by Larry Kramer
As with all pasts, it will never be buried, no matter how great any good fortune to emerge from it or how high the golden temples to be built on hills.
No one considers this: that the whole point about the Civil War is Hate. Men were told to go out and murder each other and they did so with the fervor of righteousness they never knew they possessed. That it was about freeing black people was almost beside the point: most soldiers didn’t care about slavery. It was just an excuse to go out and kill. It’s amazing how many turned out willingly to fight their own. Releasing years, perhaps even centuries, of pent-up energies was the result.
Such hate as lay at its rotten core, and in too many hearts—where did all that come from?
Did we see this coming, all this hate? Were we warned of it, all this hate? Could we not have seen it coming and aborted it, all this hate?
Could no one see that it’s a war that need not have happened? Thinking like this is considered naïve. But no war should ever happen.
And does it still remain, this hate?
We should never stop talking about the Civil War. It’s what made us what we are today. It did not unite us, however much it’s proclaimed that this is what it did. Brothers murdered their brothers. Some 630,000 men died in battle. What a hateful people we are visibly turning out to be. Or were we like this from the very beginning and we didn’t notice? Had Puritanism served a worthwhile cause after all?
“The first Battle of Bull Run in August 1861 had shocked the nation with its totals of 900 killed and 2,700 wounded,” writes Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. “By the following spring at Shiloh, Americans recognized that they had embarked on a new kind of war, as the battle yielded close to 24,000 casualties … By the time of Gettysburg a year later, the Union army alone reported 23,000 casualties, including 3,000 killed. Confederate losses are estimated between 24,000 and 28,000; in some regiments, numbers of killed and wounded approached 90 percent. And by the spring of 1864 Grant’s losses in slightly more than a month approached 50,000.”
The total figure “is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities.” Fifty thousand civilians were killed “as battles raged across farm and field, as encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, as guerrillas ensnared women and even children in violence and reprisals, as draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, as shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.”
And yet, once again, boys, men, cry for each other, in each other’s arms, over each other’s bodies and graves, as they have not done since the Revolutionary War.
Yes, the Civil War ended slavery. But did it really?
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
WALT WHITMAN
WALT
During the four years of the Civil War, Walt Whitman writes that he visits more than fifty Washington hospitals six or seven days a week, some six hundred visits to “80,000 to 100,000 of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of spirit and body in some degree, in time of need.”
He is there when no other major American writer is there. Twain and Henry James and Howells and Melville and even Hawthorne appear unable to write about this war or address it meaningfully in their work. Henry James, in fact, condemns Walt: “An offense against art,” this other great hushmarked writer lashes out, venomously or in secret jealousy. Walt visits the wounded, writes their letters, brings them little items to cheer them up, holds their hands, and kisses as many of them as he can. He believes in physical contact, the magic of touching, and is always on the lookout for pain and suffering. He will do almost anything a soldier asks of him. He is forty-one years old when he starts these ministrations. He is one of nine children, and devoted to his mother and his family.
Of course, in all of this, he struggles with his sexual attractions, struggles to govern himself, to be careful when he and another or others sneak off into the latrine at the end of each ward’s hall. The city is full of sights that turn him on, walking the streets, riding the streetcars, seeing so many men everywhere, touching their hands daily, buying them clean underwear, kissing them, kissing them, kissing them, saying goodbye, saying goodbye often just after saying hello. Most nurses love him. A few do not and suspect him of just what he is trying so hard to control. The dying walk with him all his waking hours and in his dreams.
Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest works of art an American has ever produced, is first printed in 1855, and then in many subsequent editions as Walt writes and includes more poems. It sells a few copies, attracts a few vice squads, but mostly arouses no attention at all. It is amazing to see how openly homosexual Walt’s poems are, how full of outright and unconditional love of man for man. Few notice this either. He gets away with it. (Walt’s words selected here are extracted from Now the Drum of War by Robert Roper.)
We are fully aware of the lack of a word to describe us and how we feel.
A spirit of my own seminal wet.
This is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man.
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms.
Come closer to me,
Push close my lovers and take the best I possess
Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess
Give me the drench of my passions!
I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men.
