The Viet Nam War Days: Tom as Teacher and Activist
p. 75-85
Résumés
Dale Jacobson presents recollections of Thomas McGrath as his teacher, illustrating McGrath’s commitment to activism and political poetry as methods of altering consciousness. He places McGrath’s views on politics and poetry in the context of the sixties upheavals, showing how McGrath, even as he embraced the activism of the sixties, also saw its historical limitations and tried to communicate to students a larger historical context. Jacobson presents McGrath’s teaching on both an intellectual and personal level.
Dale Jacobson se rappelle Thomas McGrath quand ce dernier était son professeur. Ses souvenirs illustrent comment, pour McGrath, son engagement activiste et sa foi dans la poésie politique étaient pour lui un moyen d’infléchir la prise de conscience. Il replace les opinions de McGrath sur la politique et la poésie dans le contexte de l’agitation des années soixante, montrant comment McGrath, alors même qu’il faisait sien l’activisme de ces années, en voyait aussi les limites et entreprenait de présenter aux étudiants un contexte historique plus étendu. Jacobson présente l’enseignement de McGrath sur un plan intellectuel et personnel.
Texte intégral
1The first class I had with Tom met in the evening in the faculty lounge. He sat on a chair at the edge of a long table, while many students simply sat on the carpeted floor. In some strange way his voice seemed to emanate from a cave, as though he spoke out of a place he retreated to when he was just a bit nervous, but the words came with authority and deliberation as he told us we should read everything, we should know everything, and we were in competition with all the great writers who had ever written, and not just in English but in all languages. But if he was nervous, I couldn’t tell if it was because he was meeting a new group of people who expected something from him, or because he knew that what he was saying was important—and he wondered how many of us would understand that importance. As I came to know Tom, I learned that he spoke with great consideration and respect for his message. The role of the poet, after all, was to transmit the message of the Muse and that role required a certain humility. In some way he also seemed to read his own poems as though they weren’t his words at all.
2In this same session, after soliciting thoughts from the class, he then proceeded to demolish a piece I had written which was permeated with the pessimism of T. S. Eliot, whom I had recently discovered. I can’t recall anything of the piece now except that it had a lot of ashes in it, but I do know what he said was justified. He was honest about poetry: there was nothing to be gained by saying a piece of writing was more accomplished than it was. Still, the second half of the teaching occurred during the break. He approached as though we needed to finish a conversation that had been interrupted and offered me a cigarette (smoking in class was common then), then asked if the class had been “too hard” on my poem. When he found that I had difficulty responding out of shyness, he merely talked for a while about how the poem was comprised of “the words that were on the paper” and those could be changed, encouraging me to show more material and come by to see him whenever I wanted to talk. I was struck by his interest. Tom always knew that teaching writing was not merely good criticism, but good encouragement and while he could be uncompromising in the former, he gentled criticism with the latter. Several years later, as we were walking out of another creative writing class in which he had characterized a poem I’d written under the influence of Rilke as “impenetrable,” he went out of his way to ask me what I was trying to accomplish with the piece. He said it was a “huge” poem I was working on and it would likely return later when I could manage it better. Then he asked if I was alright and offered me a full pack of cigarettes. His nature with gifts could be a little like a mother who expressed love by offering food. It was one of many ways he had of providing encouragement.
3These were wild years and it was a good moment to know Tom. Because of the general interest among the young people in the imagination, poetry gained an audience that was wider than its usual academic domain. It was common for college students to carry around books they were reading purely out of their own interest. Literature had taken on a life within the culture, or more accurately, within the counterculture and poetry was influenced by this vitality. A lot was possible in poetry then that the present guardians censor. Poetry was experimenting with rich, metaphorical, imagistic or surreal language and it seemed interested in threatening middle-class mediocrity, mendacity and spiritual emptiness. At least among ourselves as young writers, we thought we were creating a new voice in poetry which was rebellious, relevant, and signaling a new culture.
