Miraculously, I’ve somehow managed to spend much of my weekend on the book, thinking less about current controversies —including super-burning issues like this week’s Rand study documenting this country’s ongoing betrayal of new veterans — than about those of 1830: how long slavery should last, and what to do about the pesky presence of the original inhabitants of this continent. And I found a surprising new veteran character for the book: Davy Crockett, emblazoned in popular culture with a rifle and a coonskin cap, who killed many Indians in Andrew Jackson’s first wars.

To my surprised delight, I found that Crockett, then a Congressman from Tennessee, stood up to Jackson years later, when the then-president asked for formal endorsement of his policy of moving all Indians across the MIssissippi:

Soon after the commencement of [my] second term, [Jackson’s] famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill was brought forward, and I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself. They said this was a favorite measure of the president,and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might; that I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any other man in the whole creation I had been elected by a majority of three thousand five hundred and eighty-five votes, and I believed they were honest men, and wouldn’t want me to vote for any unjust motion, to please Jackson or any one else; at any rate, I was of age, and was determined to trust them. I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.

Crockett’s faith in his voters may have been misplaced; he was soon returned to civilian life, a fate he’d foreseen from the beginning: “ I know’d well enough,though, that if I didn’t ” hurra ” for [the President’s] name, the hue and cry was to be raised against me, and I was to be sacrificed, if possible.”

While Crockett didn’t then join fellow veterans Noah Worcester and Wiliam Ladd in their American Peace Society, instead taking the opposite stance and dying fighting for slavery at the Alamo, his vote against removal still counts for something. I’m still working to tease out how much, in this alchemists’ brew of dissent that I’m tracking. But I wonder how many deserters from subsequent wars traded stories about the frontiersman who stood up to a president.

By the way, before some random historian finds this and slams me: I know Andrew Jackson didn’t come up with the idea of removal. Sweet old Tom Jefferson had conceived of such tactics fifteen years earlier, should his chosen strategy of creating a red/maroon Generation Debt fail:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and the influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. . . . They will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.

In other words, Jefferson provided the ideology, Jackson the means, and reckless Western governments an incomplete Final Solution.

Thinking about all this, the poetry of white people pouring away their life savings at Indian-owned casinos comes clearer; I should probably mind less my parents going to Foxwoods in formerly Pequot Connecticut, or Mohegan Sun farther east. Though I understand the reluctance of William Penn’s city to want to allow a similar payback on their soil.

It took me a few months’ grieving to get over the fact that I’d never have the chance to learn directly from E. L. Doctorow, at least not as an MFA student. His work, which I came to rather late, still teaches by example, if only to show how poetry can sit quietly on the page, without intruding.

So when I came across a battered copy of his acclaimed historical fantasia Ragtime, the 1975 book so many of my colleagues at LAGCC used as the spine of entire composition classes, I thought: now’s the time. And like many readers before me, I first ate it up with a spoon, laughing and gaping as people I long knew in other contexts —Houdini, Emma Goldman, and Stanford White (who designed the late lamented Pennsylvania Station) — turned up as full-throated characters. I thought of Tony Kushner’s Ethel when I read of Emma, too – I want to ask him if he did.

And I was jealous, as always, of the ability of fiction writers to create composites, make up dialogue, and weave events whose plots match their themes. Of course, turns out he was jealous himself, as he told the New York Times in 2005: it was 1974, the world was abuzz with New Journalism, and “My feeling was ‘if they want facts, I’ll give ’em facts like they’ve never had before.’ ”

Now, I’m reading the book again, and wondering if there are lessons I can draw from it without crossing over into making shit up (as he acknowledges having done again in The March) or even crossing the line into “creative nonfiction,” a la John Edgar Wideman or Terry Tempest Williams (both of whom my admiration threatens to cross that borderline into worship).

But I’m looking at a few things Doctorow does, and wondering if I can echo them. First, he summarizes a period by accumulations of detail like these, doubtless swiped from someone’s memory:

Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meetings halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the bedroom door.

Might there be some use for paragraphs like that, especially when there are so few scenes I can paint? Or is each of those sentences so steeped in what the Foucalt crowd calls “subjectivity” that I lose my authority?Second, at first Doctorow ends each chapter with a scene that hints at the themes of the one to come, which may at first seem unrelated but then opens up similar subject matter with new complexity. I’m not sure if that’s possible in Ain’t Marching, but the idea holds me.

Third, there’s this small rant about a war made by chicken hawk Woodrow Wilson that I can’t emulate, but makes me think about how better to offer poetic glimpses of other figures:

Teddy Roosevelt accused Wilson of finding war abhorrent. He thought Wilson had the prim renunciatory mouth of someone who had eaten fish with bones in it. But the new President was giving the Marines practice by having them land at Vera Cruz. He was giving the army practice by sending it across the border to chase Pancho Villa. He wore rimless glasses and held moral views. When the Great War came he would wage it with the fury of the affronted. Neither Theodore Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was to die in a dogfight over France, nor the old Bull Moose himself would survive Wilson’s abhorrence of war.

