Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 184

November 21, 2019: Local Color Stories: “Under the Lion’s Paw”

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On how a 130-year old story can speak as profoundly to our moment as it did to its own.There are lots of reasons to read authors and texts that we’ve forgotten, including of course aesthetic ones (and audience-related ones: Fanny Fern makes me laugh as hard as any American author ever has, and that’d be enough of a reason to read her even if there weren’t a ton more!). But because of my own interdisciplinary and public scholarly AmericanStudies interests, it’d be fair to say that in this space (as overall) I’ve tended to make the case for recovering and reading such figures and works in one of two ways: because they help us better understand our histories; and/or because they help us engage more successfully with the world around us. Both of those are important individual effects, and any work that achieves either of them is well worth adding to (or keeping in) our collective memories and conversations. But the literary and cultural works that I’d call truly indispensable often manage to achieve both effects at the same time: to offer illumination into their distinct time periods and worlds, while helping provide a bit of light as we seek to navigate through the darknesses of our own. Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw,” published in his 1891 debut collection Main-Travelled Roads, is one such indispensable text. Garland spent most of his long career writing about the upper Midwest region he called “the middle border”; that included a four-volume autobiographical series about the region, but also a number of local color stories and collections focused on Midwestern lives and communities. He published those stories and collections across many decades, and so of course their historical and social contexts evolved dramatically—but in the 1891 setting of “Lion’s Paw,” one key specific context was the era’s conflicts between Populist images of the land and farmers and Gilded Age realities of bankers, mortgages, and profound inequality. Garland’s story dramatizes that conflict potently through his two main characters: Haskins, an itinerant farmer working desperately to carve out a piece of Midwestern farmland for his family’s survival and sustenance; and Butler, a banker who seems to support the Haskins family until (SPOILERS, although you know what’s coming) it is revealed in the story’s explosive climax that he has been doing so simply to raise the value of their land and earn more for himself (at their expense).That fictional yet deeply historical conflict, which unfolds through dialogues around such familiar 21st century issues as mortgages and debt, itself feels as much of 2019 as 1891. But there’s an even deeper way in which Garland’s story illuminates our contemporary moment. There’s a great deal of debate over just how “working class” the support for Donald Trump was and remains (another spoiler alert: it largely wasn’t); but there’s no doubt that as an overarching trend, at least from the Occupy Wall Street protests down to the 2018 midterm elections and the current presidential campaign, working class and populist revolts have been a dominant force in 21st century American society and politics. Yet while political debates and social movements can engage with certain aspects of American identities and experiences, literary and cultural works can, in a complementary but crucial way, help us consider and empathize with others. Garland’s story in particular can help us feel along with Haskins and his family, experience the feeling of being always on the precipice of disaster yet also one break away from stability, experience the feeling of progressing toward a better future (with the help of a community of allies) and seeing it all potentially vanish (through the antagonism of a rigged system). Those effects are perhaps even more necessary in our Second Gilded Age than they were in the first. Last short story tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?

November 20, 2019: Local Color Stories: “The Revolt of Mother”

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On the writer and story that are funny, wise, and anything but narrow.For a long time, American local color writing—and specifically women’s local color writing—and even more specifically New England women’s local color writing—was dismissed by many scholars as narrow and parochial, historically and socially representative but not particularly significant in broader, lasting, literary terms. Over the last few decades, many scholars have pushed back on those ideas, seeking to redefine the writing as “regionalist” rather than local color and to recover and re-read many of the individual authors and works within that tradition. Yet outside of academia, I don’t know that such efforts have led to nearly enough public consciousness of these writers—and if I were to make the case for why they should, I might well start with the very talented New England regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930).Freeman’s prolific career and prodigious talents were certainly recognized in her own era, as she was awarded the 1925 William Dean Howells Medal for distinction in fiction and in the following year became part of the first group of women elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. While she began her career writing children’s stories, and published works in multiple genres, it was her local color short stories for adults, collected in volumes including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Silence and Other Stories (1898), and The Givers (1904), that most established her reputation and these culminating accomplishments. And yet in the half-century after her death those same stories came to many scholars to represent Freeman’s limited scope, interests, and talents, and thus to categorize her as precisely an example of a once hugely successful local color writer whose works now retain only historical or social interest.I could push back on those ideas and make the case for Freeman in any number of ways (as have many of the scholars I mentioned in my first paragraph), but I don’t know that there’s a better way to do so than to ask you to read my favorite Freeman story, “The Revolt of Mother” (1890). “Revolt” has all the hallmarks of New England local color, from its setting on a New England farm to its characters’ dialect voices; like most local fiction more broadly, the story’s tone is mostly light and witty, with surprising character and plot twists leading to an unexpected conclusion. None of those are bad things nor disqualify the work from literary significance, of course—in fact, they make it engaging for readers, a goal of just about any author in any genre. But Freeman’s story is at the same time deeply wise in its portrayals of every member of its focal family, individually, as a community, and in their histories and evolving present and future identities. It reveals a great deal about its particular historical and social setting, about gender and marriage, about parenting and generational change, and about human nature at its most flawed and its most hopeful. In short, it does just about everything great literature and art can do, and does it all well.Next short story tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?

