April 25 2012

Forget about property. Let’s get down to cases.

In 1949, Oklahoma was just a decade or so past the worst of the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s. The Great Depression had ended; a world war had come and gone. Most Okies that were vulnerable to being driven from their homes by weather or banks had long ago left for California. Of those remaining who had not been kicked out by circumstance, the able and the adventurous had gone to California, too, to work in war-time shipyards and aircraft factories. That left the old and the infirm and the Indians and folks with oil wells. Then my folks moved to Okmulgee.

They had married during the Great Depression, my mom and dad, she just out of high school and him just two years ahead of her. Photos show a handsome couple. She was a cheerleader and ROTC “sponsor,” a kind of girls’ auxiliary for the high school junior officer corps of the day. She had black hair and grey eyes and a nice figure. She was pretty. He was handsome, a football and basketball star with wavy blonde hair and a ready smile. While she finished high school, he and a friend, Jack, set out to make do as best they could in the mid 1930s: they started up a little logging operation in the swamps and along the bayous of north and central Louisiana. They had a team of mules and a wagon. They’d go into the swamp with the mules, cut down as much as they could, chain the logs and mule-drag them onto dry ground. At nights they’d sleep on the front porches of the Negroes who lived in and around the swamps and along the bayous. Once they had a wagon load they’d drive the mules into Shreveport and sell them to a black man who had a lumberyard. This fellow was a good businessman and he was honest and gave Dad and Jack fair price for the trees. It was common knowledge that he had a silent partner in the business, a white man who owned the local Ford dealership. This was pretty much the way black folks had to do business, but old man Harmon made out ok, it seemed.

Anyway, while Dad logged, Mom lived at home with her folks and finished high school at Fair Park, where Dad had gone and where I went twenty years later. Her father, Ernest, worked for the Kansas City Southern Railroad, a line which ran between Kansas City and Shreveport. Shreveport was a railway hub in those days and the KCS had a big yard down in the West End. Ernest had started working for the railroad back in the ‘teens, before the first war, finally exchanging a life as a sort of ne’er-do-well Kansas cowboy for that of a solid married working man once his wife, Elva had presented him with three kids; there would be five but one, the baby Buddy, died in the 1918 flu epidemic.

Ernest had a good job; he was foreman of a repair crew in the yards and he worked right through the Great Depression. That made it possible for him to support a household of his married children and their families and the two children who were still in school, my mom and her younger brother. So, once Mom graduated and she and Dad got married, she just stayed there and Dad moved in. That household was eight all told: Ernest and Elva; Mom and Dad; sister Blanche and her husband Carl, a  carpenter; brother Ralph who fooled around with radios and his wife, Juanita, a student in a nursing school. Dad’s folks lived on the outskirts of town with his two brothers, Ted and John Allen, and his sister, Ruth. Dad’s father, Floyd, had grown up on a farm in East Texas and married over there, where my dad was born. By the late 1930s, he had brought my grandmother, Madie (Mary Jane), and the family into Louisiana, to Shreveport where he found work at the Libbey-Owens-Ford glass factory as a snapper. A snapper was the guy who came around and nailed shut the boxes of lights the cutters had set out. Dad was the oldest child, so in 1937, when he and Mom got married, Ted and John Allen and Ruth were all still in school.

I don’t know too much about Dad and Mom’s early married life except that they were young and handsome and full of life. There are stories of big dances out at a swimming park near Cross Lake where bottles were thrown and knives pulled. Dad played a kind of semi-professional baseball in those days and their “team” would travel to little towns in Texas and Arkansas and play the local lads for half the gate. Wives would come along with baskets of fried chicken and bottles of illicit beer and sell them at the little ball fields. There would be the occasional dispute over money, either between the teams or among the women, and a hasty retreat was beat now and then. Dad said that Mom was the best pistol shot he had ever seen; they used to go riding out around Cross Lake sitting up on the back of Uncle Ralph’s Model A and shoot at mail boxes. Mom never missed Dad said, no matter how fast Ralph drove. My favorite picture of my mother was taken during WWII; Uncle Carl was home on leave from the SeaBees and Dad was over in the Philippines so there are Mom and Carl just back from hunting squirrels and Mom in her rolled up jeans and her left hand on the rifle at her side looks as comfortable as

Annie Oakley—or Bonnie Parker, whose personality, I have since come to think, was probably closer to Mom’s than was Annie Oakley’s.

