The Origin of Arlen

"Perhaps few authors are wholly original as far as their plots are concerned," wrote the novelist Patrick O'Brian in his author's note to The Far Side of the World. "[I]ndeed Shakespeare seems to have invented almost nothing, while Chaucer borrowed from both the living and the dead. And to come down to a somewhat different plane, the present writer is even more derivative, since for these books he has in general kept most doggedly to record actions, nourishing his fancy with log-books, dispatches, letters, memoirs, and contemporary reports."

I claim no less originality for Victory Ruins.

Take a look at the picture above. That face, that thousand-yard stare out into come what may. That really stuck with me.

That is a picture of Arlon Leroy Adams of Company F, 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division, staring out of his foxhole across the fields of Bardenburg, Germany. Adams was a decorated Private First Class, with Bronze and Silver Stars, the latter awarded for destroying tanks. He survived many of the major battles of the division and the Western Front, but was killed February 24, 1945 in the amphibious assault across the Roer River.

When I first saw that face, I knew it was the face of a veteran. A man who had, as they used to say, "seen the elephant." To me, he epitomized the dogface, the lowly infantryman who, even today, wins the wars.

That tough, distant, enduring spirit I wanted to incorporate into my protagonist, Arlen Breckenridge. But I also wanted to use his name as well. It had a ring to it, one from a different time. I altered the spelling slightly, to "Arlen" instead of "Arlon." I knew little about the origin of the name, but it felt right, and didn't think anything else about it.

Later, I realized most people's association with the name Arlen was the politician Arlen Specter (whose long career, interestingly enough, started by creating the "single bullet theory" for the Warren Commission). As Arlen was not a common name now, I decided I had to ground its origin more firmly and hopefully distance my Arlen somewhat from Arlen the deep stater.

The book took endless forms to reach what it is now, but one of the themes that I realized after many drafts was consistent throughout was honoring the sacrifice of others. So it seemed natural that I would have Wade name his son after a close comrade of his own war, the Great War. Some cursory research showed me that there were lot of Arlens in the Midwest. Since Arlon Adams was from Michigan, I thought it a fit, for two men from two very different regions, but bonded by war and now by a name. Later, I found that there are other theories about the origin of the name Arlen: Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, even Gaelic. Perhaps that is why our Arlen Breckenridge is so surprised when  Wade tells him he is named after his Minnesota comrade. Maybe he had always thought such a round name from the hills and hollers was just one his father had picked because it sounded good, sounded typical amongst plain Southern folk like him. To know that maybe it was for some fair-haired Scandinavian type from the Minnesota lakes was surely a surprise for him.

Arlen is very alive to me, but so too is Arlon Adams. I don't know anything of him beyond what you can find on the Internet, but I am grateful for what he has given me, let alone my country.

I am also indebted to Warren Watson at oldhickory30th.com for freely offering all his research that led to the discovery of this photo and so much else on the 30th Infantry Division. It is a wealth of knowledge and a true labor of love. I haven't talked to him in a number of years, but I hope he is still well.

What Is A Scotland For?

I knew I would write a post describing the significance of the Scottish independence referendum, but it is a very different one from what I expected to be writing a few weeks ago.  For then I was headed to Scotland, where the Yes campaign for independence was coming from behind with great momentum.  But now you know how it turned out.

There were many mixed emotions the morning after, undoubtedly fueled by elated premature celebratory drinking and a late night at bars watching the poll returns, followed by a while on George Square while the young Tartan Army types went ballistic with their football chants and mosh pit.  I look back at my notebook at what already seems like years ago and am fascinated by the black mood that the announcement produced.  Yet as the rest of September 19 rolled along, as the future shape of things was already becoming apparent, and I exchanged views with Scots on the matter, many of the following thoughts began to take shape.  Now, at home again, I can give them the perspective they deserve, though perhaps a little divorced from the rush and vigor of the time and place that was Scotland on its decision day.

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The Scots have, to appropriate the words of the writer Allen Tate, "a concrete and very unsatisfactory history."  This is their curse and strength as a people.  They know who they are, they know where they come from and how they got to where they are.  They know their shortcomings and their strengths, and they know what they want and what they must do but that the ultimate power in attaining that is not theirs.  This makes them a complex but noble people.  For they have looked at themselves and can say, "Warts and all, this is who we are."  That is a refreshing trait compared to their southern neighbors, who exhibit the baffled, reflexive confusion, followed by outrage and revenge, that characterizes almost every dominant section within a country or union.  The Scots are painfully self-aware; the electors of David Cameron and Nigel Farage are aware only of others.

