Brief Review: Doug Anderson, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, and A Journey of Self-Discovery

 

Doug Anderson’s Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, The Sixties, and A Journey of Self-Discovery (W.W. Norton, 2009) is a fascinating and powerful memoir by someone who has been both a combat medic and a poet. It belongs on the shelves with others of the important soldier-poet memoirs, a small and often overlooked subgenre of war literature that includes books like The Enormous Room by e.e cummings and the several volumes of semi-autobiographical memoirs (something these days often called “autofiction”) by Siegfried Sassoon, whom Anderson talks about in one chapter.

Anderson was a combat medic in Vietnam before becoming a poet. The often terrifying and sad events that take him from becoming one to becoming the other are riveting and hard to forget.

The narrative begins with his difficult childhood and family life and his pre-war experiences in education and as a musician. It continues through his war experiences to his post-war life and struggles with post-traumatic stress and alcoholism. It discusses his long history as an artist: he worked as a musician, an actor, and a playwright before finding his way to poetry. It’s a book that shares the author’s nightmares (real and imagined) vividly with readers, and you can expect to take some of them with you.

It’s also a book about discovering awareness of multiple kinds, political, personal and psychological, and philosophical too, an examination of being as much as of war and of literature. It’s a story of the casualties that pile up during the attempt over many years to survive his and his country’s troubles. It’s the story of his desire to learn wisdom.

Like many important books involving war, Keep Your Head Down shows that violence is not born in war but comes from the people and cultures and values that create each specific war. It is often the behavior and beliefs of those who don’t have to experience war directly which shape the terms on which a given war takes place. The United States is a violent place, daily, and so it’s not surprising that it has often imported its violence across the world.

Memoirs of people who have been both soldiers and poets seems like a fairly small subgenre, although of course many people have become writers significantly because of their war experiences. I can’t claim to know the full breadth of books fitting this subgenre. But Keep Your Head Down is not trying to fit itself to any preconceived genre of writing, small or otherwise, even though the author knows a great deal about literature.

Instead it’s a book that consistently presents and explores the experiences of a man which don’t fit neatly into a book just about war or just about poetry or just about the life of the author or just about any of the particular versions of himself that Anderson has tried to be. It brings all those facets of his life together uniquely, and with startling honesty and believability.

At first I thought that maybe the writing style was going to be of the standard kind found in too many of today’s overly-processed major-publishing-house literary productions. I soon realized that the tautness and understatement of the sentences allowed the details to be the story, that the writing was not going to try to call attention to itself.

Keep Your Head Down is a book about how people are changed by experience, and how experience itself always replaces what we might have hoped life would be. A sense of hauntedness hangs over the book, as the author presents himself both as proud of what he achieved after The Vietnam War nearly destroyed him and saddened by the possibilities that his experiences cut him off from exploring. Certain moments of this story are going to live in my head a long time.

Brief Reviews

My longtime colleague at The George Washington University, where I used to teach, Daniel Gutstein (pictured above) shares with me an interest in writing across genres. He has published poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as work in cross-genre forms as the prose poem. Although his work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and several of his chapbooks have been brilliant surprises, oddly enough Non/Fiction is his first full-length collection. The book veers between short fiction and memoir, and between story and prose poetry, blurring those boundaries as it goes. The pieces explore a variety of locales, including Washington D.C., Florida, and the American west, as well as Israel and elsewhere overseas. The bulk of these pieces focus on a working class milieu, although the stories cross with some frequency into describing characters living a creepily rootless yuppiedom. The book is particularly startling for its array of cultural mixing; in these stories, identity is always in flux, even as some characters rigorously assert its stability. The pieces are full of the unexpected, both in the quirkiness of the characters and in the purposefully torqued, poetic prose. “I’d sat on the stone with Mrs. Kelly, the black landlady who recalled the nervous white boy stepping, bayonet-first, beside the convenience mart. Part of the town bruised, she explained, her grey-black hair combined into a grey-black knot. “ It’s not too much of a stretch to say that in its idiosyncracy and gnarled prose and concern with character and culture, the work here resembles the short fiction of the great Isaac Babel. At times the twisting language even takes on a postmodern opacity. A unique book by a unique writer who’s capable equally of the outrageous and the poignant.



I read it back in early spring, but A Model Year, by Gina Myers, is as good a first book of poems as I’ve come across in awhile and has stayed clearly in my mind. The poems are understated, often memorable, and frequently haunted and melancholy, which may come as a surprise to those who know Myers’ energetic work in social activism and local arts in her troubled state of Michigan. There’s a casual tone these poems that can be associated with the New York School (Myers lived for a time in NYC), but the social environment and individual consciousness on display here has a moodiness that seems more connected to Midwestern financial and emotional dourness, and the poems featured a more denuded landscape than one typically finds in New York School verse. “April snow & no/way to go, no turning/forward, motion lost/flickers across the wind-/shield & is forgotten./No scene waiting/to be seen, no unforgiving/space, empty drawer/& shutters shut.” The book’s final, title piece, “A Model Year,” attempts a more extended sequence, and almost stalls on its carefully crafted restraint, but ultimately works because, like in the rest of these poems, underneath the melancholy is a fierce desire to live a meaningful, socially engaged life.