November 19, 2019: Local Color Stories: “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On a far more serious story that both relies upon and challenges stereotypes.No literary movement or genre has a single origin point, of course; and while Twain’s “Jumping Frog” was certainly an early example of American local color writing, the first (late 1860s) publications from Bret Harterepresent another influential early voice in that budding genre. Harte was friends with Twain from their days as a pair of youthful California journalists, and the two writers even co-authored the script for a play (1877’s Ah Sin, although by the time it premiered Harte had largely left the production). But despite that relationship and the similar Western geography of their early lives, careers, and publications, Harte’s version of local color writing was far less consistently humorous than Twain’s, and far more consistently sentimental and sad. Exemplifying this more serious version of local color is Harte’s second published short story, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869), the tragic tale of a group of characters who are exiled from a frontier mining town for perceived crimes and immorality and meet a brutal fate amidst (and because of) the harsh Western landscape.One persistent, if understandable, problem with local color stories is their reliance upon stereotypes, their creation of characters who seem to embody “typical” roles within their particular local worlds (this was especially troubling for Southern local color writing, on which more in Friday’s post). Harte’s portrayal of his frontier mining community certainly suffers from the same shortcoming, as the four titular outcasts are: “John Oakhurst, gambler” (the story’s narrative perspective so slightly more nuanced, yet nonetheless a gambler through and through); two prostitutes, “a young woman familiarly known as ‘The Duchess’; another, who had won the title of ‘Mother Shipton’; and ‘Uncle Billy,’ a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard.” By putting their names in quotation marks Harte seems to indicate his awareness that these are stereotypical identifications and roles; but in many ways the story bears them out, both when characters live up to the stereotypes (Uncle Billy drinks heavily and then robs his fellow outcasts) and when they don’t (the prostitutes are revealed to have hearts of gold, an early example of what would become a very stereotypical character type).Yet if the story’s focal characters embody frontier stereotypes, the overall situation that drives its plot actually challenges the very notion of them. Oakhurst and his compatriots are outcast because of “a change in [the town’s] moral atmosphere since the preceding night, … a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.” It’s not just that the town (Poker Flat) hasn’t practiced such morality in the past—it’s that by expelling a few individuals chosen seemingly at random, the town can pretend to a present morality it in no way possesses (we’re told that those expelling Oakhurst for gambling were at the table with him the night before, for example). Indeed, Harte suggests that it is the casting out—and the far worse punishment of lynching, embodied in the “two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch”—which comprises the true immorality in this place and moment. Those immoral punishments operate by identifying individuals deemed “improper persons”—by, that is, associating them directly with both their own stereotypical identities and the stereotypical (and false) image of a virtuous community. A pretty nuanced and important theme for a local color story, and one of many reasons to keep reading Harte’s text.Next short story tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?

November 18, 2019: Local Color Stories: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”

