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.

What do you want the U.S. and the U.S. President to be like 20 years from now?

 

What do you want the U.S. and the U.S. President to be like 20 years from now?

Americans often vote for President on how we’re feeling that day (not even, say, two or three months ago, often enough). One thing I’ve seen though is how long a Presidency shapes the future U.S. and future U.S. Presidents, an influence that can easily last 20 years or more. The social and economic issues will change; war and global issues will change; but the tone you hear now is a tone you’ll still be hearing 10 and maybe 20 years from now.

Carter influenced the Clinton Presidency (Southern Democrat); Reagan influenced Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, even Obama with neoliberal economic globalism; Clinton influenced the political centrism of Bush 2, Obama, and Biden; Bush 2’s legacy of lying openly regarding Iraq and Afghanistan clearly influenced the all-lies-all-the-time Trump assault on democracy and freedom; Obama has obviously shaped what we see in Biden and in the current candidate Kamala Harris, and Biden has (obviously) influenced Harris too.

 So: 20 more years of contempt for truth and democracy, of racism and sexism and homophobia and hatred for anyone who isn’t a rich white man or a wife who serves him? Or 20 more years of the tone that Harris presents: respect for others, mutual aid, and a belief in opportunity for all, not just those who have historically owned and run the U.S?

And that’s one big reason why, however the country and the world and the crises we see are going to change, I’ll be voting for Harris and Walz. I want to see what’s going to come after them. I don’t want to face endlessly a Trump-style contempt for human rights and democracy and basic human dignity and respect.

Some Brief Reflections on The Collected Poems of Anselm Hollo

 

Well, I’ve read all of these poems now (the last one is on page 1048), over the seven months since I first had the book.

So. I don’t think anyone is going to call Anselm Hollo (1934-2013) the greatest American poet of the 20th century. Surely he’s the most important Finnish American poet, whatever the competition might be. He’s not going to be called the most extreme poet, the most outrageous, the most experimental, the most challenging, the darkest, the most troubling or desperate, the most dense or high-flying, the most obscure, the most filled with pressure that can be barely articulated, the most culturally incisive, the one whose despair is unmatched. He’s not the most original, as his sense of line remains closely connected to Ted Berrigan, not the most musical although his lines are often amazingly musical. He’s probably not the most ironic, although he’s close here because he’s certainly ironic. He’s probably not the most learned although he sure knew plenty. He doesn’t stand on the extreme outside edge of anywhere, calling us into the wilderness.

What he might just be, if such a thing can even be considered, is the most well-adjusted American poet of the 20th century. Maybe he’s the most ready to live with the challenges of each day and with others in a way that remains open, curious, involved, interested, eager for dialogue. Does anybody care anymore, at this stage of our all-knowing, all-orchestrated human world, about a poet who’s excited and fascinated at being in the world without being motivated by huge complaints against it, whatever huge complaints are inevitable for him and anybody else? Is it possible to care about poetry that seems motivated by enjoying and engaging the possibilities of living, to the point of keeping enthusiasm for the whole fact of it, although never losing sight of things that have gone wrong?

The poems never feel ambitious except to the extent that they consistently deflect ambition. They seem aware that a reputation for greatness turns too often into a game of who can outmaneuver the other poor suckers who happen to be more involved in other parts of life. It adds up to a kind of profound anti-ambition.

And there he might have an edge. A poet who is more anti-ambitious in his ambitions than most other poets who have thrown more than a thousand pages of poetry at the many walls and down the many dead-ends of contemporary life. A poet who finds more that’s worthwhile in living than many other writers who are laboring hard, very hard, to get somewhere.

But as he surely knew, comparisons are odious. And while challenges are good, devoting one’s life to being better than other human beings at something is surely not the most impressive, or even original, goal. So what would be the value in being more anti-ambitious than anybody else either? It’s much interesting to start noticing what’s around you and instead of saying important things at it, try to make your writing part of it.

The Alabaster Hand (1949) by A.N.L. Munby

 

M.R. James remains the greatest writer of the classic British ghost story. He also influenced a whole group of writers in what is often called the Jamesian tradition. Except for those by James himself, I haven’t read many better short stories in this tradition than those by A.N.L. Munby in his collection The Alabaster Hand (1949). Like many ghost stories in the Jamesian tradition, these stories are about England’s bad history. It won’t stay dead and keeps revealing its ghosts, with unpleasant consequences for the present.

As the brief foreword makes clear, all the stories were written while Munby was a prisoner of war in a German POW camp. Several of them first appeared in a magazine produced in the camp called Touchstone. I imagine that writing about dangers in the history of your own country might help take your mind temporarily off being imprisoned in the dangers of the present in another country.

The stories maintain a high level of quality throughout. A few of the ones that made the most impression on me are “Herodes Redivivus,” “The Alabaster Hand,” “The Topley Place Sale,” “The Tudor Chimney,” “The Negro’s Head” (nearly the only classic British ghost story that deals with racism), “An Encounter In The Mist”  (with one of the more original ghosts in this kind of tale), and “The Lectern.”

Sadly, I can’t recommend the quality of this $15 2023 Incunabula edition. It’s poorly copy-edited, in an obvious rush for whatever small cash grab might be found from reissuing a dusty book of ghost stories. Typos are everywhere, several a page sometimes, although none of them really make the stories less possible to read. But they’re very annoying. Still, this is the only edition of The Alabaster Hand that’s currently easy to get, and I’d rather read these stories in this flawed volume than not at all. They are a very significant piece of the history of British ghost stories.