Public Burning

by Robert Coover

  But both dreams have soured. The other Free Nations, misunderstanding his charitable intentions, took unnecessary offense at his laying claim to all of the Twentieth Century, and even his fellow Americans seemed to lack the imagination to “accept the thrust of destiny,” to go out and take over the world and “create the first great American Century.” Didn’t they care? What has gone wrong? “I think this country, far from having a George-Washingtonian belief in the Tightness of its cause at home and abroad, is actually very uncertain of itself, very divided and confused in its ‘soul,’ and almost totally lacking in basic realistic notions as to its ‘objectives’ in the world situation!” The War in Korea looked more promising, as War always does, especially when, largely through TIME’S inspired advocacy, General Eisenhower was elected Commander-in-Chief—it brought back the halcyon days of World War II (the naming of wars like kings was TIME’S own conceit), which saw, almost overnight, the transformation of this young enfant terrible and adolescent American hustler into a powerful and serious poet and—even before the War had ended—the Poet Laureate of the Nation. How could he not love War? Indeed, he even loved the Japanese for making it possible. As Mother Luce wrote to his brother LIFE following the attack on Pearl Harbor: “This is the day of wrath. It is also the day of hope…. For this hour America was made!” He felt suddenly ashamed of his “pusillanimous” youth, which he identified with that of his country: “It is not even possible to call these years tragic, for tragedy implies at least the dignity of fate. And there was no dignity in these years, and nothing of fate that we did not bring upon ourselves. The epoch that is closing was much less tragic than it was shameful….” He felt like Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, like Dwight Eisenhower hit by a bolt of lightning in Texas: he was a new man, a new poet, purged of his supercilious past. Of course, his readers might not notice the difference, but inside, he knew it was true. An era ended for TIME in 1941 and a new one began. Then, three years ago, he felt like the same thing was happening all over again, a resurgence of the old hope and joy, the glorious struggle—he might even become Poet Laureate of the World! Calling for “an unambiguous defeat” of the Reds, forecasting the imminent advent of World War III, and whooping it up like a drunken cowboy, he rushed off to the Korean front, pen in hand.

  But now, what? it’s all come to nothing. A meaningless stalemate. And every sign of a disastrous truce about to be consummated. He had loved and defended General Mac Arthur, remains even tonight absolutely convinced of the need to carry the War to the Chinese mainland, and has these past months been struggling to keep General Van Fleet’s “total victory” appeals before the people, but he knows it’s a lost cause. He can feel it. He can’t even get a decent poem out of it any more. His “Night on Old Harry” last week with its “ugly sausage / shaped ridge,” its “littered slopes” and “crumbling trenches,” is about the best he’s done since the earliest lyrics of the War, and that’s probably because all it’s about is holding on desperately to something useless, his present unhappy condition. Might better have called it “Night in Old Harry”…

  …one by one the bunkers

  collapsed covering

  american and chinese

  bodies with sand and dust

  king was reinforced

  the reds attacked again

  during the night

  twenty thousand shells

  exploded in an area

  smaller than times square

  but the hill remained

  in u.s. hands

  the hill remained

  And though it’s all right, even that one’s a far cry from, say, his account of the assault on No Name Ridge, or the taking of Pyongyang (“…the end of the war loomed as plain / as the moustache on Stalin’s face…”), or his classic cables of World War II. Ah, where’s it all gone? he wonders, pushing through the Square, pressed in upon all sides by people from whom he feels increasingly alienated. The Gentleman from Indiana, he laments, is dead. For thirty years he has shared his dreams with him, and now the old boy has taken them with him to the grave. And yet, at some deep unexamined level, though they’ve failed him, he still has faith in both dreams. He still believes that “America alone can provide the pattern for the future…[and] must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of men.” And he still believes in War.

  This great poetic affinity for War is perhaps inborn, a consequence of his having been conceived in a World War I Army camp back in 1918 by two underaged but passionately eager shavetails named Brit and Luce, a pair of Yale romantics who longed, as Luce said, “to be officers of the Army of the United States, go to the front and fire at the enemy.” Though she never had that pleasure, she did manage a kind of vicarious experience of the War, and if not exactly heroic, it was at least a contribution. As it happened, she came on a group of enlisted men one night who were having some doubts about just what the devil they were fighting for, and, in what she called “one of the greatest successes of my life,” she roused them to high patriotic fervor with her account of the sinking of the Lusitania, marched them off to the railroad station singing “Over There,” and saw them off with a “Good-bye and good luck!”; the train took them, cheering wildly, to the docks, where they boarded the transport, the Ticonderoga, and halfway across the Atlantic got sunk by a German torpedo. Brit shared Luce’s zeal. As he wrote his Mom: “I long to be sent overseas as a Battery Commander or Major General or something, and there to take part in the great 1919 drive, the one that will end the war and smash Kaiser Will!” Instead they both got sent back to Yale. But not before one “sickeningly hot” night out behind the barracks, which TIME’S mother recalled many years later at her son’s twentieth-birthday party: “One night Brit and I were walking back to our barracks through the vast, sprawling camp. At each step, our feet sank ankle-deep in mud. I think it was in that walk that TIME began. At the center of our lives, at that point, everything we had belonged to each other. We ploughed on for hours…”