[On November 18, 1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its original title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on teaching such American texts.]On what frame narratives and narrators help us understand about storytelling and humor.As I noted in this post on Washington Irving’s fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker and his role in how Irving presents short stories like “Rip Van Winkle,” complicated meta-fictions and frame narratives can be found in American literature at least as early as the first decades of the 19thcentury. But it was with the rise of local color writing in the middle of that century that such framing devices and narrators became a fixture in American fiction. While of course you can’t reduce that entire, multi-decade and continent-wide literary movement to any single element, it’s fair to say that one of the most consistent tropes in American local color writing is a framing structure in which an outsider narrator arrives in a particular community, encounters a storyteller therein, and then both listen to and reports for us what that local voice has to say. Sometimes (as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s magisterial The Country of the Pointed Firs ) that narrator remains an important character throughout the text; but often, as in Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” the narrator only appears in the opening and closing frames, ceding the text over to the storytelling voice for the bulk of his pages.In many ways, Twain’s outside narrator and frame structure feel very similar to the typical uses of those consistent local color elements. He is clearly an outsider, or at least a recent arrival, to the story’s local community, “the ancient [and fictional] mining camp of Angel’s”; as he tells us in the opening sentence, introducing both that outsider past and his present relationship to this new community, it is upon the request of “a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East” that the narrator seeks out “good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler.” What the narrator needs from Wheeler is a story, a narrative not just on his request’s ostensible subject—his Eastern friend’s “cherished companion of his boyhood named Leonidas W. Smiley, … who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel’s Camp”—but also one that depicts the specific and distinctive world of this post-Gold Rush frontier mining community. And when he gets from Wheeler a version of that story (if one focused not on Leonidas at all, but rather on the clearly distinct character Jim Smiley), he includes it at the center of his text in an overly meta-fictional way, as “the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph.” That crucial adjective “monotonous” highlights a divergence in Twain’s local color story from many of those published over the next few decades, however. Although Twain’s narrator seems to transcribe Wheeler’s story faithfully, he also calls it (in the same framing paragraph) an “interminable narrative” and “such a queer yarn”; when he returns as our narrator in the brief closing frame, it’s in order to literally run away from Wheeler lest he break into another such tale. These details of “Jumping Frog” are closely tied to Twain’s emerging voice and career as a humorist, one for whom eliciting an audience’s laughter is a primary artistic goal. On a broader level, local color stories could likewise frequently be described as humorous, but with a key and complex follow-up question: who is, ultimately, the butt of the joke? Is it the storyteller, oblivious to his or her silliness (as Simon Wheeler seems to be)? Is it the narrator, subjected to the silliness (as Twain’s narrator also is)? Or is it the reader? Are we laughing, that is, as much at our own gullibility as readers as at the multi-layered humor present in the text in front of us? All questions raised by Twain’s influential framing structure and narrator.Next short story tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?

November 16-17, 2019: Kent Rose’s Guest Post: How I Got to Nelson Algren

[Kent Rose is an acclaimed singer/songwriter whose new album, All That American Night , is out now. He’s also a prolific AmericanStudier, not just through his music but also on Twitter and in conversation with public scholars of all types. I’m very excited to share his thoughts and experiences with a too-often overlooked American author in my latest Guest Post!]
I learned to read before first grade. I looked at comics and the backs of baseball cards and the books of Dr. Seuss. It wasn’t something I practiced. It was one day just there. This caused me to believe that anything I could read, I should read.
I volunteered at the local library children’s department when I was twelve, like my older brother had before me. One day, after shelving, curiosity caused me to wander into the main library. I headed for fiction, starting with A. A title jumped out at me: The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. A baseball book, I figured. Opening the pages I saw “the Captain,” and the “line up” and the “bullpen,” and a character named Frankie Machine whom I pictured as a smooth-fielding light-hitting shortstop.
I lifted the book onto the circulation desk, which I could barely see over, and offered up my library card. The librarian leaned over to see who was checking out the book. She said, “You have to be a little older to read this one.”
I said, “I can read it now,” as she pulled the book away.
Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I knew there was more going on in the world than what was happening around home. I mean, l lived in a dry town, my parents didn’t drink, no neon lights, no wrong side of town, and even though I got hit by a car when four, it was a pretty safe place. We watched shoot-em-up Westerns on our black and white TV, but our gun play was restricted: cap guns were seldom allowed (too dangerous), squirt guns generally not recommended (lead to sibling squabbles), and rarely Tommy Burp guns (noisy, might bother the neighbors).
So, books were my windows into other lives. These seemed like more dangerous yet somehow more attractive lives. The Chicago I read about in Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy , and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door seemed like a city I wished I had experienced. This is, of course, slightly delusional, but speaks to the power of imagination and dreams.
Years later, in my mid-twenties, playing music full time, I read in the newspaper that Nelson Algren was moving to New Jersey, leaving Chicago behind. He was holding an apartment sale where the table on which he had written The Man with the Golden Arm might be available.
My father, a clinical psychologist, had his own kind of crime credibility, having run tests on mass murderer Richard Speck. Knowing my love for Nelson Algren’s work, he suggested we go, and we did.
It wasn’t a fancy place. Most of what had been there had been picked through. Remaining were a few out-of-date magazines he had autographed and one Eddy Arnold record, previously the property of the Chicago Public Library, bearing his signature.
But there, there he was, Nelson Algren, standing in a corner of the room. My father was cool, just said, “hello,” and bought a magazine. Knowing his organizational skills, it probably wound up getting recycled. I stood there speechless.
I didn’t buy anything that day, but carried home a memory and the knowledge that artists are not defined by where they live, but by the work they leave behind.[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on Kent’s post? Other authors or artists to whom you have a personal connection?]

