Henry James (1843-1916)

A few famous quotations from Henry James (1843-1916)

*The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million... but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. The Portrait of a Lady (1908 ed.) preface

*It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

*To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

*Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

*Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

*Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

These are the days when Birds come back—
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee—
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear—
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

Oh Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze—
Permit a child to join

Thy sacred emblems to partake—
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


-- from Harmonium , 1923

Poet Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). He was one of the few great writers to work in corporate America. He was an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He worked his way up to vice president. Almost nobody at the office knew that he was a poet, even after he became famous in the literary world. Stevens said, "I'm sure that most people here in Hartford know nothing about the poetry, and I'm equally sure that I don't want them to know because once they know, they don't seem to get over it. I mean that once they know, they never think of you as anything but a poet and, after all, one is inevitably much more complicated than that."
He woke up early, read for a few hours, and then composed his poems in his head while he walked to work. His wife didn't want him to publish anything, but he finally came out with a collection in 1923, Harmonium, which got almost no critical attention, though eventually it came to be seen as one of the most accomplished poetry debuts in literary history, including his famous poems, "Sunday Morning," and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Stevens was so disappointed in the reception of his first book that he stopped writing poetry for almost a decade. But he eventually started up again and published many more books, including Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), The Auroras of Autumn (1947), and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven (1950).
Wallace Stevens said, "It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem."


*A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

*After the final no there comes a yes and on that yes the future of the world hangs.

*Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace Stevens

*In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

*In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

****************

"The Man with the Blue Guitar" (excerpts)

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings�

IV

Richard Ford, February 16 1944 -

Novelist Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1944). He's best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.

After his father had a heart attack, Ford went to live with his grandparents, who managed a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. He went to college to study hotel management, but when he got there he realized what he really wanted to do was read literature, and he switched his major to English. After college, he taught for a year, tried to join the Arkansas State Police, and spent a semester at law school. In 1968, he moved to New York City, got married, and decided on a whim to try to become a writer. He said he wanted to do something different, and "being a writer just seemed like a good idea. It was just casting off into the dark."

Ford's first novel, A Piece of My Heart, came out in 1976. He followed that up with The Ultimate Good Luck (1981). The two books together sold fewer than 12,000 copies, and Ford started thinking that maybe he wasn't cut out for writing novels. He quit writing fiction and got a job as a sportswriter for Inside Sports magazine, covering baseball and college football. He liked his new job and would have kept at it if the magazine hadn't have folded the following year. He didn't have anything else to do, so he started writing a novel about a fiction writer who becomes a sportswriter after the death of his son. The Sportswriter was published as in 1986, and it was huge critical and popular success. He wrote in The Sportswriter, "I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives."

Ford's 1995 novel Independence Day picks up where The Sportswriter left off, with the sportswriter now a realtor trying to connect with his wife and his teenage son. After Ford finished writing it, he read aloud the whole 700-page manuscript, twice. Just before it was going to be published, his editor mentioned offhand that there were quite a few verbs that ended in "-ly". Ford agreed, and spent two weeks going back through the novel to change all the "-ly" verbs he could. All of his work paid off: Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

Ford said, "If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure."


It's the birthday of critic and biographer Van Wyck Brooks, born in Plainfield, New Jersey (1886). His early twentieth century biographies of American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman helped to create a sense of history in American literature.

Brooks said, "The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but by newspapers and the Bible."

*Fear and hope are alike underneath.

*It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

*Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

*There's a lot to be said for doing what you're not supposed to do, and the rewards of doing what you're supposed to do are more subtle and take longer to become apparent, which maybe makes it less attractive. But your life is the blueprint you make after the building is built.

*Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married.

J.D. Salinger, 1919 - 2010

Jerome David Salinger, the novelist J.D. Salinger was born in New York City in 1919. He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called "Slight Rebellion Off Madison," about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison." Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse.

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[1923]

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

SPRING

O what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

William Styron, 1925 - 2006

The novelist William Styron, was born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925. He served in the Marines, and then he worked at a publishing house, but he got fired, so he decided to try writing full time. He was only 26 years old when his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was published (1951.) It's the story of a young Southern girl who commits suicide, and he wrote it after he heard about the suicide of a girl he used to date, but the critics were convinced that he was the heir to William Faulkner and the next great storyteller of the South. He didn't like this very much; he said, "I don't consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is," and he said that the main character "didn't have to come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from."
He moved to Paris, and he helped found The Paris Review. He wrote a couple of novels that got some attention and mixed reviews, but then he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a fictional account of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, and it was an influential book, a book that got a lot of attention because it came out at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and at first it got great reviews, but then there was a backlash against Styron for his attempt to portray a black man, and people started to question whether he was stereotyping black culture. Styron was upset, and it took more than 10 years for his next novel to be published, the novel Sophie's Choice (1979), about a Polish Catholic Holocaust survivor. It was also a controversial novel, and also a very popular novel; it was at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List and won the American Book Award for fiction.
Styron liked to follow a routine, but unlike many writers who wake up early and write every morning, Styron would sleep until noon, stay in bed for an hour thinking, write in the afternoon, have a late dinner, and then stay up until the middle of the night. He said, "Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever."

