“Hey, we’re all going to take a shower. Do you want to put your socks on?"

One of the theses of Allan Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire: the history of gay men and women in World War Two is that the gay community in the US was strengthened by the mass mobilization required for the prosecution of the war. Huge numbers of men were suddenly living in single sex communities, and many of them were discovering they were not alone in their same-sex attractions. I was hoping the book would contain some love stories. I knew it would trace the military’s anti-gay policies and campaigns, the sort of thing one needs to know but which make for discouraging reading. Berube includes no love narratives, though there are hints, a few informants who mention love affairs or who met a longterm lover while in the service. 

This anecdote emphasizes the relative tolerance of het crewmates in the extremis of a ship at sea heading into combat:

Maxwell Gordon recalled what happened on his [aircraft]* carrier when two men were caught sleeping together. ‘Early one morning in chow line I was standing with some friends and there was a commotion ahead, and we all looked over the rail, and there was a gun tub below. The canvas had blown back, and there [were]** two fellows down there. I knew one of them. And they were naked, except the older one had on black socks. And they were wrapped in each other’s arms, front to back. They’d obviously been screwing all night long. People started throwing pieces of bread down on them till they woke up. They were very embarrassed — hundreds of people saw them. [The other men]** were whistling and saying, “Oh, wake up! It’s morning!” The one fellow who was a bos’n’s mate was kidded for weeks and months after about his socks. They said, “Hey, we’re all going to take a shower. Do you want to put your socks on and come along?” Because that’s all he had on.’

___________

*my interpolation … ** author’s interpolation

Berube does not present any follow-up about the progress of this exposed affair or whether the bos’n’s mate was known to have any others. 

The second anecdote is more affecting:

Ben Small remembered, a lieutenant who had been injured was being shipped back to the States, so the men ‘all went to the plane to see him off that night. It was an amazingly touching moment, when he and his lover said good-bye, because they embraced and kissed in front of all these straight guys and everyone dealt with it so well. I think it was just this basic thing about the separation of someone you cared for, regardless of sex.’

Again, the emphasis is on the unusual exposure of the male-male relationship. Letting others see same-sex love was dangerous. The consequences ranged from teasing to hostile interrogation, the stockade, prison, a locked mental ward. Thousands were tossed out of the armed forces with dishonorable discharges which prevented them from accessing the benefits of the GI Bill. Come the anti-homosexual crusades of the ‘50s, this queer branding by the military lost many a person their job, especially among the ranks of the civil service.

These anecdotes stand out for offering a glimpse into the many relationships that must have gone on but had to be kept hidden. I wish Allan Berube had given us at least one full account of a romance. 

source:

Coming Out Under Fire: the history of gay men and women in World War Two

by Allan Berube

1990. The Free Press / Collier Macmillan, NY

What no serious poet does

Paisley Rekdahl served as poet guest editor for the 2020 number of The Best American Poetry. In her introduction she makes this amazing statement:

“I have never treated poetry as a therapeutic activity; I doubt any serious poet does.”

What? Please! The statement and the tutting corollary are condescending and ridiculous. Maybe even Infuriating?  

Rekdahl’s categorical is followed by the muddled: “And yet if I resist the impulse to turn to poetry for solace, I also risk missing the intimacy that poetry offers us, an intimacy that suggests the author knows my private thoughts and feelings and that, even if she cannot speak to me individually, she speaks about us all as a world.”

Again, what? 

For Paisley Rekdahl “therapeutic activity” and “solace” seem to be the same thing. I guess she’s talking specifically about writing poetry, but she probably also means reading poetry. Why turning to poetry for solace is a bad thing goes unexplained. It must be so obvious to her that she takes it as a given. Uncontroversial. All her friends think so! Why? 

