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James Baldwin by Carl Van Vechten, September 13, 1955
General information about James Baldwin can be found at the sites hosted by CSPAN American Writers and PBS American Masters television programs. There is also a profile and video on him at bio.com. Here's an excerpt of a documentary on Baldwin; it includes an interview with Baldwin as he talks about his family and remembers his life in Harlem:
Go to the Paris Review site and read the interview with him. If the link is broken do a search for the magazine, Spring 1984, Issue 94. Baldwin also gave a speech on civil rights and race at UC Berkeley on Jan. 15, 1979. You can watch an excerpt of it here:
CSPAN has a complete copy of the speech at their site and they profile Baldwin at this page. PBS American Masters did a program on Baldwin, called James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. Unfortunately, they are no longer showing it on their website. However, there are selections of it on YouTube.
Music is a critical part of Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." There are references to gospel, blues, jazz, and rhythm & blues. We watch, along with the narrator, how Sonny is entranced by a gospel group singing "The Old Ship of Zion." Listen here to a version by the Roberta Martin Singers:
There's more. For the country blues, music the narrator's uncle likely played, listen to Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, performing songs they recorded in the 1930s. For rhythm and blues, like the song the barmaid danced to, listen to Big Mama Thornton and Little Richard. FYI: Thornton first recorded "Hound Dog" in 1952; this performance on YouTube is from 1965. Elvis Presley first recorded "Hound Dog" in 1956. Little Richard wrote "Long Tall Sally" in 1956, and it was subsequently recorded by Elvis Presley, The Beatles and many other popular acts.
The great jazz pianist Sonny Clark, who performed in the 1950s and 1960s, is an example of what Baldwin's Sonny might have played in a New York nightclub. Examples of Clark's playing appear below. (Clark, as you guessed, is not related to Baldwin's Sonny.)
At the end of Baldwin's story, Sonny plays a version of "Am I Blue," a standard that has been recorded countless times. Read the lyrics:
Am I Blue? (from 1929)
by
Harry Akst and Grant Clarke
It was a morning, long before dawn Without a warning I found he was gone How could he do it Why should he do it He never done it before
Am I blue Am I blue Ain’t these tears, in these eyes telling you How can you ask me am I blue Why, wouldn’t you be too If each plan With your man Done fell through
There was a time When I was his only one But now i’m The sad and lonely one...lonely
Was I gay Until today Now he’s gone, and we’re through Am I blue
O'Brien in Vietnam. Photographer and date unknown.
For information about Tim O'Brien see his webpage. and the one maintainedby Texas State University, where he teaches. Here is an interview O'Brien had with PBS American Experience in 2009 about his time in Vietnam, and a profile of him in Ploughshares. A timeline of the Vietnam War can be found here.
poet, writer and soldier for Britain during World War I
Sassoon's words serve as O'Brien's epigraph to his National Book Award-winning novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). The character Cacciato is a soldier-dreamer, who goes AWOL from his post for a journey that takes him from Indochina, across Asia to Paris. Cacciato is Italian for "caught" or "hunted."
I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley but everybody called him Rat.
A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and writes a letter to the
guy’s sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she had, how strack the guy was, a number one pal
and comrade. A real soldier’s soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point, how
her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years,
dangerous stuff, like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel
balls, Rat tells her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real daredevil,
because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing himself, just man against gook. A great,
great guy, Rat says.
. . . .
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you
feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been
made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. . . . . In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling. . . . . You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. . . . . In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.” True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can’t believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe. . . . . How do you generalize? War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorous, the purply black glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fire fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it; a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not. . . . . In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
Z GATOR, VIETNAM, FEBRUARY 1994 -- I'm home, but the house is gone. Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire.
On Gator, we used to say, the wind doesn't blow, it sucks. Maybe that's what happened -- the wind sucked it all away. My life, my virtue.
In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified pfc. on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent. A forward firebase for the Fifth Battalion of the 46th Infantry, 198th Infantry Brigade, LZ Gator was home to 700 or 800 American soldiers, mostly grunts. I remember a tar helipad, a mess hall, a medical station, mortar and artillery emplacements, two volleyball courts, numerous barracks and offices and supply depots and machine shops and entertainment clubs. Gator was our castle. Not safe, exactly, but far preferable to the bush. No land mines here. No paddies bubbling with machine-gun fire.