The war came and it finally caught up with Dad, even though he was married with a kid and worked in a defense industry; by the middle of the war he was cutting glass at L-O-F in Shreveport, logging long behind him. He got drafted in late 1944 and we moved up to Kansas to be with Mom’s mother in Baldwin City, a small farming and college town about 50 miles west of Kansas City. Ernest had been killed in 1940, just months before I was born. He was scalded to death when a high-pressure steam line broke in the round-house where we and his gang were working on an engine. Elva had gone home to Kansas and was running a small café. We spent the rest of the war and a year after up there; Mom worked in a factory making ammunition boxes and I just ran around this little town of about 1200 living a kind of life that only exists now in Steven Spielberg movies—before the aliens arrive.

When Dad got back from Japan, where he had served in the first US Army unit to set foot on Japanese soil, we went back to Shreveport and Dad went back to the glass factory. He had turned down a commission and a career in the Regular Army. They took up with old friends, some changed by the war, Dad told me later, but others still the same. They danced and drank and smoked and the men in the glass cutting trade kept an eye on which plants were open and which were closed. I started school in Shreveport, at the same grade school my dad had attended but then we moved to Arkansas when the L-O-F plant shut down. Soon enough it was back to Shreveport but not for long. In the winter of 1948-9, we left Shreveport for several years. First stop and fateful, was Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

April 23 2012

[In my sketchy report about my trip to Viet Nam I mentioned that there were many pregnant women everywhere we went and promised an explanation. This is it: According to a local informant, the Year of the Dragon, this lunar year, is the most propitious one in which to be born, especially for boys, and so women try to achieve pregnancy at a time that will allow them to give birth in that year.]

Not long ago a friend who labors in the lawyering trade asked my opinion about adultery. Did I think, he asked, that there was as much adultery going around as one found in current fiction, or was adultery like quicksand? I wouldn’t blame you if your first thought was, “Who should know more than a lawyer?”  But then, maybe your first thought was, “Quicksand?” I went through those in that order and then asked myself, “Why is he asking me?” and “What does he mean by ‘current fiction’?”

This is what he was up to: He was asking me because he assumed that as a literature professor I spent a lot of time thinking, if not worrying, about the relationship between fiction and “truth” or “reality.” It seems he had been reading novels and New Yorker fiction for some time and had been struck by the number of these works in which adultery was situated at or near the center of everyone’s concern, if not everyone’s activity. This did not square with life as he experienced it or saw it, even as a lawyer, and the question to me was not whether it squared with my experience in life with adultery but whether it squared with my experience with literature. Or, he asked, was adultery like quicksand?

As the father of a young child, he had also spent some time not so many years ago watching television on Saturday mornings. He noticed that the cartoon adventure shows that made up so much of that programming was convention-driven, like much of popular culture. One convention, it turned out, was the ever-present threat of quicksand. Hardly a Saturday could go by without one episode in which a daring pre-teen hero or heroine would get herself stuck in deadly (always “deadly”) quicksand, followed by an episode on another channel of the exploits of yet another daring pre-teen adventurer freeing himself, or being freed, from deadly quicksand. No one ever explained what, exactly, quicksand was or why it was there, but it was omnipresent, for sure. Now suppose, he suggested, you were a member of an advanced alien race observing matters on Earth from another galaxy by monitoring what stray bits of television came your way on the extra-galactic equivalent of a Saturday morning. Among all that you might learn, one true thing should stand out: Earth was 10% water, 5% dry land, and 85% quicksand. Was not, he asked, adultery like quicksand? Was it not that medium in which New Yorker short story writers loved to enmesh their protagonists? Wouldn’t an alien of a certain age and disposition assume, every two weeks, that human relationships were 10% politics, 5% the search for weight-loss camps, and 85% adulterous?