*"I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor."

*Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.

*A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

*Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.

Horace 65-8 B.C

Roman poet Horace was born on this day in Venusia, in southern Italy (65 B.C.E.). His father was a former slave, but by the time Horace came along, he was well-off and had a lot of money to spend on his talented son. He sent him to Rome as a boy, and then to Athens to learn philosophy and literature.
He is probably best known for his Odes, which he began publishing in 23 B.C.E., often considered the best lyric poetry ever written in Latin. He also coined some famous phrases that we still use, like Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which roughly translates as "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country," and carpe diem, "seize the day."
Horace was favored by Emperor Augustus to write a poem for the special public entertainment event known as the Secular Games that Augustus put on in 17 B.C.
Horace provides autobiographical information in his poetry. We learn that he was the son of a freedman who worked as a coactor argentarius 'auction broker' and publicanus 'tax collector'. Another source for his life is Suetonius who calls Horace a native of Venusium. He adds that Horace was short and fat, liked lascivious pictures, and spent most of his time in retirement on his farm.

Horace received an education at Rome under L. Orbilius Pupillus, and then in Athens, at the Academy, where he met Cicero. While in Greece, Horace joined the army of Brutus and fought at Philippi as military tribune. As a result of being on the losing side against Octavian and Mark Antony, Horace's family's property was confiscated.

In 39 B.C., after Augustus granted amnesty, Horace became a secretary in the Roman treasury. In 38, Horace met and became the client of the artists' patron Maecenas, who provided Horace with a villa in the Sabine Hills. Augustus favored Horace, commissioning him to write the Carmen Saeculare for the Secular Games of 17 B.C.

When Horace died at age 59, he left his estate to Augustus and was buried near the tomb of Maecenas.

The Works of Horace

De Arte Poetica Liber - The Art of Poetry (18 B.C.)
Carmen Saeculare - Poem of the Secular Games (17 B.C.)
Carminum Libra IV - The Odes (4 Books) (starting 23 B.C.)
Epistularum Libri II - The Epistles (2 Books) (starting 20 B.C.)
Epodon Liber - The Epodes (30 B.C.)
Sermonum Libri II (Satura) - The Satires (2 Books) (starting 35 B.C.)
More information - Horace. Also see: A Con

Marcus Aurelius
*"Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last,"

*" Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith," and "Very little is needed to make a happy life."

"Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good."

Masters Of War, Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

War Profit Litany by Allen Ginsberg

To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight Annodomini fourthousand
eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
in order,
here named the Fathers in office in these industries, tele-
phones directing finance,
names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of the
stockholders of these destined Aggregates,
and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,
representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking
in hotel lobbies to persuade,
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
military, gossip, argue, and persuade
suggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, this
done for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon, consul-
tants to military, paid by their industry:
and these are the names of the generals & captains mili-
tary, who know thus work for war goods manufactur-
ers;
and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,
investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens em-
ployed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
coherent and definite,
and the first form of this litany begun first day December
1967 furthers this poem of these States.

December 1, 1967
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Paul Theroux, 1941 -

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). When he was growing up, his father read to him and his siblings from novels by Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. He and his brothers were encouraged to write, and at an early age they started a family newspaper to report on the daily events of their household.

Theroux joined the Peace Corps after college and went to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting journalism to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling. He did keep traveling, and he believes that living outside the United States is the best thing that ever happened to him as a writer. He said, "Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude."

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first bestseller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975). He has since written many books of fiction, including The Mosquito Coast (1981), and many books of travel writing, including Fresh Air Fiend (2000). His most recent travel book is Dark Star Safari (2003), about traveling over land from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa.