Maybe once a month, for three or four days at a time, Alpha Company would return to Gator for stand-down, where we took our comforts behind a perimeter of bunkers and concertina wire. There were hot showers and hot meals, ice chests packed with beer, glossy pinup girls, big, black Sony tape decks booming "We gotta get out of this place" at decibels for the deaf. Thirty or 40 acres of almost-America. With a little weed and a lot of beer, we would spend the days of stand-down in flat-out celebration, purely alive, taking pleasure in our own biology, kidneys and livers and lungs and legs, all in their proper alignments. We could breathe here. We could feel our fists uncurl, the pressures approaching normal. The real war, it seemed, was in another solar system. By day, we'd fill sandbags or pull bunker guard. In the evenings, there were outdoor movies and sometimes live floor shows -- pretty Korean girls breaking our hearts in their spangled miniskirts and high leather boots -- then afterward we'd troop back to the Alpha barracks for some letter writing or boozing or just a good night's sleep.
So much to remember. The time we filled a nasty lieutenant's canteen with mosquito repellent; the sounds of choppers and artillery fire; the slow dread that began building as word spread that in a day or two we'd be heading back to the bush. Pinkville, maybe. The Batangan Peninsula. Spooky, evil places where the land itself could kill you.
Now I stand in this patch of weeds, looking down on what used to be the old Alpha barracks. Amazing, really, what time can do. You'd think there would be something left, some faint imprint, but LZ (Landing Zone) Gator has been utterly and forever erased from the earth. Nothing here but ghosts and wind.
To read the remainder of this article click on this link.
The Professional, edited by Tim O'Brien, October 11, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Tim O'Brien, courtesy the Harry Ransom Center.
O'Brien's handwritten passage of If I Day In the Combat Zone
Tim O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam on April 5, 1969, to serve with the Third Platoon, Company A, Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry Division. What he saw in battle has been so well documented that while reading his memoir I expected each page to be his last, anticipating the report of his own death. After eight months he secured a coveted rear job where his most onerous task was the preparation of The Professional, “a weekly authorized publication of the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry, APO 96219,” of which he said this:
The newsletter was one of my assigned duties as battalion clerk, the job to which I was assigned after 8 months in the field with Alpha Company. By that point in my tour, as I discussed in some detail in If I Die… I was no longer doing infantry stuff, just the typical things you might expect of a clerk—typing letters and reports, filing paperwork, counting casualties, etc. (I despised the job, and I especially despised that ridiculous newsletter. But it beat getting shot dead.)
After the war O’Brien went for a graduate degree at Harvard, where he prepared his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone. Not much draft material survives for that book, but we never doubt its veracity. In his archive, now ensconced at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, there are letters home, to his parents; there are photographs; there is a uniform; there are medals. There is a lot of material from the nineties as he tracked down fellow members of Alpha Company, and as he revisited Vietnam. And there are two copies of The Professional: October 11 and October 20, 1969. The first issue, two pages from which are reproduced here, includes illustrations, cartoons, Vietnamese-English vocabulary lists, stories, and news. It also prints a story by O’Brien entitled “Trick or Treat,” portions of which appear verbatim in If I Die.
The Professional is a remarkable survival, especially given the handful of specific objects O’Brien mentions in the memoir which have not surfaced: letters from a girl he loves, unrequitedly, who sends him a poem by Auden, and who tells him, he writes, that he “created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff.” A letter to his parents, asking for his passport and immunization card, as he considers the appeal of Europe over Vietnam. Escape plans he kept folded up in his wallet. A journal he began, “vaguely hoping it will never be read.” And, perhaps most interesting, two letters from his first army friend, Erik Hansen, transcribed into the book. None of these narrative prompts within If I Die appear to have survived.
Perhaps surprisingly, much more of the more fictional The Things They Carried is documented by material in the archive. Why surprising? He's prepared us to believe it's as true as it isn't. He writes that, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth,” and “But only to say another truth will I let the half-truths stand.” In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien writes that a “true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” In the chapter “Notes,” he explains, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened … and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” In “Good Form”: “It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.”
