The Beiderbecke Affair

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (8)

Dear Brendan,

The comparison between World War I and Vietnam is interesting, and my observations on it tie in to the fact that it was often the civilians, not the veterans, who didn’t want to talk about the war.

To begin with Vietnam: as both of us remember, it took a while for the public to come to terms—however impartially—with that war. As veterans know, especially wounded veterans, the hatred with which civilians treated returning soldiers in the late 1960s changed to a vast indifference in the 1970s. People just didn’t want to hear about it, or talk about it—much as no one wants to talk about the fighting in Iraq now. Although The Deer Hunter came out in 1978 and Apocalypse Now in 1979, it was not really until the mid-1980s that discussion of the Vietnam War intensified to the point that the public was able to process it and make some sense of where it fit into our history. Since then, I think that historians and popular writers have done a fairly good job of discussing it frankly and revealing something of its true nature.

Much the same thing happened after 1918, as we’ve been discussing. The difference is that Americans never came to terms with that war in any real sense. Yes, isolationism, the Great Depression, and World War II intervened; but there’s more to it than that. In part, we need to remember that the culture was different in the 1920s than it was in the ’70s or ’80s. On the one hand, there was the sense that “polite people don’t talk about that sort of thing”—so that while from time to time people would speak of the plight of impoverished veterans, especially after the Bonus March of 1932, no one wanted to discuss the brutality and degradation of the actual fighting. On the other, society became dominated by the escapism of the Roaring Twenties—Bix Beiderbecke’s heyday—and didn’t want to discuss the ugliness of the past.

In Europe, along with Canada and Australia, 1929–30 brought a turning inward, a kind of national introspectiveness, when books like All Quiet on the Western Front became popular. In America, apart from a brief blip of interest, nothing of the sort happened. Of course, we had not suffered as much as they had. But the almost frenetic optimism with which Americans have always liked to look at the world also played a heavy role.

In conclusion, the answer is that I have no answer. Most everything I’ve said has been speculation. Even if the why is unanswerable, though, I think it’s clear that this ignorance of our past, and the willful forgetfulness of a whole generation of Americans, is something that we need to overcome.

I appreciate all of your excellent questions and look forward to our discussion later this week!

Regards,

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7

IMAGE: 1et Division Band playing the national hymn at the Argonne cemetery on the 30th of May 1919

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (7)

Dr. Lengel,

I appreciate your reluctance to moralize about war. You could safely say that war is hell (to quote Sherman) or, less safely, that it has an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (to quote the Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien). But since you weren’t there, that wouldn’t be history; that would be ideology. You can only go on what the soldiers say.

There’s more to be said on that, but I’d rather, and I’m sure you’d rather, we moved on. Toward the end of To Conquer Hell, you write that “the Meuse-Argonne opened a lasting perception gap in American society. On one side stood the combat veterans; on the other, everyone else.”

Of course, that perception is nicely illustrated in our deciding to leave the nature of war up to those veterans. But it’s more than that, obviously. What you describe is an environment eerily like Vietnam-era America, where returning soldiers were shunned, where they felt out of it for all that they had seen and could not explain their experiences to their loved ones. “I became a citizen,” one Doughboy recalls, “but not a good one.” “War does something to a person,” another soldier testified. “We were scared, but we had to develop a numbness and an unfeeling attitude toward it all. Otherwise, we would have lost our minds.”

In the end, most soldiers just kept quiet—but not, you argue, “because they didn’t want to talk, but because nobody seemed willing to listen.” War memoirs were huge in Europe and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was translated into English in 1929. But while high quality books by American veterans were being written and published, the American public just wasn’t buying them.

Why do you think that is? And why do you think, for instance, that Vietnam was different? After all, that war launched many a writer, Tim O’Brien not least among them. Whatever the answer, the resistance to the war that you’ve mentioned more than once seems to be a phenomenon that started right away. And that fact, for me anyway, makes it no less in explicable.

The upshot, you write, is that the Doughboy “never became as fixed in the American public imagination as the Tommy in Britain, the digger in Australia, or the Poilu in France.”