This hour I tell things in confidence,
I might not tell everybody but I will tell you.
Who goes there! Hankering, gross, mystical, nude?
This is the meal pleasantly set … this is the meat and drink for natural hunger.
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous … I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
This is the touch of my lips to yours … this is the murmur of yearning.
O Drops of me! Trickle, slow drops,
Candid, from me falling—drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prisoned …
Stain every page—stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops.
Bloody drops of me.
And I found that every place was a burial-place,
And fuller, O vastly fuller, of the dead than of the living.
Union losses at Fredericksburg for the day were thirteen thousand,
Confederate five thousand.
Said Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it!”
A heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue …
I was fired for writing a dirty book.
Mercury-based meds, the most destructive of all meds, ipecac, strychnine, turpentine, castor oil, belladonna, lead acetate, silver nitrate, bleeding, purging …
These young men meeting their death with steady composure, and often with curious readiness.
Cherish your American experience! Emerson advises all hopeful poets.
I believe I weigh about 200 and as to my face (so scarlet), and my beard
and neck, they are terrible to behold—I fancy the reason I am able to do some good in the hospitals, among the poor languishing & wounded boys, is that I am so large and well—indeed like a great wild buffalo.
Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither.
Years that trembled and reel’d beneath me!
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me;
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself;
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?
All is shaken, eluding,
Only the scheme I sing, the great, possess’d Soul, eludes not …
One’s-Self, need never be shaken—that stands firm …
Out of politics, wars, death—what at last but One’s-Self is sure?
Lovers of me, bafflers of graves,
To anyone dying—thither I speed!
Many want apples.
One wanted a rice pudding which I carried him next day.
Two or three some liquorish.
One poor fellow with his leg amputated I made a small jar of very nice spiced and pickled cherries.
One lad in bed 23 had set his heart on a pair of suspenders.
I took him a pair of suspenders.
There is a new lot of wounded … long strings of ambulances … Mother, it is the most pitiful sight I think when first the men are brought in—I have to bustle round, to keep from crying. Mother, I will show you some of the letters I get from mothers, sisters, fathers &c. They will make you cry.
I lie to him about how serious is his case.
The amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and blood.
One must be calm & cheerful, & not let on how their case really is … brace them up, kiss them, discard all ceremony, & fight for them …
Mr. Lincoln passes here every evening, his complexion gray, very sad. He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful … him I love, the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.
We have got so that we always exchange bows, and very cordial ones.
Dear comrade [this to a young soldier named Tom Sawyer], you must not forget me, for I never shall you. My love you have in life or death forever. I don’t know how you feel about it, but it is the wish of my heart to have your friendship, and also that if you should come safe out of this war, we should come together in some place where we could make our living, and be true comrades and never be separated while life lasts.
Ambulances … hundreds, I don’t know but thousands, constantly on the move …
… what I see probed deepest … bursting the petty bounds of art. The hospital part of the drama deserves to be recorded … over the whole land … an unending, universal mourning-wail of women, parents, orphans—the marrow of the tragedy concentrated in those Hospitals—it seem’d sometimes as if the whole of the land, North and South, was one vast central Hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges. States plentifully represented. New York and Pennsylvania have their offspring here by hundreds, by thousands. Ohio and Illinois and Indiana and Michigan and Massachusetts and Maine. My soiled and creas’d … forty little notebooks, forming a special history of these years, blotch’d here and there with more than one blood-stain.
Chant the human aspects of anguish!
620,000 dead. 360,000 from the North. 260,000 from the South.
Poor boy! I never knew you.
On, on I go
The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand, tear not the bandage away);
The neck of the cavalry-man, with the bullet through and through, I examine;
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye …
(Come sweet death! Be persuaded, O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)
The wounded—They are crowded here in Washington in immense numbers, their wounds full of worms, many afflicted young men are crazy—they have suffered too much & perhaps it is a privilege that they are out of their senses—Mother, it is most too much for a fellow, & I sometimes wish I was out of it.
The hurt and the wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night—some are so young;
Some suffer so much—I recall the experience sweet and sad.
Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested,
Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.
