May Day 2020

Got a letter from the IRS today. Strange days when the government has resorted to sending out free money. A month ago the nice teller at the bank said $1200 had been deposited in my account on April 15.

Told her it all didn't seem real. But I did make the transaction outside having walked up to the drive-thru window, with me on the outside looking in and her on the inside looking out.

The lobby has been closed since late March.

Still the letter sent and addressed from the Internal Revenue Service thanked the hardworking people of the US and also the House of Representatives and the Senate for making this 'economic impact payment' possible. They're calling it assistance rather than a stimulus or the more accurate relief.

At the bottom of the page though is what looks like a radio wave scribbled with a thick grease pencil. On the other side is the same thing in Spanish. Which I found hilarious.

And so yes, I walked downtown on the first of the month and deposited my rent check as per the landlord's request at the convenient bank not more than 15-20 minutes away. This beautiful quirky town, all in bloom, with springtime gusts blowing my hair all around makes for a pleasant walk. Don't even notice the cloth mask around my neck in case I pass or have to meet someone. Correctly odd, the few people I see are all already distant. And all of it together as if it were just to remind us how lucky we are to merely witness it. 

May Day. A distress call and a holiday. Don't think they ran any parades today. Except in the US, in Huntington Beach, California where some poorly informed yahoos decided to get them some attention and put all themselves in danger all at the same time. Because of stupid notions about 'Freedom': 'We made the news!' As pathetic as watching lemmings, except they seem to know that's what they're doing, and today, they like it. Or like, later they'll just say 'that was opposite day'. Meanwhile as the rest of us look on in horror, they needed to tell the rest of us that they cared a whole lot about showing that they don't care at all. Somehow that's supposed to be something to prove. I remember being twenty in the US 1980's. Glad I'm not now.

Saw someone I know on twitter who said their grandpa had just died of the virus. He was a Trump fan, watched FOX all the time, thought the Covid-19 would be like the flu, couldn't believe he'd gotten it. While the world looks on in horror and takes the precautions they can or are allowed, the wife of the vice president tells us today that her husband "didn't know" he was supposed to wear a mask at the MAYO clinic in NY while visiting patients and doctors. With everybody else around him wearing masks. If you wrote this as a script for a play or a movie, the editor would laugh at you not the script: it's so unrealistic and unbelievable. His wife says he didn't know, but the clinic says they had in fact told him he should wear the mask. I say it again, the Vice President of the United States didn't even wear a mask, and the implication from this administration and his wife was that was because... I guess, 'freedumb'?

There's something deeply wrong here and yet others are carrying on like it's just Friday and there's still nowhere to eat. Or to get their hair done. And they need a little attention and they don't want to hear any bad news. Seven weeks is a long time to not be able to put this sort of thing together. Don't need to be oblique about it, they'll tell you right to your face. But it might kill ya.

So it's easy for me to stay indoors and read. I've always liked to read, only seemingly these days, when there's supposedly so much more time for it. Especially with so many others who can just stop long enough to complain about being in a hurry, right after they re-post this meme. I don't need to explain the virtues of reading this season.

But the pattern had already been set for me. The last few years I've read a bunch of fiction. Last year close to 9000 pages and for me that seems like a lot. This year I've gone back to more history. One of the best from last year was a trilogy that came out in the 1930's called USA, by John Dos Passos. The central book in that was titled 1919 and covers the years of WWI. This year I read non-fictional travel diaries and essays by the same author.

Dos Passos worked the ambulances out of the trenches of Verdun in 1917 and elsewhere when he was twenty and -one. He'd been brought up in a distended family and lived early life on the US east coast. Born out of wedlock but his father was accomplished and had connections with the old world. Young Jack spent several trips in Europe with family yet still remained an avid student and passed his entrance exams to Harvard in 1912. But then he lost his mother at nineteen, and his father a year later. He finished graduate work anyway in 1916 and as the war in Europe exploded, Dos Passos took a steamer to Bordeaux and then on to Spain. 

He wrote continuously, and sent copious letters.  He was ambitious enough even creating literary circles at Harvard in the 19-teens. You can tell at this young age he already knew he had to write to stay afloat. Also in 1916 he published an article in The New Republic titled 'Against American Literature'. In it he wrote: "We find ourselves floundering without rudder or compass, in the sea of modern life, vaguely lit by the phosphorescent gleam of our traditional optimism." Somehow at the tender age of twenty he could ring a familiar bell that still sounds perfectly American. Wish more could do that in 2020.