Happy the Man by Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.
"Happy the Man" by Horace, from Odes, Book III, xxix. Translation by John Dryden

Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho (1885). Pound was born within a few years of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot, and he was instrumental in promoting the careers of each one of these writers — as well as many, many others. He was a champion of modern poetry and prose; Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair proclaimed that it was Ezra Pound "more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it." He was extraordinarily generous with his clout, often described as "the poet's poet." Pound's mantra was "Make it new."
He'd earned a grant to study Romantic languages and literature in Europe, and then returned to the United States and got a teaching position a Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. But his rising academic star fell four months later when he allowed a stranded vaudeville actress to sleep over at his place. His landlady disapproved, his college superiors were notified, and in the ensuing scandal the 22-year-old Pound was dismissed from his professorial duties. (He later claimed all accusations were "ultimately refuted except that of being 'the Latin Quarter type.'") Nevertheless, when the college fired him, they also gave him the rest of his year's salary, and with it he headed back to Europe.
Pound spent time in Venice and moved to London. He believed that William Butler Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English, and he was determined to find him and apprentice himself to the master. He befriended Yeats in England, worked as his secretary for a while, and even lived with him for a period in a cottage at Sussex. Once, when Yeats was lecturing on at an informal gathering about the intersection of poetry and music, Pound began eating two red tulips to get some attention.
Later, in 1914, Pound would marry Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats's former lover. It was that same year that he met T.S. Eliot, whom Pound is credited with "discovering" after pushing for the publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry magazine.
Pound lived in England for eight years, and his Kensington flat became a hive of modern literary activity. He helped found the Imagist movement, along with H.D. — pen name of Hilda Doolittle — and declared its principles to be "direct treatment of the thing," to use only words that "contribute to the presentation," and in regard to rhythm: "to compose in the sequence of a musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome."
He wrote a famous poem called "In a Station of the Metro," which goes:
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough."
He wrote it after getting off a train at La Concorde station in Paris and seeing a succession of beautiful faces; he found expression for his emotion came not in speech, he said, "but in little splotches of colour." At first, he wrote a 30-line poem about it, which he destroyed. Six months later, he wrote a poem half the length of the original, and then a year later he wrote this two-line poem, which consists of just 14 words.
Pound spent most of his writing life on The Cantos, a modern epic. The first was published in 1917. He completed 109 of his Cantos; an additional eight were incomplete but published. The first of The Cantos begins:
"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."

Ezra Pound, from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920, 1921)

During World War I, Ezra Pound was an American émigré in London and the impresario behind imagism and vorticism in England. After many of his friends were killed in the trenches, including the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, he described his postwar activities in the following terms: “1918 began investigation of causes of war, to oppose same.” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, from which the following two excerpts are taken, is one result of Pound’s war-guilt investigations.



IV

These fought in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case. . .

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria, non dulce non et decor . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

Fortitude as never before

Frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

War in Vietnam

On 29 March, 1973, the last American combat troops left Vietnam, ending the direct involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Several thousand civilian Defense Department employees stayed on in Vietnam after the withdrawal of troops. The last of these Americans were airlifted out of the country when Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975.

Cherry Boy Comes Home from the War

When I came back to the states from Vietnam on 7 February 1968, DEROSing at Oakland Army Terminal from midnight to six in the morning, I was hoping my entire family would be in Stockton to greet me. Only my mother met me at the bus terminal. Naturally, I was pleased to see her, but I was bitterly disappointed that no one else had accompanied her. I didn't have a girlfriend because in Basic Training she had written me the proverbial Dear John letter. There wasn't a protester or, for that matter, an army recruiter at the terminal either. I had gotten a letter shortly before I left Camp Bearcat forewarning me that a "Welcome Home Party" was being arranged. I yearned to hear the cheers and yells from my loved ones, feel the pats and slaps on my back, the hands grasping hands, the lips touching lips, the words "We're so glad you made it back alive and in one piece" that I dreamt of it for days. I almost forgot the mortar attacks and the sniper rounds. I was in a state of short timer's frenzy. I pictured a humongous party on the 4th of February, the date I was supposed to arrive. Like all good signs born under a bad sign, the '68 Tet ruined my homecoming. On the fourth of February, swarms of Viet Cong endeavored to come through Long Binh Bien Hoa's perimeter of concertina wire to get our unarmed, young butts. I had already turned in my weapon and the rest of my gear earlier during processing. Their smoldering bodies--fresh from barrage after barrage of Willie Peter rounds--lay contorted, spread eagled, and fused to their fate, symbolic of man's ability to efface man from the planet. Was it their death or my own spiritual one that created the indifference I feel now?

It's been twenty-four years since the Nam and a little over five years since my mother died. Now, a homecoming party that never happened is nothing more than an old memory, a roll of film never developed.

