A Poet to the Rescue

       For reasons of temperament more than of philosophy, during the period of our war in Vietnam I remained apart from, though sympathetic to, the great antiwar demonstrations in our cities. To the less great ones on our campuses I was less sympathetic, especially to the sit-ins, takeovers, trashings, and disruptions: Whatever their dealings with the federal government, American universities are not federal institutions to be treated as symbols of our sometimes wrongheaded foreign policies. Academic freedom is a rare and precious thing; riot police, tear gas, and armed National Guardsmen are to be kept off university campuses at almost any cost except the constraint of that freedom. In confrontations between antiwar marchers and federal officials, my heart was with the marchers; in confrontations between campus demonstrators and beleaguered university administrators, my sympathies were often with the administrators. If I had been of draftable age, perhaps I'd have felt otherwise. I hope not. The war was wrong; the choices it forced upon American men just a touch older than my own sons were abhorrent; its disruption of the proper function of universities was deplorable -- but the universities were neither the enemy nor a fit symbol of the enemy.

       That said, I hasten to add that my politically activist students and colleagues in Buffalo certainly taught me, and many another, more than we'd known before about the political ramifications of the academic enterprise. My general innocence is perhaps invincible, but I remain grateful for their disabusing me of some of its particulars.

       Three scenes are particularly fixed in my memory as talismans of the political-academic High Sixties. The first is eerily tranquil. We have invited Ralph Ellison to preside over an informal writing seminar and to deliver a public lecture. His fee is high, but our speakers' budget is fat. When he arrives in Buffalo, however, the campus is in a volatile mood, on the verge of another political rumble. Mr. Ellison chats amiably with a contingent of my apprentice writers that afternoon, but it is decided (not by him) that his evening appearance had better be canceled. A veteran of the Old Left who has little admiration for the New, our visitor is understood to be hawkish on Vietnam; it is feared, not without reason, that his celebrated presence in a well-filled auditorium will be a red flag, so to speak, to militant black students in particular, who might seize the occasion for a demonstration that will once more bring armed force upon the university. Four or five of us, therefore, at great expense to the State of New York, spend a quiet evening with our visitor at the nearby apartment of Lionel Abel, another Old Leftist and friend of Ellison's from early Partisan Review days. The dinner conversation, as the campus rumbles, is of Jean-Paul Sartre, of Herman Melville, of old times on the Partisan Review. I have been warned that one is not supposed to ask our guest of honor how his very-long-awaited successor to The Invisible Man is coming along, but I forget and ask. "Okay," I believe he answers. And he does in fact, if I am not mistaken, speak favorably of preventive bombing -- I cannot recall exactly of whom, or apropos of what. Literary critics, maybe.

       In Scene Two, at the turn of the decade, the campus is semi-struck again; 400 riot police and National Guardsmen surround it on a pleasant spring morning with tear-gas grenades at the ready. But we are all seasoned hands at this sort of thing now, and as in a city long under siege we carry on as normally as possible. I am sitting with Leslie Fiedler and others on a Ph.D. oral examination committee and have arranged for my youngest child, then about sixteen, to meet me for lunch afterward. The examination goes badly: The candidate, himself a product of the times, has written a programmatically ahistorical dissertation we've come to call Groovy American Fiction From Last Semester; its perspective sweeps as far back as the day Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to dope. We all like the young man personally, but none of us is quite responsible for him; his original doctoral committee have dispersed to other universities or are on leave. He has no particular wish to be an academic anyhow; what he really wants to do is make movies. He cannot answer many of our routine literary-historical questions satisfactorily. To encourage him, I invite him to discourse upon the history of the idea that history is unimportant. Alas, he has no idea that that idea has a history.

