my flowers; hallowed, the gas flame, the fresh leaf on the calendar. Introibo. The stones, the ornaments will call me idolater, other parts of your soul will sing, at that very moment, praises on dif­ ferent altars; you can barely obtain the few moments of silence necessary within you for the pronunciation of the sacramental words; you who are wearing the disguise, do you imagine, when you give the blessing, that no one in the dark, cold church will see the shame rising to your face? The time has come to take up again the duties of the day. Madame Phyllis opens her eyes; old Elizabeth is going back up the steps. Gertrude sees in the living room the dead body and all the peo­ ple around it: monsieur, madame, that other lady from the first floor, and the priest, and another gentleman whom she has never seen and who is talking: "Well, I think there is nothing else to do . . . And the police must be called . . . Do you want me to do that? Please be assured that . . ." The light shines full on the clutching hand, the bloodied shoulder, the dress, its dust and its wine. The iron shutters of the two stores below are being raised. The noisy automobiles, the subway, the bells, the train whistles, the sirens which are beginning to blow. Alexis makes a furtive sign of the cross and murmurs ilEt lux perpetua . . ." Seven o'clock sounds from the nuns' steeple.

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