Excerpt - "The Beauty & The Broken-Boned" a short story

HER FAMILY LINES TRACED straight back to Ireland, on both sides.  Yet it was here that she had always been drawn to, from earliest remembrance.  She didn’t know why and had never much cared to.  One possibility, suggested by others, was that her affinity sprung from an inherited understanding of what it meant to be second-class citizens in one’s own country.  A corner of her was loathe to disavow this notion, even though it had nothing to do with her personal experience.  

Growing up in a small Pennsylvania town inside a stodgy Victorian house with a much older brother, doting parents, and an indomitable Irish grandmother, one thing she always knew was that she would not stay.  They all loved one another, but the house, three floors or not, was too cramped for the personalities.  She was desperate to outshine them all from the moment she arrived, her brother in particular.  He greatest frustration, however, was not him nor her grandmother, but the town itself.  People there grew up, went to school, returned, and settled in for life.  Not her.  

When she was eight her brother left for college at Swarthmore, then UPenn for medical school.  After that he went off to Hong Kong and then to Indonesia.  Everyone was terribly proud of him.  Even after he left, however, the house got smaller and smaller still.  It was like he was still there, in every discussion, only larger, hovering over each thought, spoken and unspoken.  And this certainly did not diminish after the events of October 2002.  Quite the opposite.    

That was some time ago, but he was gone now.  She was here, swaying in a chipped rocking chair on the edge of a courtyard under a canvas awning.  Marinating in thoughts of the past, but not alone.  A raincloud advanced over the grassland beyond the yard, and the tiny baby stirred in her arms.

The midday flight from Tangiers was every bit as terrifying as she had anticipated.  A rickety prop-jet that looked like an overhauled C-130 - a craft she knew because of her father’s one-year stint with the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam.  This one had probably been around since the time he was leaping out of them, too.  But somehow it carried her to Accra, and she didn’t even have to bail out over the top of it.  

Before leaving, her grandmother, all of 93, had invoked the protection of Saint Patrick, whose feast day she would mark while in Africa.  At 24 herself, Penn State University three years behind her, she had lived almost all of her life in her parents’ house or Happy Valley.  But that did not mean she hadn’t experienced anything.  

From the time she could board a plane she was in the habit doing so.  A year of babysitting money had bought her a round-trip ticket to Ireland (the first time) at fifteen.  Her mother accompanied her to the old homestead in County Meath.  She visited two other times in her teens alone.  The summer before college she paid her own way on a service trip to Nicaragua and Honduras with their parish.  She spent half her junior year at Penn State “studying” art in Barcelona.  

No, she was not afraid of unknown locales.  Now that she was on the ground in Ghana, out of the skies, her courage was replenished.  She felt ready.  

Inside the airport it was all crowds and chaos, shouts of African dialect and heavily accented English, a tinny British woman’s voice chirping from a loudspeaker somewhere.  Yet she managed to find her bag, which had miraculously arrived.  Pausing next to the huffing baggage claim, fielding stares towards her pale skin and auburn hair pulled back tightly in a pony tail, she quickly peeled the windbreaker off that had helped on the freezing puddle-jumper, glad she’d known to wear the capris, white tank top and field blouse, and LL Bean sandals.  She fixed protective sunglasses on her nose and her Nittany Lions cap up top, and exited the sliding glass.  

Once outside she was assaulted three ways: heat, smells, and noise.  To her front older European cars, many of which were taxis, jostled between miniature, box-like buses, or tro-tros.  Horns blared.  There were people on bicycles everywhere her eyes wandered.    

The walkway was jammed with people, many clambering for taxicabs.  Within a minute she was panhandled four times.  Every other person seemed to have something balanced on their head, including a woman right next to her carrying a basket-woven cage with two large roosters inside, chattering away, half a foot from her ear.  Somewhere, someone was riffing on a woodwind instrument at full tilt, giving it all they had.  In spite of the general melee, she was impressed by the vigorous performance.  

Then a hand tapped her shoulder.  She swiveled around to see two small men, both shorter than she although she rose to a middling 5’7”.  The white-skinned man was slight, mousy, with a very small mouth, clean-shaven chin, and a pair of perfectly round black sunglasses covering his eyes.  He wore a white Panama hat with a wide brim and seemed to be chewing something.  She thought he looked exactly like that guy in most James Bond films who delivers a message early to 007, and is then quickly dispatched.  

On his left was an even shorter, very dark African man wearing jean shorts and a retro-style Adidas shirt, the kind she remembered from grade school.  He grinned widely, his teeth shockingly and unexpectedly white.  

“Miss Porter?” the white man inquired.  “Arriving for LLCC?”

“I knew I would be easily found,” she answered with a smile, and introduced herself to both.  

The man in the hat chuckled.  “Yes, quite.  I’m Doctor Paul Minchin.  I’m the pediatrician you might’ve been told about.  I work in and around most of the orphanages in greater Kumasi.  Pleasure to meet you.”  They shook hands.  “And this,” he gestured to the second man, “is Kwadzo, courier extraordinaire.”

The man beamed at her, bowed slightly.  “Mo-hee-e!  Welcome to Ghana!” he exclaimed. 

“Mo tsumi,” she replied.  It was one of only a few phrases she had learned ahead of time in Dangme, although this was only one of many languages spoken in Ghana.  It served her well here.  Kwadzo glowed even brighter, seized her slender hand in both of his, and bowed further at the waist.  

By the time they were in Kwadzo’s “noble steed,” as Dr. Minchin called it, and making their way towards the outskirts of the capital city, it was nearly 2 p.m.  The “steed” turned out to be a Volkswagon van, the really old kind that looked like a two-tone loaf of bread on tires so worn and and slender she thought they’d do better on a moped.  The heat pressed in from all sides of the van, which needless to say had no means for climate control, and mingled with the powerful smells of exhaust and live cattle to form an invisible, encroaching miasma.  

She sat alone in a bucket seat in back, her bag tossed on the dirty, carpet-less floor of the van next to what must have been an oft-used tire iron.  The sun pounded through the windows.  She felt sweat trickling down the knobs of her spine and was suddenly overpowered with a tremendous urge to lie down right on that dirty floor and sleep.  Which she might have done, but for the steady chatter from the doctor, in front, on the passenger’s side.  He seemed eager to impress her with his knowledge of the country and the capital.  He spoke like a man that had taken an instant shine, a manner she recognized from some experience in other countries, most often with that hint of patronization that a lot of white men from other countries seemed to feel was appropriate when addressing young American women.  

“I’m sure you’re bushwhacked, dear,” he said, “but we do have a bit of a journey ahead.  Monika expressly directed me to bring you along the coastal route.  It’s perhaps 70 kilometers of extra travel, but she believes you’ll find it worth your while.  I agree.”  He draped his left arm over the side of his own bucket seat and grinned at her.  

“How long?” she asked, mostly out of curiosity.  She was exhausted, true, but she didn’t feel rushed.  In fact she felt she could use some time to allow her nerves to settle.  

“Two hours at least, maybe more, depending on what we encounter along the way.”  He left it at that.  She nodded, and for at least a moment they lapsed into silence.  

“Monika” referred to Monika Nickos, her new boss, you might say, within Let the Little Children Come International, or “LLCC.”  She was the woman charged with running St. James Orphanage in the city of Kumasi, roughly 160 miles from the capital.  This, according to her Lonely Planet guide.  She’d actually heard Ms. Nickos, which is how she planned to address her until directed otherwise, referred to as the “Headmistress,” which seemed to her ear pretty arcane.  But this was hardly the first thing since she’d landed in Morocco earlier in the week that seemed to lag behind the times.  She was to find during her stay in Ghana that there were plenty of leftover signs of the country’s former British rule.  

