Republicans and Emperors

In 49 BCE, at the tail end of the glorious, democratic, six-hundred-year-old Roman Republic, Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River in northeast Italy and thus crossed the point of no return, for he knew his action defied both tradition and law and that he and his army would soon be entering Rome, taking it by force.  He knew he was leading a revolution.  “The die is cast,” he famously said as he crossed the river, understanding full well what he was doing and what it meant, that he was challenging by main force the entrenched, senate-run government that was buckling under the weight of widespread popular unrest.    

The very same Romans who were challenging Senate rule, welcomed Caesar as their savior, but overcoming six centuries of entrenched government also created chaos as opposing parties vied with each other for power—which made the government even more unstable.   The people looked to Caesar to calm the waters, to restore order, to bring peace back to the city and the republic.  They wanted him to be king, a title Rome had proudly done without for some six centuries.  It was a matter of pride that they had no king, so Caesar wisely refused the offer, but then not-so-wisely accepted the same position rephrased as Rome’s "Dictator for Life."

            Clearly this was a semantic evasion, which led the most conservative Senators, calling themselves the Liberators, to plot and successfully assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March, 44.  So the democratic Roman Republic, which had long been run by a conservative ruling class, was threatened by a leftist revolution supporting a dictator who was then assassinated by Senate conspirators.  The political landscape of conservative Senators and military revolutionaries shifted so quickly that it was all but impossible to determine which party was actually conserving the glories of the Roman Republic.  They probably both thought that’s what they were doing. 

            Gradually, after Augustus, Caesar’s adopted son and heir, took the reins of government, the Roman Empire was born and lasted another five hundred years, a long saga of Roman emperors, ranging from the very good like Augustus and Marcus Aurelius to the very bad like Caligula and Nero, a long era of Dictators for Life.

What does this long history of Roman power and grandeur tell us?  That the justly celebrated and democratic Roman Republic ran out of steam after about 700 years and was replaced by an autocratic government led by a succession of famous and infamous Roman emperors, all of whom led an undemocratic  system that eventually self-destructed too.  But altogether, the Republic and the Empire lasted an astounding twelve hundred years.  Rome prospered under both forms--then crashed and burned under both forms.

Conclusion:  Democratic republics aren’t any more successful in the grand scheme of things than the rule of tyrants.   Damn it.

 

Henry Longfellow and John Williams: Tying Up Loose Ends

Yesterday I tied up some loose ends.  I had to rewrite a chapter of the book I'm writing on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, putting in some new information that changed the chapter significantly, and yesterday I finished up a week's work.  Nice.  Now I can think again about making some forward progress.  Lateral is good, and necessary in this case, but forward progress is what I'm after.  So tying up that loose end felt very good, especially because the lovely Roberta Louise and I are heading to exotic Istanbul on Sunday, and after a week there, we are going to Malta--the island country south of Sicily and north of Africa in the Mediterranean.  I really wanted to get this new information into my chapter before we leave.  Some things you just don’t want to carry over for even a short, two-week vacation.

Another loose end that got tied up yesterday was finally reading John Williams’ Augustus (1972).  I met Williams once in the early 1990s when I was interviewing  people for my biography of poet/translator/scholar John Ciardi.  They knew each other from Bread Loaf, once called the grand-daddy of all writers’ conferences, where for a few years in the 1960s, Ciardi was the director and Williams was on his fiction faculty.

Williams was then living, dying actually, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, one of God’s green places that is home to the state university, and I found myself with a few hours of free time from one of the Ciardi projects I was then involved in, a book that would be published by the university press, The Selected Letters of John Ciardi (1992).  I was at the same time collecting information for a life of Ciardi, which came out in 1998, so spending an hour with John Williams made a lot of sense.  

But I wasn’t ready to talk to him, hadn’t read any of his books, and barely even knew his reputation.  We talked pleasantly for an hour or two, had a drink together, but it was unproductive.  Which was my fault.  I just didn't have time back then to read some of Williams' work.  I figured I'd get to it later.  But I never did.

That’s how it stood until a man from Sarasota writing Williams’ life contacted me for an interview here in Dade City some six months ago.  We spent a good afternoon chatting, but still I hadn’t read anything by Williams.  But now that I'm retired and splitting my time between Longfellow and the golf course, I knew I could fit Williams in.  And so I did.  

I read Stoner (1965) first--and immediately fell under Williams’ spell—he’s that good. I was doing handstands at being the most recent reader to have discovered this great book.   And of course I immediately thought back to that missed opportunity, when I could have asked the man to tell me about the book Morris Dickstein in The New York Times Book Review called "a perfect novel."