Friend lawyer knew that the world is not awash (can one say that?) in quicksand. A few years ago a quicksand maven plotted a Google map with 100 known quicksand locations around the world; not so many considering that parking lots make up approximately 1/3 the metro footprint of American cities alone (there are 800 million parking spaces in America). While there is the occasional shooting, pepper-spraying, and/or irate-spouse-drive-over in a parking lot, these places don’t show up with anything like the frequency of quicksand as sites of mortal danger. (Actually, friend lawyer caught a “literary” convention in its waning hours when he watched Saturday morning tv. The heyday of tv and movie quicksand were the 1960s and 70s. Daniel Engber has documented quicksand’s rise and fall in this Slate piece from 2010: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html)

But what about adultery? I’m going to posit that friend lawyer’s real concern was not for the misguided alien but for us. What are we to make of the seeming centrality of adultery in adult fiction? Do we care how many such stories there have been since the git-go? Is it the case that only Adam and Eve were successfully monogamous and every marriage after has been the steamy stuff of literature? Or are we concerned about the effect? Does, as Louise De Salvo suggests in Adultery (2010), the very act of reading about adultery make us more likely to commit it. (“To commit it.” Stop a minute and think about that phrase. We don’t say, “to perform it” or “to accomplish it,” or “to achieve it.” This is a nasty act for us. We commit it. I remember when my once-Protestant parents joined the Roman Catholic Church, my Methodist grandmother did not write to the family at large that Joe Bob and Mary Helen had “converted” to Catholicism but rather that they had “turned” Catholic.) There might be a matter for concern if we thought by assigning Madame Bovary to be read we literature professors were endangering the marriages of those in our classes so encumbered.

But I rather think the issue is with fiction’s relationship to truth. If people don’t commit adultery all that often, should the act show up in fiction all the time? You know the answer is, “Why not?” Fiction’s relationship to truth is not an aggregate/disaggregate issue. The real question, or one of the real questions, is of “why” adultery shows up so much. After all, there are plenty of things we all do all the time that aren’t situated at the center of a complex of plots and motivations for sale on Amazon in numbers too large to ignore. Next installment I am just going to explore one of several reasons we write about and read about adultery: property.

April 10 2012

Back from my trip to Viet Nam. I’ll try to get down a few things I think about the last three weeks and then, in subsequent posts, get back to threads left unsecured last month. I wish I had some already-synthesized summing up to put here but I don’t; I have observations but I am really not sure they add up to much.

Let me start by saying that the confrontation between my war-time activities and present day Vietnamese reality never materialized. That is to say, I felt no deep emotional conflict over having bombed that physically lovely country so many years ago and then returning only to snap photos and soak in the exotic. At the war museum in Ho Chi Minh City I was repelled by the evidence of all of our destructive history there, but the difference between what I felt there from what I have felt at moments over the past 45 years was one of degree, not of kind. Sometime later I want to try to talk about the “American war” as the Vietnamese call it, but not now. I will only say that the Vietnamese seem an extraordinarily resilient people and their narrative of that war characterizes it as but one episode in a long, long war of national liberation beginning in the 19^th century.

Generally, Viet Nam is a young country demographically. Most people are younger than 40 and the rest seem to be old. I’m not sure, though, that the last part of that observation is accurate. At first glance, people on the street seem either young and handsome/lovely or old and worn; where, one wonders, is everyone over 30 and younger than 65? I’m not sure but there are a couple of possibilities, each premised on the assumption that they are present but obscured.

