Dreams Into Lightning

Millay: Christmas 1940

... I wanted to tell you about us, how wicked we are.
And yet also to say that the Star—you know the star I mean—
Is for some of us clearly visible still in the east at midnight rising, and all the night long burns serene—
And that on such nights on unaccustomed knees we kneel and in sweet discomfort
Pray for hours, and mean it, to be better than we are.
I am not one of these, I fear;
I loved you always for the things I read
About you in a book we had.
I did not meet you for the first time through the incense and stale smell
Of a room seldom aired, where people purred of heaven and howled of hell.
I used to read all day, when I was ten:
—You and Don Quijote were my heroes then.

Perhaps because of him I have been kind
Often with my heart, before consulting my mind.
I might have been wiser, had I learned direct from you—
Learned to make curlicues in the sand or on a scratch-pad while deciding what to say or do ...
Such as, "Sin—the waves come in—all pushing pebbles—each alone ...
I have it!—Let him among them who is without sin!—cast the first stone!"

I learned so young to know you, I could never see
Why we should not be playmates; you were wonderful,—
Oh, you were shiny!—and for some strange reason, fond of me.
But nothing will be done. I can do nothing. Nothing at all.
Only remember what you said, your voice, the way you said it,—
For it never was like something read, it was something heard, even while I read it—
And try to be wiser and kinder, in a world where Pity from place to place
Flees under cover of darkness, hiding her face;
Give Pity breathing-space.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay
from Make Bright the Arrows

"Peace was my earliest love": the unremembered Millay.

Peace was my earliest love, and I presume

Will be my latest; but today, adult,

Arguing not to prove but for result

Opposing concepts in this thoughtful room,

I wonder at whose prompting, schooled by whom

I urged that Peace the Slogan, Peace the Cult,

Could turn the edge of sledge and catapult

And leave us calm to cull the grafted bloom.

In all my life I never knew a thing

So highly prized to be so cheaply had:

Longing to wed with Peace, what did we do?—

Sketched her a fortress on a paper pad;

Under her casement twanged a lovesick string;

Left wide the gate that let her foemen through.

If these lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay don't ring a bell with you, you're not alone. They're from one of her last published collections, Make Bright the Arrows. The mature Millay's work did not go over well with the WWII-era literati and intellectuals. I'll let Answers.com explain:

Carelessly expressed outrage at fascism detracted from Make Bright the Arrows (1940); The Murder of Lidice (1942) was a sincere but somewhat strident response to the Nazis' obliteration of a Czechoslovakian town. She was losing her audience; Collected Sonnets (1941) and Collected Lyrics (1943) did not win it back.

(The same article pronounces Millay's 1921 play Aria da Capo "a delicate but effective satire on war.")

A bit more to-the-point was this 1940 review in Time, which vividly likened the poet to "a lady octopus caught in a whirlpool."

But it was Edna St. Vincent Millay who understood, in 1940, that There Are No Islands Anymore:

And oh, how sweet a thing to be
Safe on an island, not at sea!
(Though someone said, some months ago—
I heard him, and he seemed to know;
Was it the German Chancellor?
"There are no islands any more.")

She also understood the Intelligence Test that confronted her generation:

Q: What, if anything, would you do
To keep your country free?... A: Lay
Down my life! Q: You? You mean you'd die?
A: Certainly. (Chorus: That's a lie.)
Q: For your country's defense, how much would you give,—
If it weren't taxed out of you, I mean. A: All that I have. ...

If, like me, you read and loved "Renascence", you might resonate with the burden of understanding that comes to the "probing sense" of the older poet in these passages.

I'll leave it to you to make your own judgments about Edna St. Vincent Millay's late works. Here's one last selection, a sonnet from Huntsman, What Quarry?

His stalk the dark delphinium

Unthorned into the tending hand

Releases . . . yet that hour will come . . .

And must, in such a spiny land.

The silky powdery mignonette

Before these gathering dews are gone

May pierce me — does the rose regret

The day she did her armor on?