So now the Scots have a new paradigm in their unsatisfactory history.  For more than half of their country voted to remain subservient to London.  For all the blaring of "Scotland the Brave" and thumping the chest shouting "Whae's like us?" when the chips were down, Scots voted not to be Scotland but to be North Britain.  They basically said, "We're proud to be Scottish, but not if it involves any pain or inconvenience."

Can you say that's Scotland?  If we're using democracy as a yardstick, which we moderns are wont to do, then yes.  55% of Scots said so.  And I think they expected to say to the other 45% who voted Yes, "All right, you lost.  Time to roll up your saltires, go home, and get back to business as usual." 

Maybe the No voters didn't want to define Scotland in such a way; maybe they resented being forced to make the choice.  But they made it all the same and there are consequences for that, like every decision.  They've said, "We were free to go, but we're not sure who 'we' are."

But the Yes voters were sure.  They put their vote where their heart was.  And they've been hurt in the heart by the result, and have responded predictably.   Right now they are out joining the SNP, the Scottish Greens and Scottish Socialist Party.  They are organizing rallies, gathering supplies for food banks, and thinking about the future.  They are planning a new, expanded vision for their groups and platforms like Common Weal, National Collective, Radical Independence Campaign, Wings Over Scotland, or Bella Caledonia.  They are looking to create new, independent media sources to present a more balanced (more Scottish?) view on current events to the Scottish public.  They refuse give up and press on, still in full-on campaign mode.

Who then is taking the more active role in defining Scotland?  Those who voted once and made sure, through their own loyalty, naivete, fear, or complacency the tentacles of the British state remained firmly suctioned to every part of Scottish society?  That majority?  Or is it the minority, who are out trying to make happen what is not within their control?  If it is the former, then we have the case that there is no more Scotland.  The modern world has triumphed, where the relationship that truly matters is the state and the atomized individual, where the state says, "I love you more than anything in the world, but if you ever try to leave me, I'll destroy you and everything you care for."

If it is the latter, though, then there is still a Scotland, but in a new way.  It is a Scotland that is not defined by the historical borders of the country.  It is a Scotland where fewer people than most believe that Scots should do things for themselves, in their own way.  The Yes vote was 45% but only three out of thirty-two councils went for Yes.  The Yes voters are scattered geographically across the land -- they are not concentrated in one region of Scotland, where they can separate themselves from the No-voting rest of the country if they chose.  This is a great disadvantage, on the face of it, but perhaps in the long run, it is a blessing.  For it keeps the angry and disenchanted from breaking away from those who see differently from them.  It prevents there from being, in a geopolitical sense, two Scotlands.  The case of North Korea and South Korea is an example of this: two states, where each has embraced an ideology that they believe is best for the Korean people.  What they hold dearest divides them.

But there are two Scotlands at the moment.  Those for whom the campaign still lives on, and those who are returning to their lives, perhaps uncaring about the result, perhaps slipping back into their old cynicism about politics after the Cameron-Miliband-Clegg "Vow" turned out to be a complete fabrication.  What remains to be seen is whether there will be reconciliation or triumphalism.  If there is reconciliation between Yes and No, then some sort of new iteration of Scottish identity may emerge.  If there is triumphalism, then one of the two narratives will become the dominant one.  And it is entirely possible, despite its minority position, that the Yes campaign will write the history.  It has reason to, because it must convince future generations (even if can't convince No voters now) that it was right.  But even if they are successful in that effort, what fact lurks is that the Yes campaign had to protect an idea of Scotland against the will of most Scots.  It would thus be a minority view foisted on the rest by the will of the more committed.

What then is a Scotland for?  Is it for what the people want, even if they don't want it as its own distinct thing, a separate and independent nation?  Or is it for itself, built upon history and traditions of self-rule and those who would protect and re-articulate those traditions?  How can we call for democracy on the one hand and appeal to the idea of a nation on the other when they are not used in concert?  Is the fact that only a minority of Scots wanted independence an indication that, for most, countries are now merely images bought, sold, and displayed by the rulers?  Is the rage of the Yes minority an indication that the nation does not actually function behind the scenes like it is purported to by every face the state presents to the public?