Who was he? At the war’s beginning, he was like any other American soldier in any other era—young, confident, naïve, eager for adventure, and mostly believing in the cause and country for which he fought. Perhaps the only thing that set him apart in 1917 was his immigrant roots. By the end of 1918, however, he had become something very different and unique. Of all the soldiers in American history, the Doughboy is the first to have experienced industrialized warfare. He did so without preparation of any kind—military or psychological—and suffered terribly as a result. Yet no other solider in American history or perhaps the history of the world learned how to fight in such a short period of time. Over a period of just a few months, four million volunteers and draftees endured, adapted, and finally overcame all obstacles to become first-rate soldiers. In the process they lost some of their youth, confidence, and naivete. But they had shown, far more than any number of generals, diplomats, or politicians could ever have done, that America had an important role to play on the world stage.

This strikes me as an eloquent tribute to the long-neglected Doughboy. The dominant narrative in American pop and political culture is that we saved the Europeans’ butts in the First World War and then again in the Second. Your tribute, and your book, are no worse for complicating that portrait.

Thanks for participating in this conversation, and I very much look forward to your talk next week.

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

IMAGE: American recruiting poster

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (6)

Dear Brendan,

To give Band of Brothers credit, it does present instances of American soldiers killing prisoners. And yet even there the moralizing is heavy-handed. There is always the same tendency to present everything in black or white, rather than in the shades of gray in which war is fought.

A primary principle with me—and this is true in every history book I’ve written—is to avoid value judgments about my subject. This is especially important with something like the First World War. In a previous note you mentioned Paul Fussell. I actually don’t care for The Great War and Modern Memory, because I think Fussell falls victim to just that tendency to moralize. It seems to me that he takes his own feelings as a veteran (he fought in WWII), finds a few memoirists who seem to agree with him (Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden), and then extrapolates from there to generalize about what all soldiers supposedly felt.

From reading Fussell, one gets the impression that all soldiers (or at least the ones worth listening to) entered the war with naive ideals that were shattered by the reality of modern warfare, and returned home horrified and disillusioned with God, King, and Country. Not so. In fact, there were as many different reactions to the war as there were men who fought it—and it is worth remembering that many of the men who played leading roles in the beginning of World War II, like Hitler and Mussolini, were veterans of World War I.

By imposing on the subject our own views of what war is supposed to mean, we run the risk of minimizing or ignoring altogether the accounts of veterans whose experiences don’t fit with our vision. Thus most Americans prefer to ignore World War I altogether, because it doesn’t jibe with their simplistic notion of what war is about; while Fussell, on the other end of the spectrum, ignores the accounts of soldiers who felt ambiguous about the war or even celebrated it.

It’s for that reason that I am reluctant to generalize about E. B. Sledge’s statement. I have no doubt that the idea of war as insanity was true for him, as it is for many other veterans. And yet, many veterans have said that war allowed them to see things as they truly are, with a preternatural clarity; and others have said that it was only in war that they felt truly alive. Who is to say which veteran is right? Certainly not me.

Not having experienced the First World War, or combat in any form, I think it would be the height of arrogance for me to impose my views on my subject, or to decide which veterans’ accounts capture the true meaning of war. Instead I try to approach each account with respect, allowing the veterans to tell the story themselves. That’s the answer, also, to your question on how I depict battle. Rather than pretend I was there—to paint a portrait, so to speak, of something I did not see or experience—I try to tell it in as raw a form as possible, as from the mouths of the soldiers themselves. No one will ever accuse me of being a storyteller like David McCullough or a Stephen Ambrose, but that is at least in part (aside from their much greater talent as writers!) due to my reluctance to move beyond what I could get from the sources.

You have gently pointed out, I think, that in saying I would “honor the sacrifices of our ancestors,” I have made just the sort of moralizing statement I claim to decry. There is, true, a moral element to my approach. It is this: we have a responsibility to listen to what our ancestors experienced, with humility and respect, and to tell their tale and keep it alive for future generations.

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5

IMAGE: American Doughboys, ca. 1919

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (5)

Dr. Lengel,

I asked why Americans these days weren’t so hip to the First World War, and you replied that were it otherwise, we might be forced to confront something beyond “the romantic image of warfare to which Americans remain so attached.” In other words, even in a time of war—or especially in a time of war—“it’s so much easier not to think about it.”