       At examination's end, he waits in the corridor while we confer. Only half joking, we propose a new degree, the Terminal Ph.D.: We will give him the doctorate if he will swear a solemn oath never to profess literature. We adjourn. My then-longhaired son, in the hallway now with the candidate, casually reports that the shit hit the fan just as he was crossing campus: Some demonstratorial last straw has provoked the firing of those gas grenades. Sure enough, the stuff is now all around us; my first whiff of it, and I have no idea what to do. Nor am I alone in my ignorance: Suddenly students and teachers find their roles reversed. While I worry about our maybe getting truncheoned by indiscriminating, fed-up cops, veteran graduate students sniff the air as connoisseurs sniff wine and say things like "Peppergas. Berkeley. Sixty-seven." The fellow lately floundering under our mild examination is now all knowledgeable assurance: If we get gassed, we are not to rub our eyes, but bathe them in the drinking fountain. If push comes to shove, double up on the floor to protect gut, kidneys, and testicles; clasp head in hands to protect ears and skull. My son knows these things, too, though he hasn't been through them; he's cool as a cucumber. As it turns out, we don't get really gassed, much less kicked and clubbed. Lunch ensues; life, including academic life, goes on. But I do not forget my feeling of helplessness and that dramatic peripeteia.

       By Scene Three, the 1960s have worn into the 1970s like a too-long movie. Everybody knows the jig is up in Vietnam, but we are bombing the bejesus out of Cambodia anyhow. I fly in from my monthly off-campus reading to find Home base once again astir with a combined antiwar demonstration and literary vaudeville show. Allen Ginsberg is onstage; also Leslie Fiedler, George Plimpton, and many another, including the composer and then-conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Lukas Foss. But the poet Walter Lowenfels ("We are all poets, really") has preceded them, and the idea has caught on that virtuoso performance is a variety of fascism. Ginsberg himself is disrupted, in mid-act, by a tom-tom-beating commune called Up Against the Wall You Motherfuckers. He is denounced as a media sellout and fascist virtuoso. We are all poets, really; what right has any one of us to stand up there being talented and famous while the rest of us sit passively in audience? One pictures Ginsberg aging visibly before the microphones. The Motherfuckers will not stop for him and his Tibetan finger-cymbals; they will not stop for Fiedler, who had been among the first to prophesy that America was changing from a whiskey culture into a drug culture. They will of course not stop for the likes of Lukas Foss, a bona fide virtuoso performer, not to mention the urbane Mr. Plimpton.

       Only Archie Shepp -- a black jazz saxophonist from New York City lately appointed Professor of Music at SUNY/Buffalo and in residence between gigs -- can deal with them. I had reservations about Shepp's appointment to the faculty, much as I respected his musical prowess. Artists who accept academic appointments should be dedicated to teaching and to the university's general enterprise as well as being considerable artists; students had complained that Shepp's professoring was a rip-off: that he was cynically ad-libbing his class meetings and taunting his white students with the hopelessness of their ever understanding the black art of jazz. Whatever the justice or injustice of these complaints (Shepp was not long on the faculty), the man earned his keep that night. A crowd who would have pilloried Ralph Ellison -- unless he nailed them with a preemptive strike -- did not dare disrupt a lean and street-looking black jazzman: Snapping his fingers and improvising scat vocals over the rhythm of the tom-toms as Lukas Foss worked out a chord progression on the celeste (!), Shepp soon had the Motherfuckers and then the whole hall clapping along.

       Freeze frame and fade -- to the Yom Kippur War of '73, the Arab oil embargo, another decade, another world.

       Well. We are all poets, really; otherwise we couldn't understand one another at all, much less enjoy poetry. But if we are all poets really, I'd really rather read or listen to some of us more than to some others of us. While our government was doing its thing in southeast Asia and we teachers and students were doing ours on campus, one poet-friend of mine was doing something different, which I wrote about in 1972 for Norman Cousins's short-lived World magazine.

       In the Odyssey, speaking of the ten-year Greek expedition against Troy by which almost nobody on either side gained more than he lost, and most lost everything, Homer casually remarks that wars are fought so that poets will have something to sing about. The remark is ironic: Homer isn't saying that his or anyone's poetry justifies the Trojan War, any more than the flood of antiwar verse turned out by our poets in the past ten years justifies our government's war against the Vietnamese. It's just a poet's way of saying that all the official justifications are likely to be delusions or lies; that there's no real justification at all for destroying those people and their country, for example, and in the process leading moderate Americans to emotional treason: the positive hope that the Pentagon and the White House will lose their wretched war.