Monika Nickos, however, was Finnish, not English, and was a mystery to her otherwise.  After the placement they’d had exactly one conversation by phone, two weeks before to the day in fact, and it was brief and polite.  She’d never met anyone from Finland, but she worked for a company owned by the Dutch just out of college, and she had experienced something of European propriety and mannerisms.  Not that the Dutch and the Finnish were the same sorts of people, but it was the best she could go on.  

In her brief exchange, Ms. Nickos had said she was very welcome, they were anxious to meet her, and reiterated what she’d been told all along, which was that it was perfectly fine if she did not possess certain skill sets, such as education or medicine - she would be more than useful if her mind was open and she maintained a “posture of charity.”  That was Ms. Nickos’ phrase.   

The call had been both reassuring and slightly nerve-wracking.  She never knew what people in these types of organizations meant when they used terms like “open mind.”  However, small things like Ms. Nickos’ calm tone, elegant northern accent, and the use of that particular phrase communicated a strong sense that she was a woman who had her entire charge firmly in hand.  This might not actually be the case, she cautioned herself, but that’s the way it sounded. 

It seemed to her that the Headmistress would be an interesting woman to get to know.  She hoped they would get along.  But even if they collided here or there, she would not allow it to deepen into conflict.  She’d had her share of problems working under other women, often older ones.  Like many of her girlfriends, she preferred working for men, but doing so seemed more and more difficult these days.  Maybe this is what made the older women she’d worked for in her short experience tougher to bond with: a resentment, right out of the gate, that she didn’t encounter quite the same resistance as they had during their own ascendancy.  

She couldn’t say.  She tried at all times to be honest with herself, and she knew that she brought as much “will” into any mutual endeavor as any woman - or anyone - ever did.  

Just ask my mother, she’d joke with others, but the comment was never 100% joke. .... [continued]

Circle In The Dirt

Early Moments with My First Son

(Written in June 2008 after the birth of my first son)

Today my son, Patrick, is ten days old. Since I know time accelerates quickly, and that before I can even complete this draft these initial days and nights will be all but forgotten, I have a notion to record some of my earliest observations of him in the nascent moments of his life.

My wife and I also have two daughters, and in either case I marked their births and impact on my life in different ways. But for five years I have lived in a family of females, little and full grown, and this time around there is a vaguely familiar and somehow nostalgic tone. My son has arrived! I find myself searching for words as I contemplate the tiny face of a man of the future.

He squirms and grunts restlessly nearby, even as I write this. It’s as though he is as out of sorts as I am, wondering what to make of his existence. He was born large, over ten pounds, and that is how he looms: foreshadowing the front-row seat he will occupy in the arena of every future choice I will make as his father. He will be there watching, taking everything in, wanting to know how a man guides his own through the pitfalls of this world.

My daughters yearn for my love and affection, in all forms; this much is abundantly clear to me after five years. My son will covet these things too, no doubt, but he will probably experience a cultural pressure to compress his need for them under layers of stone. Closer to the surface will be a thirst for my example: he will want to know what being a man is. If I am successful in the rest of my life, he will want to emulate me; if I fail, he will want to redeem me. Either way he will have his trajectory marked in some way by the arc of my life. I know this because I too am a son.

In each of these first ten turns of the clock, I have been fortunate enough to have had at least two or three hours alone with just my son. As new parents know, newborn babies don’t do a whole lot. Much of the time that I have spent with Patrick so far has consisted of me giving him a bottle, cleaning off his lower half, cleaning off my upper half, and either holding him or watching him sleep.

I became reacquainted for the third time with the notion that new babies don’t know what time of day it is. Therefore they are frequently wide awake in the middle of the night, looking around, discovering what lies in store in this world. These are the moments I want to write about.

When I have Patrick late, for now, I first swaddle him in a blanket, in an attempt to mimic the way they wrapped him in the hospital. Sadly, this is something I’ve never been able to do properly. Like those roll-up croissants you make in your own oven; they always look perfect when assembled – as long as someone who knows croissants does the rolling. I give him one or two ounces of formula from a bottle. He chugs it happily, sometimes with his eyes open, sometimes with them closed or at half-mast. Then, after he burps, unless he is truly exhausted, he spends time simply staring at me.

Perhaps there is a reason beyond the physiological that newborns do not smile. One forgets the potency of the infant’s drill-bit stare into his or her parent’s eye in their earliest days. After all, the child has been thrust into an environment far noisier, more expansive, and more treacherous than their former residence. Like any of us who have been transplanted abruptly from one world into another, these little persons are simply looking for a friendly face.

So my own son stares at me and he does not smile. He shows neither recognition nor affection. Scientists say that he is not capable of doing so yet, and I have no reason to believe this is not true. Still, in those moments in the middle of the night when Patrick is awake and I am awake, and our faces – our eyes – are no more than three inches from one another, I notice that his expressions are by no means neutral.

He occasionally furrows his brow ever so slightly while studying my face. A tiny corner of his mouth curls slightly here and there, the ghost of a smirk. Faint, wispy eyebrows suddenly jerk up or ruffle momentarily as if being strafed by some ill wind.

Then there is the color of his eyes – dark, dark, wet blue, like a vacuous deep sea, calm for the moment, but concealing so much beneath the surface that a father can be sure he will never be able to identify, let alone understand, all that resides there.

In short, it looks to me, sometimes, like he’s measuring me up. It’s beginning to dawn on him in some primitive way that I am the man that will mark his life. You, his eyes ask with incredulity, are my father? Are you sure you’re up to the job?

It brings to my mind freshly a distant period from my life – something I would normally prefer to leave in my wake. Sixteen years ago, when I was a younger man, just coming out of college, I entered the United States Army in order to fulfill my end of a scholarship I had won that financed my education. Within one week of graduation I was shipped off to Fort Benning, Georgia, to begin Infantry training. The course lasted about fourteen or fifteen weeks, and trundled through all sorts of combat-oriented skill training, from individual tasks and weapons proficiency to squad- and platoon-level tactics.

Early on in the course there was a training block on hand-to-hand combat. This is the only time I have ever engaged in anything close to fisticuffs in my entire life, aside from the usual schoolyard scuffles as a boy. I am neither aggressive nor particularly competitive. It simply isn’t in my nature to solve anything by means of fighting, and I lack the ability to hold my own very well in a brawl. Yet I like to think that if the time ever comes when I must physically defend myself or my kindred, I will do it, or go down in the attempt.

Anyway, one morning during my training the instructors carted a big group of us to a large pit filled with dirt and wood chips. It was well before dawn, but this was Georgia in the summertime, so it was already hot and humid. I can still see the sheen of sweat on the faces of the men, revealed in somewhat foreboding manner by the headlights of two or three Humvees they had parked in a circular fashion around the pit. There must have been proper lighting available, but I think this little touch was psychological.

For the first hour or so, some self-defense expert from one of those units nobody is supposed to know about barked at us through a megaphone, and we paired off to try out various punches, kicks, blocking maneuvers, and everyone’s favorite, ‘takedowns’. It was painful and exhausting, but of course you could not show weakness. Then they assembled everyone and said that it was time for them to ‘evaluate’ us on what they called our ‘physical courage.’

One of the sergeants drew a large circle in the dirt and chips with the heel of his black combat boot. He ordered all the men to gather ‘round. Then he called for ‘volunteers’ to square off in combat. A few guys in my training platoon who suspected that I was weak shoved me forcefully into the middle of the circle.

You can predict what happened next. There was a trainee named Manges, a man in his 30s instead of just out of college, who had already served in Infantry units before. He had been through special Ranger training and even actual combat, in Grenada in 1983. He’d won a medal for valor. Physically, he was also over six feet tall and muscular. I am 5’9”, and that includes the combat boots. He stepped into the circle, and the men howled like dogs.

I fought against Manges, having no other choice, and I lost. It wasn’t this bloody battle of the sort depicted in movies – we weren’t allowed to punch the face. But the side or the back of the head was fair game. They stopped our fight when Manges pounded me so hard just above my left ear with the ball of his hand that I fell down and didn’t stand up again. It wasn’t the proudest moment of my life, but I lived on to fight – or not – another day.

