Ninety one years ago, at 11 minutes and 11 seconds after 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month, the war ended. Sixteen million had died. Twenty one million were wounded. Blinded and maimed veterans would populate city streets for years, selling pencils or pen-wipes or whatever passersby might want. An entire generation was depleted, offices couldn't find the people they needed, women didn't marry. Poets and authors and painters didn't create great works because they died in the trenches.
Some did survive. J. R. R. Tolkien began writing about elves and hobbits while hunkering in a dugout on the Somme. E. E. Cummings wrote The Enormous Room about his experience being imprisoned in France; he'd written about the insanity of the war, and the generals didn't like it.
Ernest Hemingway was wounded on the Italian Front; he was a noncombatant, an ambulance driver. He had over 200 pieces of shrapnel removed from his legs. He was 18. He met and fell in love with a nurse; years later he wrote a book about it. Gertrude Stein called them The Lost Generation, a name that suited them, they were survivors but the battlefield would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
A few days before his 21st birthday, Robert Graves was wounded on the Western Front. His death was reported in the Times. His parents received his belongings. But he wasn't dead. He would survive another 69 years and write more than a hundred books.
War supplies the defining moment in many novels, some written by authors who were there, others, like Stephen Crane's the Red Badge of Courage, written by authors who weren't even born when the conflict took place. Some of the most vivid depictions of heroism are acted out by film stars––John Wayne comes to mind––who stayed home. And then there are combat veterans like James Stewart––who was also too old to be drafted––who avoided war movies, instead playing disappointed men like George Bailey and Elwood P. Dowd. Veterans of World War I wrote America's musical comedies and edited its newspapers, performed surgeries, taught school and invented everyday products, built its cars and designed its skyscrapers. Many of their stories are in A Book of Ages. Whichever era they fought in, war runs like a seam through hundreds of the lives I included in the book, and it reverberates down the years, coloring everything they did.
Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tolkien. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Epiphanies
One evening in September 1931, C. S. Lewis had one of those late night discussions about Christianity with his usual Oxford chums J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The next day he had an epiphany on his way to the zoo. He was on the back of his brother's motorcycle. Lewis later tells how when he started off for the zoo “I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Lewis was 32 and had always been a skeptic.
Life is full of journeys, long and short, with and without epiphanies. But there are discoveries of one kind or another waiting just outside our door. Even the minor ones are pretty interesting. Not everyone gets to discover the Pacific from a peak in Darien or the moons of Jupiter from a hillside near Florence. Sometimes, like Graham Greene, we come across something ordinary like a reasonably priced meal when that's exactly what we need. There are a lot of discoveries in A Book of Ages. They can happen at any age.
Life is full of journeys, long and short, with and without epiphanies. But there are discoveries of one kind or another waiting just outside our door. Even the minor ones are pretty interesting. Not everyone gets to discover the Pacific from a peak in Darien or the moons of Jupiter from a hillside near Florence. Sometimes, like Graham Greene, we come across something ordinary like a reasonably priced meal when that's exactly what we need. There are a lot of discoveries in A Book of Ages. They can happen at any age.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day
I associate Memorial Day with the small town parade of my childhood. Old men in carefully preserved uniforms. Small flags at the cemetery. It wasn't until I'd grown older that I realized what was on the minds of those old men in uniform. They'd grown old while comrades of theirs had not. What would those other lives have been like if events had turned out differently? Roles reversed. It's the kind of speculation the other bystanders are incapable of. They say crisis pulls all of history into a single moment. I wrote my book as a collection of moments, funny, sad, tragic, heroic and commonplace. Many of them take place in wartime, with lives suddenly put in the balance.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
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