       When poets address an abomination almost too enormous to imagine, they're likely to focus not on the spectacular features of it, but on some relative detail, to bring the larger horror Home. So W. S. Merwin, in a poem written a dozen years ago about the threat of thermonuclear war, doesn't speak of the incineration of millions of people, great libraries and museums of art, cities drenched in history and beauty. He talks instead of innocent things atomized quite by the way: migrating birds, delicate deer, wildflowers. In that same spirit, a major effort is being made by a friend of mine, himself a poet, to save one small and delicate thing from the general destruction of Vietnamese civilization.

       The young man's name is John Balaban; he studied fiction-writing with me at Penn State some years ago and poetry-writing with Robert Lowell at Harvard. But instead of merely writing anguished poems about Vietnam with his right hand while pursuing a literary career with his left, John Balaban has made three separate rescue trips, each about a year long, to the country itself.

       The first two times, under the auspices of the Committee of Responsibility, it was children that he and his co-workers rescued: specifically, children burned so badly by American napalm that only high-tech American hospital care could aid them. Balaban's work kept him close enough to the action to get him wounded in the 1969 Tet offensive, and close enough to the people to learn not only the Vietnamese language but also something of the country's literary life and history, in particular its extraordinarily rich and complex tradition of oral poetry.

       Like Chinese, but even more so than Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language: that is, the same word, pronounced at various pitches, may take on various meanings, perhaps quite unrelated to one another. This is what gives some Asiatic languages their peculiar sound in occidental ears; it also gives the poets, as well as the ordinary speakers of those languages, a whole extra dimension of verbal associations to work and play with, in addition to the puns and wordplays that speakers of every language regularly make use of. For this reason, oral poetry -- poetry composed to be performed out loud, for the ear -- has always played a much more prominent role in Vietnamese cultural life, Mr. Balaban informs me, than it plays in Russian or American cultural life, even in the age of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Allen Ginsberg. And it's an art practiced not only by the bright young poets of Saigon and Hué and Hanoi, but also on the folk level, by illiterate farmers in the Mekong Delta and Montagnard peasant women, who perform from memory traditional poems of great age and wit, and of a complexity that one can only call oriental.

       In English, for example, we have a number of "palindromic" words -- words like Madam or deified, which read the same backwards as forwards -- and a few very short palindrome sentences, such as Madam, I'm Adam, or Able was I ere I saw Elba; we even have a few palindromic verses, unrhymed and bordering on nonsense, the longest of which (that I know of) is only two short lines:

       Dog as a devil deified,

       Diefied lived as a God*

* Since writing this in 1972 I have seen much longer (and proportionately more tortured) English language palindromes in The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, among other places. A reader of this article even sent me a photocopied typescript of a 50-page novella of his authoring, perfectly palindromic letter for letter, and almost perfectly unintelligible.

       Contrast this with one of several amazing specimens of Vietnamese oral poetry that John Balaban came across between burned children: a sort of bilingual syllabic palindrome, strictly metrical, which reads frontwards as a poem in Chinese, and backwards -- tonalities and all -- as a poem in demotic Vietnamese, both of them perfectly coherent! Or another, a "children's" palindrome (word for word, not letter for letter) eighteen lines long!

       But of course, like everything else in South Vietnam, from rain forests to family relationships, this splendid oral poetic tradition is rapidly disappearing, depending as it does on "live" performers in both senses of the word. And so my young poet-friend's third and current year in Vietnam, which he has just concluded and rather narrowly survived, has been a rescue mission of a different sort: Armed with a tape recorder, a diplomat's tact, a poet's sensibility, and a hero's courage, John Balaban has gone into the rice paddies and the literary cafés, the hill villages and university halls of South Vietnam, has sought out and won the trust of such oral poets as he could reach, and has preserved on tape at least some fragments of this fine and shattered art, which we may hope he will publish with appropriate commentary.*

* He did. See Ca Dao Viet Nam: A Bilingual Anthology of Vietnamese Folk Poetry (Greensboro, NC: Unicorn Press, 1980), from which I borrowed heavily for the Vietnamese-poetry passages of my 1982 novel Sabbatical: A Romance.

       As with engravings of the passenger pigeon or photographs of the great American Indian chiefs, one must be grateful that an artist got there in time to preserve the image, even though he couldn't save the subject. John Balaban's poetical rescue work absolves us of nothing, any more than the rescue of those burned children does -- but thank heaven he did it.

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