And yet, it’s not, not from the opening line:
“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl name Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.” Tim O’Brien carried letters from a girl named Gayle, and carried them back to civilization, and preserved them for decades. He also saved a letter he wrote to her on October 17, 1968, but never mailed. In his youthful, tense, inconsistent hand, he is already conscious of the disconnect and unity between reality and his presentation of it:
The very form of the letters and words here (my penmanship is straight & jerky & kinda childlike) conveys wrong things now. Add to that the fact that the thoughts themselves, the substance I put down, is inaccurate to reality, and you have a real problem. … I can go over to Vietnam, set up shop, and try to keep bullets & shrapnel & blood off my body & hands; the other choice is desertion, pure and simple. No, just pure. Not so simple, if you think about it, and I admit that I have done that. All night after getting the news.
Martha of the first chapter, the reader eventually learns, was not Jimmy’s—or even O’Brien’s—first love. That place of honor was held by the nine-year-old Linda of the last chapter: his fourth-grade sweetheart who died of a brain tumor in the summer of 1956, before returning for the fifth grade. Linda, the book version of a girl named Lorna Lou Moeller with whom O’Brien had been in love at the age of nine, incites and dominates the book’s final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead,” which appeared on its own (as did several chapters of the book) in Esquire. After publication O’Brien received a five-page letter from Mrs. Moeller, who had read the chapter, recognized her daughter, and remembered the O’Brien boys. She sent O’Brien a dozen photos of Lorna Lou, and a clipping documenting the too short life of a girl who would occupy space in O’Brien’s consciousness throughout his teens and adulthood. Moeller recalls her daughter’s feelings for the O’Brien siblings, and recounts the course of her illness and death.
In “The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien had written, “It is now 1990. I’m forty-three years old, which would’ve seemed impossible to a fourth grader … And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body—her life.” These thoughts dated back, though, to the late fifties: two stories, composed in high school, have been preserved, in which he grapples with Lorna Lou’s illness and inevitable death. In “Two Minutes,” composed on seven leaves of his father’s letterhead from the Equitable Life Assurance Society, he recounts his futile attempt to save “Nancy,” who killed herself because “I’d persuaded her—no forced her would be a better word—to come with me to New York from her Indiana farm.” He races home in his car, knowing she is at death’s door, hoping he’ll make it in time to save her. Another story, called “Tulips,” filling twenty-two leaves of letterhead, is about a girl named Linda and a boy named Tim. O’Brien writes in 1990 that he had, in his youth, “saved” Lorna Lou in his dreams, always seeing her alive, sometimes discussing her death with her. In one dream he asks her what it’s like to be dead. She responds, “I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”
By the time O’Brien came to write The Things They Carried, he had experienced staggering death and loss as an adult, but his mind returned, still, to the nine-year-old girl:
And then it becomes 1990. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. She’s not the embodied Linda; she’s mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name … She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all.
He can also see his dead Company mates, Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon. “And sometimes I can ever see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. I’m young and happy I’ll never die.”
In response to my description of The Things They Carried as “(perhaps marginally) more fictional than If I Die,” O’Brien commented,
by any ordinary standard the vast bulk of TTTC is invented and is fiction. Even the Gayle/Martha material is almost entirely the product of my imagination, both in terms of its detail and in its rendering of events. The Lorna Lou/Linda stuff calls more heavily on actual events, yet 80 or 90 percent of the chapter is completely invented. As a novelist, I have ruthlessly (and joyously) sacrificed the so-called ‘real world’ for the sake of story.
What interests me, then, is the process by which O’Brien cast and shaped and finessed objects, facts, memories, and dreams into a compelling narrative. Working papers for this—though not for If I Die—proliferate in his archive. In addition to raw drafts of individual chapters and two annotated rounds of the complete manuscript, I saw page proofs, with O’Brien’s final autograph revisions throughout.