Your response reminded me of a moment from We Stand Alone Together: The Men of Easy Company, a feature-length documentary that accompanied the television miniseries Band of Brothers. A soldier called Popeye recalls being wounded by a German grenade and how afterward he felt as if he’d let the other men down.

Cut to Popeye’s commanding officer, the otherwise stoic Dick Winters (holding back tears): “My God. It’s beautiful when you think of a guy”—cue strings in the background—“who was that dedicated to his company, to his buddies that he apologizes for getting hit. But that’s the kind of guy he was, that’s the kind each one of them was. They were all the same.”

This, I assume, is the “romantic image of warfare” to which you refer. To Conquer Hell, meanwhile, seems intent on slapping readers back into reality. On the first day of battle at the Meuse-Argonne, you write, “seventeen German soldiers surrendered to an American machine-gun company. The Doughboys brought their captives before the company captain and asked what to do with them. ‘I’ll take care of that,’ he snapped and, taking a machine gun, he massacred the lot—one of them ‘just a kid.’”

When a lieutenant asks another soldier what he did with his prisoners, the private replies, “I tended to them, sir.” Meanwhile, a German soldier begging for water is met with a bullet to the head.

You approach these incidents with the detachment of a journalist. In fact, your unwillingness to moralize seems to lend the anecdotes additional power. It also leaves room for readers to wonder whether the horror Doughboys faced in combat wasn’t at the root of this kind of brutality. Do you, for instance, agree with E. B. Sledge, who in recounting his experience in the Pacific during World War II, wrote, “It is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane . . . To me the war was insanity”?

I’m also curious as to how you approached depicting battle in your book. A movie producer would gather up all the latest special effects and then start blowing stuff up. What do you as a writer do?

Finally, you mentioned in an earlier post that one of your goals in To Conquer Hell was to “honor the sacrifices of our ancestors.” How does cutting through the “romantic image of warfare” do that? And have your efforts met any resistance?

Brendan

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4

IMAGE: German Prisoners (ca. 1919) by Fred Varley

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (4)

Dear Brendan,

I do not think that the lack of interest in World War I in the United States stems from the unpopularity of the war at the time. Most Americans supported the war effort in 1917–18, and although isolationism came in vogue during the 1920s and 1930s, disillusionment did not take hold in America like it did in Europe. Vietnam was much less popular, and yet it receives much more attention today than World War I ever did. And while the film footage of World War I cannot compare to that of World War II, there is in fact a lot of interesting footage in archives; and of course the lack of film footage of the Civil War has not dampened popular interest in it.

You describe some of the war’s most interesting dramatis personae. The American historian Barbara Tuchman treated many of them in her wonderfully written (if not always historically accurate) book The Guns of August, which was published over forty years ago and remains popular. Likewise, as you say, there are people like Lawrence of Arabia and the Red Baron. Spurring an interest in such figures has never been difficult, however. Books and movies about the air war and Lawrence’s exploits are omnipresent, even in the United States. Why? Because they all retain some element of the romantic image of warfare to which Americans remain so attached. Hollywood recently came out with yet another movie about the air war, Flyboys, which centers on the Lafayette Escadrille. The movie’s creators had a lot of fun with computer-generated special effects (even so, the movie flopped). But can you imagine any Hollywood producer investing money in a movie about life in the trenches, or the Hitler Channel (uh sorry, I mean the History Channel) producing a new documentary about World War I on the ground? No, it’s just too ugly. It’s so much easier not to think about it.

Evidence of the American mindset can be seen in the recent attempt to revive R.C. Sheriff’s brilliant World War I play, Journey’s End, on Broadway. Originally written in 1929, the play had a tremendously successful revival in London in 2004. On Broadway in 2007, it flopped. Perhaps the parallels with Iraq were too painful. More likely, as a reviewer for Variety implied, the ground war just didn’t seem exciting enough.

What I’d like Americans to remember is that millions of their ancestors were unable to indulge the same luxury of just turning away. A whole generation of young men went over there in 1917–1918—commanded in many cases by officers whose minds remained fixed in the nineteenth century—and faced the realities of modern industrialized warfare as no American soldiers ever had before. The results, inevitably, were both traumatic and transformative.

