Since he was a little boy my middle son has been a serial enthusiast. Back then it was rocks, carnivorous plants, Dmitri Mendeleev and the periodic table, coins, electronics – one focus of interest after another. He wasn’t fickle or easily distracted by the next shiny thing. Rather, he is blessed to find the world filled with interesting things, and it would be a shame to neglect any of them. Guy Davenport might have been writing about Michael in his introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus (1996): “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”  In our most recent telephone conversation, the topic was the Byzantine general Belisarius (c. 505-565 A.D.), who served under Emperor Justinian I. Belisarius reconquered much of the territory formerly part of the Western Roman Empire, including North Africa, that had been lost less than a century earlier to the barbarians. Belisarius is judged a military tactician of genius, rivalling Alexander and Julius Caeser. Michael is a first lieutenant, a cyber officer, in the Marine Corps, so the appeal is obvious. What we know of Belisarius’ life is a mingling of history, rumor and legend. Edward Gibbon’s account in Chap. 41 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes compelling reading. Here he describes the defeat of the Moors in 535:   “The formidable strength and artful conduct of Belisarius secured the neutrality of the Moorish princes, whose vanity aspired to receive in the emperor's name the ensigns of their regal dignity. They were astonished by the rapid event, and trembled in the presence of their conqueror. But his approaching departure soon relieved the apprehensions of a savage and superstitious people. . . . and when the Roman general hoisted sail in the port of Carthage, he heard the cries and almost beheld the flames of the desolated province. Yet he persisted in his resolution; and leaving only a part of his guards to reinforce the feeble garrisons, he entrusted the command of Africa to the eunuch Solomon, who proved himself not unworthy to be the successor of Belisarius.”   For amateur readers and non-scholars, history can be frustrating. How do we sift myth from reality when original sources are scarce and authorities disagree? Who do we trust? And what of those with no historical rigor who settle for complacent legend and contented ignorance? Maryann Corbett considers such things in her poem “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel” (which a friend of mine always calls the "Hitler Channel"):   “Is it by God’s mercy   that children are born not knowing   the long reach of old pain?   “That the five-year-old, led by the hand   past the graffiti, cannot fathom   his mother’s tightening grip,   “or why, when a box of nails   clatters to the tile like gunfire,   his father’s face contorts?   “So slow is the knitting of reasons,   the small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel   “as a cousin’s offhand story,   or a yellowed clipping whose old news   flutters from a bottom drawer,   “or some bloodless snippet of history   dully intoned as you doze off, in the recliner—   “so slow that only now, in my seventh decade,   do I turn from these sepia stills,   this baritone voiceover, chanting   the pain of immigrant forebears,   my thought impaled on a memory:   “my twelve-year-old self, weeping   on Sundays fifty years ago   when my father drove us to mass   but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields,   “doing what his father had done,   and his father’s father before him,   wordless to tell me why.”   History is more than academic. It overlaps the personal. We all dwell in history, even Americans. Not long before his death, my brother learned that our mother’s side of the family – the names are Hayes, McBride, Hendrickson – was once Roman Catholic. How did he learn this? Why hadn’t we known this before? What caused the severance? With his death, what he learned sinks again into the gloom. “The small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel.”

“I recall admiring the calmly expository flavor and simple, nonjudgemental humanity of profile stories Patrick Kurp contributed to the Gazette, years and years ago.”  After three decades, I’ve heard from a former newspaper colleague, a music writer, Mike Hochanadel. A retired photographer and newspaper alumnus, Marc Schultz, alerted me to Mike’s blog, “Hoke’s Jukebox” (“Quiet reflections on a loud life”) devoted to happenings in upstate New York, where I lived and worked for nineteen years.   Mike refers to the features I wrote for The Daily Gazette in Schenectady from 1994 to 1999. In particular, I wrote a weekly series about “hamlets,” mostly in Saratoga County. I use quotation marks because these are not places that officially exist, at least according to any government, including the post office. Often they were rural crossroads without signs, phantom places from the nineteenth century.   I would consult old maps, identify a promising defunct community, perhaps do a little research at the library and spend the day tramping around the hamlet. Usually, I would visit the cemetery, reading the stones that hadn’t been erased by acid rain, then knock on doors. Once I happened on a burial, in a grave dug by hand by the cemetery caretaker, a garrulous old man. Most people would talk to me, though often they were puzzled that anyone was curious about the place. Sometimes their families had lived there for generations. Other were newcomers. Slowly, over the course of the day, after many interviews, I formed an impression of the place. Then I drove back to the office and wrote my story. I remember Koons Corners and Porters Corners. All the stories are clipped and buried in a file cabinet. The novelist William Kennedy once asked if I was trying to be the Charles Kuralt of the Capital Region.   I used to tell journalism students that I worked in two media – words and people. I was seldom interested in most conventional journalistic beats – government, business, politics, courts – though I had to cover all those fields and I’m grateful for the experience. I just never had much interest in “news,” and still don’t. People interest me, as does the quality of the writing. Mike’s description of my prose above is pleasing to hear. I worked hard on my copy to avoid clichés but at the same time to avoid purple language. In other words, I tried to be concise and precise.     On this date, April 7, in 1891, Jules Renard wrote in his journal: “Style is the forgetting of all styles.”   [The quoted passage is from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

“Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? -- that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?”  The Battle of Shiloh started in southwestern Tennessee on this date, April 6, in 1862. Casualty estimates total almost 24,000 in two days of fighting – the bloodiest engagement on American soil up to that time. Union forces, though victorious, lost more men than the Confederates.     Among the combatants was Ambrose Bierce, a first lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He was nineteen years old. In 1881, Bierce published his nonfiction account of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” from which the passage at the top is drawn. It’s the source of the title of an excellent volume, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (eds. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, 2002).   Bierce’s account is typical of his prose, fiction and otherwise – terse, utterly unsentimental and often witty. His eye, as usual, is focused on the odd detail, not the wide-angle scene:    “There was, I remember, no elephant on the boat that passed us across that evening, nor, I think, any hippopotamus. These would have been out of place. We had, however, a woman. Whether the baby was somewhere on board I did not learn. She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage; and when she selected mine I felt less flattered by her preference than astonished by her penetration. How did she learn? She stood on the upper deck with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying a small ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to remember that I took off my hat to this little fool.”   Bierce romanticizes nothing and sounds remarkably modern, almost contemporary: “At Shiloh, during the first day’s fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.” Bierce served for four years during the war and saw action at Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kenesaw Mountain (where he was severely wounded), Franklin and Nashville. I shared my appreciation for Bierce with R.L. Barth, a poet and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who replied: “‘What I Saw at Shiloh’ is indeed a great piece of nonfiction. I think he’s one of America’s greatest writers on the subject of war, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation as one. For the most part, if I see him mentioned it’s for his life, his attitude toward life, his spooky stories, or of course The Devil’s Dictionary. And yet, the best of his Civil War stories are extraordinary explorations of aspects of war.”  For a strategic account of the battle, see what Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote about Shiloh in Chap. XXIV of his Personal Memoirs (1885-86):    “Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect. . . . There was, in fact, no hour during the day when I doubted the eventual defeat of the enemy, although I was disappointed that reinforcements so near at hand did not arrive at an earlier hour.”

Magazines have long been fond of asking well-known writers to recommend books appropriate to certain times of year, usually as Christmas gifts or so-called “beach reading.” The results tend to be surprisingly conventional and unrewarding, with pleasing exceptions. Consider this:  “Since I long ago gave up reading for any reason except pleasure, my literary diet does not vary much by the season. If anything, I find I am apt to indulge myself in less trivial fare during holiday months than in the winter -- I have more leisure for savoring and less need to drug myself to sleep with something uncerebral.”   The writer is the much-underrated American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) responding to the “Recommended Summer Reading” feature in the Summer 1962 issue of The American Scholar. Among her co-respondents are other members of the journal’s editorial board, including Alfred Kazin and the historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Carrer of Jim Crow). Sorry to say, most of responses are dull. McGinley distinguishes herself by enthusiasm, good taste and no evidence of showing off.   Like her, I’ve never understood how reading in the summer differs from any other time of the year. The choice of reading matter is an internal affair, not subject to the influence of sunlight, warm temperatures and other external factors. McGinley makes an exception for travel:   “On a motoring trip, for instance, my husband and I always carry along A. E. Housman. You have to be young to enjoy Housman, and young is what one is inclined to feel while driving happily along strange roads. Enclosed, insulated from real life by speed, movement and the abandonment of domestic duties, the adolescent pessimism, the pseudoclassic despair and the impeccable music of that verse seem satisfying as they did when we were college freshmen. It does not do for bedtime reading but it is delightful to chant aloud en route.”   I’m charmed by the scene of a middle-aged American couple, sometime during the Kennedy administration, reciting in tandem one of Housman’s lyrics while touring the country. McGinley recommends other good titles – Kim, Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, Austen’s Persuasion, H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks, Adam Bede, Trevelyan’s History of England. That final three-volume work is, she writes, “as romantic and satisfactory a book as one could ask. In fact, a vacation is a natural and proper time to renew one’s friendships with early enthusiasms. The wells of joy are apt to be livelier in pleasant weather.”   In his introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, in 1892, Housman says: “The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.”