He put his hand to eighty-five pages, sometimes adding, dropping, or changing a word, other times, revising an entire speech or paragraph or striking through a line or series of lines. He seems to have had the most difficulty settling on text in “In the Field” and its complement, “Field Trip,” but the distribution of the balance of revisions is fairly even throughout the book.
Where we’ve all seen “Joint Chiefs of Staff,” he originally had “Bobby Kennedy.” The “orange glow of napalm” was originally black. Bad breath had been fever blisters, and before that, acne. An aluminum suitcase turned into a cardboard box, and then back, to “a metal suitcase.” A banyan tree became a palm tree. Was it “hot and steamy,” or, better, “cold and steamy?” High school had been college, and a “lacy red blouse” had originally been a pink T-shirt. More substantively, he deletes “I was a coward” and a discussion of gallantry, and rewrites a sentence about losing the Silver Star. Such examples convey the spirit of this final round of revision and show a fair sampling of the sort of changes that could be either alterations to enhance the story, or more simply reversions to accuracy (after all, if Faulkner was right, “memory believes before knowing remembers”).
O’Brien has played so much, and so successfully, with genre that I wonder that we bother to acknowledge some of the distinctions that seem so important to the publishing sales force and the bookstore buyers and the talk-show hosts. Does it make any kind of sense to separate If I Die from The Things They Carried and even Going After Cacciato in the bookstore? Clearly, someone thinks we as readers care. I’d argue strenuously that we should not. We should simply take a page out of one of O’Brien’s books: “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.”
O'Brien talked with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, on April 28, 2010, about 35 years since the Vietnam War ended, in which the United States lost about 52,000 lives. It was also the 20th anniversary of The Things They Carried, a collection of linked short stories, has sold more than 2 million copies since its publication in 1990.
You can find the video and transcript of O"Brien's NewsHour interview here.
Towards the end of the interview the NewsHour's Brown asks O'Brien about the high school students he had addressed earlier that day. Brown's question to O'Brien: "Twenty years later, what is it that you hope that they and others take from the book?"
O'Brien's response: "To move beyond platitude, to move beyond the mythology we carry about ourselves and our country, to move beyond the — sort of the notion, I suppose, that, through physical violence, we’re going — we can always accomplish what we want.
"Sometimes — sometimes, things like wars can do precisely the reverse of what you want with a policy. You can manufacture enemies, as I was telling the class, that a bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
"If it strikes some little boy, a 3-year-old, you have got a very angry mom and a very angry dad and a bunch of neighbors who are not happy. That isn’t to say I’m arguing against all war. And — but it is to say that I think young people, in particular, need to understand the complications and the ambiguities of these things, and to hear it from someone who has not only gone to a war, but devoted a lifetime to suffering from it."
O'Brien talkswith the NEA for its "Big Read" of The Things They Carried, which was published in 1990.
O'Brien with War, Literature & the Arts: O'Brien has spoken often about the conundrum that writers and readers face when they examine a work of literature. Out of this tension there is one goal, O'Brien claims when he is speaking with Brian C. McNerney in the journal War, Literature, & the Arts, Fall/Winter 1994. O'Brien tells McNerney, "All stories are meant to put a reader into the shoes of a storyteller or at least into the shoes of, if not the storyteller, then the characters in the story." O'Brien then adds, "Fiction in general, and war stories in particular, serve a moral function, but not to give you lesson, not to tell you how to act. Rather, they present, they present you with philosophical problems, then ask you to try adjucate them in some way or another. But it's an imperfect world, and we can't find perfect solutions in an imperfect world. And yet, even in this imperfect world, we seek proximate solutions. That's the business of living, and fiction tries to address that." (10-11)
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin
IN THE FIRST WEEK of school I often encourage (ok, rant to) all of us--yes, myself included--to read the newspaper everyday. For a class like English 1B with its focus on literature, it would seem that a newspaper would not be a necessary daily exercise for reading poetry, fiction and plays.