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

IMAGE: Trenches (1917) by Otto Dix

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (3)

Dear Dr. Lengel,

You write with evident frustration that the First World War “has poor entertainment value,” but I’m wondering why you think that. (Or, rather, why do all the editors and publishers out there think that?) Does it stem, as one commenter suggests, “from the unpopularity of the war in the U.S. at the time, and from the fact that there isn’t any exciting television/film footage of WWI like there is from WWII and later”? I have my own ideas, but first I want to know what novelist could resist the following bits of history?

Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian revolutionary who started the war by murdering the Austro-Hungarian archduke, managed to complete his mission only by accident. (Two wrong turns don’t make a right, apparently.) And Franz Ferdinand, unlike so many other European royals, tended to support peace, not war. His death was, perhaps, one of the great ironies of history and worth a novel in itself.

Speaking of novels, it seems perfectly novelistic that the rulers of Germany and her great enemy Russia were cousins and themselves related to the king of England. The queen of Romania, meanwhile, was British and the queen of Austria-Hungary French.

Or how about this? The German Kaiser had a withered left arm. Was his zest for battle an elaborate overcompensation of sorts? An extra-firm handshake on a geopolitical scale? Psychoanalysis may be unworthy of history, but that’s my point. It is worthy of a good story. And speaking of psychology, one of the Kaiser’s top generals, Erich Ludendorff, slowly went mad during the war. When, in March of 1918, he finally punched through the Allied lines, he had no idea what to do next—certainly one of the great military blunders of history. But it was his presumed nervous breakdown a few months later that led him to call for an Armistice—although he then refused to participate in peace negotiations or shoulder any responsibility for Germany’s defeat. (He left that to the politicians and the Jews.)

The war ended as strangely as it had begun.

And this is not the half of it, of course. (French mutiny! Lawrence of Arabia! The Red Baron! The Bolsheviks!) Could it be that the United States, despite such huge losses at the Meuse-Argonne, was too distant a player in these dramas to sustain popular interest almost a century later? Was the world map too unfamiliar in 1914 for us to really grasp now how fundamentally it changed at Versailles? I mean, what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire anyway? And why should we care about its end?

Perhaps the Great War is as foreign and confusing to Americans as European football. We’ll watch a little of it on television, but after that, we’d prefer Gettysburg and the Battle of the Bulge, thank you.

Brendan

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2

IMAGE: German general Paul von Hindenburg, the Kaiser (with bad arm hidden), and Erich Ludendorff

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (2)

Dear Brendan,

Five years ago, when I made the shift from academic writing to popular history in General George Washington: A Military Life, my editor at Random House warned me how important it was to tell a good story. Americans, I learned, have a peculiar and sometimes distressing way of looking at history. They need a good beginning and a clear end, sympathetic characters, and a clear, fast-moving story. Anyone who reads popular reviews on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.com knows that the highest compliment a reader can give a history book is to say that it “reads like a novel.” So, finding the story in history is really critical with an American audience; even more important in some cases—though I hate to say it—than telling the truth.

My biggest challenge in writing about the Meuse-Argonne, then, was not to discover the truth of what happened—the source material is so rich, indeed, that the facts are really unavoidable—but to discover the story. I think one of the reasons that World War I remains so little studied or understood in the United States today is the perception that it lacks story. As some publishers told me when I was shopping the proposal, World War I has poor entertainment value. And for Americans, entertainment really trumps our desire to know the facts, or to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors. Terrible to say, but I really believe it’s true.

So, how to find the story while remaining true to the facts? I started with the presumption that any war is really made up of millions of individual stories. We can generalize, but each person takes his or her own unique background into the war, and emerges with his or her own unique set of experiences and interpretations of what happened. The key to understanding World War I, then, is to look at the stories of individuals, to approach each perspective as equally meaningful and valuable.

This is not really all that difficult to do. As an avid, longtime collector of war literature who has published the only comprehensive bibliography of published accounts in English, I know about and have access to literally hundreds of accounts—letters, diaries, memoirs—of Doughboys from all walks of life. My goal was to bring their experiences together into one grand narrative, and tell the story of America’s bloodiest battle from the bottom up. Thus you will get to know not just the “big names”—Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Mitchell, Truman, and so on—but those of obscure private soldiers, as well. Bringing these together gives us a complete sense of what happened, even though it consists of a multitude of individual human stories rather than just one.