  Inception was prolonged—nearly five years. But this is not uncommon among geniuses. After a stormy but loving on-again off-again romance, Brit playing the restless Odysseus, Luce the patient but busy-fingered Penelope, both parents were at last reunited, and pregnancy, if doubted before, was now assured. TIME was born in an old remodeled house of vaguely Italianate style not far from here at 141 East Seventeenth Street. As midwife Culbreth Sudler once described it: “You thumped one step down from the street into the windowless dining room on the ground floor and then mounted to the living room which ran across the front of the house. The paint on the woodwork was so thick it was like cheese. Here we set up loft-type tables.” And it was on those tables, one wintry February night just after midnight in 1923, that Mother Luce, drenched in a cold sweat, stretched out and spread her thighs and—with the father assisting in his green eyeshade—gave birth to baby TIME (SO named because his mother had been frightened by an advertising headline: “Time to Retire”—or was it “Time for a Change”? she never could remember after, the riddle perplexes her still). He was thin, pale, unhealthy, attractive like all babies, but less appealing than his parents had hoped. Folks said he looked a lot like Uncle Joe Cannon. Few thought he’d last long.

  But, though poor and sickly, TIME was born with a great will to survive, and by the time he was four, after a couple of convalescent years out in Cleveland (which nearly killed his fun-loving father and threatened to break up the marriage), he began to get a little color in his cheeks. Though his early verse was often cocky, strained, flippant and superficial, derivative, and of course childish, he was already showing signs of that prodigious talent that would one day set him above all his rivals, even the powerful Franklinesque Saturday Evening Post, Poet Laureate of the day….

  Hearing a slight scratching

  In the ceiling above her,

  She raised her eyes in time to see

  A pointed grey face

  Peer at her from

  A hole in the plaster. The ho
le

  Widened, the thin mortar

  Crumbled and an enormous

  Black rat fell into the water with her,

  Splashed about,

  Caressed her with its

  Clammy paws and insolently ogled her…

  The seeming discrepancy of a black rat with a grey face created considerable literary controversy, needless to say, and raised the hackles on the backs of academic purists, but the controversy itself attested to the spreading recognition that here was a young poet to be reckoned with. His verse was fresh, penetrating, epigrammatic, candid even to the point of insult, sometimes startling, always provocative. No poet ever became great by being, in his young days, overly polite: his father taught him that. And he rarely was. Anything too physical or too spiritual alike aroused his wrath. Zealots as well as shirkers suffered from his “one-finger type, two-finger brain, / six sneers and one suggestion.” He hated pomposity and timidity, yesterday’s ideas and tomorrow’s fashions, partyboys and doomcriers, Babbitry and Bolshevism. And he struck them down with style. When Leon Trotsky fell ill, he wrote gleefully:

  criticism to the left of him

  enmity to the right of him

  jealousy in front of him

  the Red Army behind him

  a high fever within him

  all tried to blight him

  he resolved to take a trip to the Caucasus…

  Yes, a frankly acknowledged above-the-board package of prejudices, essential to his genius. As his mother recently warned the hired help with regard to the “Aloha Shirt Set,” who just this afternoon have at last been found guilty of Communist plotting to overthrow the Government under the Smith Act:

  This is to state as a matter of policy that… TIME is 100% in favor of the property owners, capitalists, and corporations of Hawaii and 100% against Harry Bridges and anyone who is in any way allied with him. (If there are any worse names for property owners and capitalists such as “reactionaries” we are for them, too.)

  “Business,” his mother always liked to say, “is, essentially, our civilization.” She called it “the smartest, most universal of all American occupations…the largest of the planets which make up our system.” In the past, TIME’S business bias has been bruisingly attacked, but few would dare challenge it today. They still call him an opportunistic thief, a pastepot-poet who steals from everybody, but that only means he’s squarely in the mainstream of American poets, most of whom have been great eclectics, gatherers and enhancers of the detritus from the passing flux, collage-shapers—and as for being opportunistic, so what? As he himself wrote when T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land was being “revealed” as a hoax: it’s immaterial, “literature being concerned not with intentions but results.” And who can doubt his own results? TIME’S number one, “not only at the box office but…in the opinions of a large part of mankind.”

