Part XII
Annotations are below, matched to superscript footnotes in the text
Map of My Country
annotated by John Holmes
XII.
Coming out the front door of my house, east was at my left hand,
North at my back, and south at the end of the street under trees.
To my right was west as I walked down the front steps into the world.– -
There is hardly space under my hand now for more color or contour.
Music runs over the state lines like storm on a weather-map.
Names and the days I remember crowd on famous houses,
Shadow and travel with, spread, echo, and brighten beloved lives.
Home is the compass-star in the nearest lowest corner;
The scale is the distance a voice travels from room to room,
The distance a word moves from page to heart;
It shows memory, a match struck in the kitchen at midnight,
Memory, a green fern opening on the windowsill.⁶²– -
But how shall I measure the distance, and was it a main highway,
From Charles Gott to the desert places? How many years to the mile?
How far is it from home to the fortieth birthday?
The scale said, All roads as wide as this are main highways,
And all roads lead home, or away from home.
How far from the Governor's hand on my hand on the whistle, when men
Chopped ropes that dropped gates at the Charles River Dam,
To the Sunday night I cursed the news of Roy Baxter,
Dead in Australia? How shall the live man tell the dead boy
Home is the compass, and time is the scale to measure by?– -
Dear Roy,
Your letter from Hickam Field, telling me of seeing the movie of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" in California, was good to get. I had forgotten you were in that freshman English class the year I first read it. But you hadn't forgotten. Your signature was a surprise: Lieutenant Roy Baxter. You'd laugh, but I read that letter to my classes last week. You could have signed it Roy Baxter, freshman- Roy Baxter who worked afternoons in the library- Roy Baxter who read aloud to the other pilots on the Pacific transport. Now it is Lieutenant Roy Baxter, killed in action, my first student, a good reader, and a long way from home.
Yours faithfully ⁶³– -
Needing a scale to help me understand
Distances in this land,
I have written on this map in my own hand,
"Decades are measured with the names of friends.
East is an ocean smell when the wind changes.
Age is an old calendar. Peace is a room.
Home is the compass, and the scale is time."– -
I knew a tough sea captain who had good luck.|
He bought the broken old house he had run away from at nineteen;
His money made it comfortable for the ghosts:
His dead sisters enjoyed, he said, the flagstoned gardens.
Henry Thompson took me there, Henry whose road never got him home,
Henry who kept his own, mine, and a thousand secrets,
And crashed them all into a tree one midnight.– -
Needing a north for that story
I have drawn compass, legend, color, scale.
Blue is the glass in one of Charles Connick's windows.
White is a tablecloth at Sunday night supper.
The longest distance I ever traveled
Was from the kitchen to the telephone,
Ten years ago, knowing what the ring meant.
The deepest I ever went down
Was into the night that Johnny, aged three, spent alone,
Bruised, bandaged, drugged, in the hospital after an accident.– -
Some young mothers and fathers know how we clung together awake
All night that night; how quiet the house was in the morning.
That was years after the evening
I first heard her singing
Up ladders and flights and skies
Of many measured voices,
Then her one voice no more,
But the praise to God of the great sounding music
At Bethlehem of the Bach choir in the Mass in B minor.
And how should I know her after that, I, of the listening crowd?
But found her and brought her home.⁶⁴ ⁶⁵ ⁶⁶– -
Measure from the first meal the first day in our first house
To London under the bombs, Greece after the bombs, or France.
Measure the darkness
Of our living room any night in the sixth year, the eighth year,
The last lamp-switch snapped off, the chairs there unseen,
Our hands finding each other's hands, and we go up to bed,-
And the darkness in the dark
Behind bandaged eyes by a wall in Czechoslovakia the same night.
The scale reads no distance here.
The scale says near.– -
All the roads lead home and away from home.
One from this book-walled, print-hung, lamp-lit room
To an English writer's lost burned library, and back.
One from our family Sunday afternoons, all the children,
Food, music, a garden, to a Chinese town, and back; grim.
One from my own voice speaking to my son
To my father's voice to me, thirty years ago, and back.⁶⁷– -
I have come a long way using other men's maps for the turnings.
I have a long way to go. I have drawn the map again,
Spread with the broad colors of life, and words of my own.
I could not say where I am now until I knew where I had been.
Until I found my way here I would not know how to go on.– -
I am in the happiest house since I was a boy;
Big, airy, quiet in the mornings, with trees outside all the windows.
