By Samuel Hynes; Frederic C. Beil & Naval Institute Press; 270 pages.
“Every generation,” writes Samuel Hynes in the preface to his new book, “is a secret society.” The secret his generation shared was the experience of coming of age in the Second World War. Hynes was eighteen when he entered Navy Flight School, and not yet twenty-one when the war ended. In the meantime, he’d learned to fly in combat effectively enough to earn an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross in the Pacific. Afterward he went back to the normal business of living, became Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton, and wrote books on the Edwardians and on W. H. Auden. But still he carried the secret. It “made us different from those who were older or younger than ourselves, or who were not in the war. I can’t formulate the differences in terms that seem adequate to the experience, but perhaps I can recover something of the experience itself.”
To do so, Hynes has tried, he says, “to tell it with the voice of the young man who lived it, and to see it with his eyes, and not to impose upon it the revisionary wisdom of age.” Though this intention carries with it the alarming possibility of a cloying, disingenuous simplicity, Hynes instantly finds the voice he seeks, and his memoir is written with unfailing grace and clarity.
Every stage of his development as a pilot is described with a richness of observation. Here, picked at random, is a routine flight at the beginning of his career: “It was late as I flew back from some practice solo, and the sun was nearly set, but the air was still warm and bright. … Below me lights began to come on in houses and farms, and everything that was not a light became dark and indistinct, so that the ground was almost like a night sky. But still I flew on in sunlight. The surface of the plane seemed to absorb and hold the light and color of the sunset; brightness surrounded me. It was as though the earth had died, and I alone was left alive.”
Hynes brings the same sense of both mood and specific to every aspect of his years as a flier: the training, the endless chatter with his fellow pilots-to-be about sex, his plunge into marriage, the death of friends, the indispensable drinking and bawdy songs, the planes, the fighting. It is not a book about war, although of course the war informs it throughout, nor about hardware, although Hynes is very good on it (“That month the Navy took away half the squadron’s TBM’s and gave us SB2C’s instead. These were the Navy’s new divebombers, bigger and faster than the SBD’s 1 had trained in but in every other way less satisfactory … some public relations man had decided to call the SB2C the Helldiver, and it was as showy and as phony as the name, like a beach athlete, all muscle and no guts”). Inevitably the “wisdom of age” that the author sought to keep at bay seeps quietly onto every page, and Flights of Passage is a calm, poetic, and sometimes very funny musing on the quality of youth, and the gains and losses that come with the passing of time.
Feud
Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900
By Altina L Waller; University of North Carolina Press; 313 pages.
Of historic family fights, brawls, and feuds, the long-running struggle between two Appalachian clans, the Hatfields and the McCoys, occupies the most prominent place in the American popular imagination. In comic strips, songs, movies, and television, the unruly and ignorant hill folk have succeeded in becoming such a part of America’s mythic past that many readers will no doubt be surprised to discover that the combatants were real people.
The feud began in the late 187Os when Old Ranel McCoy, something of a patriarchal figure in the backward and impoverished Tug Valley of Kentucky and West Virginia, became convinced that Floyd Hatfield, cousin to a rival clan leader, Devil Anse Hatfield, had stolen one of his hogs. At first the feud resembled a spat: instead of pulling out the guns, Old Ranel complained to the justice of the peace. A jury trial followed, and Old Ranel lost the case. Memories were long, however, and a year and a half later, still incensed at the trial’s outcome, two of Old Ranel’s nephews, Sam and Paris McCoy, beat up one of the witnesses against their uncle, a fight that ended in the witness’s death. Spurred on by an interclan romance between Johnse Hatfield, the handsome, fun-loving son of Devil Anse, and Roseanna McCoy, the two families continued to do battle in a war that reached its height in 1888. In that year the Hatfields attacked the McCoy house and burned it to the ground, killing two of Old Ranel’s children. The house burning and the murder created a national sensation. The governors of West Virginia and Kentucky sent emissaries to investigate. In the following year a number of the Hatfields and their supporters were tried and convicted of murder. The public hanging in February 1890 of Ellison Mount, one of the defendants, marked the feud’s end.