The fact that we must ask these questions demonstrates that we have come to a strange time in the idea of a nation.  Not the nation-state, not the Westphalian creation that puts an all-encompassing centralization and homogenization at its core.  Rather, it is the nation as a collection of people who have common experience; who have governed and been governed by each other; who influenced and were influenced by each other; who make something which is complex and nuanced, but not relative.  It has a word -- in this case, Scotland or Scots or Scottish -- so it is real, it is a thing, distinct from others.  Going into the Scottish independence referendum, I thought the moment would demonstrate the fact that people have instincts and loyalties to something older and more immediate than the abstractions of the modern state.  But I can see now that I was wrong.  This was no rebellion of the anti-modern.  The relationship of the state, which merely uses the idea of nation or people or identity as a image to cloak itself, to the individuals it rules is the dominant one in our world.  It holds the allegiance, or the fear, of most people, and makes the idea of democracy obsolete because of the codependency it fosters.

So on the one hand the state has trumped any of our attempts at recalling shared experience, memory, and community as a basis for creating (or restoring) polities that better serve the people who live in them.  Yet on the other hand it is plain that large political units in the developed world are increasingly unsustainable.  They centralize not only political power but also economic power and suck dry the hinterlands and the periphery.  What cannot be sustained will not be; empires and mighty unions eventually crumble or disintegrate.  So Scotland will have its chance again at independence, at self-rule.  When it comes, Scotland may want it, or perhaps not.  Whatever the case, Scotland will have to contend with its concrete and unsatisfactory history.  It will have to decide what it is, why it did what it did, make peace with that, and move ahead.  It will have to reconsider what Scotland is, and it will do so, I am sure.  Yet the country cannot ever escape the fact that, given the clear chance after 300 years, it voted against being itself on its own terms.  The Bannockburn glory, the "bought and sold for English gold" myth of Burns' lament, it all must be reconsidered in that light. 

Scotland will one day be a new nation.  But it will not be the same nation, just as it is not now.  That is refreshing for what it can achieve and how it will make itself in its own vision.  And yet it is also sad for what it leaves behind as a consequence of its own decisions, imperfect as they may be.

“I have said: ‘My native land should be to me
As a root to a tree. If a man’s labour fills no want there
His deeds are doomed and his music mute.
This Scotland is not Scotland.’

Like my comrade Mayakovsky
’I want my native country to understand me.
And if it doesn’t, I will bear this too;
I will pass sideways over my country
Like a sidelong rain passes.’

This Scotland is not Scotland
But an outsize football pitch
Filled with nothing
But an insensate animal itch.”

— Hugh MacDiarmid

Walking Ground

I walked ground with my father, in rain and heat, in Pennsylvania last week.  The ground could be called many things, most probably “hallowed” by those who care to bandy about such terms.  To us, it was more personal than that, more personal than some sacralized description worn out by repetition.  It was about our family, and its place in a bloody, muddy, confusing past.

Those moments we walked ground were 150 years to the day that my great-great-great grandfather led his regiment in an attack that would unfold into the Battle of Gettysburg.  We are fortunate that we have a clear picture of what he went through that first day: he wrote memoirs in his later years and there is an excellent work on his regiment's experience of the war.  To study him, the man, and his path through the Civil War is to gain a complex picture of a sliver of American history.  The Colonel was no firebrand.  He came from Moravian stock, pacifist Germans who believed in pious, communal living.  His father broke from the vocation given to him by the town fathers and started a successful mercantile store, and even sent his son on a business trip to New York City the year before the War.  The family tone, therefore, sounds like the classic mid-nineteenth century Whig: lawful commerce and profit as the bedrock of society, and may nothing ever disturb it.  Yet when war broke out, and North Carolina reluctantly went to fight the Union rather than supply troops to invade its fellow states, he joined the volunteers.  Why? He was no secessionist in principle ---- he declared that he felt the people's rights were secure under the Constitution.  Yet he also said his duty lay with his state.

The nuances of the Colonel's motives are lost to time.  But it is clear that this man does not fit neatly into the preconceived (and ever-narrowing) categories that we are told today define men's motivations, and especially those of Southerners, in fighting the Civil War.  There is no doubt that when men step onto a battlefield, they are motivated by a sense of getting home or never letting down their fellow soldiers ---- that is the impetus for all competent soldiers in combat.  But that does not explain why men volunteer to fight in the first place. It does not explain why my ancestor, nor poor farmers, blacksmiths, and clerks -- many from parts of North Carolina with small farms, bad roads, and few slaves, all of whom had everything to lose and nothing to gain -- would go off to fight for a principle as abstract as the institution of slavery, the narrative that is fed to us.  And if their experiences individually and as a unit, as a living, breathing cohesion of men, are that complex, then how much more complicated is the war itself, not to mention its roots?