Two chapbooks by Sandra Simonds, Used White Wife and the self-published Made From Scratch, are fascinating and energetic reads. In UWW, Simonds’ flair for high octane, historically detailed Surrealism takes a flarfy turn for the outrageously comical: “You’re not supposed to fuck your first cousin, expert/ on Reform Era pamphlets,/ or eat an oatmeal-flavored Powerbar on/the toilet. Even my dog, Scruffy-Pie, knows/not to shit in the room/where you sleep or sleep/where you’re not supposed to think of the clitoris.” UWW is hilarious, but also psychological insightful, a rollick through the ages that turns up a lot of hidden cultural embarrassments. Made From Scratch has a few outrageous moments, but seems more personal, historically specific, and sad by turns, and at times its emotional power runs deeper than that in the other chap. Both books feature Simonds’ startlingly rich vocabulary. She’s a writer who is only continuing to grow into the range of what she can do.


Another impressive first full-length collection, Occultations, by David Wolach, is more hardcore avant than the above books. The range in Wolach’s work is first and foremost formal, combining surprising uses of spacing, multiple overlays of text, and visual art, among much else. The book’s first of several extended poem sequence, “transit” is both the most lyrical and the most powerful and direct in the book, dealing with the author’s physical pain but also revealing a social awareness that’s too broad and informed to be solely an exploration of individual body and self, and the poem’s lyricism remains jaggedly unconventional. “What are we to do now/dark drawing its own outline/the wild/ child tapping terror pane/ your lands and grooves/ evidence/ of hallas, your hands their re-appearing/act/ leaves glass behind leaves all possible codes behind/” The later, even more experimental pieces are fascinating as well, and are full of political insight and outrage, as well as a sophisticated understanding of theory and culture. If there’s something occasionally a bit first bookish about Occultations, it may be that at times, Wolach wants to throw everything at once at the reader. The book is full of busy pages, to put it mildly, and the greater minimalism of the final piece, “ book alter (ed),” makes for a crucial contrast that wraps up the work nicely. Still, Wolach takes a lot of necessary risks, and Occultations is a demanding, rewarding book.

discussion continued: the usefulness of genre?

Hey everybody:

Thanks for your helpful and welcoming responses. I’m using this blog a little bit as a way to generate some conversation topics of my own, and I’ll have time for it sometimes and not others, I’m sure. I do like participating on other people’s blogs, but there are sometimes things I want to say that would be out of place elsewhere. I’m not a fan of the people who seize blog comments boxes for their own agendas; if you have an agenda, start your own blog, and if that agenda’s interesting enough, people will probably read it.

Ann, obviously we could talk about how the fiction industry and media have been hung up lately on some very questionable distinctions between memoir and fiction, but that would only be saying what we already know. I do think that both fiction and memoir involve an important “truth test”; we read them partly for what they tell us about the world, the human imagination, etc, and when those things seem consciously falsified, that’s a problem. But deciding where the truth vs. falsity line lies is very tricky; the lie is clearly not in the conscious inventing, which all fiction and memoir does. Nor is the issue really “accurate depictions of the world” since so many inventions of the kind we would now call sci fi or fantasy or all sorts of avant garde and other non-realist literatures have incredible truth telling power. My fiction mixes things that happened with things that didn’t all the time., and I know yours does too. Finally, I’m trying to let my fiction or poetry “call it how I see it,” but that means very different things at different times. I’ll have to think again about it. I wonder where other people see a “truth test” in their own writing.

Small Fry, it’s funny to be in the position of teaching when, on one level, I help students make (tentative) distinctions about genre and then, on advanced levels, I show them all sorts of literature in which those distinctions break down. But like you, I think it’s probably fine, even if sometimes shocking for the students. I guess there are two types here of the pleasure (and the pain) of knowledge; the growth that comes from being able to make successful distinctions, and the growth that comes from realizing that a lot of it really is a house of cards.

FrankenS, what you say is definitely true. You and I usually talk about this in the context of rock and roll, which as you’ve made clear to me numerous times, is different in many ways from literature. Still, yes, genre can be one way of structuring a piece of music or writing–and I’m leaving aside, for now, how completely fuzzy words like “genre” and “form” and “structure” have become, although it’s an issue I’m hoping to return to soon. But I would say this: even the strictest sticklers for genre norms probably still imagine themselves as adding something new to those norms. If not, the artist runs quickly into nostalgic paint-by-numbers (your phrase, I think) copycatting. Funny though: we don’t, in literature, have revival cover artists, people literally doing all Frank O’Hara or Gertrude Stein like some bands do Presley or the Beatles. But I bet that’s just because there’s no money or literary prestige in it.