4Tom was interested in this culture, particularly its rebelliousness, and he encouraged us to trust the spirit within ourselves both by the personal example of his life and by invoking historical illustrations. Any casual reader of Letter to an Imaginary Friend will easily notice the same tactics used in his poetry. But even while he tried to teach us the true nature of the beast we were rebelling against, he had his suspicions about the pseudo-political poetry, which soon disappeared with the end of the Viet Nam War. As early as 1973 he remarked: “And out of so much of this temporary ‘war politics’ rises a terrible spiritual smell which signals to the enemy: ‘I’m not really like this.”1 And in fact, he was right. The dominant poetry returned to the halls of academia where it cloistered itself in preoccupations with how the personal and private world was also political, at most allowing politics from the aloof vantage of the self-aggrandizing nobility of the “poetry of witness” that came in the eighties. In the early eighties one of the most famous (and awarded) poets of St. Paul had apparently already decided even witness was too much, proclaiming on a panel that she thought the silent meditations of contemplative nuns were the greatest political protest. A truly secret weapon. Signs of the changing times, though not quite as Bob Dylan had meant.
5No doubt the American definition of communism as Stalinism, despite the Khrushchev revelations and policies proving that communism was not one fixed Stalinist political view, was useful for divorcing politics from poetry for those who sought an excuse to not confront the class history of their own country. The Communist Party USA’s inability to sufficiently acknowledge the vicious criminal record of Stalinism did not help matters, and eventually, under the pressures of Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize communism in the USSR, helped cause the CPUSA to splinter at its Cleveland Convention in 1991. And yet it seemed to me that the Soviet history, whatever it was or wasn’t, remained essentially irrelevant to politics in my own country since my country’s class history of oppression was hardly the consequence of those who found it difficult to confront Stalinism. How the crimes of Stalin diminished the crimes of capitalism has never been clear to me, even though there are many who continue to make that curious argument. Robert Bly was in fact one of the poets able to see through this obfuscation, noting that America was essentially “projecting” its own repressed failings onto the Soviet Union. While Bly’s psychological analysis was likely true and interesting enough, Tom understood most clearly the class nature of our own history, which had its own roots.
6Perhaps most insidious to political poetry—or simply the spirit of poetry that wanted more range than would eventually be allowed—was the burgeoning arts industry that brought the careerists of poetry, which I have come to call the poetry mafia. In the Midwest a kind of romantic poetry of the land and its frontier mythos grew up that for the most part ignored the real history of the area, as well as the politics of the wider nation and world that contributed to this history. Enraptured within the chaotic and creative energies of the times of the Viet Nam War, when we thought real cultural change was possible, even inevitable, we had no idea how quickly poetry would abandon those energies. Nevertheless, Tom was persistent and indefatigable in promoting revolutionary change against the status quo of the imagination. The national imagination, he claimed, was false, excluding the poor, the oppressed, the minorities, the working class. The romanticized “poetry of place,” by which was meant the nostalgic past without its most gruesome struggles, might take the writer out of the office into nature and the superficial past, but it couldn’t confront the times or the real urgencies of history pressing against the moment. There is no question that Tom thought having a sense of one’s place was important. As he noted: “Every time the poet touches the earth—that is, touches what he knows—he gets strength out of it.” Still, while Tom certainly maintained that “you have to know your own turf and you have to know it well, the security of knowing where you start from,” he also stated that “North Dakota is everywhere, a condition”2 that was defined by the wider political world and its history, which the most regional (parochial, provincial) writers, in talking about “place,” seemed intent upon ignoring, as if homesteading a romanticized enclave, a separate country within the nation. Tom warned that a sense of place without a sense of its real history would only create what he called “local color.” “You can’t understand the past without some politics.”
7Perhaps it was the desperation of the times that saved us from romanticism. There was an urgency during this moment and Tom always acknowledged and appreciated our sometimes naive efforts to change the world, even as he pointed out the limitations of our politics. While he often instructed that it was “better to organize than mourn,” as Joe Hill advised, he also understood the necessity of desperation in intense political times: “Revolutionary consciousness has its beginnings in despair.” He was very accepting of the darkness that inhabited my poetry, though at times he would suggest that perhaps I’d written enough about “the soul turning inward on itself.” We were fighting our own cynicism and the political darkness of our country. As Jim Morrison put it: “The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” On the other side of that warning was the desire of a generation to fully celebrate life: “We want the world and we want it now.” The sixties came like a crack in the door of time, and through that crack emanated a strange brilliant light of potential for a different world, both frightening and elating, that illuminated the corrupt and poisonous oppressions of history, the long-buried discontents in the soul of the nation. It was as though having been exposed to this intense and brief light gave birth to a creative energy in us that only Tom could fully see and nurture. Had he not been there, I have no doubt it would have been lost. Unfortunately most of the work by his best students, not only from Moorhead but also from the West Coast, still remains unknown in the current restrictive climate.