During his trip to Spain he receives word that his father is ill and he needs to return to the States as soon as possible. He does in two weeks time but his father had died, and two months later in April, the US entered World War I.   After attending anti-war and socialist rallies (May Day in 1917 was a rather important year for that), and nearly getting arrested in Greenwich Village, by summer he'd decided to return to Europe and work for a Harvard-organized ambulance corp under the auspices of the Red Cross. In June he left aboard the SS Chicago returning across submarine infested waters back to Bordeaux and the war that he already despised.

Quick to pick up on the garish layers of twisted absurdity, he writes to friends he knew from school and tells them what he sees. Excerpts from his diaries clatter like stuttering camera shutters.

[from Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941 John Dos Passos, The Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. NYNY 2003]

"Band playing hula hula on the wharf people dancing in and out among the luggage --

Man who wanted a paper as a souvenir - "cause you see sir I'm seein' off my son. I don't reckon they'll mind do you, sir?"...

La traversee - uniforms - smoking room crap games. Singing, champagne -

"For we're bound for the Hamburg shoal to see the elephant and the wild kangaroo.

God help Kaiser Bill

Oh old Uncle Sam,

He's got the infantry

He's got the cavalry

He's got the artillery...

Then by God we'll all go to Germany

And God help Kaiser Bill"

General atmosphere of expectation of raising hell in Paris."

...

And they arrive and there are orders and classes and drills where they tell them about 'Whores - protection - champagne, etc.'

Then a poem listed as 

"Poitiers -- July 2nd

Wide grey-green fields,

Dappled with swaying vermillion,

Everywhere glowing with stains of poppies,

Poppies sprung from old sad fields

Of a battle long fought out...

How many years, oh God,

Before the blood of battles springs up

Into the arrogant glowing youth

Of poppies?"

To a friend July 12,

"I wonder where you are... But America seems infinitely far off now -- I can hardly imagine it exists at all. I've never experienced anything like the strange break with everything past that has seemed to come over me since that sleepy quiet trip... Life since then has been a grotesque -- a jumble of swooningly pleasant and strangely sinister despairing times. A sort of Alice in Wonderland with the world at stake instead of the March Hare's watch...

I'm still in training at a camp in the middle of heavenly French hills within distant hearing distance of the big guns to the north -- "

From the diary July and August:

"The abandon of complete misery - My God - how ridiculous it all is - I think in gargoyles

The men of the Middle Ages had the right idea in their rollicking grotesque dance of Death...

I'm dying to write - but all my methods of doing things in the past merely disgust me now, all former methods are damned inadequate - The stream of sensation flows by - I suck it up like a sponge - my reactions are a constant weather vane...

How damned ridiculous it all is! The long generations toiling - skimping, lashing themselves screwing higher and higher the tension of their minds, polishing brighter and brighter the mirror of intelligence to end in this - My God what a time - All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas - The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men - the heroics about war - my country right or wrong - oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world."

As summer rolled on for him that year he got to more places whose simple images that he set down could be picked up later for fiction. Even his diary excerpts here confirm that much and, true to form, questions whether they will. East of Paris, the ancient town of Chalons was converted into a staging ground for transport vehicles and supplies and the many hands marshalling them destined for the front further east. Dos Passos sees it as a dusty but lovely Gothic place fit for an afternoon dip in the Marne with the fellows in their striped-tights, conscious of the novelty.  Or at a beer garden next to the inn "..in an arbor - how many pleasant drinks have been drunk here! how many wedding parties flushed with champagne have laughed and giggled and blushed and felt the world soft and warm...". 

In a few weeks he would describe with bitterness the widescale death, how everything what was told at home on the war were complete lies, how the vans they had to drive were full of bullet holes, about taking shelter underground huddled in gasmasks with the posion gas above and outside as the shells exploded.  How the actual combatants, or captors and temporary prisoners 'could laugh and chat and kid each other', where the actual conflicts there were only as heated as Harvard-Yale baseball games, how decent everybody was if they could just be left to themselves.  

Another hundred years before Dos Passos, another traveller and chronicler describes another part of France. As a boy this fellow was sent at seven to his grandmother's house in far western Placoet, a sleepy village on the Arguenon, itself a twisty stream that flowed into the English Channel at Saint- Malo in Normandy. He says it was perhaps the happiest place he had known. Called then as now a noble, a conservative, and a Royalist, but living nearly eighty years, Francois Rene de Chateaubriand is also called the founder of French Romantic Lit.  But we are far removed from him. It's been so long since then, that the term 'Romantic' no longer means what it meant for those in the middle and later 1800's. For them the facts of their Revolution and of Napoleon set many remembering former days with great yearning and a tremendous sense of loss but, also promise. 