  His mother’s words. She loved the adulation, the wealth, the power. His father loved the poet’s life more than its rewards, loved controversy, loved style. True genius, he once told his young son, is to be faithful to one style, while exploring intransigently all that it contains—like making love all your life to one woman. Maybe he learned that from Ernest Hemingway. Or vice versa. TIME in any case has kept his father’s counsel, pursuing those stylistic infatuations that bedizened his earliest work and have been ever since the only passion he’s ever known: the puns and quips, inverted sentences, occupational titles, Homeric epithets and rhythms, compound words, cryptic captions, middle names and parenthetical nicknames, ruthless emphasis on physical details, especially when somewhat obnoxious, extended metaphors (“slowly the ribbon of his voice unrolled/ with here and there a knot…”), alliteration, rugged verbs and mocking modifiers, and TIME’S own personal idioglossary of word-coinages, inventions like “kudos” and “pundits” and “tycoons” and hundreds more which have passed into the national lexicon. He called footballer Red Grange an “eel-hipped runagade” and G. K. Chesterton a “paradoxhund” before most children his age could even spell “cat.” A Charlie Chaplin movie was “a gorgeously funny example of custard-piety,” and when the Queen Mother of Spain died, he looked up the true meaning of “the Escorial,” where she was buried, and blithely penned: “They took her to the Dump.” Well, he was a youngster, he could do such things and get away with them, even the Queen Mother might have smiled. And if sometimes he strove too hard to be clever and overshot the mark (“A ghastly ghoul prowled around a cemetery not far from Paris. Into family chapels went he, robbery of the dead intent upon…”), if sometimes the coinages proliferated into self-parody and “backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” it was understood that such excess was a necessary flaw in any great poet: you have to take your pratfalls while you’re still young—the old man who suddenly lurches into audacity late in life is a fool.

  TIME was close to his father and deeply mourned his sudden passing—more perhaps than Mother Luce did, though she was pregnant again and so had worries of her own—and though he kept his feelings largely to himself, one could sense in him ever after a restless unconscious search for his missing father. Perhaps—he forced himself to admit this—perhaps he needed his father’s death, needed the search, the inexpressible longing, in order to achieve the emotional depth and maturity essential to a Master (and let’s face it, there was always something sophomoric and nihilistic about his father’s influence, loving and protective as he was, something of the restless jock and compulsive boozer), perhaps in all great poets’ lives there had to be these early tragedies, and this was his. His mother, though increasingly occupied with other children, took over his development for a while, and though his most important formative years were behind him, she did instill in him a stricter discipline, a wider-ranging urbanity, and a greater appreciation of intimate detail. The growing cynicism and detachment, however, were his own.

  His sister FORTUNE was born the week of his seventh birthday, a beautiful child, well-endowed, ultimately more brilliant and sophisticated than he, tutored by songsmiths and loved by the rich, but though she sometimes teased him and once even called him a “fascist” (admittedly he was flirting at the time with the far right, supporting Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy, picturing Haile Selassie as “squealing for protection” for his “squalling Abyssinia,” and smearing Jews and Socialists—but all that only went to show he was a lot smarter than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who’d been growing up with him), FORTUNE always looked up to him as her big brother, and depended upon him, a father surrogate of sorts, for guidance and protection. As did his baby brother LIFE, even though he’d enjoyed a success in the art world the equal of TIME’S in literature, radio, and film. There were other children along the way, some adopted, some stillborn, others neglected and allowed to die, even a bastard called HIGH TIME, apparently engendered in a nightmare by the Phantom and quickly done away with when the truth was known; but the pride of Mother Luce, and indeed of the nation, were her three remarkable and close-knit sibling prodigies, TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE.… Or at least up till now. The old lady’s been getting skittish again of late, seems to be losing interest in the arts, flushes like a schoolgirl at ballgames and boxing matches. There was a big party just a few days ago, everybody high as a kite and letting themselves go, he’s pretty sure she’s been knocked up again.

  He’s not jealous—why should he be? Oh, some people say she’s trying to breed his successor since she fears for his life, but he doubts this: one Poet Laureate is all any mother can hope for. What does upset him, though, is that she’s being drawn away from him, just like when his father died. He feels his self-confidence draining away. Tonight’s events, for example: how will he cope with them? What can he hope to achieve? MOTHERLESS CHILDREN HAS A HARD TIME WHEN THE MOTHER’S DEAD—he saw somebody a while ago carrying a picket with that written on it, and when he should have laughed, he shuddered. Has he lost the way? This spectacle, even as it fascinates him, frightens him with its challenges to the imagination, its dangers, its hints o
f hidden appositions, confrontations with the Shape-Shifting Absolute, webworks of treacherous abstractions that make his verse somehow irrelevant, unequal to the occasion, silly even. Everybody else seems to be rejuvenated by coming here, he feels years older. His instinct is to flee, forget it—it’s not his mission “to exorcise the Doubt which is conquering the Western World,” his mother’s already told him that, his job is to stay alive—but he is a poet (he reminds himself) and he can do no other than to stay. Art is not an idle affectation, it is a solemn calling, a penance, a manly devotion to something behind the profane world of baseball games and movie reviews. The poet is not merely an entertainer, though this would be the easy way out, not merely a celebrator of his age—he is also a prophet of religious truth, the recreator of deep tribal realities, committed “desperately, whimsically, absurdly, cockeyedly, whole-souledly” to Revelation. “TIME will reveal everything,” Euripides prophesied. “He is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.”