Headway

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When my uncle, William van Schelven, died in Brownsville, Texas, about twenty-five years ago, my mother flew from San Diego to clean out his apartment, a labyrinth of books, maps, newspapers and real estate transactions. "Location, location, location," as his sales mantra, and he seems to have been among the first to establish the effectiveness of that approach to the real estate hustle. If he had every block of his territory calculated to the quarter-minute for its ease of access to schools, churches and shopping, however, his own life remained detached from any local neighborhood of smoothly flowing intersections. Married, divorced, and childless, he let his own living quarters spill into the disarray of alcoholic solitude. The magnitude of the task of emptying his apartment almost overwhelmed my mother, especially since she was only interested in keeping personal items, and all of these were thoroughly mixed into an almost intransigent jumble of receipts and ideas for inventions, such as how to make building bricks out of salt. Despite sifting every box and carton twice before she disposed of it, my mother was unable to locate the one thing she most wanted to find in all that clutter: a small handwritten account by her father about his childhood in Holland. The apartment took over ten days to clean out, but if my uncle had ever actually had on one of his shelves Cornelius van Schelven's journal of his youth, it had been lost at some indeterminate point before the last five years of my uncle's life began to blur.

I suppose my affinity for my maternal grandfather is primarily based on this missing manuscript, though I have no fantasy that somehow his memoir is a lost masterpiece. The Dutch are lyrical when it comes to a translucent palette of colors: one cannot imagine an account of European painting which did not feature the contribution of painters, especially of landscape and still-life, from the Netherlands. On the other hand, the Netherlands has not distinguished itself in literature. Although my grandfather was familiar with six languages, his mastery of any of them fell short of the insouciant gracefulness or desultory impertinence needed to retrieve wisdom or wit from the memory of daily observation. Nevertheless, the desire to record some portion of one's life and to think about how the patterns of that recording might hint at another layer of substantial, and even enduring, meaning seems to have impelled him to begin and finish a version of his youth. Whether he mentioned his father's suicide is not something anyone else will never know. Cornelius had briefly studied for the ministry when he was a young man, but dropped out of that training when he realized how sincerely his teachers believed in the inherent depravity of human beings, and how much every conscious creature deserved to be damned eternally. That rejection of a potential career was as much of a rebellion against his upbringing as he could manage. He was fundamentally conservative, and loathed the financial impetuosity that led an older brother to squander the family's estate in bad investment and incessant, reckless gambling.

Both of my mother's parents were immigrants from Holland, though Cornelius had come over first during the earliest years of the twentieth century. He emigrated from Holland in part because he knew the conflagration of a continental war was inevitable, and he figured the United States was the furthest away he could get. As he settled in, he may have briefly regretted his decision because his first job was miserable: the company boss was a loud, obnoxious man who enjoyed insulting his employees. Eventually he found work in the civil service in Washington, D.C., where workplace insults were more muted and oblique, constrained by rules that were of themselves an affront to the common sense of ordinary civility.

His desire to escape the European compulsion to modernize warfare proved to be an illusion, though during World War I he must have felt some initial satisfaction in his choice to leave Europe. His only son, William, however, ended up seeing combat not only in Europe during World War II, but was also recalled into service during the Korean War. William van Schelven began World War II as an enlisted man, and was discharged as an officer. As is the case with most men who actually carried weapons, he spoke very little about his experiences, which included the Battle of the Bulge, though he did say that he spent one winter night in a farmer's wooden cart, burrowing into dry manure in an attempt to keep warm. Of Korea he simply said, "It made the Battle of the Bulge look like a Sunday school picnic."

I was aware of my grandfather's choice and my uncle's service when I participated in public protests of the Vietnam war, though I also knew they would have scorned my opposition to the war crimes committed by this country in that neo-colonialist adventure. For many young men in my generation, opposing the war was a matter of objecting to the imposition of a military draft on young people for a war that had little, if any, believable justification. I had not only my own father's twenty years of service in the U.S. Navy to contend with, but the contradiction of a grandfather who wished to avoid war and an uncle for whom it was impossible to do anything but plunge into it hip-deep.

