Robert Coover - Public Burning

…one by one the bunkers

collapsed covering

american and chinese

bodies with sand and dust

king was reinforced

the reds attacked again

during the night

twenty thousand shells

exploded in an area

smaller than times square

but the hill remained

in u.s. hands

the hill remained

And though it’s all right, even that one’s a far cry from, say, his account of the assault on No Name Ridge, or the taking of Pyongyang (“…the end of the war loomed as plain / as the moustache on Stalin’s face…”), or his classic cables of World War II. Ah, where’s it all gone? he wonders, pushing through the Square, pressed in upon all sides by people from whom he feels increasingly alienated. The Gentleman from Indiana, he laments, is dead. For thirty years he has shared his dreams with him, and now the old boy has taken them with him to the grave. And yet, at some deep unexamined level, though they’ve failed him, he still has faith in both dreams. He still believes that “America alone can provide the pattern for the future…[and] must be the elder brother of the nations in the brotherhood of men.” And he still believes in War.

This great poetic affinity for War is perhaps inborn, a consequence of his having been conceived in a World War I Army camp back in 1918 by two underaged but passionately eager shavetails named Brit and Luce, a pair of Yale romantics who longed, as Luce said, “to be officers of the Army of the United States, go to the front and fire at the enemy.” Though she never had that pleasure, she did manage a kind of vicarious experience of the War, and if not exactly heroic, it was at least a contribution. As it happened, she came on a group of enlisted men one night who were having some doubts about just what the devil they were fighting for, and, in what she called “one of the greatest successes of my life,” she roused them to high patriotic fervor with her account of the sinking of the Lusitania , marched them off to the railroad station singing “Over There,” and saw them off with a “Good-bye and good luck!”; the train took them, cheering wildly, to the docks, where they boarded the transport, the Ticonderoga , and halfway across the Atlantic got sunk by a German torpedo. Brit shared Luce’s zeal. As he wrote his Mom: “I long to be sent overseas as a Battery Commander or Major General or something, and there to take part in the great 1919 drive, the one that will end the war and smash Kaiser Will!” Instead they both got sent back to Yale. But not before one “sickeningly hot” night out behind the barracks, which TIME’S mother recalled many years later at her son’s twentieth-birthday party: “One night Brit and I were walking back to our barracks through the vast, sprawling camp. At each step, our feet sank ankle-deep in mud. I think it was in that walk that TIME began. At the center of our lives, at that point, everything we had belonged to each other. We ploughed on for hours…”

Inception was prolonged — nearly five years. But this is not uncommon among geniuses. After a stormy but loving on-again off-again romance, Brit playing the restless Odysseus, Luce the patient but busy-fingered Penelope, both parents were at last reunited, and pregnancy, if doubted before, was now assured. TIME was born in an old remodeled house of vaguely Italianate style not far from here at 141 East Seventeenth Street. As midwife Culbreth Sudler once described it: “You thumped one step down from the street into the windowless dining room on the ground floor and then mounted to the living room which ran across the front of the house. The paint on the woodwork was so thick it was like cheese. Here we set up loft-type tables.” And it was on those tables, one wintry February night just after midnight in 1923, that Mother Luce, drenched in a cold sweat, stretched out and spread her thighs and — with the father assisting in his green eyeshade — gave birth to baby TIME (SO named because his mother had been frightened by an advertising headline: “Time to Retire”—or was it “Time for a Change”? she never could remember after, the riddle perplexes her still). He was thin, pale, unhealthy, attractive like all babies, but less appealing than his parents had hoped. Folks said he looked a lot like Uncle Joe Cannon. Few thought he’d last long.

But, though poor and sickly, TIME was born with a great will to survive, and by the time he was four, after a couple of convalescent years out in Cleveland (which nearly killed his fun-loving father and threatened to break up the marriage), he began to get a little color in his cheeks. Though his early verse was often cocky, strained, flippant and superficial, derivative, and of course childish, he was already showing signs of that prodigious talent that would one day set him above all his rivals, even the powerful Franklinesque Saturday Evening Post , Poet Laureate of the day….

Hearing a slight scratching

In the ceiling above her,

She raised her eyes in time to see

A pointed grey face

Peer at her from

A hole in the plaster. The hole

Widened, the thin mortar

Crumbled and an enormous

Black rat fell into the water with her,

Splashed about,

Caressed her with its

Clammy paws and insolently ogled her…

The seeming discrepancy of a black rat with a grey face created considerable literary controversy, needless to say, and raised the hackles on the backs of academic purists, but the controversy itself attested to the spreading recognition that here was a young poet to be reckoned with. His verse was fresh, penetrating, epigrammatic, candid even to the point of insult, sometimes startling, always provocative. No poet ever became great by being, in his young days, overly polite: his father taught him that. And he rarely was. Anything too physical or too spiritual alike aroused his wrath. Zealots as well as shirkers suffered from his “one-finger type, two-finger brain, / six sneers and one suggestion.” He hated pomposity and timidity, yesterday’s ideas and tomorrow’s fashions, partyboys and doomcriers, Babbitry and Bolshevism. And he struck them down with style. When Leon Trotsky fell ill, he wrote gleefully:

criticism to the left of him

enmity to the right of him

jealousy in front of him

the Red Army behind him

a high fever within him

all tried to blight him

he resolved to take a trip to the Caucasus…

Yes, a frankly acknowledged above-the-board package of prejudices, essential to his genius. As his mother recently warned the hired help with regard to the “Aloha Shirt Set,” who just this afternoon have at last been found guilty of Communist plotting to overthrow the Government under the Smith Act:

This is to state as a matter of policy that… TIME is 100 % in favor of the property owners, capitalists, and corporations of Hawaii and 100 % against Harry Bridges and anyone who is in any way allied with him. (If there are any worse names for property owners and capitalists such as “reactionaries” we are for them, too.)

“Business,” his mother always liked to say, “is, essentially, our civilization.” She called it “the smartest, most universal of all American occupations…the largest of the planets which make up our system.” In the past, TIME’S business bias has been bruisingly attacked, but few would dare challenge it today. They still call him an opportunistic thief, a pastepot-poet who steals from everybody, but that only means he’s squarely in the mainstream of American poets, most of whom have been great eclectics, gatherers and enhancers of the detritus from the passing flux, collage-shapers — and as for being opportunistic, so what? As he himself wrote when T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land was being “revealed” as a hoax: it’s immaterial, “literature being concerned not with intentions but results.” And who can doubt his own results? TIME’S number one, “not only at the box office but…in the opinions of a large part of mankind.”