I recall this unflattering episode not for the fight itself, but because of what happened right before. Manges and I circled one another, right there in the dirt. I was grimy and sweaty and so was he. He stared at me right in the eyes as if to tell me that I was a virus for which he was the antidote. I stared back, trying not to waiver, because I knew that it was a moment that I had to ride out, to the extent that I could.

No one told us to circle each other first. It just happened. A classic confrontational square-off; the only one I have ever engaged in before or since. Until certain moments over the last ten days, that is, when my own son stared me in the face, and I suddenly realized that it looked and felt to me a little too much like that unhappy morning from my past.

What is this? I thought to myself while Patrick’s eyes bore into mine. Is my firstborn son really challenging me this early? Is this just some base male dread surfacing, some submerged fear of inadequacy? Is it just because it’s somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. and I am tired and making things up? One thing is certain: these early moments didn’t quite feel like the father-son bonding experiences I had always imagined I would have. Patrick just stared on, well into those passing hours.

Reflecting on this, I feel that while I cannot be sure that I have the answer he is seeking, I recognize that there is a question in his eyes, some great wondering involuntarily coursing through his blood. The puzzle for me is how to respond.

I have been pondering it, and if I could get away with answering him in writing rather than to his face, my response might go something like this:

Son, the day will probably come when you find yourself underwhelmed by my physical strength, or what you may perceive as my ‘toughness.’ I do not begrudge you the right to question your father. But you will never be unimpressed by the strength of my love for you. For it is my right to claim you forever as my son. Thus, if one day I scratch a circle in the dirt, it will not be to confront you. Rather, it will be to gather you in, along with your sisters and your mother, into whatever place our family marks out as our own. And whatever that impetus is in the marrow of our male bones that makes us circle one another as strangers, when it comes to you I will harness it and apply it in reverse. I will enfold you into myself, and confirm for you, blood of my blood, that we are not strangers, and never will be.

We two, father and son.

Putting Aside Childish Things

Some reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love

TWENTY YEARS AGO this spring I was discovering the work of Bruce Springsteen. I’d heard of him, though. He’d been around the block a few times already by then. You have to understand that as a teenager during the late 1980s, I was a pure metalhead. (I still am – no apologies.) I thought Bruce Springsteen was a bandana-wearing, sleeve-rolling, girly-dancing wimp who wrote dumb lines like “wearing trouble on their shirts” and “I check my look in the mirror.”

Metalheads do not “check their look.” We know you don’t like it. That’s a you problem.

I never had time for a popular rocker like Springsteen back then. The whole point of metal was to hold up a middle finger to whatever was broadly accepted - to plant one’s flag on the fringe with the outcasts. Bruce was the Rolling Stones or Michael Jackson or Def Leppard. He was the mainstream.

Springsteen’s album Tunnel of Love, which turns 25 this fall, came out in my junior year of high school, 1987. It was the follow-up to the über-successful Born in the U.S.A. I remember watching what struck me as an excruciatingly boring video for the single “Brilliant Disguise,” with Bruce sitting in someone’s kitchen playing an acoustic guitar and singing. At the time I was blasting Metallica, Judas Priest, and reconnecting with God through Stryper. I played bass in my own garage band, had a girlfriend, and felt morally superior to everyone else. I was an active Christian youth, “on fire” for God. I was sitting on top of the world.

After the album came out, a few things happened. Bruce went on tour, and had an extra-marital affair with his backup singer. It blew up all over the New York tabloids (I grew up in Jersey, just like Springsteen). What a moron, I remember laughing, neglecting to realize that despite a little high school puppy love, I had never come anywhere near to the fruit - forbidden or otherwise. In the fall of 1988, I went off to college, and promptly forgot about Springsteen.

Fast-forward roughly four years, to spring 1992. My twin brother and I were living together in an off-campus apartment near our college, where we were seniors. I don’t remember how, but by some means he had gotten a hold of a cassette that had Tunnel of Love recorded on side B. It found its way into our little twin-deck boom box around March or April of that year, and it didn’t come out until graduation.

The experience I had this time with Tunnel of Love was a bit like that famous line by Mark Twain where the young man is amazed by how much his father has learned in the space of a few years. But by then I already suspected the truth, and didn’t feel like I had much time to chuckle over who had changed and who hadn’t. The end of college was upon me, and since I was there in the first place on an ROTC scholarship, I was about to go off into the U.S. Army. On my own, without my family, without my brother.

With this hard rain coming, suddenly life didn’t seem like a big joke anymore. Or if it was – maybe all of it was – it seemed there was a real good chance that the butt of it would be me. That seemed to be what Bruce was finding out in Tunnel of Love’s wry opener, “Ain’t Got You.” “I got more good luck honey than ol’ King Farouk,” he sings, somewhat idiotically, “but the only thing I ain’t got baby I ain’t got you.”

I didn’t have her, either. Or anyone else. I didn’t even understand what was approaching, because it hadn’t reached me yet. But Springsteen’s album did something for me from the first listen, something I really needed: it told the truth. The more I heard the record, the more it began to feel like Bruce was shouting the lines at me, or at least in my direction.

“There’s things that’ll knock you down you don’t even see coming,” he warned in “When You’re Alone,” “and send you crawling like a baby back home.” I didn’t have the option to crawl home, but if I did I might have. The guy who sang those lines was no wimp. He’d been to the battlefield. Where he’d had the innocence and ignorance blown right out of him.

I fell into a rabbit hole that spring called “Two Faces.” This succinct, sober tune from Tunnel almost feels like a throwaway upon a first listen. Musically, like many of the other songs, it is lean: it features a solo performance by Springsteen, mainly on acoustic guitar, with spare accompaniment by an organ, his own E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg’s percussion, and a brief guitar solo.

The story it tells is more like a sub-thought of the rest of the album’s narrative. It’s about a guy who is trying to hang on to his girl, but he’s feeling heat from a third party, another man who is vying for her affections.

I rewound and played that song over and over again. I didn’t realize why at the time, but I do now. The reason I related to it so profoundly had little to do with the “story.” I sensed something about the artist. The man who had written “Two Faces” was basically admitting to the world that, in spite of his astounding success, he really didn’t understand himself.

I met a girl and we ran away

I swore I’d make her happy every day

And how I made her cry

Two faces have I

This short verse, the first of the song, in its own way captures the essence of the entire record. It’s common knowledge that Tunnel of Love was Springsteen’s examination of a relationship between a man and woman going south. It explores the conflict between dreams and realities in the context of a marriage. How we think life will go versus how it goes.

I could hear something in both the lyrics and the music of “Two Faces,” something I was getting from nothing else I was listening to at the time, possibly from nothing I had ever listened to. For me it was the music of loneliness, of fear, of conducting a self-analysis and being dissatisfied with the outcome. It didn’t sound like any place I had been to before. It sounded like the place I was going.

If Tunnel of Love was only about human love, it would have been mostly lost on me. At the time I first heard it, and through most of the decade beyond, love did not come my way. I didn’t know about it, hadn’t felt it before, and almost gave up on it entirely. That made for a rough ten years. Yet anyone who believes that the challenges of living without love far outweigh the challenges of living with it clearly has never experienced it. Also, I might add, they probably have never heard Tunnel of Love.

Even though a marriage in crisis provides the central context of Springsteen’s album, and the lack of understanding between the male and female is the lens through which everything on the record is seen, Tunnel of Love also speaks to an even deeper truth. That truth has to do with who, or Who, is really behind what happens to ourselves, to everyone else, to the entire universe. Who’s in charge here? is the question behind all the questions on this album. You can hear Springsteen wrestling with it throughout. “Nobody knows honey where love goes,” he admits late in the journey. “But when it goes, it’s gone, gone.”