Waller describes this long-drawn-out battle between two families but also sets out to show how the feud was not, as is ordinarily assumed, simply the product of the backwardness and isolation of Appalachian culture. She does allow that the Hatfields and the McCoys were cut off from civilizing institutions; even at the start of the twentieth century, the region resembled the frontier of an earlier generation, and there was a good deal of brawling and rowdiness. Waller argues, however, that it was the economic and social dislocation produced by the arrival of commercial life, including the timber mills and the Norfolk and Western railway, laid down in the late 1880s, that prodded the rival groups into violent confrontation.
Border Fury
A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917
By Paul J. Vanderwood and Frank N. Samponaro; University of New Mexico Press; 312 pages.
Of all the modern mediums of written communication, the postcard is probably the most sentimental and lighthearted. But as this handsome volume of picture postcards depicting the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the war between American troops and Mexican rebels demonstrates, postcards once served a very different function. They were, in fact, a form of primitive news bulletin. Professional photographers, and even more often amateurs, would rush to the scene of flash floods, fires, tornadoes, strikes, and other newsworthy events and then put their photos on postcards for general distribution. These cards acquired an enormous circulation.
The postcard was introduced into the United States on May 1, 1873, when the Post Office Department began to issue postal cards to postmasters throughout the nation. Within six months Americans had bought sixty million of the cards. In the 187Os publishers began to print holiday greetings and advertisements on postcards. It was not, however, until 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that picture postcards came into general use as souvenirs of an unusual spot or sight. In 1907 the popularity of postcards surged when postal legislation allowed divided backs on postcards. Now the sender of a card could write a short message on the back. The popularity of postcards profoundly transformed the writing habits of Americans, who came to rely less and less on long letters.
One of the first major events to receive attention from postcard publishers was the Mexican Revolution and the ensuing struggle between American troops and rebel guerrillas. Americans learned the course of the rebellion through the thousands of postcards they purchased. An astonishing variety of cards churned out by local amateur photographers as well as by larger, more profitable firms brought home the first skirmishes between U.S. and rebel troops at Agua Prieta, Sonora, in 1911, the April 1914 landing of American sailors and Marines at Veracruz, and the March 1916 expedition of American troops into the interior of Mexican territory led by Gen. John J. Pershing.
The postcards not only offered an exciting sense of the progress of the war—the battles, the skirmishes, the defeats, and the victories of a long struggle—but also provided a series of arresting images that conveyed a sense of the varied experience of life during wartime: the hardship visited on the troops by the Mexican heat and dust, the boredom and tediousness of army life, the long bouts of waiting for transportation or supplies, the extended periods of inaction, as well as the camaraderie and playfulness in the barracks. The most serious and important contribution that these postcards make to the historical record can be found in the wealth of period detail they contain—precise information unavailable elsewhere concerning troop movements, battle tactics, morale, weapon types, and the personalities of generals, rebels, and politicians.
Mills and Factories of New England
Photographs by Serge Hambourg; Harry N. Abrams; 108 pages.
Mill buildings, it has been said, are as essential a part of the classic New England landscape as are mountains and rocky fields, and as basic to the region’s history as Pilgrims and Kennedys. Serge Hambourg, a French photographer, started taking pictures of old New England mill and factory buildings in 1982, shortly after he moved to this country. Ninety of his elegant color photographs have been collected in a volume that both documents and celebrates its subject matter.
He has shot mills inside and out. There are whitewashed clapboard buildings that with their wide-plank floors and wavy-paned windows look like the city dweller’s dream of a country hideaway; there are heavy granite edifices with squinting clerestories; there are the familiar long, severe brick buildings alongside turbid Massachusetts rivers. Some of the interiors still contain their old belt-run machinery, preserved as museum pieces; others are cleaned and emptied and have been photographed to reveal structure and space. The pictures compose an unwritten history of the New England mill (and the captions are very good too). Two thoughtful essays, by the architectural historian Kenneth Breisch and the writer Noel Perrin, explore the history and cultural place of the New England mill.