More as I keep re-reading. The book reminds me that I am as determined to hold onto the book’s intense, novelistic style as I am to strive for scholarly rigor and loyalty to facts. The dance may leave me with even more vertigo than usual.

“To this moment, I dream about America.”As the last line of “Betrayed,” George Packer’s acclaimed 2007 New Yorker article about Iraqis working for Americans in Iraq, that sentence was moving and near-elegiac. But as Waleed Zulaiter speaks that line on the stage of the Culture Project, ending Packer’s play BETRAYED, the pain in his voice reaches an audience already in tears.

I’d hoped to bring Captain Montalvan with me to the preview on Sunday, since like Packer he carries memories of Iraqi allies that he feels were betrayed by incompetence and greed. When he told me he was ill, I felt as though I were bearing witness for both of us.

And most of the play was fantastic. I loved all the composite characters: Adnan, a slim bearded Sunni at first galvanized by the overthrow of Saddam, who quotes a British existentialist as he calls himself “a non-belonger,” and Laith, a Kurdish Shiite who learned English by listening to American TV, is played by Sevan Greene with humor, pathos and constant motion — beginning with his entrance, when he arrives at Adnan’s apartment glad that he hasn’t been killed by the militias pursuing him. And I cried at the death of Aadya Bedi’s Intisar, a slender young woman who refuses to wear a hijab (Muslim headscarf) despite militia threats. Before then, she’d stolen my heart by telling her newly-in-Iraq supervisor, Foreign Service officer Bill Prescott (played by Mike Doyle) that one of her goals in life is to bicycle down the streets of Baghdad. “And perhaps someday I will!”

Director Pippin Parker, using very simple sets, clearly evokes the few places he needs: Adnan’s living room, Baghdad checkpoints and side streets, and most of all the simple table and chairs that establish the Green Zone and the U.S. embassy, where the three are hired as translators. Told by one of the two American protagonists, a security officer played by Jeremy Beck, that “anyone coming from the Red Zone must be considered suspect,” Intisar responds simply. “You mean Iraq.”

For the next two hours, we see all three working steadily, living increasingly double lives as Iraq grows ever more sectarian and violent and neither the embassy or the U. S. military (embodied by Beck in two different characters, each a combination of boisterous energy and explosive anger) seem interested in protecting them. We also watch Prescott’s transformation from naïf to grieving parent, limned masterfully by Doyle — from someone who can say with a smirk, “You can’t say everyone’s against you, our poll numbers say 45 percent still favor the occupation!” to a rebel against what he calls the “mental blast-walls” surrounding American conceptions of Iraq. When the play’s narrative returns the moment of the opening, with Laith fearing for his life and asking Adnan for the ultimate sacrifice, the audience can only pray that the latter’s cell phone will ring, with long-distance news that his friend will be spared.

The play is as unflinching as all good journalism, describing hard realities and charging that officials’ reluctance to be seen as “losing” a war has left many good people stranded, dead, imperiled. And as theatre, as a glimpse of interior life during wartime, it works better, perhaps, than it has a right to.
“It all looks very familiar,” said one audience member beside me, a native of Lebanon.

I do wonder, though, at one of the script changes that happened as Packer’s 20,000-word article was being turned (as he wrote last week) “from journalism to theatre.” Now, all characters use the term “Al-Qaeda” when referring to Sunni militias. While it may have helped simplify the narrative, especially when competing names of Shiite militias are already crowding the dialogue with unfamiliarity, that very simplicity felt more political than narrative, given that most observers have attributed only a minor percentage of crimes in Iraq even to Al Qaeda’s homegrown Iraqi offshoot, Al Qaeda in Mesopatamia. Did they do it to blunt charges that the play (which takes no actual stand on the war itself) is anti-patriotic? Haven’t we moved, as a country, past the point where such charge hold any water?

—

A few reading this may already have noticed that I took this post down Monday, at the producers’ request, until opening night. Now the Times review is in, just as a print version of my own (less personal than the one here) hits the streets.

And I just deleted some tedious. Livejournal-style notes on why I haven’t been updating here: if you want to know what I was up to, check the relevant weeks of Chelsea Now or ask yourself what Edgar Allen Poe, William Apess and William Lloyd Garrison have in common. I thought I’d be through with the 19th century by now, on this draft,  but instead have only about 3000 tossed-aside words and too many research materials to show for it.

So if I decide, like those from halfway around the world, that the new year starts now, it means that I have to discover somehow a new means of concentrating on this maddening story. On writing it and on immersing myself in the events as they unfold, whether it’s Winter Soldier, ongoing debates about veterans and PTSD, or the end/middle game of this particular war. 

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a poem by a writer I have always mildly detested, even though I’ve taught his work — written the year he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private:

 SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

THY soul shall find itself alone ‘
Mid dark thoughts of the gray tomb-stone—
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
The night—tho’ clear—shall frown—
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given—
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

 Time to revisit the dude, for me – as I am having to do with this old soldier, whose response to having been a prisoner of war was perhaps not unlike that of one of our leading Republican presidential candidates.

Most of us have no idea how much military lawyers do, every day, to keep the government’s current policies from barbecuing the Constitution.

See today’s News Feed, or just go here: now, if our current administration prevails, they’ll suffer for it.