Robert Coover - Public Burning

Smiling wryly at all the hidden ironies, the National Poet Laureate watches them go, then wanders unobtrusively through the area, collecting images, experimenting with various forms and meters, searching for the metaphoric frame by which to contain and re-create tonight’s main ceremony (“…the last scene…the seventh decision…dance to his violent tune…shouts of anathema…as the clock ticked on…”) and cause it, by his own manifesto, “to happen in people’s heads.” This is what his art is all about, this is what it means, as his mother says, to be “called to be the servant of truth.” It is not enough to present facts — something has to happen in time and space, observed through the imagination and the heart, something accessible and yet illuminating to that reader he writes for, the Gentleman from Indiana. Raw data is paralyzing, a nightmare, there’s too much of it and man’s mind is quickly engulfed by it. Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination, of giving them shape and visibility, keeping them personal . It is, as Mother Luce has said, “fakery in allegiance to the truth,” a kind of interpretive reenactment of the overabundant flow of events, “an effective mosaic” assembled from “the fragmentary documents” of life, quickened with audacious imagery and a distinct and original prosody: “Noses for news lie betwixt ears for music.” Some would say that such deep personal involvement, such metaphoric compressions and reliance on inner vision and imaginary “sources,” must make objectivity impossible, and TIME would agree with them, but he would find simply illiterate anyone who concluded from this that he was not serving Truth. More: he would argue that objectivity is an impossible illusion, a “fantastic claim” (“gnostic” is the word on his tongue these days), and as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts — not to mention Ultimate Truth — even remotely possible.

Thus, debating uneasily with himself, less self-assured than his readers might suspect or hope, he threads his way through the masses in Times Square, alert to his task, but reflective in mood, worried that he’s got off the track somehow, fearful of his powers even as he fears their diminishment, and conscious, a young man at the pinnacle of success and in the full bloom of life, of his own mortality — didn’t Mother Luce predict his death as long ago as 1936? He and his brothers must surely die, she said then: “I don’t suppose we can establish the date for the euthanasia… But one way to look at them, at this date, might be to say that they have twenty more years of life….” He was only thirteen years old when she said that, and it had frightened him to think that, like Jesus Christ, he might have only thirty-three years to walk this earth. And it was possible, it was all too possible. Not only were the actuarial tables dismal enough for poets like himself, but hadn’t his own father died prematurely at the age of thirty-one? A sudden and sordid death on the night of young TIME’S sixth birthday, he’s never quite got over it. Almost like his Dad was trying to tell him something. The hard way. Though TIME loves his mother and is often inspired by her, it’s the ghost of his unhappy father, he knows, that he carries in his poet’s heart. And now thirty of his allotted thirty-three years have washed away, he has just three of them left, three short years to sort things out, find some way of rejuvenating himself, of overmastering the world’s entropie attack on him before it’s too late. And in this, he knows, his fate and America’s are linked: he and America both seem to have lost, as his mother says, “that feeling for the future, the confidence in the bigger and the better, the spirit of you-ain’t-seen-nothin’-yet”—but perhaps tonight…?

Twice before, he thought he’d found the secret: once, just before World War II, with his dream of “The American Century” (“We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world…the dynamic leader of world trade…the powerhouse from which the ideals [of Western Civilization] spread throughout the world…”), and again three years ago, at the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, with his vision of perpetual War: “One of the great perennial themes along with Love and Death.” His mother’s vision, actually, but as always he had been inspired by her: “In the next few years Americans will have to live with War as they have not since the days of the settler and the Minute Man…. War always has been, is and always will be part of man’s fate until Kingdom come.… In any case, we are not going to end War without practicing it some more — and living with it…. If ‘coexistence’ with the present Soviet Communist system is impossible, is total War ‘inevitable’? Maybe so, maybe not, but what no man has a right to say is that we can live peaceably and happily with this prodigious evil…. The Soviet Empire will continue to expand unless it is opposed with all our strength and that includes the steady, calm and constant acceptance of the risk of all-out War…. The truth will be made plain by wrath if not by reason!”

But both dreams have soured. The other Free Nations, misunderstanding his charitable intentions, took unnecessary offense at his laying claim to all of the Twentieth Century, and even his fellow Americans seemed to lack the imagination to “accept the thrust of destiny,” to go out and take over the world and “create the first great American Century.” Didn’t they care? What has gone wrong? “I think this country, far from having a George-Washingtonian belief in the Tightness of its cause at home and abroad, is actually very uncertain of itself, very divided and confused in its ‘soul,’ and almost totally lacking in basic realistic notions as to its ‘objectives’ in the world situation!” The War in Korea looked more promising, as War always does, especially when, largely through TIME’S inspired advocacy, General Eisenhower was elected Commander-in-Chief — it brought back the halcyon days of World War II (the naming of wars like kings was TIME’S own conceit), which saw, almost overnight, the transformation of this young enfant terrible and adolescent American hustler into a powerful and serious poet and — even before the War had ended — the Poet Laureate of the Nation. How could he not love War? Indeed, he even loved the Japanese for making it possible. As Mother Luce wrote to his brother LIFE following the attack on Pearl Harbor: “This is the day of wrath. It is also the day of hope…. For this hour America was made!” He felt suddenly ashamed of his “pusillanimous” youth, which he identified with that of his country: “It is not even possible to call these years tragic, for tragedy implies at least the dignity of fate. And there was no dignity in these years, and nothing of fate that we did not bring upon ourselves. The epoch that is closing was much less tragic than it was shameful….” He felt like Paul struck down on the road to Damascus, like Dwight Eisenhower hit by a bolt of lightning in Texas: he was a new man, a new poet, purged of his supercilious past. Of course, his readers might not notice the difference, but inside, he knew it was true. An era ended for TIME in 1941 and a new one began. Then, three years ago, he felt like the same thing was happening all over again, a resurgence of the old hope and joy, the glorious struggle — he might even become Poet Laureate of the World! Calling for “an unambiguous defeat” of the Reds, forecasting the imminent advent of World War III, and whooping it up like a drunken cowboy, he rushed off to the Korean front, pen in hand.

But now, what? it’s all come to nothing. A meaningless stalemate. And every sign of a disastrous truce about to be consummated. He had loved and defended General Mac Arthur, remains even tonight absolutely convinced of the need to carry the War to the Chinese mainland, and has these past months been struggling to keep General Van Fleet’s “total victory” appeals before the people, but he knows it’s a lost cause. He can feel it. He can’t even get a decent poem out of it any more. His “Night on Old Harry” last week with its “ugly sausage / shaped ridge,” its “littered slopes” and “crumbling trenches,” is about the best he’s done since the earliest lyrics of the War, and that’s probably because all it’s about is holding on desperately to something useless, his present unhappy condition. Might better have called it “Night in Old Harry”…