I was exempt from military service in the late 1960s because of childhood asthma, though I have often thought I would have been luckier to be healthier and stronger as a child, and gone to Canada. After failing my draft physical, I worked and saved enough money to go to Europe. Part of me wondered if there was an alternative life elsewhere, but when I visited Holland, I realized there was little room there for a young expatriate poet. I stayed with very distant relatives on a sugar beet farm just outside of Leewarden, a town that required a couple hours on a bus to get to its small town square. My grandmother had written them in Dutch, and asked if I could stay with them, and if they could drive me up to Friesland to visit her unmarried sister, who lived in a convalescent home. The story was that she had been a nurse in a hospital during the Second World War, and that the Nazi soldiers had badly abused her. Who knows how difficult those years were for her? People did starve to death in Holland then. I remember reading an article years ago about a well-educated woman in the United States who, during a brief stay in Amsterdam, asked an elderly person in German for direction. She was astonished, she said, when the person replied by yelling at her with contempt. I have no idea of how often my great-aunt was raped, or if she managed to wiggle through the war unscathed. Given the promiscuity and rapacity of American servicemen overseas since World War II, I would be naïve to imagine that an occupation army in Holland would be more restrained.

My great-aunt was too weak to get out of bed, and the conversation was halting. She spoke a dialect peculiar to Freisland, and the stout farmer who had driven me up north spoke barely enough to introduce us. I don't think she had many visitors, but she did not seem embittered. On the contrary, she seemed triumphant, as though an elusive and still incomplete victory had circled back to comfort her final memories. She knew of course that my name, in German, means "moor" or "Arab," and this side of my family came from the coal mines districts of the Alsace-Lorraine. If the German name disturbed her when she first saw it in my grandmother's letter announcing the possibility of my visit, she seemed to have long dismissed it as an irrelevant superficiality. After all, her nephew had fought the Germans, and helped to defeat them, and I was her grandnephew. A genealogy of valor in resistance is more about action than etymology. Regardless of my name, I doubt she referred to me by anything other than my first name to anyone she talked with in the afterglow of my brief visit.

My father's father was a roofer, and he spent a good portion of my father's childhood on the road. His only son joined the military, although he never saw any actual combat during either World War II or Korea. He served twenty years, during which his wife and he moved my five siblings and myself back and forth the country, mainly shutting between Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego, California. When we were in Norfolk, we would travel up to Arlington, Virginia or Milton, Massachusetts, and visit them during the father's time off from duty. When I think of my grandparents, I have no other context but war and preparing for it, and I don't regard it as a coincidence that I am writing these words as the United States, for the first time in its history, has invaded a country out of no motive but undiluted paranoia. "They might attack us." It's as clinical a case as one could imagine restrained by a straitjacket at the local asylum, except this is on a massive scale of self-delusion.

A war can only be justified if all of its citizens who are capable of fighting in that war put themselves in a position of equal risk. One can always detect the stench of hypocrisy if one were to ask how likely a war would be if the sons of the wealthiest citizens had to face the imminent likelihood of door-to-door combat in a foreign city. Of the 500 members of Congress who voted on the act that allegedly authorized Bush to wage a unilateral war, only one had a son on active duty. The more important question is how many of the top 500 contributors to each of their re-election campaign funds have children on active duty? We're talking about 25,000 people, who need to be asked one very important question. Imagine yourself at the Vietnam Wall. How many of the names there mean anything on a personal level? Jot down a detail of that person's life, and give it to your son or daughter so that the name - say, Dennis Christie - means something to your daughter. If a person is unable to identify any of the names in that manner, they shouldn't give up. They simply need to dig up their pre-marital telephone books and call their old flames. Ask them the same question. If once again, the names are simply a telephone book to an imaginary city called "Patriotic Duty," then we can be fairly certain the incommensurate sacrifices of other people are the result of a deliberate, calculated, and criminal deception as fraudulent as any swindle pulled off by prevaricating stockbrokers.

In thinking of my grandparents, the issue is how have I honored their emigration, their choice to reject the old world's rules of government and war. They left the familiar, and asked how their lives could be imagined in a different country that claimed to provide a more just estimate of each person's dignity in being a citizen. Perhaps they would be shocked at my apparently brazen disloyalty towards the country that provided them with a semblance of refuge, but I am demanding nothing less in their memory than an accounting that does not privilege inequity as the first condition of our patrimony.