Part VII
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
VII.
The bells rang every hour from the tower in the trees
In the springtime every day. A bell said, Go,
And we went, from gym to Greek to chlorophyll,
To coffee at ten in the morning, back to the Bible,
And met the girls we were in love with, after class.– -
We had been fourteen when the War was over, too young
For that one; then, as it happened, too old for the next.
We were graduated in nineteen-twenty-nine, a year,
We were told at Commencement, great, the greatest,
Opening out like a broad road up the map
From youth to yonder, to heaven, to anywhere. ³⁷, ³⁸– -
We shall never know so much as long as we live
About God or verbs again, or be so in love.
Here it is: bells, books, coffee, evenings in spring.
Here's the night we walked. Streetlights. Leaves in rain.
We made notes. We were very good at making notes
On what the professor thought we thought he said,
And at gazing at him and thinking of something else,
Poems, maybe . . . or maybe last night . . . or something.
Not Sacco and not Vanzetti, in the papers then. ³⁹
We were very important, were very busy, expected
At all the dances, and always seen there dancing.
We spoke our mind in print, in the college weekly,
Definitely against the examination system.– -
The bells rang every hour from the tower in the trees.
What was it going to be like, we had asked ourselves?– -
Everyone reading, we thought. The books! The books!
Not drudgery, but all blown in a new exciting light,
Fiercely, and not indoors, but everywhere,
Walking, working, talking everywhere about new ideas.
(What is God? What is truth? Is there a life after death?
How much margin of freedom, Dr. Givler, Dr. Neal?
Tell us Plato's secret, or why F equals Ma,
Tell us why Shakespeare endured, why the rocks are rich,
Tell us the real meaning of life, and how to live.) ⁴⁰
College is a place where no one reads the papers.
College is a long four years that will never end.
But the secret of civilization was ours to ask for:
A magic: kneel in the classroom, rise, and know all.– -
The thing for the map is the thick crowd of names,
Not of heroes or readers, but names of those who were there,
Assigned to our dormitories by the registrar,
Chosen by upperclassmen to join our clubs,
Beside us in lectures because of the alphabet,
Therefore our friends.
Only the careless and hard,
The gay, the stubborn, the wild self-powered, were worth it,
And most of them never obeyed or heard the bells
In the stone tower, at twenty minutes past the hour. ⁴¹– -
Their hour was midnight, or after, reading aloud,
Talking, eating, listening to Bach and to Beethoven,
Drinking coffee, laughing, talking, reading aloud,
Working their way to France on a freighter, and home,
Crazy and glorious, poor, always poor, and talking.
Maybe the secret of civilization was this, off-campus,
Proving that Dante is best if read in Italian,
And somebody's new album of Brahms' First Symphony;
Witty and careless, with coffee and more music, and midnight.– -
In the morning the President, by special appointment,
Would see the editor, campus figure, and sleepy.
If only he could be told about Brahms, and Italian,
And coffee and civilization and books and no money.
And he could have been told, but I couldn't tell him.
I couldn't tell him, and now I can't tell even myself.
I can't call back what it was I wanted to say.
And what if he'd asked me how I liked the college?– -
It was not what we thought.
Better?
Well, different.
Duller?
No. Different, not what we thought.
Worth it?
Yes, worth it. But not for the reasons they told us.
Then what?– -
For the people. For the professor of chemistry I hated,
Who knew it, and showed me his dearest research, as if
Two artists consulted, so shouldering me toward my art;
For the professor whose B was precious, as some A's were not;
For Tommy, for Peg, for Larry, for Chan, for Duke;
And for the letter-carrier, and the night watchmen.– -
The seeing so many people, and naming them every day.
For the people; the place; the times hung in memory;
Nights on the Chapel steps whispering closely, or not;
The crazy excitement of May in our senior year,-
The last classes, the last everything, the remembering
Supper hours warm and noisy at the fraternity house,
The tired silence when at last the presses were running
Too loud for talk when the college paper was yours
And you knew every word in type in the forms by heart.
O God, you say, that was all good, and it was good.– -
Then they all come in a whirl of mornings and faces,
Too many men and women, a photograph-album world.