November 15, 2019: Veteran’s Week: Veterans Against the War(s)

[In honor of Veterans’ Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the longstanding veterans’ communities that we hardly ever recognize—and my personal connection to them.Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) has been around for forty-six years, almost exactly as long as the National Organization for Women (NOW). But for one reason or another—perhaps the specificity of its name, perhaps the controversies and critiques that surrounded and still surround the organizaton—VVAW is not, to my mind, generally recognized as a contemporary American activist organization. Instead, VVAW tends to be treated as a part of history, a reflection of the growing 1960s divisions in American culture and society over the Vietnam War and related issues. Those historical questions certainly contributed to the organization’s founding—but just as NOW has existed long past the specific women’s movement issues and debates that prompted its 1966 founding, so too has VVAW extended its efforts and reach well beyond the end of the Vietnam War and its era.Recognizing VVAW’s ongoing presence and activism would be important on its own terms, but it would also help us to better engage with the similar organizations that have become increasingly prevalent in late 20thand early 21st century America. I’m thinking specifically of two very distinct but equally influential groups: Iraq Veterans Against the War, which focused its initial efforts on that particular recent conflict but has gradually broadened its scope, just as VVAW did; and Veterans for Peace, which was founded in 1985 and has opposed militarism and conflict more broadly from the outset. Among the many reasons why these organizations deserve our fuller recognition, I would argue that such awareness would significantly challenge one of our most persistent recent narratives: that each American must choose whether to “support the troops” or oppose war. These anti-war veterans’ organizations reveal that schism as a false dichotomy, one that masks the possibility—the increasingly prominent possibility—that troops themselves can oppose wars.While such anti-war veterans’ organizations seem to be a relatively recent American phenomenon, my own family history indicates that there is nothing new about wartime service producing anti-war sentiments. My paternal grandfather, Arthur Railton, was a World War II veteran and a committed pacifist, and he consistently credited his war experiences as the source of that subsequent and vociferous opposition to war. In the absence of organized anti-war veteran activism in prior generations, it might be easy to develop narratives that would (for example) contrast Greatest Generation vets with Vietnam-era ones—but such contrasts would, as my grandfather proves, be no more necessarily accurate than a purely historical understanding of VVAW. The truth is that anti-war veterans are not a product of any one moment or debate, but rather comprise a longstanding, ongoing, and significant American community.
Crowd-sourced post tomorrow,Ben
PS. So what do you think? Last chance to share texts and contexts for that weekend post!

November 14, 2019: Veteran’s Week: African Americans in World War I

[In honor of Veterans’ Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]On two opposing yet crucially interconnected ways to remember a community of veterans.Thanks in large part to the film Glory (1989), we’ve started to develop a collective sense of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War; thanks to similar cultural texts such as the film Red Tails (2012), we’ve perhaps begun to do the same for the African Americans who served in World War II. But for whatever reason—perhaps it’s as simple as the absence, to date, of a historical film centered on them?—I don’t think we have much of a collective awareness at all of the equally significant community of African American soldiers who served in World War I. Coming half a century after abolition, in the same era as such defining histories as the Great Migration, the lynching epidemic, and the founding of the NAACP, this World War I service is certainly as significant as those other, more famous ones, and deserves far more remembrance in our 21stcentury culture.If we start to engage with the histories of this community, however, another reason for our general amnesia about them becomes clearer: compared to the pretty inspiring Civil War and World War II stories, the history of these World War I soldiers—and of the vets when they returned home—is a strikingly dark and divisive one. Exemplifying those dark histories are the words of the U.S. chief military commander, General John Pershing, who while publicly recognizing African American soldiers privately composed a secret communiqué to white officers instructing them that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands with them, seek to talk to them or to meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly these troops, especially in front of white Americans.” And when they returned to the United States, these veterans found themselves right back in a society where President Wilson had recently segregated the federal government, where The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a towering cultural achievement, where whatever protections their uniforms had afforded them ended as abruptly as did the war—as illustrated horrifically by the year-long racial terrorism that came to be known as the “Red Summer” of 1919.So we can’t better remember these World War I soldiers and veterans without remembering another in the long national series of hypocrisies and horrors directed at African Americans—which of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember them (quite the opposite). But on the other hand, we can also work to push beyond those negatives to remember the deeply inspiring sides to this community’s service, and to consider how they brought those experiences back with them to the post-war nation. In his May 1919 essay “Returning Soldiers,” published as an editorial for his monthly NAACP magazine The Crisis , W.E.B. Du Bois makes the case for thinking of the soldiers in precisely that way; throughout his stirring editorial Du Bois contrasts the cause for which these soldiers have risked their lives for the “fatherland” to which they will soon come home, concludes, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” It’s quite possible to see this era, and this community of veterans, as a vital step toward the Civil Rights Movement—and in any case it’s well worth remembering this inspiring side of their experiences.
Next post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other histories you’d share for the weekend post?

