Dad
and I sat on the afterdeck of his cruiser at anchor off Pond Island, several miles seaward from our summer
cottage, Undercliff. Everyone else was
ashore—the women, the dogs, the children—enjoying the picnic. At fourteen, I was a man, so I had stayed aboard while Dad
smoked a pipe, and I had coiled down all the lines in the hope that he might
notice. Dad wore his long-billed
fisherman’s cap, a discouraged sweater, ratty khakis rolled to his knees, and
sneakers with no socks. His WWII German
binoculars hung around his neck. Lt.
Cmdr. (ret.) Richard Eberhart, Poet Laureate of the United States, serving at
the pleasure of President Eisenhower, himself a former military man, gazed out
over the placidities of Penobscot Bay, Maine, and growled.
“It took us a long time to learn how to hate.”
He was speaking about the war, a rare event. I was profoundly still, not to break the
spell. I was hungry; I was famished for
truth. “We are not the hating kind. Yes, we were angry. That was easy. It was easy to be angry. The Germans,” he said, “they were better than
we were, better soldiers. We respected
the Germans…after all, Goethe, Beethoven.
The Japanese were just a horde.
We hated them first. It took us
longer to hate the Germans, but we did it, finally.” He looked elsewhere. “You don’t go to war over anger. You go to war over hate.”
He knocked the ash of his pipe overboard against the
gunwale. “We are not the hating kind,”
he repeated.
By that time in my life, I knew my father’s war poems
more deeply than by heart…by soul perhaps.
I was beginning to understand their passionate plea that God explain and
not hide His ineffableness behind an indifferent and especially not an ironical
cloud. I was beginning to understand
their anguish at the snuffing of the young machine gunners my father tutored. I was beginning to understand their horror at
the seduction to beauty of tracer shells—designed otherwise to kill—as they
arched elegantly and silently at a distance and under a slender moon.
Calm now, when it was just Dad and me, and on the sea
where I was masterful and at home, Dad was for me at that moment an adored and
a supreme amalgam. He was a poet of
Blakean fire; an aggressive and razor-edged intellect; a ruminator who burrowed
down into the muck and found there a jewel and tossed it—with fanciful
élan—into heaven. And he was also a naval man who knew the despair of seeing
names on a list whose faces he could not recall, but they had gone to early
death, who defended their nation with the .50 caliber tail- and turret-mounted
machine guns on the navy bombers, whose marksmanship was my father’s responsibility.
From Dad’s revelations, I was beginning to comprehend, if
not yet fully to understand, something else as well. Historian John Keegan has mused about this
regarding World War One. The hates, yes,
we can eventually understand the hatreds of war. But it is the loves…that’s where we are
baffled. The loves of one’s mates; the
loves, even, of the martial circumstance, albeit horrifying, in which one is
placed; the loves of acts of absoluteness that are performed selflessly and
with a passion as high as artistic inspiration or religious ecstasy…these loves
we turn away from—when swaddled round by sleepy and peaceful pleasure later—for
our attraction to then frightens us and, we worry, it brings us shame.
I had not been a warrior at age fourteen, but there was a
schoolyard bully I had hated. My anger at
this young man had grown as his outrages against me compounded. I, being a civil follow, and moreover the son
of a poet, had tried at first to reason with him…his name was Carl. But as is customary with bullies, Carl disdained
sweet reason. It took numerous evils
before my anger boiled over into hatred.
Now, one day I had taken enough. Catapulted by a passionate ecstasy of
violence into no more than forty-five seconds of shock and awe, I arranged it
that the bloodied and frightened Carl would never again come within twenty
yards of me…and he never did. I had hated
that Carl, and I had loved that moment, and my muscles still feel the ecstasy
of my battle today.
My father stood.
“Enough about hate. Let’s join
the ladies ashore.”
“But what happened then?”
No comments:
Post a Comment