One, which accounts for some of the phenomenon, presented itself just a few days before we left for home. We were “trekking” near Viet Nam’s border with China, in the northwest of the country, near a town called Sapa, and were joined from time to time by Hmong women going to or from market, fields, or bamboo stands. Often they wanted to sell us something but in every case they would casually fall into step along side us and walk along for a mile or so before veering off in one direction or another. My wife chatted with one woman who had some English (most Hmong women [we saw few Hmong men and they never spoke] knew the phrases “Where are you from?” and “Will you buy something from me?”) and said later to our trek guide that Hmong life must be very hard. “Why,” he asked, “do you say that?” Her response was that in conversation she discovered that the woman she had assumed to be in her seventies, as is my wife, was really only fifty. What other than a hard life could age one so? The trek guide’s answer was one word, “opium.” Many Hmong women smoke opium their entire lives and one consequence is the haggard, worn look. Opium production is illegal in Viet Nam but little energy is spent enforcing those laws against local grower/users. This is the case even in the region just to the west of Sapa where Viet Nam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos come together in the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s two major sources of illicit opium, the other being the “Golden Crescent” with Afghanistan at its center.

The other possibility is the one put forward by my wife: life in Viet Nam is harsh. I think this is particularly true in the major cities. Actually, life among the Hmong and the other ethnic minorities of the northwest seems hard but not harsh. Life in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, however, looks harsh to me. Those two cities remind me of New York City in the 70s and early 80s and of Managua, Nicaragua, in the mid-80s. Life there seems to be lived in the streets, endlessly engaged in curb-side capitalism; on corners and sidewalks men make keys, repair shoes, cut hair, practice every variant of bricolage. My favorite was the man who sat on a small stool on a corner of a busy intersection with a tank of compressed air and a hose, waiting for the moto (motorbike, of which there are seemingly five times as many than autos) with a flat tire to struggle up to him. Both times I saw him, on successive days, he had no business but he was stoically (?) waiting for fortune while entertaining his young grandson (?). Interestingly enough, given the rarity of cars on side streets in Hanoi, there were a number of tire repair store fronts where punctures and the like could be fixed on the sidewalk. Folks reading this in Brooklyn will remember 4^th Avenue in the late 70s and the “Flats Fixed” storefronts along that big street between Atlantic Avenue and Sunset Park. Just like that! Men sell services on the street in Hanoi and HCMC; women sell goods. Because the sidewalks are filled with men at their tinkers’ trades and with hundreds of small “pop-ups” for eating, seated on low plastic stools at low plastic tables while the food simmers over charcoal fires in ingenious small burners, women walk in the streets carrying baskets full of pineapples, onions, dried fish, bread, pastries, flowers, mushrooms, herbs, caps, scarves, t-shirts, flags…I can’t do justice to the number of women or the variety (and redundancy) of their goods. The only men I ever saw selling a “thing” as contrasted to a “service” were selling books, carried in the crook of an arm in a small pasteboard box.

I don’t know how this life feels; it looks harsh because it seems the effort to make it work is unremitting. At the Women’s Museum in Hanoi we saw a short film in which women street vendors described their lives: isolation from families, incredibly long hours, poor health, little profit. None of these women, and none of the men at curbside, was young. About half-way through the trip a text came to mind that made it all a bit more familiar to me. In 1941, in an essay on comic postcards, George Orwell noted that in the Britain of such postcards the population was either quite young or quite old. This was not, he argued, just license on the part of such postcard auteurs as Donald McGill, but rather a reflection of a desperate reality of English life. In the England of the 20s and the 30s, Orwell said, there was no such thing as adulthood. There was youth and then there was old age; life in England erased anything like the possibility that the impulse to love and procreate would lead to domestic adulthood, family, hearth, comfort. Reaching one’s majority meant the onset of toil and deprivation in a heartless industrial landscape where youth served until suddenly overtaken by age. That is how urban Viet Nam looks; there are many many beautiful young women and energetic young men and there are many many haggard, thin, worn elders. There are very few men and women of simple mature adulthood.

Oh, and there are many many young children, all astonishingly lovely. They will soon be joined by a considerable number of younger siblings if the presence of pregnant women on every block is any indication. Just why there are so many pregnant young women in Viet Nam at this moment is a matter for next time.