… the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—our South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)—or East or West—Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley—some where they crawl’d to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills … our young men once so handsome and so joyous—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife … the clusters of camp graves in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee—the single graves left in the woods or by the roadside … corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged … the infinite dead … the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows …
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
Poor dear son, though you were not my son, I felt to love you as a son, what short time I saw you sick & dying here—it is as well as it is, perhaps better—for who knows whether he is not better off, that patient & sweet young soul, to go, than we are to stay? So farewell, dear boy—it was my opportunity to be with you in your last rapid days of death—no chance, as I have said, to do anything particular, for nothing could be done—only you did not lay here & die among strangers without having one at hand who loved you dearly, & to whom you gave your dying kiss.
* * *
Half of those that die in your Civil War die from disease.
I killed one half of this one half.
I am getting into the swing of things. It took a little cooperation on the part of your people but once that was in hand it was all systems go. This war has helped me.
You are my homeland. My rock and my redeemer. You are my people, my lost tribe.
Before this war I almost died a number of times. During this time I have only been able to survive in a very few of you. But I survived. I endured.
I have now established my beachhead where brothers murder brothers.
I can suffer pain. My own cells murder each other every day. I had given it no second thought. But I see that you have not felt half so sad at this destruction of your own as I do of my own. You human murderers are as adept as I am. I must be on my guard. You will come after me soon enough with a vengeance.
If you are going to continue to kill each other I can save you a lot of trouble.
HERE BEGINS THE HISTORY OF THE MASTURBOVS
Doris Hardware will meet Abraham Masturbov in 1925 and bear his son, Mordecai, in 1934. Mordy Masturbov will grow to become a central figure, the incubator, creator, generator of the climate, atmosphere, dare I say history? again precise words fail me, of the plague of The Underlying Condition. I don’t know what to call him because after all these years I can still remember that young body which I’d pined for so at last in my arms, and he was also the rich landlord’s son who was also our cousin. But Mordy and Sexopolis are to provide the signal Petri dish for this plague to nurture itself into worldwide growth.
On one long dark night still some years away Doris will have a breakdown and tell Abe her own family’s history. Since chronologically Turvey belongs here, here he is placed.
This, then, is Mordy’s future mother talking, to his future father, about her own father, and her own father’s father, and her own father’s father’s father.
If you can handle another sneak peek at the geneal
ogy, Abe’s father, Herman Masturbov, will be born soon, in 1880; his own parents, Yissy and Truda, will be prevented from celebrating his arrival in even a modest way because they will be getting massacred in a pogrom in Russia (many of which in fact are going on at this very minute), but not before making certain their newborn son is spirited away in the arms of a distant cousin who is on his way to the New World.
TURVEY
My great-grandfather came to America from Croatia and immediately went west, ostensibly to escape conscription in the Civil War, but actually to sell women. I don’t know where he got the idea. He’d read a lot about America. It was hard not to, even then, when the exploits of the white men, with their Winchesters and Colts, were coming to define masculinity everywhere. And the gold rushes! Everyone had heard of gold rushes. The whole world believed America’s streets were paved with gold.
He chose Colorado because it sounded nicer than Arkansas or Arizona, which are harsh words. He was a lonely man, taciturn. He hated to talk, even to his family, perhaps especially his family, which was enormous, as he fucked his way across America, keeping a careful record of who his children were, promising to make things right when he made his fortune. He enjoyed sex, coupling with women and playing with his penis, and when drunk he boasted that he masturbated a dozen times a day and produced as much semen late at night just before going to sleep as he did in the morning upon arising and doing it for the first time of the day. He held contests to prove it and he always won. It’s said he never lost at anything. And he probably never did.
Turvey was his first name, though it sounded like his last, which was never used, which was Hartinckwarjender, which no one could pronounce or spell or even remember, even in a country where so many names were unpronounceable. That’s why we became Hardware. In this country and the old one he had a dozen children by his first wife, who finally died in childbirth. He deserted them, plus the fifteen or more he had by other women. He did leave notes saying he intended to send for them, and that he knew some would die but that everyone would die if he stayed. He’d seen more than enough of how dirty life was, and how dishonest. He had a sense that he would make a lot of money somewhere else. Some people just know this from an early age—you probably do, Abe, or did, or will.