But only the simple version of the battle, and the war, exists in the modern mind.  The park rangers I listened to spoke with great authority about the battle in what were actually only the most general terms of the action.  Unwittingly or not, they helped create the image of the battle in the visitor's mind that resembles the battlefield map ---- units in neat, mass ranks, filled with generic soldiers, led by a commander whose name becomes synonymous with either brilliance or ineptitude.  Units charge or retreat, commanders lead or die, and the battle progresses to a new phase, and now step right this way, ladies and gentlemen, for our next stop on the tour.

The physicality of the Gettysburg battlefield makes this even more acute. Everywhere are granite monuments and brass placards, denoting the left flank of such-and-such regiment and the death of the heroic John Reynolds.  They are convenient markers for the placement of units, but serve to reflect the space back upon the visitor.  Tourists take a picture of the monument, then hand the camera to a bystander and have their picture taken next to it.  And then they move on to the next one.  They found the spot where this famous unit made its stand, recognized it, found it interesting, and now can move on.  But did they look at or walk the surrounding ground?  Did they imagine what it would have looked like without the memorials, paved roads, and minivans? And how did that physical space compare to the recollections of those who actually fought?  I know that the Colonel's regiment turned the flank of a New York regiment.  But what did that look like?  And did they achieve surprise because they made their wide, flanking maneuver in high, thick grass?  Or is it as another source states, that his regiment was hiding and waiting in the grass for the New Yorkers to arrive, and not advancing?  My father and I sat for a long time on the battlefield trying to piece all this together.  But first and foremost in our minds was the thought that, whatever the movements might have been and how they might appear to us on the ground today, they were for the sake of killing.  Americans killing Americans. That was the purpose of it all.

But it is hard, so hard, to conceive of that.  You cannot do it without information, and lots of it, in all its confusing, often contradictory forms.  And to simplify that information is to annihilate any relation of that very real past to the present in which we live and which we know is complicated.  We lose imagination and thus we lose realization.

Persisting, then, through all the approved descriptions and graven images and stone idols of the Gettysburg park, is the celebration of The Good War.  The blood was a little less red, the cries for water or mothers from the wounded a little less shrill.  It can be painless for us as a nation because it is a painted as a holy cause ---- the Gettysburg Address is Lincoln's Sermon on the Mount and his exclusive rendering of the definition of the conflict's meaning is his Beatitudes.  As a people we are absorbed by the deceptive grandeur, and we lose sight of that age's complexity and the true human scale of what transpired, the waste, the death, the tragedy for the whole country.

And the conflict will forever continue to be justified: for the progressives, it was the seed of the civil rights movement, despite the facts; for the right-wingers, it was the chance for industrial capitalism to rule the whole country at its whim.  Southern resistance to despotism is discounted, and Northern resistance to the excesses of its own government is not considered relevant.  They are all side shows to the story of the Good War.

Most visitors at Gettysburg probably believed with little questioning most of the tenets of that story.  Yet something still brought them there. Whether it was the scraggly, lanky man in dirty Carhartts and a ratty Ole Miss shirt, or a barrel-chested, pasty-skinned Midwesterner in his labor union hat, the common folk were there.  They were there because someone that belonged to their family, the commoners who do the dying in our wars, had been at Gettysburg.  Maybe they celebrated because they believed their ancestor had fought the good fight and won.  Maybe they were overcome with melancholy for what was dared and failed, as my father and I were.  In any case, we were all there, together in honor, but still divided, or deluded, by what the actions of those men meant.

On the third day, my father and I walked in a grouping of people from Seminary Ridge to Cemetery Ridge, following the path that Davis' brigade had taken in the final Southern assault.  Walking that ground, you descend into a depression, unable to see your opponent. Then you rise up to one and then a second crest, when the objective finally comes into view.  Only then they were silhouetted by their position on the crest, making perfect targets.  My great-great-great grandfather's regiment has the horrible honor of having the most men fall farthest to the front of the Confederate line.  They came within eight or nine yards of the Union troops behind the rock wall, but did not cross it.

When the commemorative Pickett's Charge march was over, our overzealous park ranger riled up the members of our group and led them in a mock charge over the rock wall.  I did not go.  Those men did not make it and I would not dazzle myself with any wishful imagining.  We are not here to project our fantasies onto the past.  If we do, those hopes will remain only fantasies.  What remains to us is to understand what went awry, what led Americans to slaughter Americans for four long years, and correct our understanding.  If our nation has become what we sense, what we know is not itself, then it is up to us to break down the myths that perpetuate that invidious redefinition.  It is not up to us to change the past ---- it is our duty to act in its light now, without its error.