In this regard, the structure of Tunnel of Love is important, much more so than it would be today. Twenty-five years ago, we stood at the end of a certain chapter in the story of popular music, and Tunnel emerged right at this overlooked but critical juncture. I am referring to the demise of the traditional “record” format, when albums had two sides (two faces?).

Tunnel of Love was the last album Springsteen ever made with this format in mind. It makes a big difference. The whole album is one journey, but it has two legs, and back when you would have needed to flip over the LP or cassette to listen to Side Two, that pause served a purpose.

As originally conceived, the album has six songs per side. The first six, starting with the near a-capella “Ain’t Got You” and closing with the poignant “Walk Like a Man,” generally examine the emotions associated with a romantic relationship on the way in – the way it feels when it’s new. If my earlier stipulation is accurate, that Tunnel of Love has to do with the way we think life will go versus how it actually goes, then Side One is about our plans, our dreams. Even the unfortunate young woman called Janey in the side’s lone exception, “Spare Parts” – who winds up battle-worn and resigned by the song’s end – begins her story with a naive impression of male-female love. This half of the record is full of pride, youthful optimism, lust, hubris, vigor, and a healthy portion of fear.

The pinnacle of Side One is the third entry, “All That Heaven Will Allow,” a masterpiece of narrative songwriting. It carries the listener on a fully-realized arc in the space of four short verses, showing us a young man’s journey from lust-fueled infatuation to the enriching experience of authentic love. In the first two verses, the protagonist, with a little money in his pocket and the freedom of youth, is merely entranced by the woman who has caught his eye. He uses the phrase “all that heaven will allow” to refer to her only, trying to articulate what he feels: that she is beautiful, mysterious, bewitching, and, possibly, the key to his future. But he is still a young man. “All I want to do is dance,” Springsteen sings, signaling the youth’s sense of priorities.

In the third and fourth verses, however, time has passed, and the relationship has transcended mere infatuation. Some of life’s realities have begun to creep in, which Springsteen conveys through the images of “rain and storm and dark skies.” Yet this man draws strength from his partner’s love. It’s giving him the confidence to wrestle with those elements:

They don’t mean a thing

If you’ve got a girl that loves you

And wants to wear your ring

The reference to the sealed commitment of marriage is revealing. The young man has found true love through marriage, not in spite of it or off to one side of it. He has learned that he’s been blessed not just with a woman’s love, potent as that is, but the love of the Divine, the love that forges and seals the wedding band.

Springsteen has always been coy about his religious beliefs and/or practices, but this song exposes a sensibility formed by his inherited Roman Catholicism. Springsteen has a clear understanding of the sacramental. If that were not the case, the song would not end the way it does: “I want all the time/All that heaven will allow.” That’s not a reference to a woman or her love. That is an appeal to love’s Divine provenance.

When I was digging into these songs with gusto at the end of my college career, and later on in my first months in the Army, I longed deeply for the experiences that the young men on Tunnel of Love were going through. I wanted to feel my oats, go out on the town with friends, find the girl with the blue dress described in “Tougher Than The Rest” and show her that I was the one for her.

I also responded on a more fundamental level. I am a Roman Catholic too, from birth. I recognized Springsteen’s hunger for grace in his his singing, the way you recognize the voice of a beloved relative on the phone. I could hear the loneliness behind the bravado in “Tougher Than The Rest” and “All That Heaven Will Allow” – I felt it myself, and I was as anxious as the youths in those songs to step into a man’s shoes.

It’s no accident that the last song on Side One is called “Walk Like A Man,” or that it places the protagonist at the far end of the center aisle in a church, watching his bride approach. Shortly afterward, they both step “into that long black limousine/For their mystery ride.”

Even though I wanted all of this, I also felt some hesitancy and trepidation about it back in 1992 and 1993. Why? Because on Side Two of Tunnel of Love, Bruce Springsteen tells us about what it’s like to go through that passage, and what may be waiting on the other side.

The last four songs of Tunnel of Love are the most shattering of Springsteen’s long and ample catalog. They are also among the bravest songs I have ever heard. Although Springsteen, both before and after this album, has moved listeners around the world with stories of common Americans struggling to hold down jobs, stay true to their families, come back from fighting in wars, or just make it from one day to the next with their dignity intact, I’m not sure he has ever spoken so truthfully and so nakedly as he does on the back end of Tunnel of Love.

I will forever appreciate that courage. It taught me about love and sacrifice well before I had the channe to encounter those things for myself. Even today it re-educates me, well after my own experience has taken me from an acutely alone and under-confident young man to a happily married husband and father of four children.

Springsteen channeled his personal heartbreak and failure into his art, and spun them into profound lessons that he shared with the world. I find this inspiring, and while it may not exonerate the artist from his mistakes, it demonstrates his strength of heart and his willingness to rise above them. I have tried to use creative writing as a means of rising above my own shortcomings, with God’s help, and I am able to relate to the process Springsteen engaged in as well as the lessons.

Springsteen had married the actress Julianne Phillips after the astoundingly successful Born in the U.S.A. album and 1984-1985 world tour. The marriage was rocky from the outset, apparently, forming the basis of the material that would become Tunnel of Love. Then came that album’s supporting tour, the well-publicized dalliance with backup vocalist Patti Scialfa, and a divorce. Of course, Springsteen and Scialfa then married, settled down as much as possible, and had three children of their own in the 1990s.

Thus, the second side of Tunnel of Love is about what happens, when the first side was about the way we picture things will go. But it’s important to note that the songs are not about what will happen, to everyone. Springsteen was not saying that love is a terrible ride, do not go into that tunnel, it will only make you sick or broken-hearted or worse. He was saying that you do not and cannot know how things will go. And you’d better be prepared for anything.

It is here where I connected to these songs. The voice on the album didn’t sound like some bitter, angry celebrity upset that everything didn’t fall into place for him the way it always had before. It sounded more like a mentor, kind of like a big brother, who had been a little further down the road (okay, a lot further) than I had, and was letting me know that adulthood, personal freedom, having a little money, and, eventually, love and marriage, were not all flowers and sunshine. I was all ears.

“You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above,” Springsteen sings on the title track. That felt like a prescription for my whole life in 1993. After college, I reported to Fort Benning, Georgia, as a young officer assigned to the Infantry - “the Queen of Battle.” Anyone who knew me at all knew that for me to be assigned to a branch of the military whose stated mission is to “close with” and “destroy the enemy”

was a hilarious cosmic joke. And I would have thought it was, too, if I wasn’t the guy on the wrong end of it.

After eight months of training, I was assigned to an Infantry battalion and given a platoon to lead for one year. About three-quarters of my men were older than I was, and all of them had more experience, in however way you want to understand the term. These men had me for chow, every day. It was a tough time, and I would never go back to it if it were possible.

I was nowhere near ready to be in a love relationship then, and saw few opportunities. No one knew better than I that, at least on the surface, Tunnel of Love was a long way from my reality. Yet, I remember one of the very first things I bought at the Post Exchange, or PX, was my own copy of the album on cassette. I played it nonstop until somewhere around 2000. Then I replaced it with the CD version that I have sitting in front of me as I write, which is so worn out itself that “Two Faces” doesn’t even play properly. You have to stop it and pass right on to “Brilliant Disguise.”

Which is what we’ll do now, en route to a conclusion. “Brilliant Disguise” is the first of the final four songs I mentioned earlier, which for me are the dark heart of this rich, wonderful, and sad album. The others are “One Step Up,” “When You’re Alone,” and “Valentine’s Day,” the last of which we’ll save until the end.

“Brilliant Disguise” is such a profound statement on two people exploring the vagary of love with one another that there’s almost nothing to add. Just go listen to it, or listen to it again. If you have ever loved another human being before, you can relate to Springsteen’s lines, “I want to read your mind/to know just what I’ve got in/This new thing I’ve found.” But he realizes that he is just as baffling to his partner as she is to him.