BUT THEN I MADE the point as I introduced Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It" (back in fall 2010) of having read the week's newspaper about broadcaster Glenn Beck and his appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. Beck's event, which he named the Restoring Honor rally, might be pertinent, however small, to the poem we were about to read. At least knowing of Beck's event on August 28, 2010, and King's ""I Have a Dream . . . " speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom occurring on the same day, August 28, in 1963, at the same location, would help us see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and "Facing It," the poem that Komunyakaa has written in a political and physical context. Some things to keep in mind now. The Wall is in Washington. It is on our nation's mall. It is within view of the Washington Monument. It is next to the Lincoln Memorial. It is across the Potomac River from the Arlington Cemetery, which holds more than 400,000 bodies from the United States and eleven countries. It has the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It is our history. None of these are insignificant things when considering what Komunyakaa has written. Then, by coincidence, yes, unplanned when I put the class syllabus together, that on September 23, 2015, we would read Komunyakaa's "Facing It," once more. It turned out that our reading of it was the same morning that Pope Francis visits Washington and addresses a Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol. The Capitol, at the east end of the mall, is a walk of less than three miles from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Knowing something of this intersection of history and architecture, politics and religion, adds a richness for readers as they read Komunyakaa's "Facing It." Is Pope Francis, in his speech to Congress, raising some of the same themes as Komunyakaa? I think so, but you decide for yourself. Here's the transcript of his speech and a video (CC) of it.
Komunyakaa's "Facing It" has straightforward political and historical components, yet it is a work of art that is intricate, not easily understood and personal. It is singular to one person, but not of one place, nor one time. This person's experience that Komunyakaa describes, and considering the poet's biography it is probably his experience, occurs as he stands before the memorial. Others are present at the Wall, but it is a moment opposite to attending a rally or a demonstration. A crowd's frenzy is not imparting its force on one person; instead, one person has the authority to contemplate, to pray, and be alone, for someone who has died. For a moment the person at the Wall and even the reader are free to think their own thoughts, let their mind wander across landscapes fixed and ghostly, upon an innocent face with unkempt hair, and with charged reluctance, emote. The poem's speaker remains there to honor the dead; it is a liturgical self-expression created and delivered by one. The solitary experience of the poet and other visitors to the Wall may reach a shared consensus with others, but it is of no matter whether they are ever present at the same site where Komunyakaa and other visitors have stood before. The memorial's designer Maya Lin might have been anticipating what Komunyakaa explores in his poem when she recalls the complexity and controversy of its design and building that she recalls in "Making the Memorial" for The New York Review of Books. "What is," Lin has asked, "a memorial's purpose?" Can we accept death? she wonders. These are questions Komunyakaa is asking too. Though Komunyakaa was not, as far as I know, vilified for writing his poem, Lee was condemned for her design. In the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision we see her occupying a world where there is a fierce crowd pressing its force down on her. It is a demonstration or a rally she has no control over. All she can do is do what she does alone. The same for Komunyakaa, as well. They sit at tables and work. They can look out their windows. At children. At widows. They grieve. Lin's achievement and Komunyakaa's achievement permit us to do what they do: step away from the crowd and see and consider the thing we choose on most days to ignore. There it is at the Wall. Many have passed before us. We can accept it. Or not.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is on the lower left, next to the Lincoln Memorial.
A war's madness and death yield a steady, unforgiving grief. This is something that Komunyakaa examines as he recalls his record of service during the Vietnam War. During "the late 1960s," The Poetry Foundation reports that "Komunyakaa served as a correspondent for Army publications in Vietnam. Although he uses images from this experience in many of his works, the poet deals directly with the war in his collection Dien Cai Dau. The title means 'crazy' in Vietnamese and was used by locals to refer to American soldiers fighting in their country. In the opinion of Kirkland C. Jones, 'Komunyakaa's Vietnam poems rank with the best on that subject. He focuses on the mental horrors of war—the anguish shared by the soldiers, those left at home to keep watch, and other observers, participants, objectors, who are all part of the 'psychological terrain.' "In these poems of Vietnam, Komunyakaa uses his characteristic style to tangle together the natural and the man-made, the Southeast Asian landscape and the war. In the words of Bloomsbury Review contributor Samuel Maio, 'Komunyakaa, through his simple and vernacular diction, his evocative images and chronicled experiences, successfully provides us with glimpses into the mind of a dien cai dau, often quite aptly named, the insanity of Vietnam measuring against (and similarly affecting) its principles, as these terrifying poems—drawn by the precise hand of an unerring craftsman—make so strikingly clear.' Koestenbaum remarks that the poet's casual juxtaposition of nature and war belie the artistry at work." Because of his prominence as a poet, Komunyakaa, who has also taught writing and literature at universities across the United States, has been featured in many publications. BOMB magazine (an unfortunate or ironic magazine title that will feature a poet writing about war) joined poet Paul Muldoon in conversation with Komunyakaa, and Ploughsharesprofiled Komunyakaa. In addition to the The Poetry Foundation's discussion of him and his work, The Academy of American Poets and Modern American Poetry pages on Komunyakaa are also quite informative. There are many videos on the web of Kumunyakaa reading his poetry. Watch him read "Facing It," below.
