William H. Gass in his “In Defense of the Book” (Harper’s Magazine, reprinted in Best American Essays of 2000) quotes from an old book he picked up:
What a deale of cold business doth a man mis-spend the better part of his life in! in scattering complements,tendering visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feasts and Playes, making a little winter-love in dark corners.
Gass recommends more reading, more visits to libraries and bookstores to find books, to promote literature, more acquaintance with Joyce, Hegel and others. All this wealth of reading to replace the past-times listed in the old book. In spite of who I am, a lover of books and words, I am more attracted to the phrase “making a little winter-love in dark corners” than to any of the other phrases in that sentence.
“Making a little winter-love in dark corners!” The exclamation point and italics are mine and the sentence is George Saintsbury’s from A History of English Prose Rhythms. The phrase is wonderful. Books promote civilization, William Gass claims, but what is civilization worth if not for those dark corners where we can shelter from the cold of winter and make a little love. Perhaps even read poetry to each other. Kathleen Ely’s essays, set mostly in the winter months of Montana, often remind me of that passage. And we need more of that huddling, love-making, even if Saintsbury is more concerned about the darkness, about the need to huddle away from uncivilized life. We need places and time to cling to each other, to be warm together, to make love, to protect ourselves from so many of the stark realities that remove pleasure from our lives.
A person who hungers, who hides from invading armies, who shakes from fear of disease, can still find a dark corner, a shelter, if only momentarily, from all that and a little winter-love can help warm and light up those corners. Like Gass, I am for more reading of books but I cannot reject dark corners if they are filled with the making of love.
***
Years ago, in a particularly dark corner in the red dusty city of Pleiku, war bursting out all over, I walked a few klicks each week to the local air force library and checked out book after book by Thomas Hardy. When I had a new book from the library, I would turn off the road and sit for a while near the shores of Lake Bien Ho and read. I must have read all the novels and the poetry and these were a great solace in those times. But I did not have my own dark corner, my own place to make a little love and I did not have a woman I truly loved. I suspect I would have enjoyed Vietnam had I been blessed with that second half of the equation.
I do not mean to suggest I was in great danger or that armed soldiers searched for me as I dreamed of making winter-love in the weeks and months before the Tet Offensive of 1968, only that we were caught in larger movements just as Hardy's characters are. The gods know that my friends and I, at least, were among the safest Americans in the whole country. The books helped. Thoreau helped. Poetry helped. Hell, even dark old Thomas Hardy helped. But what would have made it all worthwhile, except of course none of it was really worthwhile, would have been a little warmth in that dark corner of Pleiku. Cold business? Nonsense! Life-affirming business.
I took books with me to Vietnam. Camus’s L’etranger, Sartre’s Les Mouches, Hemingway, Yeats, Frost, Hopkins and others. And I reread them while I was there. I still have a few of those books in my personal library and the edges remain coated with red dust to this day. I keep them because the redness reminds me of Pleiku each time I pick them up. I read most of the books in that little library that, for some reason, contained the complete works of Thomas Hardy; but those books would have been secondary had there been someone like Frederick Henry’s Catharine Barclay. Still, though,that was in another war and, besides, the wench is dead.
I am reminded, I think, of those novels and poems because the deterministic nature of Hardy's work fits so well into my own view of that war and of my being there. You see, I had been teaching for two years in a small high school back in the Big Thicket of Southeast Texas. I quit that job at the end of the school year in 1965 to go to UT-Austin to work on my Ph.D. in English and between my old teaching deferment and my soon-to-be student deferment, my selective service board sent me a classic letter. I could, I know now and suspected then, have successfully fought my being drafted but the currents swirling around me, my indecisiveness about what I really wanted to do when I grew up caught up with me and I went down to the recruiting station and joined up. Sometimes some of us do not do the things we do for any particular reason, only because, well, what the hell, we don't have anything else we really want to do. We let outside forces make decisions for us. That was 1965. Two years later, the year I actually went to Vietnam, I suspect I would have found, as Dick Cheney did, things I would rather have been doing.
Books. Love. War. What a combination!
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