Where does that leave us? Springsteen wonders. If you have not laid down the proper foundation to build love upon, in a rather bleak and inhospitable place. My brothers and I often comment to one another about the astonishing impact of the last four lines:

Tonight our bed is cold

I’m lost in the darkness of our love

God have mercy on the man

Who doubts what he’s sure of

Every time I hear that it knocks me over. Even back in 1993, it had the same effect. It was written by a still-young man in crisis, who was in an untenable situation, an intolerable match, much like me and the U.S. Infantry. It wasn’t lost on me that, at least on the page, Springsteen had reached towards God. I was doing a lot of the same thing.

By the time you get to “One Step Up,” it’s clear the war is over, and all the listener can do is hear it flame out. It’s terrible and tragic. The mention of the furnace in the first verse that “wasn’t burning” is all you need to know. There’s a girl in a white dress, a silent church, a despondent bird.

I drove around the deep south alone, listening to this song repeatedly. “When I look at myself I don’t see/The man I wanted to be,” the voice said. I’d pull on my battle dress uniform and stand in front of a mirror. I knew I’d chosen my path. It wasn’t about that. It’s just that none of it was playing out the way I’d hoped.

I’ve already noted the lines in “When You’re Alone” that really did me in, about unexpected things knocking you down. There was that big brother again, the one who felt burned and beaten himself, but who still cared enough about those coming behind him to say: “You’re gonna find out .... that when you’re alone, you ain’t nothin’ but alone.”

By now, though, with the fight over and the battlefield a wasteland of carrion and ash, the signs of a hard-won maturity and perhaps even a tiny gleam of hope are beginning to emerge. There are no “hard feelings” moving him to sing. There’s only the tragedy and the mystery of what happened, and the storyteller’s eternal question of what will happen next.

And then there’s “Valentine’s Day.” I am still not sure I fully understand this final song. Maybe no one does. In it, our unnamed man, no longer swollen with pride or braggadocio, finds himself alone in a “big lazy car” on a “highway in the dark,” trying to find his way back to home and hearth. The lyric expresses restlessness, a “pounding” heart, perhaps an anxiety that if he doesn’t get there soon, he might lose the one person he’s desperate to locate.

Significantly, however, he never quite arrives before the album ends. The car plods on through what seems like a long and lonely night, possibly representing the endless touring cycle of a performance artist, while the man muses poignantly, even poetically about something both he and the listener seem to understand is already gone. Yet at the same time there is a longing in the voice and in the music, a kind of gentle resignation, a prayer for forgiveness. It features a low, brooding keyboard; a loping, hangdog bass line; a weary vocalist, aware of his own culpability. “Valentine’s Day” might even be considered a kind of musical apology.

And yet, there are glimpses of a future life, a vision of what one might call “better days” down the road ahead. Only the vagabond in the song is too tired, too spent to see them clearly. Describing how he heard from a friend who had just become a father, the narrator says he could “hear the light” in the man’s voice. He speaks of awakening from a dream the night before “scared and breathing,” still alive, only to witness “God’s light” streaming through the window.

Then, in one of Springsteen’s most breathtaking lyrical turns, he attempts to put a name to the unspeakable hunger filling his soul, to describe what it is that still eludes him in this baffling, unpredictable existence:

It wasn’t the cold river bottom I felt rushing over me

It wasn’t the bitterness of a dream that didn’t come true

It wasn’t the wind in the grey fields I felt rushing through my arms

No no baby it was you

Who exactly is he speaking these words to? It’s hard to know. In the end, it doesn’t much matter. He’s still a certain distance from her, whoever she is, or whoever She is. All he can do is keep going.

I remember, as a young Infantry officer, when we used to go on training exercises, for two or three weeks at a time. We’d sleep and eat in the wild and train by night and by day, usually deep in the Georgia woods, either sweating or freezing, depending on the time of year. These never went well for me. It’s hard to strain around the clock to be something you aren’t. I did my best to do what I had sworn to do, hoping my number would never be called to go fight and possibly die to defend America. It never was, and I am very fortunate. But the other soldiers ate me alive.

When these exercises would finally end, they would stuff us on these dirty military cattle-cars and shuttle us back to the main post, with all of our gear piled on our knees. Sometimes these rides took an hour or ninety minutes. They’d bring us to some ball field near headquarters, form us up again one last time, then officially “release” us for three or four days off. Often it would be around one or two o’clock in the morning.

I used to keep Tunnel of Love in my car’s tape deck when I left for those training exercises. When I got back, I’d drive home to my puny apartment, and I’d play “Valentine’s Day” on the way. Every time. I’m not even sure why I did this. I wasn’t returning to anything except my four walls.

It’s a song to lick one’s wounds by, I suppose; a song for late at night, after an ordeal has been endured and you were having a beer with a brother. It’s a mellow, somehow comforting song that acknowledged defeat but also dared to hope, to believe, in “God’s light...shining on through.” It made me feel better, that’s all I know.

At 21, in the early 90s, Tunnel of Love spoke the plain truth to my soul when I needed it. It helped me to put aside childish things, as Saint Paul wrote, and to put on the yoke, or the cross, of a young man. As a middle-aged husband and father of four, at 41, Bruce Springsteen’s brilliant and courageous album still helps me appreciate all that I have been given. I love the record for both of these things, for the plentiful return on the investment of time I’ve put in.

What kind of experience will this record be in twenty more years - or on its 50th anniversary? I hope I’m around to find out the answer, because I know Tunnel of Love will be.

Small World: A Pennsylvania Gothic

They followed me here. I saw whole squadrons of them cutting through clouds after my two-bit Chevy, straight out Route 78 from Jersey.

My parents retired to Lancaster County in the 90s. For my birthday they gave me a 3-day, 3-night stay at a bed and breakfast not far from their house in Ephrata, so I could finish the novel that’s been slowly driving me insane for two years. The weekend before Halloween, I took Friday and Monday off, kissed Julie, and set out on the three-hour drive to Pennsylvania Dutch country.

For several months, I now admit, I’ve felt growing pressure. Finishing the drive Friday in late afternoon light, the sun falling like a dragon struck, I could feel hot blood rising. Julie is due in March with our first. After that, who knows? We need more money, too. I can’t tell what sort of father I’ll be. Then there’s this novel, the one I’ve been writing since grad school. I can’t seem to close on it. But if I don’t before March---

The novel is about my stint in the army. It’s what I know. But nobody likes it. My classmates panned the first four chapters. I showed it to a close friend. He asked, “What exactly did you do in there?” “It’s in the book,” I said. “I had a couple rifle platoons. We’d get instruction in classrooms, then we’d go shoot for a while, then we’d tromp around the woods for a few weeks, and after that we’d go to some desert or swamp and train for a month.” “There’s your problem,” he said. “It’s a novel full of guns and maneuvers, but no fighting.” “It was stressful. I learned a lot.” “But it was pre-Iraq. You never faced death. You only shot blanks. Pow pow pow! Who cares?”

I pulled off 78 and snaked down Route 512. The geese flew on overhead. They come from Canada, but they take over space like Americans. I’ve heard that geese in flight at dusk are really the souls of the departed war dead haunting the land where they fell. But I wouldn’t know anything about war or the dead.

Rupp’s Bed & Breakfast is a few miles west of Lititz. A bonechip moon followed me down the long driveway straight into a stubble-cut field. The lane terminates between a red brick farmhouse, connected by flagstones to a smaller cabin. The farmhouse was dark and silent, enshrouded in indigo. The cabin had a chimney and floral drapes in the windows folded like wings over artificial candles.

They had carpet-bombed everything with dung. Close by two of them stood in a pumpkin patch raked clean. They stared as I trod on their waste, carrying a six-pack of Guinness. Their long black necks and beaks nearly swallowed by the encroaching shadows so that they resembled decapitated gray ducks frozen rigid where their heads had been lopped.

