February 22, 2006
Washington's Birthday Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:15 AM EST In January 1814, having published The Corsair, Lord Byron announced that he would not be writing any more poetry for at least a considerable period of time. And he actually stuck to this resolution for a few months. As late as April 9, 1814, he wrote in a letter, “No more rhyme for—or rather from—me. I have taken my leave of that stage, and henceforth will mountebank it no longer.” But that evening he learned of the abdication of the Emperor Napoleon at Fontainebleau on April 6. The man who had held all Europe, from Portugal to Moscow, in his grip, and dominated the life of the world in which Lord Byron (who was born in 1788) had lived, had fallen from power. Perhaps never in human history had a man risen so high so fast and then fallen so far. Napoleon was only 44 when he arrived at Elba to begin his short-lived exile there. Byron, of course, would not have been the very great poet that he was if he could have resisted writing about so extraordinary an event and so extraordinary a man. The very next morning he wrote his “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte.” ‘Tis done—but yesterday a King!
And armed with kings to strive—
And now thou art a nameless thing:
So abject—yet alive!
Is this the man of thousand thrones,
Who strew’d our earth with hostile bones,
And can he thus survive?
Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far. Byron goes on like that for eighteen verses, and well worth the reader’s time they are. But it is the nineteenth and last verse that interests me today, the 274th birthday of a Virginia planter who led a ragtag army to victory against one of the world’s great powers and then, having accomplished so singular a feat, happily laid down his sword and retired to his beloved farm. “Where may the wearied eye repose,” asked Byron at the end of his Ode, When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes—one—the first—the last—the best—
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make men blush there was but one!
February 21, 2006
What Did the Vets Really Want? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST Recent articles about men and women returning from service in Iraq have reminded me of other veterans returning from other wars. In Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle’s joint memoir with Robert McAlmon, she records Hemingway’s observation that it would be difficult for their generation “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace, war-shocked and disillusioned as we were.” The prediction turned out to be prescient, and not only for the artistically inclined expatriates who fled Prohibition-era America for Paris. The twenties were a riotous, raucous, and unbridled decade on the home front as well. Prohibition was a joke, though according to Sinclair Lewis’s gimlet-eyed depiction of George Babbitt’s attempt to purchase alcohol for a dinner party, not as comfortably circumvented by law-abiding citizens as we have come to believe. The country was drunk on business, boosterism, advertising, and, of course, the stock market. Everyone was getting rich quick, including the celebrity evangelists who thundered against the temper of the times. Then came the bone-aching, nausea-inducing, suicide-inciting hangover of the Depression. What I find most curious about Hemingway’s prediction, however, is that it should have proven true for the aftermath of the first war and not the second. With the notable exception of the Beats and various visual artists, most returning GIs seemed to want nothing more than “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace,” though I doubt they were any less “war-shocked and disillusioned” than the generation who had fought before them. My first instinct was to ascribe the difference to America’s shorter and less devastating participation in World War I. But Europe, which had endured four years of unimaginable slaughter, had its own version of the roaring twenties, including expatriates. In her book February House, Sherill Tippins recounts that young British writers like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood flocked to Weimar Berlin for artistic and sexual freedom, just as their American counterparts did to Paris. And the twenties roared almost as noisily abroad, fueled by legal alcohol, as it did at home, fueled by illegal. Perhaps the explanation for the difference between the postwar attitudes of the lost generation and the greatest generation (though let’s hope that particular label is on the way out) lies in what came before they marched off to battle. The earlier generation was not only reacting against the horrors of war, it was also rebelling against the decades of suffocating Victorian and Edwardian peace. In 1920, America voted for a return to normalcy, but what it really wanted was not to go back to security but to throw off restraints. In 1946, returning vets and the women they had left behind wanted nothing so much as that dull normalcy under which their elders had chafed and which most of them were too young to have known, thanks to the Depression, but not too disillusioned to still dream of.
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