Yet for all that, it is the story of the man at the top—Pershing—which remains one of the most compelling. I think that Pershing’s conduct in the battle was heavily influenced by his own personal tragedy of having lost almost all of his family in the Presidio fire of 1915. From the time of that fire, which gutted him inside, Pershing survived very much by willpower alone. And it was that belief in willpower that informed his whole approach to battle—that the will to win, to persevere whatever the casualties—made the difference between victory and defeat. And so he pushed his soldiers on, without regard to casualties, in some of the most horrendous casualties that American soldiers have ever experienced.

Billy Mitchell is another interesting, almost luminous figure—and yet I believe that his conduct left much to be desired. He, even more so than Pershing, was motivated by a tremendous arrogance and vanity that left him unwilling and even incapable of seeing what did not fit into his preconceived schemes. In the Meuse-Argonne, be it noted, the Germans enjoyed almost complete air superiority over the front lines, even though Mitchell’s planes were better supplied and probably more numerous.

To your final question, whether my book will encourage Americans to remember, I can only say I hope so. Many individual descendants of veterans have contacted me and thanked me for remembering their ancestors. In other quarters, however, there has been a studied indifference to my subject that cannot help but be distressing when many of these same people fall over themselves to trumpet the 500th history of the Battle of Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge.

Regards,

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1

IMAGE: Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell stands by a Vought VE-7 Bluebird at Bolling Airfield, Washington, D.C., in May 1920. According to Lengel, “Mitchell emblazoned his aircraft with his personal symbol, an eagle in a circle, in a bid to pose as an ‘intrepid airman.’”

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (1)

Greetings, Dr. Lengel.

I’m reading To Conquer Hell, your just-released book on the Meuse-Argonne, the World War I battle that proved to be the bloodiest in American history. And I should say that I’m very much enjoying it, although perhaps “enjoying” is not quite the right word. After all, you describe the battle as “an inferno of fire and blood” that, in the fall of 1918, killed more than 26,000 Doughboys. By way of comparison, Gettysburg resulted in only about 8,000 killed in action—and that’s when you combine Union and Confederate forces. D-Day cost the lives of a mere 3,581. Our popular imagination, of course, regularly inflates that last total. D-Day looms large, but the Meuse-Argonne? Not so much.

Why do you think that is? You write that since 1919, when former war correspondent Frederick Palmer “wrote a chatty patriotic book titled Our Greatest Battle (The Meuse-Argonne),” only two books about the battle have been published. Two! In almost 90 years! “So far as the American public is concerned, the Meuse-Argonne might as well never have occurred,” you write, despite the battle being “the biggest logistical undertaking in the history of the U.S. Army, before or since.” (Again, my mind leaps automatically to D-Day, and I can’t help but wonder, “Really?”) So that’s a lot of forgetting we’ve done in the years since, but you don’t speculate as to why—or at least not at the beginning.

Of course, the First World War in general is not the most studied of conflicts among Americans—and yet it was so culturally significant. (I’m thinking of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which suggests that the conflict gave birth, in many respects, to our modern mindset.) In the course of your writing, did you worry about needing to overcome some kind of years-long silence on the subject? Did it affect how you approached your writing?

The title of your Virginia Festival of the Book panel is “Finding the Story in History,” and you do seem to approach this history in terms of story. (I have heard, by the way, that you’re a great storyteller.) Only a hundred pages in and I feel like I actually know folks like General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force. You begin the book by showing how all the steam was taken out of this very ambitious man’s career right before the war when a fire at the Presidio in San Francisco killed his wife and three of his children. The scene where he receives the news accidentally by phone has all the drama of a novel.

So does your description of Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, who commanded American flyers. You tell us he was “outgoing, independent, arrogant, intelligent, and hardworking” before memorably noting that he sported a walking cane “because he thought it made him look dapper.” Going into war, one suspects that this sort of arrogance may loom large.