And then, with all those good vibes about Stoner still washing over me, I went online to find a copy of Augustus, which won the National Book Award in fiction in 1972.  But it took a couple of weeks to arrive, plenty of time for me to get involved in some other book, some other writer, so when it did get delivered to my front porch, I promptly put it aside for a while, until an article in The New York Review of Books (August 2014) came out on Williams and Augustus, the men and the book.  As it happens, last week I was also contacted by another potential Williams biographer for yet another interview.

The universe was sending me some not-so-subtle messages to tie up this loose end.  So I did.  Finally, and to my great pleasure, I read Augustus.

Neither a small-town college professor in Stoner, nor the mighty Caesar Augustus himself can match up against a universe that will have its way with them. That's one of the insistent themes at the heart of both of these great Williams books.  But I don't want to talk about the books, don't want to review them or critique them.  I was just tying up a loose end--and by doing so discovered a novelist worth reading, worth holding in the highest esteem.  Now that's one good loose end.  I can leave for Istanbul in peace.  

Listening to Voices

           The New York Times Book Review editors asked Dean Koontz what book he thought was most "disappointing, overrated, just not good."  I didn't care that he listed Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse because I never liked it much either.  But he also says he stops reading when he realizes the author has embraced his character's nihilism.  But why stop there?  I stop reading when the author embraces his character's religious faith, Marxism, capitalism, feminism, politics, sexual preferences, psychological school of thought--just about any agenda.  I don't go to fiction to be instructed in the author's way of looking at the world.  I go to fiction to hear a voice telling me about people and places, moods and feelings, the sort of thing we used to call "universal" in our stories and poems.  And even then, if I don’t like the voice, I’ll stop reading pretty quickly.  There are simply too many books out there to bother with the voices you don’t like listening to.

The Redemption of an Over-aged Baseball Fan

          I'm embarrassed to be a baseball fan.

          It would be all right if I were just a casual fan who sees an occasional game, a guy who secretly finds the whole thing boring.  It is.  I realize that.  For one thing, baseball games are way too long.  Managers teach their hitters to go "deep in the count," which in baseball lingo means 3 and 2 counts and lots of foul balls.  Make the pitcher work.  Get his pitch count up and up until the opposing manager has to take him out, which is good because you want to get into the other team's bullpen.  That's when our guys might be able to put a couple of runs on the board.  Slow the game down.  Get those pitchers tired.

          Pitchers slow the game down too, especially when they have to work out of trouble.  With runners on base, pitchers often go into slow-motion--rub the ball down, walk around the mound, reach for the rosin bag, shake off the catcher's signals, throw over to first to keep the runner close, call the third baseman over for a chat about who should cover a bunt.  Lord, a half inning can run half an hour.

          But I love every minute of it.  It's high drama.  And my emotional life hangs in the balance--absolute, pure elation on the one hand, total, heart-breaking depression on the other.  And of course, that's why I'm embarrassed to be a baseball fan, especially now that I'm 72.  Shouldn't such feelings have passed by now?  Gone the way of all youthful passions?  But there I am at the TV most nights with the sound turned off so I can read some book or do some lap work.  I care.  Damn it all to Hell.  I care.

          Today, however, I feel a little better about all this.  My good friend Jim Kozelsky gave me his copy of Sports Illustrated, which has an article by Tom Verducci on "The Passion of Roger Angell," one of those magnificent New Yorker writers I've been reading for years.  If you know baseball at all, you know Angell's essays on the national pastime.  I won't heap superfluous praise on one of the great writers of our age, but note please that he is to be enshrined, at age 93, into baseball's Hall of Fame today, July 26, 2014.  He'll be receiving the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the "highest honor given by the Baseball Writers Association of America," according to Verducci.  And it's worth saying that Roger Angell is not a member of BBWAA because he isn't a major league beat writer.  He's way better than that.

          And here's why I'm posting this entry:  Roger Angell loves baseball the same way I do--and he too knows that it's embarrassing, but  he also sees our redemption.  Verducci quotes Angell:  "It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look--I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable.  Almost.  What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring--caring deeply and passionately, really caring--which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.  And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.  Naivete--the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball--seems a small price to pay for such a gift."
 
          I couldn't have said it better myself--of course.  Few could.  I'm just happy, thrilled even, that this grand old man of baseball has said if for me.  Bravo.  And thank you.