8It became fashionable to view the youth movement as naive idealism verging on the ridiculous, but in its objections to the Viet Nam War and civil oppressions, it was part of a historical process. Even more, many of the slogans of the time are part of an older tradition. As far back as the thirteenth century, the Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon, in contesting the absolute authority of the Church of Rome, decried four modes of ignorance. These were too great a loyalty to authority, too much respect for custom, too great a submission to the righteous mandate of the crowd, and the vain pride of intractability. All of these limitations in thinking interfered with learning. Bacon said, “Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities: look at the world!” The young certainly challenged social customs and traditions and two of the slogans of the time were: “Do your own thing” and “Question authority.” Aside from the focused political issues of civil rights and the Viet Nam War, the whole point of the sixties was an effort to open up new ways of looking at the world.
9Tom took the youth movement, with all its follies, seriously. Life should express itself and in a world that is oppressive, life should rebel. Tom always promoted protest against the status quo, which he saw too much as being without spirit, without enthusiasm, without celebration. But he also had a tremendous ability to remain detached and involved simultaneously. After the murders at Kent State University by the National Guard, when the mask of the State for an instant fell, he walked into our creative writing class and mentioned that it was better to organize than mourn, concluding with the comment, “Well, as the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times.” It wasn’t until later when I learned that the Chinese meant this as a curse that I understood the dialectical wit of the remark. Later on, as some of us students marched to the administration building to demand a campus-wide moratorium on classes in protest to the murders, I was surprised to see him holding the door open for us, the only teacher around. He cautioned, “Be careful, you might get shot.” The realities of history and class conflict were never far beneath the moment, as he reminded us. Later we discovered that the Governor had been in touch with the campus officials, ready to offer the “assistance” of the Guard should it be requested. Thirty years later, Governor Rhodes of Ohio died, not questioning that his action at Kent State was necessary: “It was people who thought something was wrong with America.”
10It was always curious to me that Tom maintained that “the revolution should be fun,” especially as I was locked in my deep seriousness. Again, this comment is illustrative of his dialectical nature. Humor was allowed, in fact, it was part of the celebration, even in times of struggle. More than once he commented that communists he had known were too serious and straitlaced. He at one time advised students to pelt the National Guard with marshmallows as an act of protest. Absurdity could be a weapon. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find any National Guard to pelt so they rained their terrible soft fury down upon the President of the University, who later noted that it was impossible to become indignant.
11It was McGrath who talked me out of enlisting for the Viet Nam War to assist the wounded. While I was deeply opposed to the war, I was also afflicted with a guilt deriving from my academic deferment while others, mostly the poor, were conscripted. As we know, one third of the casualties were black soldiers while black people comprised a little more than one tenth of the US population. I thought that entering the war for the purpose of saving lives would resolve my moral crisis, but Tom, quietly listening behind his desk, pointed out that even in this capacity I would be supporting the war effort with my presence, noting that the military function of a medic was to return soldiers as quickly as possible to combat. He also pointed out that the real battle for ending the war was occurring at home, where one’s presence at demonstrations would be politically useful. He noted further that while it was sometimes useful for a writer to witness a war, he did not believe this war was worth seeing in that way, especially as I would be on the wrong side. It was a brief but crucial conversation for me. He managed to resolve my dilemma and lift the burden of my (too moralistic) class guilt.