Equally novelistic was your description of Colonel George C. Marshall, who would later lead the Army in World War II and the State Department after. Intimidated by his pre-battle logistical duties, he took a walk to calm himself down and ended up sitting with a French fisherman on the bank of a canal. “They did not exchange a word,” you write, “but after watching the fisherman for half an hour Marshall felt a little calmer.”

This is memorable stuff, but do you think it will be enough for Americans to want to remember the Meuse-Argonne again?

Brendan Wolfe

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro)

IMAGE: “A Dangerous Corner is Exermont, Oct. 7, 1918” from American Armies and Battlefields in Europe

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro)

This week I emailed Edward G. Lengel, author of To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918, and asked him if he’d be willing to engage with me in a conversation about the book. (Lengel will be appearing at the Virginia Festival of the Book this month in a panel titled “Finding the Story in History.”) In particular, I want to chat about his approach to story and to the vivid characters involved in this, the bloodiest battle in American history—characters like John Pershing, Billy Mitchell, George Marshall, George Patton, Harry Truman, Alvin York, and on and on. I also hope to get at some of the reasons behind the Meuse-Argonne’s virtual erasure from American popular memory (honestly, do you know anything about the battle? I didn’t) and whether that affected the book’s writing.

Thankfully, Dr. Lengel, who is a history professor at the University of Virginia, is game.

“I would be very happy to have an email discussion with you about the book,” he wrote me. “Yes, I anticipated and have met problems in overcoming the ‘long silence’ on World War I. Yet I suppose what has surprised me the most has not been simply the forgetfulness, but the actual resistance to discussing this war—a resistance that continues to this day. As I have heard from many quarters, Americans simply find this war too ugly to think about—and (forgive my cynicism) there is a sense that WWI has a low entertainment value. That says a lot about us as a people.

“So let the questions fly, and I’ll answer them as best I can.”

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘I love words and I hate death’

Silence is a major theme in Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons as it was in Tóibín’s 1999 novel The Blackwater Lightship. (I don’t have the novel with me, so bear with me while I remember . . .) The protagonist is Helen, a middle-class wife and mother whose husband teaches in an Irish-language school. Her brother Declan is gay and is quickly dying of HIV/AIDS—two bits of news that come as a shock to Helen, who drops her life to care for her brother.

(Yes, the novel was made into a Hallmark film, but oh god, it’s so much better than that.)

Declan’s silence—about his sexuality, about his diagnosis—is hardly surprising. But there is also a silence that surrounds Helen, and that silence is the Irish language. It never occurred to me until recently that perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Helen’s husband teaches Irish. It’s a language that is nearly dead and, as such, resides more in the world of ghosts than in the world of real people. Helen’s challenge at the beginning of the novel is to leave her husband and her tongue, if only temporarily, so she can better confront reality.

Ireland has always been haunted by languages: from Latin to Irish-Gaelic to English.

“In Irish writing, we have survived to inherit the tension between the Latin of non serviam, Satan’s and Stephen Dedalus’s insistence on remaining apart from the fold, and the Anglo-Saxon of the groans and moans which fill the work of Samuel Beckett,” Tóibín writes in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999), which he edited. “One language has faded to a large extent which means that the other one, English, the one we use now, could fade too, slip and fail.”

I like the image of one language silently shadowing another.

“In Beckett’s play All That Fall,” Tóibín continues, “Mr. Rooney says ‘sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language,’ and Mrs. Rooney replies: ‘Well, you know, it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dear Gaelic, there is that to be said.’ And, in this version of things, the Irish tradition in English, from Jonathan Swift to the new generation, begins from that point: the language must be worked for all it is worth until, as John Banville’s narrator in his early novel Nightspawn says, ‘we are all up to our balls in paper, and this same testimony would remain: I love words and I hate death. Beyond this, nothing.’”

Words are the things of stories and novels, and yet in Tóibín’s writing, hardly anyone ever wants to speak. If the author is working the language for all its worth, Helen is, too: leaving behind Irish so she can finally speak to her family.

PREVIOUSLY: “a new language / is a kind of scar / and heals after a while / into a passable imitation / of what went before”

IMAGE: Text of the famous Old Irish poem “Messe ocus Pangur Bán,” or “The Scholar and His Cat” from the Codex Sancti Pauli, Monastery

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.