The entrance is in back. There’s a small patio with a rocking chair. Harvested corn stalks stretch as far as the horizon.

It was not until I circled around the first time that I saw, fifty yards off, a massive barn in disrepair that seemed older than the gnarled black tree beside it. Its ruined phalanges curling and uncurling like those of Dickens’ third ghost.

An hospitable handwritten note greeted me with all the warmth one could expect from a piece of paper. It told me that the owners had left two days before to bring their three grandchildren to Disney World. The hostess expressed unflappable faith that everything I could need or want was there for me. “Your parents tell us you’re a writer,” the note mocked. “So fall to, and Godspeed.”

There’s a brick fireplace, a black iron kettle, a tidy kitchen, coffee maker, couch, lamp. A nautilus of stairs leads to a second floor, little more than a dormer, with two puny windows, a king-size bed, and a washroom so tight you can steady yourself in the shower by putting hands on hips.

Everything I could need. I set down my things and wrote well into the night, shooting words into the void. Pow pow pow!

I was in an indoor carnival ride, floating down a canal. At first I recognized nothing. In front of me were a snowy-haired elderly couple with three small sunburned boys stuffed between them, roughhousing. There was piped-in music, a sunny tune from long ago. Bright colors were everywhere, and hundreds of mechanical dolls, twirling, kicking their legs, strumming fake guitars or blowing tiny horns. I sat alone in back, looking around, forgetting something. The old woman spoke inaudibly and the boys exploded in giggles. Up ahead there was a round tunnel leading through to another color-strewn chamber. As we drew near I saw a dark form hanging from the ceiling. Like an oversized, misshapen bat. Small World! “It’s a small world…” As we passed below I looked up. The thing blew open like an obscene lotus, huge dirty wings descending, a black beak and slickened red worm hurtling into my eyes----

I bolted upright. Shadows and shapes flickered. Outside in the night thousands of them were screaming, crying over the rush of wind.

Even though I worked late I got up and went out for a run, shirtless, in the autumn air. A writer needs stamina, and running supplies that. It fires blood to the brain, too.

I’ve always been amazed at the way the land here dips and rolls like an earthen surf. Over every rise are waves upon waves of crops, silos, the newest outbreak of McMansions. But in the early morning as you negotiate the hills you get that sea-feeling Melville once described that I associate weirdly with fertility, of mind and soil. You half expect a great swell of mud and molten rock, wafting you towards that terminal shore.

On the final stretch the sky was a black-blue that I imagine is aped only in some dark chamber of the sea. There was an absolutely brilliant crescent moon. Passing before it was the largest cluster of chevrons in the sky I had ever seen. The cacophony was deafening.

I returned to the cabin and flopped into the rocking chair. The cool air dried me as the light began to expand. In my head I was planning the day’s work. I had figured a way out. A way that had fighting, a confrontation....

When I awoke sunlight flooded my vision. One of them stood directly before me. Its wings were spread and it was hissing. Thrusting myself up, I tried to stand on the chair. The goose charged. We both fell backwards, my head slamming the brick. It leapt right onto my chest and thrust its beak into my face repeatedly. The skin opened on the bridge of my nose. I hammered the bird’s swollen, damp gut with my fists. Then it was gone, and I was lying next to the overturned chair, bleeding on the stones.

That afternoon I calmed myself only by drinking the last four Guinness bottles. It helped drown out the taunting. Tomorrow, I thought, it ends. But first, the work. I was writing furiously. I’d solved the problem. Two disgruntled soldiers had found their way into the arms room somehow, requisitioned the Hog and a few belts of 7.62, and started mowing down troopies from the woods in the middle of PT. My young lieutenant spontaneously mounted a foot patrol to take them out. You want real bullets? Now you got ‘em. Pow pow pow!

Out here it smells like something exhumed. It’s Sunday morning. I stink, too. I never even put the shirt back on. Last night, after dark, I went out to the abandoned barn with a flashlight and rummaged til I found what’s needed. There were several, hanging from long nails. I set them on the patio and went inside. The novel was completed near midnight, I think. I stuffed the notebook back in my bag, then laid down.

The geese wouldn’t allow the comfort of sleep. But these things are settled only at first light. After a while, I came back here and waited in the rocking chair. Now, finally, gray streaks are fanning from the horizon.

I see them: a huge convocation in the distance; a demon congress assembled among the shorn stalks; a spirit-dance; the souls of the dead who have targeted me, according to the logic of some pre-ordained judgment.

It’s time. I stand up, then reach to grab what I have appropriated. They clink against one another. I jump off the porch and start running, sprinting, across the decayed remains of corn. The geese natter for a second. Then, en masse, they lift off and fly low. At me.

“You think I can’t face you!?” I scream. “How you like these wings!?” I extend my arms, a 30-inch sickle in each fist, and keep running.

No Backing Down

An excerpt from Mutt Ploughmans' book Forever Voyaging: One Writer's Apprenticeship with Herman Melville.

For years I have nursed an idea for a specific writing project in some nether corner of my mind. The concept is to write an historical novel about Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who became unexpectedly famous due to his remarkable spiritual memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), and who went on to have a long and distinguished career as a prose writer, poet, peace activist, and spiritual mentor.

This is an ambitious scheme, and nothing in my history suggests that I have either the skills or the stamina to bring it off. I would have to do a great deal of background research, for one, something I lack the resources and the time for. It would also be extremely taxing from a craft point of view, trying to get a handle on the nuances and the complexities of a figure so well known and even revered in many circles.

To write a novel like this is a pipe dream. But I hold on to such things. A writer should always dream big. If he can’t, he should find a job in an office somewhere (or keep the one he probably already has). When he gets a vague idea for a future project, he sometimes will try to plan for it in advance, anticipating the moment when he may feel bold or just insane enough to give it a try. He keeps one eye open all the time for anything that could help, while keeping the idea on low heat in his mind. Sometimes this lasts for years.

Not long ago, for example, my twin brother and I were in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, and I spotted an out-of-print paperback edition of a 1970 book called The Man in the Sycamore Tree: The Hard Life and Good Times of Thomas Merton, written by Ed Rice, a lifelong friend and close confidante. I knew about the book from having read biographies of Merton, but had never seen a paperback copy before. The book was musty and old. All the better. I bought it without hesitation. I do not know if I will ever have what it takes to give my novel about Merton a try. But if I ever do, that discovery in Philadelphia will surely be a tremendous help.

I bring this up in order to explain that when I read the following anecdotal tidbits about Melville, I related well to what he was doing. Most fiction writers probably would. In 1849, just before sailing for England to hand-deliver the manuscript of White-Jacket to his British publisher, Melville saw and promptly purchased at a downtown New York bookstall a pamphlet with the extraordinary title The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (A Native of Cranston, Rhode Island), Who Was a Soldier in the American Revolution. This tale chronicled the titular figure’s real-life journey from the battlefields of America to Europe, where he remained in “exile” for fifty years.

Both of Melville’s grandfathers served with distinction in the Revolutionary War, a source of pride for the writer throughout his life. Thomas Melvill, Herman’s paternal grandfather, had in his possession a glass vial filled with tea leaves from the actual Boston Tea Party that Melville could remember admiring as a boy. Clearly Melville bought the pamphlet to stow away for future use. This fact seems confirmed when, weeks later, he recorded in his journal that while in London he had picked up a map of the city dated 1766 “in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative of a beggar.” These advance maneuvers eventually led to his 1855 novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile.

After the debacle of Pierre, Melville seemed inclined to move forward on a number of different azimuths. Most immediately, in order to earn much-needed cash, he turned to writing short fiction for the literary magazine market. Some critics have characterized this period as Melville going “underground;” indeed, many of the stories he wrote were published anonymously. He was paid about $5 a page on average - surprisingly lucrative wages - and his work appeared primarily in two publications: Harper’s New Monthly Magazine; and the newer Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, published by George Palmer Putnam, whom Melville knew through his (dwindling) connections in the New York literary establishment.