November 13, 2019: Veteran’s Week: “The Red Convertible”

[In honor of Veterans’ Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the powerful story that embodies, but also challenges, one of the most widely understood aspects of veterans’ experiences.Some of the more challenging kinds of topics to AmericanStudy are those for which we already have a pretty good collective understanding—not ones where there are widely shared but inaccurate narratives, but rather ones where we seem, by and large, to get it right. In that case, after all, it would be fair to ask what a public scholar has to add to the conversation. One such collectively shared understanding, it seems to me, has to do with the widespread prevalence of PTSD and similar illnesses and conditions among veterans—we’ve been talking collectively about related questions and issues since at least World War I and “shell shock,” and have since Vietnam become increasingly aware of just how significant an issue this illness comprises for all of our men and women who return home from wartime military service.Just because we’re generally aware of an issue, though, doesn’t mean that we’re fully engaged with its histories and stories, with questions like how it impacts individuals and communities. There are lots of ways to increase that kind of engagement, but I know of few that are more effective than encountering works of art that can humanize these broader historical issues; and thus I can think of few more salient AmericanStudies efforts than highlighting such works of art. When it comes to PTSD and war veterans, I don’t know of any artistic work that more concisely and powerfully captures those histories than Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Red Convertible” (1984, first on its own and then as part of her wonderful short story cycle Love Medicine). Through her depiction of two brothers, one (Henry Lamartine Jr.) a Vietnam vet dealing with PTSD and the other (Lyman Lamartine) narrating both Henry’s story and its effects on his family and community, Erdrich brings veterans’ PTSD home in literal, metaphorical, tragic, and deeply affecting ways.If reading Erdrich’s story thus helps us embody this broader historical issue, it also definitely challenges, or at least complicates, our widely shared understanding of that issue. For one thing, the Lamartine brothers, like most of Erdrich’s characters and Erdrich herself, are part of the Ojibwe Chippewa (Native American) tribe and community, and her story thus forces us to grapple with the hugely disproportianate percentage of Native Americans who have served in our country’s wars (and thus been affected by issues such as PTSD). And as a result, Erdrich’s story also reminds us that PTSD, like any illness and especially any psychological illness, varies widely and crucially depending on a range of other factors, many connected directly to the particular community and environment surrounding the affected person. So a broad understanding of veterans and PTSD, while a good starting point, requires a good deal more engagement and analysis, and Erdrich’s story can help us carry that work forward on multiple levels.
Next post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other texts or images you’d share for the weekend post?

November 12, 2019: Veteran’s Week: Band of Brothers

[In honor of Veterans’ Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]On nostalgia and nuance in one of our best recent representations of war.I’ve written before, in this post on images and representations of World War II, about historian Michael Kammen’s categories of remembrance and commemoration: the former an attempt to capture the past with more accuracy and complexity; the latter a more simplified and celebratory representation of history. Particularly interesting, I’d say, are the cultural texts that seem to include both types, and it’s in that category that I’d put Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)—the film opens with the famous extended D-Day sequence that is absolutely gripping in its realistic depictions of the battle in all its chaos and horror, a section that exemplifies genuine remembrance of such a historic event; but then the film segues into a larger narrative that, while still featuring realistic battle sequences, feels far more driven by various war-film cliches and commemorative ideals.Spielberg’s follow up World War II work, produced along with his film’s star Tom Hanks, was the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers (2001). From its title and famous promotional image on, the miniseries certainly reflects a deeply commemorative perspective on the men of Easy Company and, through them, on World War II soldiers and the Greatest Generation to which they belonged. Like Ryan, the series is unsparing in its depictions of the violence and horrors of war; but outside of one peripheral character, the company’s over-the-top and ultimately unfit-for-battle training officer (played to crazy perfection by David Schwimmer), its portrayals of the soldiers are overtly and consistently celebratory. And one of the series’ most unique and effective touches—the choice to begin each episode with interviews with the surviving Easy Company veterans whose characters are represented onscreen—would seem to add one more compelling layer to those celebratory depictions.But in fact I would argue the opposite: that the veterans’ interviews tend to comprise the series’ most nuanced remembrances of the war and its histories. The men talk openly and frequently, for example, about fear and exhaustion and apathy and other less-than-ideal emotions, reminding us that these were not Hollywood heroes but simply average young men thrust into an often horrifying and always uncertain world. And particularly striking are the group of interviews in which the veterans talk about Nazi soldiers, recognizing that they were similarly young and scared and human, and reflecting on what was asked of each group (to try to kill each other, to put it bluntly). Like the similarly striking choice to include in the series’ final episode a speech delivered to his men by a surrendering German general, these veterans’ perspectives complicate the kind of good vs. evil narratives that are necessary for pure commemoration, and remind us that remembrance of the war—any war—includes the histories and stories of all the involved nations and communities.
Next post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other stories or images you’d share for the weekend post?