12These were years of terrific debates, contention, and exploration. They were a time of justified fear and distrust of the State, at least for men, who were one postage stamp removed from Viet Nam, jail, or exile in Canada, all options that would alter one’s life forever. The Chicago police and FBI, in one of their joint adventures, had murdered Fred Hampton and others in their sleep. Nixon’s no-knock law prevailed, as did other constitutional violations such as surveillance and mail-tampering. People were shot and killed outright by police and drug agents in raids on communal houses. In one of the great historical “Freudian” slips of all time, Mayor Richard Daley, the infamous boss of Chicago, declared that the police were not present “to create disorder but to preserve disorder,” in defense of what an official investigation later called “a police riot” during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The war, which anyone with eyes saw was an imperialist neocolonial effort, was also a domestic war against the civil and constitutional rights of US citizens, primarily the young who were challenging the system on two fronts, the war abroad and puritanical constrictions at home. Jazz had always rebelled against puritanism and rock music continued that spirit but at the same time expressed political rebellion. Implicit in the rejection of puritanism was a threat to the status quo more profound than simply Eros unleashed as hedonism, as the media liked to portray the “sexual revolution,” but an urge long buried in the culture going back to Christ and before: agape; universal communion; love of life; though unburdened of Christian masochism and puritanical guilt, repression and original sin; an assertion of the essential goodness of human nature. These values or attitudes, vaguely articulated in some of the music, were in direct contradiction to an economic system of exploitation. The sixties “idealism,” as it has been called, had no political force and wasn’t formulated in real revolutionary terms, but it existed: at Woodstock in 1969 among the thousands who attended, not one fight broke out, though the second version 30 years later proved the same communal sensibility lacking. All the old mores and values were questioned and new ones were invented and explored—the counterculture was loose and chaotic, a national movement without organization, and so from the point of view of the existing powers, dangerous since it must have seemed absolutely unpredictable. But its idealism was also its weakness, which McGrath saw clearly enough. The movement never looked past the war, its music, its feeling. McGrath kept pointing out to us the larger labor history of the nation, the economic realities, the fact that the banks would not simply volunteer to be socialized in the name of brotherly love.
13He initiated me into political understanding by suggesting historical and political works to read. I recall when he suggested that it would be useful for me to read Marx. He was listing some books when I peremptorily declared that I already knew Marx, thinking as most people do in the United States (including most academics I’ve met) that all a person needs to know to be conversant in Marx are the basic tenets, the concepts of the proletarian and bourgeois classes in conflict and the notion of wealth deriving from labor (as Abraham Lincoln and others also asserted). Kenneth Rexroth in an essay dismissed Marx in a single sentence in such an arbitrary way it is clear he knew next to nothing about him, though his dismissal was certainly in vogue. Americans often reduce complexities to dogma, which is one reason I think Tom used as an epigraph to Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Part III, the statement by Einstein: “Make it as simple as possible—but no simpler! ”3
14When I made my thoughtless remark, Tom didn’t criticize me for it, or sigh in exasperation, or show any sign of displeasure. He looked at me carefully for a moment and asked, “What have you read?” When I tried to defend myself by saying that I “knew” Marxism, he simply asked, in a tone of genuine curiosity with no hint of rebuke, “Why do you say such a thing, Dale, when it’s not so? Why do you say that?” At the time I couldn’t articulate that I lived in a culture that reduces complexities to simplistic absolutes, so I said nothing. Tom proceeded on with his initial instruction as if I hadn’t interrupted him. He was a patient teacher and his purpose wasn’t to prove me wrong but to plant an inquiry like a seed.
15I don’t think Tom paid much attention to the use of psychedelic drugs prevalent during these times. He certainly wasn’t morally opposed to them unless they became personally destructive but he didn’t see them as we did, organic agents or gatekeepers into the psyche, a way of jolting the mind and senses out of the old patterns of seeing the world so that its “spiritual” nature could be revealed. As young explorers (who were unaware of how much had already been explored), we sought an altered perception just as we sought to alter the world, and while Tom certainly didn’t object to altering perception as exploration, since imagination did this all the time anyway, he didn’t see any ultimate value to drug use, even for writing. Tom’s politics were too grounded and pragmatic for the supposed “spiritual” idealism of drug-induced experiences. Still, he didn’t object to psychedelic drug use in itself and might have even considered the experiences “interesting,” though marijuana was the only drug I ever knew him, very occasionally, to indulge at all, usually in a social setting when it was offered. For the sixties and seventies generation, marijuana was essentially a socializing tool, used in part to ameliorate the anxiety of young people alienated from each other, as American society trains them to be, who were suddenly flung together into their own communal culture. It was a kind of social glue and the need for it at all is perhaps indicative of the damage our culture inflicts upon its young.