"The New York Times" obituary of Tillie Olsen, January 3, 2007:
"A daughter of immigrants and a working mother starved for time to write, Ms. Olsen drew from her personal experiences to create a small but influential body of work. Her first published book, “Tell Me a Riddle” (1961), contained a short story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” in which the narrator painfully recounts her difficult relationship with her daughter and the frustrations of motherhood and poverty. To see the complete New York Times obituary for Olsen (1912-2007), see this site.
The Gray Panthers, in their 2007 newsletter, recalled Olsen's life as an "author, activist and role model par excellence for working women, [and who] died on New Year’s Day [2007]. She is best known for her book Tell Me a Riddle, which energized and inspired women writers in the feminist movement of the 1960s and since, for her life of active support for social justice and union rights, and for her determination to write and success in writing while working low-paying blue-collar jobs. You can find the complete Gray Panthers reprint of the Progressive Magazine, November 1999, article on Olsen and interview with her here. In an interview published on the Web site of 'Modern American Poetry,' Ms. Olson said, 'I buy 100 copies at a time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (for distribution). It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s great work.' For the past year the SF Gray Panthers Civil/Human Rights Committee has been campaigning to get the Declaration of Human Rights incorporated into the SF Charter and the California State Constitution. We salute Tillie Olson, an admirable woman." The Modern American Poetry website also reprints the Progressive Magazine, November 1999, article on Olsen and interview with her here. You'll find another interview with Olsen on that site as well. There is also the website http://www.tillieolsen.net/ with further information about Olsen. Constance Coiner's overview of Olsen's life can be found here.News of Olsen's death was reported by the " Stanford Report", January 10, 2007.
Olsen in the 1940s
Tillie Olsen was interviewed by "The Progressive,"November 1999.Here's an excerpt:
Q: How did you learn?
OLSEN: In the college of literature. What's in books--history, too. And the great college of motherhood. You learn so much about human development, human capacity. And it doesn't have to do with whether you have wealth and advantage or not. It has to do with the parenting those first few years before the world comes in with its enormous effect. The ecstasy of achievement when you first learn to walk, the passion for language. When children first learn to talk sentences, you usually can't shut them up. When they learn how to climb, for instance, again the ecstasy of achievement, that real hunger to learn, to have experiences, to be on top of something.
And the college of activism--that whole participation with others in trying to make change for the better. When I had only one child, I was already a labor activist. I did leaflets for unions in the old mimeograph days way back in 1932 and '33. And of course, '34 was the year when union organizations finally were really winning. The General Strike was my second-ever arrest. The city jail was just packed. We'd be serenaded every night from the men's section with "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."