Our furniture is full of stories, the books speak,
The rooms are scarcely empty yet of our friends here yesterday.
I am almost forty. I worry. Sometimes it is very bad.
The planes drone often, like conscience, or fear, overhead,
My son asks what the whistles are for and I tell him trains.⁶⁸
Sometimes I forget to worry. We are all here
Where our planning brought us and our luck and love.
It is enough, I think, at the table; we have enough food.
So we eat the good moments, the meat; we have one another.
Then we remember the starving.– -
What we want in our new house is more news of building,
Of a great love of building houses
For people like us now, and the child later.
What we want is a little more money; not much;
Money enough to rejoice with, and more time.
We want the world, not the moon. The world
Well, the world with sun shining in all rooms
As in ours through flowers on glass window-shelves.– -
What we want is the world making good news.
People like us talk this way, a kind of prayer.– -
We have the first child now, a boy growing.
We have the employer's caution, no warning really.
People like us trust him, he is anxious for many.
But we overhear, we wonder, and what we know
Is a crack showing in the outside house-wall;
Once in a while the wind through it a little.
What we want is to be let alone in our own house
With the child's noise, the day's letters, the door open,
A friend's painting on the wall, and meals, and music.– -
All this can be taken away from people like us.
But why? To us it is ours, to others nothing.
Takers destroy what they take, they never gain.– -
We govern our country kindly, our seven rooms,
Naming our holidays. And who, what neighbors,
Envy or need our books, our flowers, our evenings?
People like us would build in the wilderness, build
If there were two stones on ground to set together.
We never ask who made wilderness, man or God.
People like us hear the world's wars, but think
Beyond. What we want, and always wanted, is peace.– -
-Medford, Mass.
Jan 12, 1954
Postscript
A number of ideas about references, overall plan, conspicuous omissions, and autobiography itself have occurred to me since finishing the annotations, and I now intend to add to this documented study.
As I turn the pages now, not having looked back since I began, I find in the poem the following inventions, i.e., images, allusions, statements that are autobiographically untrue in the sense of not having taken place in my life. I want to discover what sort of things I felt it necessary to insert, and to try to learn, in general and in particular, why I did so.
1. -A game in the schoolroom, naming the big cities right.
-Mere they see in clear air a hundred miles.Here they go to bed early. They fear snow here.
-And plot the changed way I hear men speak in the west,Words in the south slower, and food different.
II. -Nothing specifically autobiographical here, I think, except the slowly gathered envy of the musicians, because their way is wordless; later I felt more strongly the same envy of the painters and the architects.
III. -And nothing here untruthfully inserted, since this section is all based on family history.
IV.-What here is imagined, is imagined; not what I mean by inserted.
62) Long before I came to it I had fixed it in my mind that this concluding section was to be, in terms of autobiography, home, and, in terms of the map, that compass-star and scale always drawn in one corner. Home would show as the place from which one gets direction, and by which one measures. This was an excellent and perhaps inevitable thing; but I talked too much about it. I have never, before or since, had the experience of announcing what I intended to write, and then finding it almost impossible to carry out. It seemed harmless, saying it as simply as I have just stated it, but it took the edge off the invention; there was no surprise left in it for me, and I worked harder and with more anxiety over this part, for this reason, than any of the rest of the poem. It may not have that feeling now to a new reader, and I cannot honestly say that it does to me, re-reading it. But coming to these pages in the book, I am overwhelmed again with the feeling of near-failure and desperate effort I felt in writing it.
63) Here, and elsewhere in this section, there is deliberate carry-over and repetition from earlier sections, perhaps more deliberate than other echoes and repetitions. Here I was summing up, and could make allusions within the poem instead of outside it. But Roy Baxter's death is obviously very new; the first death of any of my students. I had found the Benet story in the Saturday Evening Post the week it came out, and nearly wore the copy out, reading it to all my freshmen. Roy wrote me that he had dropped in at a movie in San Francisco, accidentally hit the movie, remembered my reading it to his class, and hunted, for some books in a second-hand bookstore for ship reading, as a result. That, of course, made the news of his death the more poignant, but I had liked Roy as a student very much, and would in any case have remembered him.