Victor H. Bausch earned his master's degree in English from California State University, Stanislaus, and his master's degree in Library Science from San Jose State University. His work has appeared in Slipstream, The South Florida Poetry Review, Touchstone Literary Journal, Prophetic Voices: Anthology of War and Peace; Tour of Duty: Vietnam in the Words of Those Who Were There, and others. He is a Viet Nam veteran (1967-68), a member of Veterans for Peace, and works as a reference librarian at Monterey Public Library.

Larry Hardiman

The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.

William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

"No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith."
J.B. Priestley

"I decline to accept the end of man."

William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950

"All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. 'I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories.' he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account."

Richard Ellmann

________

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885 - 1951

Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota (1885), author of Main Street (1920)and Babbitt (1922), and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
He left his hometown in Minnesota as soon as he could. He worked for newspapers and for publishing companies, wrote short stories for magazines, and wrote some potboiler novels and even a few serious novels, but none of his books did very well.
In 1920, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who were editing the satirical magazine American Mercury, met up with 35-year-old "tall, skinny, paprika-headed" Sinclair Lewis, who was unknown in the writing world, at a mutual friend's apartment. Lewis walked up to Mencken and Nathan, put his arms around their shoulders and tightly around their necks, and began yelling at the top of his voice that he was the best writer in the country and that he'd just written the best book in the country, to be published in a week — and being critics, the two of them should duly take note of this. He went on like this at high volume for about half an hour, and when Mencken and Nathan finally escaped, they went to a pub to decompress and concluded that he was an idiot. But Mencken read the book anyway, and was bowled over by it.
The book was Main Street (1920), about a fictional small town in Minnesota called Gopher Prairie, a place inhabited by "a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world."
Main Street was a huge sensation. No one had ever written such a scathing indictment of small-town American life. Within nine months, it sold about 200,000 copies, and within a few years, the book had sold 2 million copies and he'd become a millionaire. In 1922, he published Babbitt, which was also highly successful. He turned down the Pulitzer Prize that they tried to award him for his 1925 novel Arrowsmith, and when the Swedish Academy called to inform him he was being awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature, he thought the phone call was a prank. H.L. Mencken, who'd been so exasperated by Lewis a decade prior, wrote: "The award of the Nobel Prize to Sinclair Lewis gave me immense pleasure. I can imagine no man whose recognition would be more offensive to the general run of American literary patriots. It was a blow exactly in the eye."
Though Sinclair Lewis left Minnesota as a teenager and spent most of his life traveling or living in Washington, D.C., 16 of his 22 novels involved Midwestern towns or Midwestern protagonists. He said he found creative inspiration while "sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average Citizens of the United States."

Flannery O'Connor, 1925 - 1964

The novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). As a young girl she was terribly shy and prone to temper tantrums. She became famous in her hometown when she was five years old by teaching one of her chickens to walk backward. A New York City reporter came and filmed the chicken for a newsreel.
She wanted either to be a writer or a cartoonist. During college, she submitted her cartoons to The New Yorker, but she was rejected, so she began to focus on her writing. She applied to one of the only creative writing programs in the country at the time, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she was almost rejected because the admissions interviewer couldn't understand her southern accent.
Once she got into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, people there didn't know what to make of her. She never read James Joyce or Franz Kafka, or any of the other fashionable writers of the era. She was more interested in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. During class, she almost never spoke, and her classmates only knew she was listening by the way she occasionally smiled when she thought something was funny.
But even though O'Connor was an outsider, her fiction impressed everybody, and she won an award that got her a contract to publish her first novel. She was still working on that novel when she began to notice a heaviness in her arms while she typed. Traveling home to Georgia for Christmas that year, she grew so sick on the train that she had to be hospitalized when she arrived. It turned out that she had inherited lupus, the same disease that had killed her father.
She moved in with her mother and began receiving steroid treatments, which made it difficult to walk without crutches. She said at the time, "I walk like I have one foot in the gutter but it's not an inconvenience and I get out of doing a great many things I don't want to do." Even though the disease made her extremely tired, she forced herself to write for three hours every day on the screened in porch of her mother's house. She wrote to her friend Robert Lowell, "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, (or so I tell myself)."
O'Connor's first novel Wise Blood came out in 1952. Three years later, she published the story collection that made her name A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955). It contains her two most famous short stories: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and "Good Country People" about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.
O'Connor filled her stories with crazy preachers, murderers, the deformed, the disabled, freaks and outcasts. An uncle once asked her why she didn't write about nice folks. O'Connor focused on the grotesque because she said, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." She died a little more than a week shy of her fortieth birthday.
Flannery O'Connor said, "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."


*At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

*Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

*I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

*The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.