Between these two journals, some of Melville’s most enduring fiction was first revealed to the world, including “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Harper’s, 1853), “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (Harper’s, 1855), and “Benito Cereno” (Putnam’s, 1855). In the following chapter, we will examine these and other short fiction works by Melville – which, when considered individually, effectively broaden a reader’s understanding of his marvelous skills and range of interests.

Some also regard this time as Melville’s period of “seclusion,” when he withdrew into himself, and was possibly even afraid to write another novel after the beating he’d taken for Pierre. Personally, I can’t find evidence in any of Melville’s writings up to Israel Potter that he was ever anywhere other than deeply within himself. Nonetheless, one may be tempted to conclude that he was cowed into writing thrifty or whimsical short fiction by the negative feedback he received all his life from critics. But when you look closely at Melville’s life and his working output during this time, it seems that nothing could be farther from the truth.

First of all, while some of the shorter stories he wrote could indeed be characterized as entertainments (one story called “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” is about a vain rooster with a glorious lineage), several of his shorter works still wrestle with weighty themes and betray a kind of progressive urgency. If you have read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” you know that its meaning and its themes could be debated without end, but no one would describe that particular story as “whimsical.”

Though he changed direction frequently, and experimented in countless ways during these mid-career years, Melville did not tamper his pace. He did not like to allow too much idle time to pass between projects “for fear of facing that dreaded state,” Robertson-Lorant writes sympathetically, “in which a writer looks at blank paper and sees the existential void.”

In addition to writing almost all of his short stories in this decade, he also wrote another novel – apparently on the heels of Pierre – with the beguiling title Isle of the Cross. In a prime example of literary tragedy, however, the manuscript has been lost to the ages.

Only a handful of details are known regarding what this novel would have been about. Thanks to his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, Melville had been introduced to an accomplished attorney named John Clifford. At some point during the course of their acquaintance, Clifford told Melville an intriguing story from his professional experience that rooted itself in the writer’s mind. The story had to do with a woman, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper on Nantucket, who saved a drowning soldier from a shipwreck, eventually marrying the man. They had a daughter; but later, apparently afflicted with wanderlust, the man went off to sea again. It was not until many years later, when their daughter was seventeen, that the man finally reconsidered and returned to the woman, full of penitence, expressing a desire to repair his broken relationship with his family.

It is fascinating to speculate on how this novel may have colored Melville’s overall legacy, or what place it may have taken in a meritorious hierarchy of his books. The novel would have been notable for the fact that its primary character was a land-locked woman, not a sailor or some other white, male misanthrope. For Melville to write an entire novel around a woman’s life demonstrates significant advances in his sensibility and in his skills as a storyteller. Yet, because of his damaged reputation as a result of Pierre, he was unable to convince a publisher to accept Isle of the Cross. The manuscript was tucked away somewhere and, eventually, swallowed up by time.

Sometimes when a writer is between projects, she simply flails around for a while, lobbing a bunch of darts at the big wheel of potential ideas in her imagination. She may write a story here, an essay there, an aborted beginning to a novel, perhaps a blog post. I experienced this kind of water-treading between March and June of 2010. It’s a drag. I couldn’t come up with any new ideas for stories or even a quick essay, so I spent time on my own blog, posting amateurish responses to Melville’s books. I also spent time editing the stories I had written previously, sending them out to small literary magazines, and waiting for weeks and months – only to receive rejection notices for every one. This was nothing new. Truthfully, it feels worse to lack a new story to tell than to hang on the fate of existing ones.

As I worked through this head-turning, somewhat jarring period in Melville’s own literary progress, I again felt as though I could relate to some of his experiences. He tried out a bunch of new things, seeming to grope for the one project that would command his full attention.

Since it seems evident, from our perspective, that Melville’s writing was changing into something else, the thought occurred to me that perhaps 2010 was a year in which I was turning into a different sort of writer myself. This may be the ultimate reason why I was so gripped by Melville in general, and for such a long period. He might be the ideal companion for any American writer undergoing a transformation.

In my case, this notion seemed welcome. After all, my first 20 years of writing had not led me into any bright, lush valley of success. But that didn’t make going through radical change any less painful. It’s hard to be unsure of exactly where you are going or how you might get there. When you consider Melville’s total body of work and the life he led, you see clearly that no matter how else he may have stumbled, or what sort of man he was in matters unrelated to art, he never allowed the indecision, the empty void of despair, to defeat him. Melville was a kind of Tom Petty of American letters, standing up before the gates of critical and commercial Hell. He wouldn’t back down.

*

In 1853 and into 1854, having already penned one story that would go down as a classic of the form (“Bartleby”), Melville re-read the pamphlet about the war veteran Israel Potter. Having had the impulse to snatch it up in the first place, in the faith that the right time to take on Potter’s story would make itself known, it must have been stimulating after the experimentation of 1852-1853 to re-discover this gem from his own library. This time, Israel Potter’s tale seized Herman Melville for good. In Andrew Delbanco’s words, “the story of a life that starts out gloriously but leads nowhere suited Melville’s mood.”

He got to work on what we would today call an historical novel, or maybe a work of speculative fiction, based on this broadly unknown tale of a soldier who helped bring about the birth of a nation, but was never given the recognition he deserved. He wrote it in a refined, comparatively direct prose style that bore the stamp of the work he had been doing in magazines. Like his earlier Redburn, Israel Potter was far more palatable to the common reader than his other novels. Melville was as aware of this fact as anyone. When we come across passages like this one, describing a naval battle, it seems he was consciously working to keep hold of the reader’s attention, in spite of the fact that it sounds a little like an early version of Yoda:

Elsewhere than here the reader must go who seeks an elaborate version of the fight, or indeed, much of any regular account of it whatever. The writer is but brought to mention the battle, because he must needs follow, in all events, the fortunes of the humble adventurer whose life he records.

It seems unlikely that the same man who penned Mardi or Pierre would write in this manner without first undertaking a fundamental overhaul to his craft.

Seeking to turn a profit from his effort, Melville sent off the first 60 pages of the novel to George Palmer Putnam, requesting that the story be serialized. He assured Putnam that his newest work continued “nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious” and “very little reflective writing. It is adventure.” The publisher evidently drank the Kool-Aid. Unlike most of the work of his great contemporary across the pond, Charles Dickens, Israel Potter was Melville’s only serialized novel.

The novel that eventually emerged from all of this is Melville’s shortest, clocking in at fewer than 200 pages; with a paltry 26 chapters (Mardi, by contrast, has 195). When all the pieces were assembled and published as one volume in 1855, it was priced at $0.75 apiece and it sold about 3,000 copies in its first six months. While this does not seem spectacular, it was more than twice what Pierre sold while Melville was alive. Although it seems to receive the least attention from modern Melville critics and aficionados, it has been described as one of the most accessible and entertaining of his books – though it does contain, to this reader anyway, a sizeable dollop of flat-out weirdness on top of its historical/fantastical mixture.

Israel Potter is a humble farmer from rural New England who dreams of one day owning a piece of land. Having fallen in love with the daughter of a more prominent neighbor, he leaves his parents’ nest at a very young age to formally request the girl’s hand. But his appeal is coldly denied, and Israel, destitute and broken-hearted, decides to volunteer for the nascent American militia. He acquits himself bravely at Bunker Hill and elsewhere, witnessing many horrors, but when he returns home to pursue his dream, he discovers that his money is worthless. Turned away again, Israel does what so many groundless, unfocused young men did during this historical era: he goes off to sea.

There his life takes another dramatic turn. The United States, now its own nation, still maintains a rather tempestuous relationship to its former motherland. Unfortunately for Potter, his ship is seized by the British navy, and he is transported in shackles to England. Setting foot on foreign soil as a still-young man, Potter has no idea that he will spend the next five decades in Europe, unable to scratch together the means to return to his own country.