If we turn to a dictionary to help us figure out what Rekdahl means by “therapeutic” we get this at Merriam-Webster: “having a beneficial effect on the body or mind”

Surely even to the deadly serious Paisley Rekdahl it wouldn’t be verboten for a poet to think of poetry as “having a beneficial effect on the … mind”. So she must mean something less broad, a definition with bad connotations. Similarly, another definition at M-W goes, “producing a useful or favorable result or effect”. That doesn’t seem to be so horrific as to be something a poet ought never to do. I imagine Rekdahl arguing that true poetry is not created purely in order to produce a useful or favorable result or effect. True poetry/art is full and deep — full of contradictions, ambiguities, suggestions. That which looks like poetry but is crafted solely to produce a favorable effect is propaganda. “Propaganda” is a word with few positive connotations. Propaganda typically leaves out a lot of truth in order to pare down to the only message it wants to get across. That sounds bad. 

Earlier in the essay Rekdahl talks about how at the beginning of the Covid epidemic her “inbox was daily stuffed with requests from poetry chain mails and journalists and school administrators and arts programs to supply them with poems, preferably ones that could offer people inspiration. … [But] I didn’t feel poetry should be hopeful … [W]hy should I trust a poem that insisted everything, and everyone, would be all right?”

Well, that does sounds like a cheery kind of propaganda, doesn’t it? She’s exasperated by all this grasping after hope, that she, as a poet, is supposed to provide. I’m not a therapist, she seems to say. That’s not my job. Soothing you is not poetry’s job. 

Maybe not. But it’s quite a leap from pique over being prodded to produce poems that soothe to declaring that no serious poet ever turns to poetry for solace. 

Art therapy — and by extension, poetry therapy, I suppose — gets a bad rap. Since Paisley Rekdahl turns her nose up at the word “therapeutic” I immediately thought of the attitude I’ve encountered over the use of art and poetry as ways to heal. Art isn’t meant to heal! It’s meant to — something else — something serious. Make you think, feel, make you analyze, parse — but not heal, dammit. That’s for mommies — and medicines. Could there be some misogyny in the disdain for art therapy? “Serious” is such a masculine word.

Every Best American Poetry includes several pages at the back that not only give brief bios of the poets but also feature the poets talking about their poems. So do any of the poets talk about poetry as a therapeutic activity? 

Victoria Chang: “[M]y mother passed after a long illness and I was/am a bit lost without her. I read … many poems that helped me … I can see, in retrospect, that I wrote these poems to help myself, to see if I could get to the center of grief. Could I distill it? Describe it?” 

Gee, that sounds almost like the definition of “therapeutic.”

Max Ritvo: “I want my writing to heal people. And not like chemotherapy, but like a good veggie soup. Poetry must entertain if it is to heal.”

Arthur Sze: “In traditional Japanese culture, when a ceramic pot is broken, the shards are reassembled and bound together with gold-dusted lacquer. This ‘golden repair’ does not disguise but highlights the breakage, and in writing this section [of the poem that appears in the anthology], I conceived of silence as my gold lacquer.”

James Tate: “[Poets] may end up with an audience and a following of some sort, but in truth they write their poems with various degrees of obsessiveness mostly for themselves, for the pleasure and satisfaction it gives them. And for the hunger and need nothing else can abate.”

So many unserious poets!

source:

The Best American Poetry 2020

edited by Paisley Rekdahl

series editor, David Lehman

Scribner Poetry / Simon & Schuster, NY

word of the day: vedette

word of the day: vedette

Mario Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian novelist. He became involved in Peruvian electoral politics in the 80s. In the following paragraph Vargas Llosa talks about a man mulling a run for mayor in the capital, Lima. 

context:

His image was that of a likable emcee and a favorite of the masses — because of his manner of speaking filled with ‘in’ words, such as manito, for ‘pal,’ patita, for ‘getting the bounce,’ chelita, for ‘blondie,’ and all the picturesque expressions of the latest slang popular with teenagers — associated with the world of show business, of popular singers, comedians, and vedettes, and not with public affairs.

definition (lexico): A leading star of stage, screen, or television.

I like the way Vargas Llosa defines a bunch of words all at once, except vedette. Anybody familiar with the phrase “getting the bounce”? According to Collins, it means “to dismiss or be dismissed from a job.” I think I’ve heard “give him the bounce,” maybe on TV? Collins says it’s US slang. 

source:

A Fish in the Water: a memoir

by Mario Vargas Llosa

translated by Helen Lane

1994. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York