In that the foul supplants the fair,

The coarse defeats the twice-refined,

Is food for thought, but not despair:

All will be easier when the mind

To meet the brutal age has grown

An iron cortex of its own.

Martin Van Buren

... wasn't a great President.

But he was OK.

The Presidents

Tomorrow is Presidents' Day in the United States. It may have started out as a conflation of Lincoln's birthday (February 12) and Washington's birthday (February 22). For many Americans it's just another generic Federal holiday.

As it happens, I've been trying to catch up on my American history and the presidencies in particular, and at the moment I'm focusing on what Ted Widmer calls "the purgatory between Jackson and the Civil War." (Widmer, Martin van Buren, p. 5.) This is a period that seems to get overshadowed by the dramas of the Revolutionary/Constitutional era and War of 1812 on one end, and the Civil War on the other end.

In fact, during the period 1836-1861, there were no less than eight consecutive Presidents (from Van Buren to Buchanan) who each served one term or less. (Two died in office.) I've taken a perverse interest in reading up on the lives and careers of these eight men, and on the events that transpired in America while they held the office of President. I may be sharing some of my notes here.

Abdul Rahman Arif, 1916-2007

Abdul Rahman Arif; President of Iraq, 1966-1968. Iraq's last pre-Ba'athist leader. Died August 24, 2007.

Wikipedia: Abdul Rahman Arif

Abdul Rahman Arif (Arabic عبد الرحمن عارف `Abd al-Raḥmān `Ārif) (1916–August 24, 2007) was president of Iraq from April 16, 1966 to July 16, 1968.

He was a career soldier, and supported the military coup in 1958 that overthrew the monarchy. He also supported the coup that brought his brother, Abdul Salam Arif to power in 1963. His brother appointed him head of the army following the coup, and when the younger Arif died in a helicopter crash, Abdul Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president; three days later the military decided that Abdul Salam should be succeeded by his older brother instead. Arif was appointed president (military dictator) by the Revolutionary Command Council. He continued his brother's politics, but with a more nationalistic profile.

His presidency was a turbulent one, and on July 16, 1968, while Arif was sleeping, his own assistants along with members of the Ba'ath Party and Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr overthrew him in a coup.

It was accomplished when the defense minister, Hardan Al-Tikriti, phoned Arif informing him that he was no longer president. Arif was exiled to Turkey.

He returned to Iraq in 1979, when Saddam Hussein came to power, and largely stayed out of the public and political spotlight afterwards. He was allowed to leave the country once by Hussein's regime to undertake the Hajj. Arif left Iraq permanently after Hussein was removed from power by the US-led occupation, and lived in Amman, Jordan from 2004. He died in Amman on August 24, 2007.

New York Times obituary:

Former President Abdel-Rahman Aref of Iraq, who was overthrown nearly 40 years ago in a coup that brought Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to power, died in Amman early Friday. He was 91. ...

Mr. Aref rose to power in 1963, five years after the bloody overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy, when his older brother, Abdel-Salam Aref, who was the president, appointed him army chief of staff.

Three years later, Abdel-Salam Aref died in a plane crash and Iraqi Army officers chose the younger Aref to become Iraq’s third president. The plane crash was believed to be sabotage.

Abdel-Rahman Aref was president until 1968, when he was toppled in a bloodless coup by the Baath Party, led at the time by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who became Iraq’s next president. But Mr. Hussein was believed to have held behind-the-scenes power in the coup and later, until he formally took over in 1979.

Arthur Goldschmidt, A Concise History of the Middle East (1983):

In Iraq, Abd al-Rahman Arif, who had replaced his brother Abd al-Salam Arif (who died in a plane crash in 1966), was overthrown by a rightist coup in July 1968. Two weeks later another faction of the Ba'ath Party seized power in Baghdad. Iraqi politics and policies often mystify foreigners. Basically, the new government did not get along well with Syria (while both were ruled by the Ba'ath Party, the dominant factions were different) because of their dispute over the use of Euphrates River waters. Relations with Iran were strained because both countries wanted to control the Shatt al-Arab, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet before they empty into the Gulf. In addition, Iraq criticized Egypt and Jordan for having accepted Resolution 242, tacitly recognizing Israel. In northern Iraq, the Kurds went on fighting for their independence, and the new regime tried to distract popular opinion at home by publicly hanging fourteen convicted Israeli spies (nine of whom happened to be Jewish) in Baghdad.