16I was impressed with how little marijuana seemed to affect Tom, his essential manner remaining unchanged. Perhaps it was his ability to remain involved and detached at the same time. Marijuana usually influences people in one of two ways: they tend to become either very quiet or very loquacious. On one occasion a half-dozen of us were visiting a friend and Tom had come along. This friend got us all extremely stoned, and Tom smoked too. One among us was a young Viet Nam War veteran, who had become very cynical and was often sarcastic. He made a light joke about the way our host had said something, at our host’s expense. He satirized our friend’s manner, and under the influence of marijuana, the satire seemed excessively funny, but initially didn’t rise to ridicule. But the laughter went beyond its initial friendly jest and escalated. As can happen on marijuana, hyperbolizing took on a life of its own like an enormous ship set in its course. Marijuana exaggerated the power of the group and no one wanted to be responsible for changing the subject. I noticed that Tom watched the group for a while as the laughter continued unabated. People continued with the satire of our host and no one was willing to try to stop it. Finally, a shock in the midst of our desperate joviality. Tom interjected: “Why? Are you all stoned?”—harshly emphasizing “stoned” to show us our lack of grace toward our host. The group fell instantly quiet, ashamed and deeply serious, aware that we had been out of control. We felt the ship jolt. No one among us knew how to break the oppressive silence. Tom, undaunted, looked directly at the initiator of the joke and asked him if he had been in Viet Nam. He replied in perhaps the only genuine voice I’d heard from him, a simple yes. It was as if he understood that Tom was acknowledging the source of his cynicism and pain. Tom then proceeded to tell a long story about the Air Force in World War II. He chuckled, though none of us did, when he told how the planes were lost or shot down because the navigators, who were from cities, would get confused. His right hand gestured easily with a cigarette to punctuate a chuckle or a word. Planes kept flying off in all sorts of directions. The Air Force was losing so many planes that it finally decided to use farm kids as navigators, because someone suggested, probably a farm kid, that they would know how to keep a sense of direction. Urban kids didn’t know north from south, there was no moss that grew on the north side of skyscrapers, but on the farm everyone knew where north was and watched time by the position of the sun. We all listened, captivated as much by the story as the fact that Tom seemed indifferent to the power of the group, seemed in fact unaffected by the power of the drug. But more, he had rescued us from our own fear of ourselves and we were grateful. Tom wasn’t about to allow a drug to be more powerful than the most obvious—and necessary—of human powers, within grasp if only we insisted upon it: the capacity to save each other and create the human family, in Christian terms called agape, in Tom’s political and more pragmatic terms called solidarity. There also seemed to be an implicit lesson directed toward the young Viet Nam War veteran: while war was gruesome, it was also possible to detach oneself from the absolute horror of it—to find some distance for the sake of personal survival.
17Tom once described himself to me, with one of his sly smiles and a glint in his eyes as if he were divulging part of a secret, as “an indefatigable teacher.” His main lesson was that we should care for each other. Everything, his politics, his poetry, his conversation, was focused on how we could make that happen. But it required a little courage. In those ancient Greek plays, the chorus sang simply of what had already occurred, what it had witnessed, the voice of refrain. Tom promoted potential in each of us, the courage to step beyond “the mandate of the crowd” and sing our own aria, not merely a refrain of politics as tragedy or grief as determined by history, but to acclaim a reality yet to be invented, the human spirit raised up beyond the limitations of the moment and its restrictive past, a song of our mutual world and light.
Notes de bas de page
Auteur
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Dale Jacobson
University of North Dakota, Grand Forks
Dale Jacobson, poet, essayist, educator, and close friend and protégé of McGrath. His afterword to McGrath’s Letter to An Imaginary Friend (published by Copper Canyon Press); his introduction to McGrath’s final collection of poems, Death Songs; and his scholarly essays on McGrath’s poetry in the North Dakota Quarterly and American Poetry Review uncover major aesthetic, social, and political aspects in McGrath’s work. His latest books are Exile in My Homeland, A Walk by the River, and Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast. He teaches at the University of North Dakota and lives just across the Red River in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, with his wife Therese.
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