Italian Statues

Henry sat under the stone buttocks of the young man.

“There is an irony, I admit, in that I was running away from history - in search of history.”

Serious and a little stout, legs crossed, hands compressed as he sat in the garden chair.  Waistcoat ochre.  The lady, listening attentively, smiling politely.

“I knew it was not for me.  One heard from classmates of the horror of it all.  The deaths, the injuries, men herded together.  Here one can reflect upon historic bloodshed without losing one’s composure.”

Sunlight dappled the courtyard.  The vines changed colour.  The youth held up his hand.

His hearers heard it all.

The grinning skull, teeming with maggots.  A man gaping in a bloody shirt.  Genitals smashed by a metal slug.  Hospitals screaming with the smell of gangrene.  Guts torn by shrapnel.  The stumps of amputated men.

Jaws shot away.

“Besides I have never much cared for the Negro.  Understandable, perhaps, to fight for Greece - or at any rate the idea of Greece - the Carbonari, perhaps, or Bolivar - but to go to war for Jim Crow?  Only my compatriots could choose so ungainly an object to save.”

The lady nodded.

“Booker T. Washington does not read my books and I do not read his.

“Of course I count myself a Republican of some sort, if only to keep the Democrats out, but really it means nothing to me.

“I love to count the emperors’ heads and think about their fates.  So much more interesting than contemplating the governors of Massachusetts.”

“My people are just ghosts but they do fill a room.  I wait for them and listen at the mirror and they allow themselves to be described at any length.”

The water bubbled in the fountain.

“In any case, nothing came out of the war by way of literature.  How could such a thing be written down?  Crane went for sensation but he got everything second-hand.  As for the actual soldiers, their idea of telling the story is, ‘First there was a battle at such a place then three days later at such another place -’ until they have covered every patch of dust in the Chickamauga campaign.

“Really, too ghastly!”

His voice a little English.

“Civilization is a process and the great house is its site,” he returned, “Life takes place there, measured in relationships among the better sort.  The rest is just delivering coal and bringing in groceries.  That may be unfair but there it is: life’s little tragedy is vastest in terms of scale.”

The god made a graceful gesture and held the pose.

“You might have found matter in the war,” said one of the men, “to write about, I mean.”

“No,” said Henry, “Homer has said it all.  What remains is simply the grim chronicle of wounds.  I might have died and that would not have helped my writing - or been put into a bath-chair before my time, which I would have found unutterably depressing.”

“But your vision!  Surely!”

“Precisely.  If I had wanted to write about the war I would have dreamed it but I have nothing to add concerning the ranks of blue.”

“Do you believe war is no longer glorious?” asked Adler, “is that your point?”

“It can be glorious, certainly those of my acquaintance who watched from atop the bluff with telescopes reported the sight of men advancing in the field was altogether bucking.  We know now however a little better than before how inglorious glory can be.”

A timeless confidence in his plunging voice.  That and a china-blue Italian sky overhead like a lid on his talk.

“One Harvard friend of mine came back dismembered, minus an arm.  I found that most distressing.  Others did not return at all.  Bereavement cannot be general, it makes no sense.

“War, I am afraid, is inherently vulgar and growing more so.”

“But the uniforms!  Men of the best families serving as officers!  That is what makes life worth living.  We cannot survive shut up in a picture gallery!”

“Ah, the gallery!  Of course the masters could transform a massacre into a tableau.  I would have to compete with photography and that is something I will not do.”

The gun sounded for four o’clock across the bay.

“Time, I think, to go in.”  He struggled to his feet.  “May I?”

14/15 October 2003

© Roger Howe 2008