He was succeeded by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who was deposed (officially, he "resigned") on July 16, 1979 - the eleventh anniversary of the Ba'ath coup. Saddam Hussein - who had been ruler in all but name for some time - assumed the presidency of Iraq. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr died of undisclosed causes on October 4, 1982.

On Reading American History

For a while now, I've been wanting to fill the gaps left in my knowledge by the lack of any serious education in history in the public schools of the 1970s. Recently I began taking steps to correct that; of course the study of history is a lifelong undertaking. Here are some initial thoughts on the American History books I've been reading.

The books I've been reading on American history are:

Hugh Brogan - The Penguin History of the United States
Paul Johnson - A History of the American People
Schweikart and Allen - A Patriot's History of the United States
Winston Churchill - The Great Republic

Also, scored the beautiful two-volume seventh edition of "Growth of the American Republic" by Samuel Eliot Morison et al.

Of the four single-volume histories, two are by Americans and two by Brits; Brogan is the lone liberal of the group. It's interesting to cross-reference between the books and compare accounts and interpretations of each event. I started with the Revolution and went straight through to the present day (except in Churchill's book, which ends with WWII). This week I'm going to go back and review, and highlight certain key areas that are of interest to me, for example the birth of the Progressive movement of about a hundred years ago - the forerunner of modern liberalism as we now know it.

Hugh Brogan's book is readable, informative, and fun. It's great to read if you want the viewpoint of an articulate, intelligent liberal in the 1970s era. He is laudably anti-Communist, but (I think) astonishingly naive about the Soviet Union's intentions. He falls back on the diversion that (paraphrasing) "Russia and China were never a monolithic bloc the way the scaremongers thought they were" - exactly as so many libs do today about the Arab/islamist regimes. Brogan also delivers a stinging condemnation of pre-WWII pacifism; but his comments on the State of Israel (near the bottom of page 622) will make you sit up and say "Huh?"

Paul Johnson is the British Conservative MP who wrote "A History of the Jews", and his history of the US is definitely pro-American. Johnson has a very illuminating section on the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, and (on page 636) a highly informative explanation of the change from small-government liberalism (which saw big government as "a conspiracy to steal money from the hard-working population") to big-government liberalism (which "began to see a strong federal government ... as the defender of the ordinary man and woman against the excesses of corporate power"). Only criticism of Johnson: way, waaaay too many statistics!

Both Johnson and Brogan stress the inherent danger of the myopic pre-WWII mindset of "neutrality" which refused to see nations in conflict as "aggressors" or "victims" but simply, and without distinction, as "belligerents". Moral relativism, anyone?

Schweikart's book is great. It was written explicitly as a conservative history of the US, and as a rebuttal to Zinn (the authors deny that last bit, but I think it's obvious). The authors are critical of American policy when it's appropriate, and devote a great deal of space to the civil rights movement. They have a great admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, despite his Progressive ways. They're sharply critical of Eisenhower, "hardly in the vanguard of civil rights", whom they blame for "cementing the view among black politicians that their only source of support was the Democratic Party." The section on the radicalization of the campus is invaluable. My only issue with "Patriot's History" is that I think the authors offer too many opinions as "fact". But there are plenty of facts there, and facts are what's been missing from the teaching of American history for much too long.

Howard Zinn's book "A People's History of the United States" was a success when it came out, and it sold well in paperback - and I can now see dozens of used copies of Zinn sitting on the shelves of Powell's (including, possibly, my own). I think Zinn's book was successful, not because Americans were looking for a left-wing history of their country, but because they were starved for any book on their country's history that promised to be readable and informative.

I'm looking forward to the release of the paperback edition of "Patriot's History", and I'm betting it will sell well, too.