Here's the spring night we walked in, after the movies,
Here's Braker Hall, I think this was our junior year.
The book riffles. There's Gene remember Gene Goss he
Played the banjo he died there's Henry remember Henry
Thompson he died look there's what was her name look
Mark's married who's that Jim I saw Jim the other day
He asked for you who's-that-who's-Dave-there's-Joe-
Where's-Joe-he-used-to-be-very-funny-shut-the-book.– -
Shut the book. It's a good book. But a long time ago. ⁴²
37) This college section of the poem was written to take its place in the plan, and the writing anticipated with some pleasure. I knew beforehand that I would use blank verse, because it would be about the place in the poem Where it would be a suitable variation, and it would be necessarily of a length that would require the blank verse to be idiomatic and easy-going, which would suit the subject-matter, too, and would furthermore be in a tone that had become natural to me. What I had not expected was that I could remember very little about the years I had spent at Tufts College, very little, that is, about major events or the courses. "The thing for the map is the thick crowd of names" was the conclusion I came to, and that seems, after all, to be what most memories of college are made of.
38) The book was published in the fall of 1945, and the poem was written at least a year earlier. In 1944, I published a pamphlet called ALONG THE ROW, which contained all the poems I had written about Tufts College, from undergraduate writing on through the Class Poem, and later pieces I had written on request or for some occasion. I added some short prose pieces I had written as editorial fillers for the Tuftonian, and the forty-page book was handsomely illustrated with photographs by Prof. Melville Munro. In this collection of poems I included the college section from "Map of My Country" and for this pamphlet I revised. it somewhat, to the extent that I added some lines, here and there, and some names that would have more meaning to the Tufts audience than they would to the general reader. From here on, as I annotate the poem, the added lines will be indicated by parentheses setting them off. None yet.
39) These names were vague to me; I knew there was talk about them in the Boston papers, and was aware of a puzzled disagreement with my father's harrumphing that the-damned-foreigners-ought-to-be-hung. At that time James Rorty visited the campus, and I met him for the first time. He was Tufts '15 and as editor of the Weekly, and a poet, I had reviewed his book of poems, CHILDREN OF THE SUN. He asked me if there was much liberal spirit among the students, and I said No. He asked me if there had been protest-meetings on the campus about the Sacco-Vanzetti execution, and I said No. "My God!" he said, "where is liberalism, fire and spirit, the rebellious daring, to be expected, if not in the young?" Gently I told him (probably sounding smug) that nothing had happened, and that in college we did not read the newspapers much, if at all. It was true.
40) When I was in Tufts College, Dr. Herbert V. Neal gave a course he called "Theoretical Biology," which was always large, and always stimulating. It could be counted as one of the two required courses in science, and there were no laboratory periods; I took it rather than face Physics. It assumed we had taken the first-year course in botany and biology. Dr. Robert C. Givler, head of the psychology department, in his lectures fought Dr. Neal's ideas about evolution, God, the margin of possible human freedom of choice, and so on, and Dr. Neal, in his lectures , fought Givler's determinism. Those who took the Givler course first flocked into Neal's course ready to mock and disprove, and were won over; it worked the other way, too. Actually the two men were friendly, off the lecture platform, and were quite aware that they had set up an ideal situation for jolting their students into thought. Many were the fervent and defensive papers written; long and loud were the dormitory arguments after midnight. The professors chuckled happily. I wrote a paper on the margin of freedom, for Dr. Neal, intend-ing in the zeal of my ignorance to show him once and for all that human freedom of choice was limitless, or nearly so. My reading for the paper reduced the margin I could believe in to a fraction of one percent, maybe to one and a half percent.
41) None of this has changed much at Tufts, nor is the picture so different from any other small college. Then I was a student, the bell rang at twenty minutes past the hour, and the morning schedule included chapel service at eight. Now only freshmen go to chapel, and it is not a service, and the bell rings on the hour. All the names I used are real names, but that makes no difference, either. A professor at Kansas State University, reviewing the book for the Kansas City Star, wrote me that it seemed to him his own college life, and that as he read he unconsciously substituted other names for buildings, the square, the professors, and friends.