So, long before all that, young Rene was sent, at an age his mother deemed wise, off 'to Combourg' in order for him to receive a classical education in math and latin. Combourg was the site of the castle where his father worked and resided. The young boy would be taught by the clerics at nearby Dol cathedral not twenty km from Saint-Malo on the coast. The trip by carriage from Saint-Malo took all day. It was the first fortnight of May. There were sand cliffs and wooded gorges, broad fields of daffodils, jonquils, interspersed with marshland. The birds had come on schedule that spring with swallows and cuckoos, the quail and nightengales arriving just a few weeks before they would be seen nearer Paris. His heart pounds he tells us, so much that he has to stop writing as memories from thirty some years before flood his present. The year his pen was set to paper was 1812 and the French armies under the new emperor Napoleon were pressing on to Borodino on their way to Moscow. But Chateaubriand was in Dieppe, on the coast of France, north of Rouen and Paris, and far away from the fighting, and trying to think about something, anything else.

He was likely eight to eleven years old so the year was 1776 or '79, in a carriage with his mother and sisters.

"At sunrise one morning we left Saint-Malo, my mother, my four sisters, and I, in an enormous old-fashioned Berlin with gilded panels, exterior footboards, and purple tassels hanging from the four corners of the carriage. Eight horses, bedecked like Spanish mules, with large bells draped around their necks and smaller ones fastened to their bridles, sporting many coloured housings and woolen fringe, dragged us on our way. While my mother sighed and my sisters chattered without pausing once for breath, I looked with both my eyes, I listened with both my ears, and I marveled at every turn of the wheel.... For ten mortal miles we saw nothing but uplands bordered by woods, fallow fields that had scarcely been cleared, rows of black wheat-stubble and indigent oats. Charcoal burners led strings of scrawny ponies with tangled manes. Longhaired peasants in goatskin tunics drove emaciated oxen with shrill cries or trudged in the wake of heavy plows, like so many labouring fauns. At long last, we came to a valley, at the bottom of which, not far from a pond, there rose the single spire of a village church. The towers of a feudal castle loomed above a copse of trees lighted by the fires of the setting sun. ... After another half hour, we left the highway, and the carriage rolled along the edge of a quincunx into an avenue of trees whose branches interlaced over our heads. I can still remember the moment I entered under that shade and the dreadful joy that I felt there. ... we crossed a forecourt planted with walnut trees which led to the steward's house and the garden. From there, we went through a little gate into a grassy courtyard called the Green Court: to the right were a row of stables and a stand of chestnuts ... at the far end of the courtyard ... the castle stood between two clumps of trees. Its bleak and melancholy facade was dominated by a curtain-wall... that linked together two large towers of disparate age, height, girth and material. These towers were topped with crenellations and surmounted by  pointed roofs, like bonnets set upon Gothic crowns.

"Barred windows were visible here and there in the bare walls. A large staircase of twenty-two steps, steep and wide, without banister or parapet, had been built over the filled-in moat where the drawbridge used to be. These stairs led up to the main door of the castle, carved into the middle of the curtain-wall. Over this door, the coat of arms of the "Seigneurs de Chateuabriand" hung between the fissures through which the arms and chains of the drawbridge once had passed.

The carriage stopped at the foot of the staircase, and my father came down the steps to meet us. The reunion of his family so softened his mood for the moment that he favored us with the most gracious expressions. We climbed the stairacse and proceeded into an echoing anteroom with a high, ribbed ceiling, and from this anteroom onward into a small interior courtyard....

A supper served... which I ate without constraint, brought the first happy day of my life to a close. True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all....

My first appearance at Combourg was of short duration. Two weeks had scarcely passed before I saw the arrival of the Abbee Porchet, the principal of the College de Dol. I was delivered into his hands and I followed him in spite of my tears."  
 - book i, 7 in Memoirs From Beyond The Grave 1768-1800 Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, trans. Alex Andriesse, 2018 NYRB Classics, NYREV Inc.

His father, also called Rene, had left home at fifteen seeing there was no way he could be educated at home, or fed. From San Malo in May of 1734 the father Rene boarded an armed schooner which, as fate would have it, took him to a sea battle where the French were trying to give relief to the beseiged Poles under Stanislaus, then in Danzig. Rene was wounded twice but made it back to France and in further adventures was captured and beaten by pirates and eventually made a fortune in the French West Indies. 

Rene the son, our memoirist here, was very conscious of his nobility. The name which the father had taken great pains across his life to refurbish and maintain; the coat of arms above the castle at Combourg; the inheritances, the properties, or lack of them; the distance from court; the multiple times that Rene himself had to appeal to the Office in Paris to confirm his nobility, and what it took to become a Knight of Malta then, all show in that age how the once powerful had become fragile and imperfectly perceived when class distinctions tumbled, when government changed hands and form again and again. And all that was before their revolutions.