Q: How were you in school? OLSEN: I had this real passion for books, although almost everything I read wasn't anything like the people I knew or the life around me. The marvel was, by imagining, I gained so much from [as Anna says in 'Yonnondio,'] 'being in places you've never been, inside people's heads you wouldn't ever get to know.' Without articulating it, I also learned I had something to add to literature. In study hall, instead of doing my work, I read because I didn't have much time otherwise. Ours was a large family [Olsen had five siblings, and she was the second oldest], and sometimes my mother worked outside. There was so much to be done. We were poor. My mother used to buy chicken feet. And you'd have to chop off the nails. Then you'd scald them, then you'd peel them. Once, my daughter Julie was buying chicken feet for soup, so I told her about this. "You know, one doesn't always remember accurately. There's nothing to peel," she said. And I said: "Julie, when you buy them now, they're already peeled." I remember when I first started high school and we were studying ancient history. My mother, who had never had formal education, was always curious about what we were learning. She said, "Tell me, what was good about slavery for humanity? I don't mean for the slaves themselves." I thought this was a crazy question. "What do you mean? Nothing is good about it." And she said, "No, think about it. What was good?" Well, I really thought she'd lost it. I couldn't think of any answer. So she said, "Those who owned them had leisure." Not everybody used their leisure in the same way. People who were thinking were able to be philosophers, like Socrates, or playwrights, or sculptors. And she went on to the uses of literacy by a small number of humanity. On some of the jobs my mother did she could bring along a couple kids. There were some where she couldn't, and then she worried. This was before child care.
It was the period before automatic dishwashers, and you washed clothes with the washboard. If you were lucky, you could get a wringer--what Walt Whitman called "the technological sublime." I really appreciated that phrase. I know there's a lot of scorn about these advances. But think of the enormous difference in time even having an electric dishwasher makes. I remember women in my generation saying, "It wasn't Lincoln who freed the slaves. It was the Bendix." The Bendix was the first automatic washing machine.
Olsen in 2001, two years after this interview was conducted. Photograph by Eric Risberg/Associated PressQ: Why do you write?
OLSEN: Because I'm a human being and human beings have a need to express themselves. Also, I stuttered. So I listened a lot, and there was a lot to listen to in my neighborhood. And there was the wonder of the black church, right around the corner. I loved that music so much, sometimes I'd go sit on the stairs. Once one of the women said, "Why don't you come up and sit in a real chair?" So I went in and came every Sunday I could.I also had luck because I was proud of my class--because of growing up with Socialist parents and having sat on Eugene V. Debs's lap and given him red roses. And hearing him. I remember how he said passionately, "You are not heads to them, brains that can think. You are not hearts to them, that can feel. You are hands." And he held up his hands. And he started, you know: "Cowhands, farmhands. . . ." I was impressed again by the power of language.
Q: A lot of your fiction uses language as it is spoken.
OLSEN: Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know our country so much better.
Tolstoy was so excited, absolutely thrilled, when Maxim Gorky began to publish because he was writing working class. When he met Gorky, Tolstoy told him about the time he'd had this great night in Petersburg. It's winter, freezing, but he's had a night of gypsy music and women. He comes out, dressed warmly in his army great coat and fur hat, striding along, to use Thoreau's expression, "inhabiting his body with inexpressible satisfaction." He feels this tug at his coat. Here is this filthy little bare-legged kid trying to pull him back and pointing to this half-naked woman, vomit all over her, lying unconscious in the gutter. He brushes that kid aside. He has no intention of touching her, freezing to death though she may be. His beautiful mood is spoiled. Again the little boy, looking imploringly up at him, pulls at his coat. He pushes him away hard.
By this time, Tolstoy is crying, and he puts his arms on Gorky's shoulders, looks into his eyes. "And you," Tolstoy says, "you must keep writing what happens with the people who are not ever written about. Or else that little boy will follow you with his eyes all of your life as he does me.
For the complete interview, and it is definitely worth reading,go here.
Here is an excerpt from the film
Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action
There is also a wonderful interview with Tillie Olsen talking about "I Stand Here Ironing."Go here to watch the video.
Scott Thurow, novelist known for suspense mysteries, devoted an NPR report about his admiration for Tillie Olsen's writing. You can read and listen to the program by clicking this. At the same page there is an excerpt of her novella Tell Me a Riddle.
Amy Hempel was asked in a Paris Review interview about Olsen's influence on her writing. Hempel said "I love 'I Stand Here Ironing,' and I always use it when I teach because it’s such a technical feat—the way the story keeps opening up, following directly from the first line, from what is troubling this child, to her family, to many struggling families, to a nation in the Depression, and back to the original child, the last line answering the first line. It’s so well made."
Tillie Olsen, left, marching in protest with other opponents of apartheid in support of full divestment in South Africa by the University of California. See more about Olsen at "Stanford University Report," January 10, 2007