November 11, 2019: Veterans’ Week: A Veteran Performance

[In honor of Veterans’ Day, a series on cultural and historical engagements with this important American community. Please share your suggestions for veterans’ texts and contexts for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.
There are no shortage of memorable World War II stories in our national narratives—of course there are the overarching narratives like The Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; there are the explicitly and centrally celebratory texts, such as in films like Midway or Saving Private Ryan; the more complex mixtures of celebration and realism, films like From Here to Eternity or Flags of Our Fathers ; and the very explicitly critical and satirical accounts, as in the novels Catch-22and Slaughterhouse Five . One could even argue, with some accuracy, that if there is any single event or era that doesn’t need additional reinforcing in our national consciousness, it is World War II. And similarly, one could argue that if there’s any group of American films that can’t be considered generally under-exposed or –remembered, even if some have waned in popularity or awareness over time, it’d be those that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Well, I guess I like a challenge, because I’m here to argue that a World War II-centered film that in 1947 won not only Best Picture but also Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing, and Music has become a much too forgotten and underappreciated American text. That film was The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s novel about three returning World War II veterans and their experiences attempting to re-adapt to civilian life on the home front. It’s a far from perfect film, and features some schmaltzy sections that, perhaps, feel especially dated at more than sixty years’ remove and have likely contributed to its waning appeal. But it also includes some complex and powerful moments, and a significant number of them can be attributed directly to Wyler’s most famous and important casting choice: his decision to cast former paratrooper Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost both of his hands in a training accident, in the role of Homer Parrish, a similarly disabled vet with hooks replacing his hands. Homer’s relationship with the extremely supportive Wilma (played by Cathy O’Donnell) offers its share of the schmaltz, but in other ways his character and performance are much more dark and complicated, affecting the emotions through their realism and sensitivity rather than just overt heartstring-tugging.
That’s especially true of the scene that stood out to me most when I watched the film (as a college student in the late 1990s) and that has stuck with me ever since. Homer, once a star high school quarterback who was used to being watched and admired by younger boys in that earlier role, is attempting to work on a project in his garage but struggling greatly with his prostheses; he knows that a group of neighborhood boys are spying on him in fascination and horror but tries to ignore their presence. He can’t do so, however, and in a burst of anger releases much of what he has been dealing with since his injuries and return, breaking the garage windows with his hooks and daring the kids to fully engage with who and what he has become. The moment, big and emotional as it is, feels as unaffected as it gets, and manages to do what few of those more well-known World War II stories can: celebrating and critiquing in equal measure, recognizing the sacrifice and heroism of a Homer while mourning what war does and takes and destroys. Ultimately the scene, like the film, provides no definite answers, no straightforward adulation of its veterans nor darkly comic takedown of war myths, but instead simply asks us to think about what life (in and out of war) has meant and continues to mean for someone like Harold Russell, and all his veteran peers.
Indeed, Best Years is ultimately about precisely that—the experiences and identities of the soldiers themselves, at their best, at their worst, and everywhere in between. On Veteran’s Day, and on every other day as well, I think it’d be ideal to focus not on wars at all, horrific and cold and impersonal and, yes, hellish as they always are, but on remembering those Americans whose lives were and continue to be so impacted by these experiences—not least, I have to add, because I think we’d be a lot less cavalier about starting wars if we did so. Next post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other films or images you’d share for the weekend post?