Though he arrives as a prisoner, Potter isn’t about to take his incarceration lying down. Characterized by Melville as “bred among mountains,” and thus having a certain natural toughness and an aversion to being patronized, Potter escapes from bondage, aided by a sympathetic “knight” named Sir John Millet. Millet even goes so far as to use his contacts to help Potter find work, and eventually, by twists and turns of fate, secures the escaped prisoner a job as a “laborer” in the gardens of none other than King George III, the very personification of the enemy force Potter had shed his blood at Bunker Hill to rebuke.

From this point forward, the novel proceeds on an unlikely but engaging path, bringing Israel Potter into circumstantial contact with some of the most famous figures from the Revolutionary War period. In Andrew Delbanco’s helpful description, Israel Potter is presented as a kind of “18^th century Forrest Gump.” Like that character, Potter seems to have within him a healthy measure of simplicity or innocence, or both, but he acquits himself well physically when the situation demands, and he does not shy away from speaking the truth no matter who he is addressing. While tending to the King of England’s garden he one day, inevitably, finds himself in a dialogue with the monarch. When George III requests that Potter address him properly as his sovereign, the younger man’s reply is unambiguous: “Sir, I have no king.”

Finding himself in an unlikely position of proximity to the innermost mechanisms of the British monarchy, Potter encounters a man whose expertise is the acquisition of intelligence. Noting both Potter’s youth and his moxie, the man recruits him as a spy and sends him on an “errand” to France to glean information from the American statesman Benjamin Franklin. Subsequently, Potter is led into various other improbable adventures, including individual escapades with Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones.

Melville clearly had fun presenting caricature-like portrayals of these widely known personalities from the legend of America’s birth. Franklin is portrayed as a punning, hedonistic power broker who seems to thoroughly enjoy the exalted status he maintains in Paris. John Paul Jones, on the other hand, comes over as a trigger-happy warmonger, always itching for a fight. When he has the opportunity to take note of Potter’s disdain for the British, he enlists Potter to participate in his marauding naval expeditions: “You hate so well, I love ye. You shall be my confidential man.”

Thus, turned this way and that by kismet, Potter endures many colorful adventures on what he sees as the wrong side of the Atlantic, some more treacherous than others. One of the most striking aspects of this character’s story is that while he is called upon again and again to risk his own well being for one cause or another, by men who recognize his courage, he is never quite taken care of by any of them, and is repeatedly dismissed once the job is complete. Potter ends up homeless on the teeming streets of London, trying to scratch out a living as a furniture repairman. He walks around hollering the novel’s signature calling card: “Old chairs to mend!” When he finally gains the opportunity to sail back to America, most of his unique but unlucky life is behind him: “An octogenarian as he recrossed the brine, he shared locks besnowed as its foam. White-haired old ocean seemed as a brother.”

Returning to his home country after so many years gone, Potter has nothing left. He tries to locate his father’s old homestead, only to find it has long been burned to ashes. He files a legal injunction seeking recompense from the government of the United States for his role in the Revolution, but it is summarily dismissed “by caprices of law.” As Melville writes strikingly near the end of Potter’s story, “his scars are his only medals.” Lastly, as a final insult, when Potter makes his way to Boston to attend a Fourth of July parade celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, he is struck and nearly killed by a “patriotic triumphal car.”

Israel Potter is a fascinating entry into Melville’s canon for numerous reasons – its polished prose style; its historical perspective; its tall tale-like tone; its sense of play – but one of the most intriguing aspects of this novel and its history is the way it was received versus the way Melville intended it. Even though he wanted the novel to appeal to many readers – what fiction writer does not aspire to the same thing? – the book was clearly written as a critique of his own homeland. Melville felt that the story of the real Israel Potter stood as an example of how the United States of America, conceived with such noble intentions, had betrayed its own values, its own principles.

Yet the critics, for once, widely approved of Israel Potter, and turned a blind eye to the book’s implicit satire. One reviewer praised it for its “manly and direct” narrative style. They patted Melville on the back for finally cleaning up his act and delivering an entertaining story steeped in risk and adventure, and disregarded the apparent discomfort the author felt about the state of things in their young nation. As with Israel Potter himself in his day, the critics seemed to feel that if they just ignored Melville’s satirical broadsides, they might quietly sputter out on their own.

What Melville must have felt about all of this is hard to know. Surely he must have appreciated positive notices regarding his work as much as the next writer, and probably some of the good reviews were helpful in the book moving a respectable number of copies. But it also must have been a familiar frustration that the novel was not read closely enough by most critics to notice qualities that might have been considered controversial. There was often a dismissive or patronizing tone to the way the critics treated Melville’s books, especially as he grew older. Almost as if their reviewing his books at all should have been honor enough for him, and that he ought to have been grateful for their taking notice of what he brought forward.

Israel Potter doesn’t quite have that feeling of a great ambition winningly accomplished that one derives from novels like Moby-Dick or Mardi, or even Pierre. It is an odd bird even in Melville’s catalog. Yet I feel like it is distinguished in a number of ways. It confirmed Melville’s standing as a ceaseless innovator who challenged himself at all stages, throughout his writing career. It is one of the very few homegrown works I have seen in any art form – books, films, visual art – that is willing to take a critical view of the United States and its actions with regard to the American Revolution. One almost never finds anything about the birth of our country and the years immediately following that is not presented in glorious colors. In that sense, Israel Potter is a brave novel. It will make any American think.

Melville was patriotic enough, and was rightfully proud of his own family’s historical participation in the Revolution. Yet he also had a compassionate and progressive way of thinking about the common man, and was unwilling to gloss over actions by the government or society at large that he saw as socially unjust. He would brilliantly demonstrate this bedrock principle again, almost immediately after publishing Israel Potter, in his great novella “Benito Cereno,” focusing this time on slavery and racism.

Another distinction of Israel Potter is that it is still the only novel I’ve ever come across that is dedicated to an inanimate object, bizarre as that sounds. In some ways this book’s dedication page (actually almost two pages) is central to the entire concept; indeed, Melville said as much in a letter written decades later: “In what light the book … is to be regarded, may be clearly inferred from what is said in the dedication.”

If one flips back and reads these pages again after the devastating denouement to Israel Potter’s story, and notes that the book is presented “To His Highness the Bunker Hill Monument” (in Boston, Mass.), one begins to grasp Melville’s full intent. Israel Potter is, unfortunately, a prophetic book. At times it has the feel of a Vietnam-era anti-war novel, even though it preceded that conflict by over a century. When the reader reaches the last paragraph of the dedication, there can be no doubt of its sardonic tone:

Your Highness will pardon me, if, with the warmest ascriptions on this auspicious occasion, I take the liberty to mingle my hearty congratulations on the recurrence of the anniversary day we celebrate, wishing your Highness … many returns of the same, and that each of its summer’s suns may shine as brightly on your brow as winter snow shall lightly rest on the grave of Israel Potter.

The final aspect of the book I wish to reflect on is the very name of the character himself. Even though Melville did not invent the name of “Israel Potter,” he immediately seized upon its ironic possibilities, with its reference to the “potter’s field,” a term describing a mass graveyard for criminals and outcasts. This is the kind of detail that a writer jumps all over, and immediately begins to unpack in his mind. If they are very fortunate, it can trigger the spark that drives and sustains an entire novel.

It was an enlightening and enjoyable experience to read Israel Potter, a novel that seems unjustly forgotten. It is difficult to find a book that is both a colorful entertainment and an instructive case study of a great writer’s continual evolution. The book is well worth a modern reader’s time. Hell, I felt proud of myself merely for having discovered and enjoyed a novel about a character named “Potter” that had absolutely nothing to do with magic, wizards, or “muggles.” With due respect to J.K. Rowling and her success, that alone, in our time, feels like an achievement.