64) Up to this point, the poem is feeling its way, I think now, and this may be because of the trouble I had in beginning to write it at all. There is a sort of insistence in the "Needing a scale" and in the "But how shall I measure," as if I were pushing myself forward, and urging myself to stick to the subject t here, the scale and compass. I note the repetition of the ocean-forest-music device yet again, in the east-age-peace-home lines. I have already identified Henry Thompson, and I cannot quite see why I wanted to drag in the captain, who now seems a distant curiosity. Henry himself meant much to me: Henry took me to call on the captain, at Harwish, Mass., and at the time it was very funny, and very startling, and I associated that visit with Henry's name, and probably used it here to add to the variety, to increase the exotic. A more normal house cannot be imagined, nor a more casual voice than that in which he remarked that his sisters enjoyed it. Ghosts at. noon in the Cape Cod sunshine. The old captain had a most extraordinary subterranean bar, richly stocked, for his guests, he said; he never took a drink.
65) The Connick blue, in his magnificent stained-glass windows is a sort of trade-mark. I had come to know him well, because he loved poetry. He gave some hundred copies of the book, MAP OF MY COUNTRY, the Christmas after it was published; and late and shortly before he died, painted my portrait. I was to have been a pall-bearer at his funeral, but was away. Here again I have made a set of symbols, the blue, then the white of the tablecloth, the distance to the phone, the deep of the night of the accident. No real incident at all is referred to by the telephone. The white of the tablecloth was real enough: the dining-room table under the low-hung colored-glass shade, and cocoa and bread and butter and fruit, Sunday nights. In a short poem I called "The People's Peace," in this volume, I wrote,
"The peace not past our understanding falls
Like light on the old soft white tablecloth
At winter supper warm between four walls,
A thing too simple to be tried as truth,"
and this was before the Map poem, so I was reaching into poems already written for some of my images, but could hardly have failed to use this particular one.
66) Johnny (John Ludlow Holmes) was born March 16, 1936. When he was a few months more than three, he strayed (once is enough) from the house at Billingham Street, and was sitting on a curbstone at a trolley-car stop, leaning over, when an automobile pulling close to the curb and moving slowly because of the trolley stopping, struck him on his left. He was terribly scraped and bruised and cut, and had a slight concussion. I was at my college classes, and it was not until about one o'clock, four hours afterward, that his mother telephoned me, to say he had been taken to the hospital. She wanted to spare me as long as possible, yet to warn me herself, lest someone on the campus tell me; and there was nothing I could do then. I had, in fact, to wait a long hour, and then go out to Arlington Heights and read poetry to a women's club. It was a polite nightmare, and I was afraid each minute that I would hear myself announcing the accident to the ladies. We could not of course go to the hospital, and could not see him for a week, but even then the sight was shocking. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and naturally here it became a measure, and an extreme.
I had first met Sally (Sara Frances Ludlow) in Easton, Pa., in 1932, when I was an English instructor at Lafayette College there. She sang in the Bach choir, and I used to go over to Bethlehem with her to the rehearsals all one winter, and sit in the gallery of the old Moravian Seminary and listen. Then the Bach Festival cane, in the spring, the choir sang in the Lehigh University chapel. But what the crowds heard once then, I had heard over and over again. She played the violin and the viola, a music I have written of in other poems, especially one called "Great Law," after her death in 1947.
67) The next five lines make the turning-point in this section of the poem, with the re-statement of "I have come a long way using other men's maps for the turnings," from Part I, and from here on is the poem that should perhaps have been the closing section complete, the rest omitted. I was only partly conscious, I think, that as I put together the first half of this section XII as published I was again saying that death and pain lie very close to life and happiness, having given all of Part IX to this theme - "Put terrors where no knowledge is." But I had knowledge of the terrors, and it made my good fortune the more sharply happy.
68) This is 11 Edison Avenue, in Medford, near the Tufts campus, and we had just moved here, in the spring of 1942, when I was finishing the poem. Twelve years later the rooms still seem high, being on the second and third floors, and on a hill, and I am still happy with all the vistas, paint, furniture, and inhabitants. The rooms at Billingham Street were very small, and by contrast, and in the spring, this house seemed spacious. The war was with us, though, no matter how hospitable we were; if it was forgotten, the planes reminded us, and the air-raid sirens, and the blackout. This reference to the times, that year, and the others, to London and Greece, and the bombs there, date the poem; yet so far from topically that they, too, are symbols of the knowledge of terrors.