42) What follows was written for the pamphlet, ALONG THE ROW, to explain some of the names and events of the poem. It is dated Nov. 1941, and entitled
FOOTNOTE TO A POEM
It is true that we used to out class, and go with Henry Thompson down to Teele Square for a cup of coffee during the third hour in the morning. Not strongly recommended now. It is true that we went to all the dances, wrote editorials in the Weekly (the same ones they write now) and it is true that we never heard of Sacco and Vanzetti at the time, and that we used to look for a certain face and figure after class, and were graduated in 1929. "The Bells Rang Every Hour" is a section from a very long poem, pretty much autobiographical, but not all written in this meter or manner, which is soon to appear in a book called Map of My Country.
The scene is of course definitely Tufts College, yet we tried to make the elements typical enough and general enough so that it. would be true to others. Most of the names are those of real people. A terrifically colorful essay could be written on the crowd referred to as "the gay, the stubborn, the wild self-powered." College would be a poor place if every year it did not produce such rebels. Though we played both ends against the middle, being of the liberal and the conservative parties, life was good, and, what is better, it seemed good at the time. The president (who didn't specifically fail to be receptive as described) was Dr. John A. Cousens, to whom we were deeply indebted, and without whose quiet care we should never have been able to hear Bach at midnight. He never knew that, we thought. But he was too knowing a man to miss much; maybe he knew, after all. We hope he did.
The professor of chemistry mentioned in the poem was Dr. Durkee. As an undergraduate poet it seemed to us that his department went out of its way to persecute us. We were quite wrong. But the day he sent for us we thought wildly of the six lab experiments we hadn't done, and thought for sure we were sunk. Dr. Durkee took us into his private lab and showed us the experiments he was carrying on to achieve a synthetic marble-like substance. He was never a very eloquent but he made us feel then that our work was important, marble or poetry. His stroke of genius was that he never mentioned our deficient lab work. We made it up.
The letter-carrier was Ole, one and the same , forever and indivisible, and we hope he gets a big monument; but not yet. The night watchman then was not a young man, but he was genial; we'll never forget the midnight we tossed a bottle onto a very respectable faculty lawn, for fun, and the cop said, "Good evening," Just as it hit the snow. We had a charmed life. He died of heart-failure, in uniform and on duty, one night. As for the "presses running," and the "supper hours warm and noisy," we were editor of the Weekly, and we lived at the A. T. O. house. That's the way we felt about it, then. Young Mr. Mergendahl, this year's editor, and his engineer brother, and their sister, Nina, lived next door, end used to come out on their tricycles, and we made friendly overtures by showing them how a tobacco-pouch with a zipper worked. They were charmed, needless to say.
But all this goes to show the hollow uselessness of footnotes. We can't talk this way about Gene Goss or Henry Thompson. Dave is David Leon Hertz: we saw his name on the screen the other night as a scriptwriter for a big movie. We'll remember a long time the day his mother sent him a complete set of Conrad's works, boxed. Dave had been to sea, and had picked up Conrad's books one by one, at sixty cents a copy, and was nearing his goal of a full set. Then the packing-case came. Dave left in his junior year, and now it's Hollywood. This footnote tells less about more than it tells more about less, which is usually true of good footnotes. What we know, we'll wait for future scholars to mis-interpret, and laugh at them.
The form of the alleged poem is blank verse, but very loose, and some of our friends haven't hesitated to call it flat. In contrast with the other sections of the long poem of which it is a part, it suits us. The only thing we worry about is that someone we used to know will think they aren't in the poem. Or that they are.
(Time passes, and footnotes beget footnotes. Dick Mergendahl, the undergraduate engineer in 1941, died of heart-failure, weakened by chronic asthma, and left a wife and small child. Dave Hertz flew his private plane out across the Pacific Ocean and never came back. Dr. Durkee's house is now the Faculty Club. Ole the letter-carrier is long since retired. All the boys who were in uniform at the end of the poem are out of uniform now, fathers, professors, editors; and Dave Wyman is dead.)