 William Blake, "Jacob's Ladder" I began "Why Don't We Do Right?" sometime in 2022, for by the end of the year I thought it good enough to consider submitting for publication. It reached its present form in the summer of 2023, but I have continued to make small changes since then. It is not, as some readers may conclude, a response to the events of October 7 of last year.
The poem treats three situations—a writer in occupied France who, despite the pangs of conscience, writes antisemitic works to give him the freedom to pursue his sexual adventures; the celebrated French composer, Olivier Messiaen, who during Occupation took over a prestigious post in the Conservatoire de Paris after a Jew was ousted; and Billy Wilder, the Austrian born screen writer who fled Austria to escape the Nazis: he represents all those who fled, hid, or suffered to save their souls in the Nazi era. As the speaker—a high school teacher—tells his students, our choices in the end may not be much better. We must step into the fire laid for us. The poem is in the form of the teacher’s lecture at the end of the school year in May 1968. In my youth, world and American history classes rarely got beyond World War 2. When I graduated in 1970, only twenty-five years had passed since the end of the war, many veterans were alive and occupied prominent public and corporate positions, and the war loomed large in popular consciousness. The teacher, Mr. Jones, is rather more interested in the juxtapositions and dark meanings of history than in communicating with his students. There was a lot to ponder at the time. May 1968 was the month of the uprising in France; a delayed effect was the resignation of De Gaulle the following year. It was also the month that peace talks began between North Vietnam and the US. Neither of those events are reflected in the poems, but these are: it was just five years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, and the month before Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in LA (here, I give the teacher a bit of prophetic power). A key term in the poem is the slang word mahaha. It could mean “nonsense” (a meaning noted in the 30’s; a variation was mahoula) or “silly talk,” a meaning from 1947. Currently it means a laugh by someone planning evil deeds, like bwahaha in cartoons. I hope the poem reflects all three meanings. Why Don’t We Do Right? American History Class, May 1968 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?—Jeremiah 8:9 1941!—a hole in history—a year in which all the visible gods had abandoned us, in which god was really dead or gone back into his non-revealedness.--Emanuel Levinas Today, class, the Second World War continues with us at peace: Whirlaway wins the Preakness; the Giants start wearing plastic batting helmets. The Einsatzgruppen are cleaning and loading weapons. The self-selected wise define the world, from Abram to Zapruder, but a gunsel grumbles, “Your mixed-up talk is giving me a headache; it’s mahaha.” He settles the argument by shooting up the globe to make it move. His slugs shatter Memphis and LA. Where’s Jeremiah when you need him? [A hand shoots up.] Your mixed-up talk is giving us a headache! What does mahaha mean? Let’s see how it’s used. [Another hand.] Teach, we’re so confused. This isn’t in the book. Congratulations! You’re getting the point. Like love and chickenpox, history comes at us hard, off-script, and when it’s done the world’s been rearranged. So what was and was not mahaha in that year, some say of grace, 41? At four of a summer morning, the joyful noising of the birds, the mockingbird’s improvisations are not mahaha; they are antonyms of nonsense, the reaching for light and grace in jubilating song: now you know what isn’t it. Mr. Jones, will this be on the test? But class, this is mahaha: in October, a French raciste de plume visits Munich on Goebbels’ invitation. Walking the streets, he sees a mustached man in black serge and a little hat. He looks like a sacristan, but on his chest an emblem has been stitched, two and a half inches wide, a yellow star. The writer follows the little man down the street, but only a little way, till he comes to himself: I’m not the same as that little man! Oh, he looks vulnerable and anxious, but he carries the diseases of Moscow and Wall Street. Our clever writer buys in to antisemitic mahaha, scribbles Le Péril Juif to purchase the freedom to write unmolested his sexual adventures with a Nazi poet, a Wehrmacht Sonderführer. Class, we are like him. Like which one, Teach? Pop quiz: Which one are we—victim, victimizer, collaborator? Explain in complete sentences. The writer’s full of himself, and self is mahaha. He should have gone the way of dispossession, become the great soul paraded in his journal: o his frisson of pity for the little man facing extermination: how exquisitely it sharpens cruelty! It makes one feel clean and jubilant. It certifies the superiority of the Übermensch. [Most of the children doze off, a few cry.] Why are we studying this beast? To help us cage or kill our own mahaha beasts. Here’s an instructive case: a composer in Stalag VIII recalls the angry Panzers rolling across his France. He will become famous, but in his myth certain inaccuracies will arise, for his is not “a concentration camp,” the instruments that play his great Quatuor are not “decrepit,” his work of composing and performing is assisted by his German imprisoners. Released, he will become professor of harmony, a post from which a Jew has been ousted. And if he does not know this? In evil times, to prosper is to be complicit. To serve truth and save their souls, some choose to suffer, flee, or hide, like Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and Voegelin: heroes, whatever their flaws. Dear class, your choices may not be much better. Mr. Jones, will we be tested on this? Consider Billy Wilder, the writer who fled Austria for Paris, then the US. In the week of Pearl Harbor, his Ball of Fire lit up screens smoking with the Arizona. The actors in his comedy—Homolka and Sakall, who escaped the Nazis, Kinskey who fled the Reds and the Whites—remind us of the divinely light-footed worlds we lost where ballerinas giggled up and down iron staircases, whirling round and round Jacob’s ladder wearing tights and smelling of rice powder on nude shoulders. As Spade says to Wonderly, it’s not always easy to know what to do—not easy to improvise righteous song while history’s demons chase the angels weeping down the iron staircase. Not easy in our republic of lies to do justly, walk unself- deceived, speak uprightly. Teach, we’re lost and sad and don’t know why. I thought we won the war. So let’s watch Ball of Fire and laugh: “The mouse is the dish. We’ll be stepping, me and this smooch. I mean, the dish, I mean, the mouse.” Let’s leap into the fire laid for us and make a joyful noise unto the Lord. NOTES: The poem relies heavily on Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s slang-filled screenplay for Ball of Fire and on François Dufay, Le voyage d’automne. Other sources include Kansas Joe McCoy (title); the screenplay for Casablanca by Julius Epstein, Philip Epstein, and Howard Koch; the notes of Olivier Messiaen for his Quatuor pour la fin du temps: John Huston’s screenplay for The Maltese Falcon; Psalm 100.
Posted 6 July 2024
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