It is amazing what a great deal of beauty industrialization brought to—and left behind in—the towns and cities of New England.
The Pilot and the Passenger
Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States
By Leo Marx; Oxford University Press; 357 pages.
Since the first European settlers gazed across the untrammeled American landscape, writers have sought words adequate to describe it. Leo Marx, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Cultural History at MlT, ably negotiates the thickets of American letters in an attempt to more fully understand the American landscape’s influence on the lives of its inhabitants. This collection of nineteen essays written over a forty-year period examines an array of literary figures, from Melville and Emerson to Irving Howe and Susan Sontag.
In the title essay Marx probes the development of Mark Twain’s vernacular style in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There were two ways to look at the Mississippi River: from the vantage point of the passenger, who regarded the river in serene contemplation of its great natural beauty, and from that of the pilot, attuned to the dynamics of the river, conscious of its current, wary of snags. With Huckleberry Finn, Marx asserts, Twain broke free from the European literary conventions, with their painterly appreciation of light, colors, and forms, and adopted the language of the river people in order to convey otherwise inexpressible truths: “… we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by … and maybe see a steamboat coughing along upstream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was a sternwheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. …” “The Machine in the Garden” (later expanded into Marx’s important 1964 book) focuses on the cultural response to technology and industrialization. The verdant wilderness that enchanted (but also intimidated) the early pioneers was tamed by the nascent technology of the industrial revolution. The machine in literature was an ambivalent icon: it represented the indomitable will of civilized man, but it also shattered the pastoral idyll of the American landscape. Marx finds Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Ethan Brand” suffused with the “imagery of technology”— fire, metal, and steam—which makes it one of the initial entries in the literature of American disillusionment.
In the penultimate essay, “The American Revolution and the American Landscape,” Marx asserts that the land itself, the “unhistoried landscape,” provided some of the impetus for the American Revolution, inviting the Founding Fathers to cast off old institutions and to begin again.
Leo Marx is not a popularizer; his writing is steeped in academic tradition. He dismantles the arguments of his critical predecessors up to and including T. S. Eliot with a kind of stern pleasure. Much of scholarship is a dialogue with the past; Marx’s ruminations on technology, American pastoralism, and our “uncompleted revolution” demonstrate the importance of this dialogue as we prepare to meet the future.
Revolution at the Table
The Transformation of the American Diet
By Harvey A. Leuenstein; Oxford University Press; 320 pages.
Early visitors to America were astonished at the abundance of food that regularly appeared on American tables and equally astonished at our indifference to this bounty. The national motto, one observer said, was “Gobble, gulp, and go.” This enjoyable, informative book traces the steps by which we moved from disregard of what we ate to our present intense concern with food and nutrition.
There have always been some gourmets among the gluttons. Thomas Jefferson grew to love French food during his years as American minister to France and introduced French cooking into the White House when he was President. By 1880 French chefs were firmly ensconced in the nation’s wealthiest houses and finest restaurants.
By the turn of the century Americans were becoming conscious of nutrition as well as taste. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of foul conditions in slaughterhouses launched a wave of concern about the purity of what we ate, and simultaneously a burst of food faddism hit the country. As the different components of foodstuffs were discovered, various nutrition gurus came forth with theories about them: it was necessary to chew tirelessly (the Great Masticator, Horace Fletcher); we must avoid meat and masturbation (”consumption of the former encouraged the latter,” according to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg); anything spicy was detestable (Sylvester Graham, promoter of graham-flour products).
There were also social scientists—the new nutritionists—who worried about the diets of the poor. Immigrants flooding into the country brought with them their food preferences, most of which were rejected by those already here. The first ethnic food to gain wide acceptance, in the 1920s, was pasta with tomato sauce—cheap, meatless, rich in carbohydrates, and chock-full of that newly appreciated ingredient: vitamins.
Anyone reading this lively history of the misinformation and hype embedded in the complicated quest for good nutrition in America can’t help looking a bit more skeptically at the strictures pouring forth as gospel from today’s food experts.