Thoughts on Joseph Smith's "American Crucifixion"

Today's New York Times Book Review has a review by Benjamin Moser of Alex Beam's book American Crucifixion:  The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church (published by something called PublicAffairs and selling for $26.99).

I doubt I'll ever read the book, but I was taken with a few facts I hadn't known about crazy Joseph Smith and the spiritual phenomenon known as Mormonism, which he invented.  First, Mormonism is a religion “whose followers believe that the Earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of the planet Kolob, and that the Garden of Eden was created somewhere in the neighborhood of Kansas City."  That sort of thing has made Mormonism such an inviting target for mockery that “there's no sport in scorning it," according to the review—and attacking Smith himself is so easy that it amounts to "a distasteful piling on."

But the reviewer piles on anyway:  Smith in the 1820s "began to 'translate' from tablets he kept wrapped in a tablecloth, a series of visions that became the Book of Mormon, a turgid sci-fi novel that nonetheless managed to sway a nucleus of converts."  But so many people hated Smith that he was murdered by a lynch mob when he was 38 in 1844.  

 His “crucifixion” changed everything.  Silly and infuriating as Smith may have been in life, in death he was elevated beyond sainthood into godhood itself.  He became "a flamboyant frontier L. Ron Hubbard."  That is, for his followers Smith was much greater in death than he had ever been in life, for in death he joined all the other "miracle"-making saviors throughout history.  And it’s also true that by any logical standard, it is no more difficult to believe in him and Mormonism than "than it is to believe that Moses parted the Red Sea, or that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, or that Jesus was born of a virgin."

Take it all together, and you have a story worth retelling, as  Alex Beam has done by taking familiar materials and refashioning them into an irreverent new book.  That sort of work gets my attention and applause--which is as far as I'll go in the way of a secular genuflection—to Beam, that is, not Smith.  I might even read the damn book.

Addendum:  According to a front-page story in the New York Times on November 10, 2014, Smith had a “loyal partner” in his “loving spouse Emma,” but nevertheless “took as many as 40 wives,” including one who was only 14.  He even married women already married, sometimes to his friends and followers.  Polygamy, in Smith's self-serving theology, was the restoration of a practice "commanded by God" and followed by Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs—which thus enabled him to claim full biblical immunity for a super-charged sex life.  American Crucifixion is now officially elevated to “on my nightstand” status.  I’ve got to know more about this guy.

Whining Poets

          I'm tired of poets whining about the public not appreciating them.  I know more poets than most people do because I've spent my life in colleges and universities which have taken them in as Writers in Residence (comfy positions for poets whose names are sometimes recognized) and as faculty members in creative writing departments around the country.  One blogger claimed in 2012 there were 71 MFA programs (Masters in Fine Arts) and another 112 programs where poets can teach Creative Writing majors; the blogger estimated there are at least 800 new MFA's given out every year.  I doubt if anyone knows how many are poets.  But my guess is too many.

          I like poetry and have written about it, and about poets, most of my professional career.  But there is no way anyone can keep up with the the annual tidal wave of new poets, new books of poetry, and new schools training them.  And it should be made clear from the outset that there are many more good poets now than there ever have been before.  But because of their sheer numbers, they go unread.

          The poets themselves and the Creative Writing programs they come from are their own audiences.  They attend each other's readings and pretend there is a place for them someplace else in the literate universe.  That is delusional, but it's a fiction they all hold on to--just as they hold on to the idea that they are under-read and under-appreciated.  Their usual posture is a sort of hang-dog look of disappointment and lofty superiority, a difficult combination that they manage with the same irritating panache observed in perpetually misunderstood teenagers.

          I think maybe they should take a close look at T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, both of whom worked for a living, Eliot as a banker at first, then in the publishing business, and Stevens in the insurance world.  They didn't whine about audiences.  They wrote when they could, squeezed it in between other obligations.  Nothing hang-dog about them.

God and Superstition

Superstition.  noun

su·per·sti·tion

1.  Excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings:  "He dismissed the ghost stories as mere superstition."
2.  Unfounded belief, credulity, fallacy, delusion.
3.  A widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation.
Synonyms:  myth, belief, old wive's tale.  

No one wants to be known as superstitious, so gullible as to believe things that are clearly untrue.  We smile with superiority at the person who believes good luck comes from a rabbit's foot, bad luck from a black cat; that toads cause warts and eating fish will make you smart.  We're way too smart to believe in things like that.

And yet no one who believes in God thinks he's being superstitious.