Sunday
Dec. 7, 2003
Books
SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2003
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Poem: "Books," by Billy Collins, from Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House).
Books
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow;
when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. The attack came after the United States had frozen Japanese assets and declared an embargo on shipments of petroleum and other war materials to Japan. On the morning of December 7, soldiers at Pearl Harbor were learning how to use a new device called radar, and they detected a large number of planes heading toward them. They telephoned an officer to ask him what to do. The officer said they must be American B-17s on their way to the base, and he told the soldiers not to worry about it. A sailor named James Jones, who would go on to write the novel From Here to Eternity (1951), was in the mess hall that morning. Because it was Sunday, there was a bonus ration of milk to go along with breakfast. Jones said, "It was not till the first low-flying fighter came . . . whammering overhead with his [machine guns] going that we ran outside, still clutching our half-pints of milk to keep them from being stolen."
The Japanese planes dropped bombs and torpedoes, and ships started capsizing and sinking. Men jumped and fell from the boats into the water, which was covered with burning oil. Most of the damage occurred in the first thirty minutes. The U.S.S. Oklahoma capsized, and the California, Nevada, and West Virginia sank in shallow water. The U.S.S. Arizona was completely destroyed, killing more than 1,500 soldiers aboard. When Nurses arrived for morning duty they found hundreds of injured men all over the base. The nurses ran around, administering morphine, and to prevent overdoses they wrote the letter M on each treated man's forehead.
There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded. Two days after the attack, the Navy passed out postcards to the survivors and told them to write to their families, but not to describe what had happened. A man named George Smith said, "My mother didn't get that postcard until February. . . . When the mailman got [my] card at the post office, he closed down and ran all the way to my house . . . woke up my [parents] and told them, 'Your son's OK.' I would not see my mother for two and a half years."
Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, "a date which will live in infamy," and he used the event as the grounds for leading the United States into World War II.
It's the birthday of the novelist Willa Cather, born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia (1873). Her family moved west when she was a little girl, to get away from a tuberculosis epidemic. The disease had killed all of her father's brothers. Congress had recently passed the Homestead Act, and thousands of people were moving west to take advantage of the free government land. She always remembered the journey out to the plains, sitting on the hay in the bottom of a Studebaker wagon, holding on to the side to steady herself. She said, "As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything - it was a kind of erasure of personality. I would not know how much a child's life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it, if I had not been thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron." Her family settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and most of her fictional Nebraska towns are based on it. She fell in love with the Nebraska landscape. She wrote, "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth is the floor of the sky."
Cather idolized the immigrant women of Nebraska, who worked alongside men in the fields. As a teenager, she cut her hair short and wore boys' clothes, calling herself William Cather. She traveled around the town with the local doctors, telling everyone she was going to be a surgeon, and she did experiments on frogs in her spare time. But when she went off to college, she got involved in journalism and eventually moved to New York City to edit McClure's magazine. She became an extremely successful magazine editor at a time when men ran almost all magazines and newspapers in New York, but the job kept her from writing anything but short fiction. After living in New York for fifteen years, she quit her job and took a trip back home to Nebraska. Standing on the edge of a wheat field, she watched the first harvest that she had seen since her childhood. When she got back to the East, she began her first great novel, O Pioneers! (1913). She said, "This [is] the first time I walked off on my own feet--everything before was half real and half an imitation of writers whom I admired. In this one I hit the home pasture."
Cather went on to write many more novels about the westward expansion of the United States, including My ántonia (1918), The Professor's House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). They're novels about longing for an America that had been settled, divided up, fenced off, and lost.
Cather said, "We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it-for a little while."
It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Joyce Cary, born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland (1888). He started out wanting to be a painter, and went to art school, but nobody liked his paintings. He moved to Paris and tried to write a novel about the bohemian scene there, but he never finished it. Hoping to find better novel material, he volunteered for the British Red Cross in the Balkan War against Turkey. He nearly died twice and never wrote any fiction about the experience. After that he went to Africa, and almost died a half a dozen more times. In 1918, he was shot in the head, but survived. He said, "A special luck follows me everywhere. . . . I shall not die a violent death. My insurance money will be wasted."
In Africa, he started writing several novels, all of which he burned in frustration. Finally, he published a few stories about African colonial life in the Saturday Evening Post, and made enough money to write for a living. He's best known for his novel The Horse's Mouth (1944), which is narrated by a cranky, frustrated old painter named Gulley Jimson. He wrote, "Even the worst artist that ever was, even a one-eyed mental deficient with the shakes in both hands who sets out to paint the chicken-house, can enjoy the first stroke. Can think, By God, look what I've done. A miracle. . . . Must be one of the keenest pleasures open to mankind. It's certainly the greatest an artist can have. It's also the only one. And it doesn't last long, usually about five minutes."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
