Mother, 1940

ne afternoon in the summer of 1942, I discovered in that Ballintoy trunk room a plywood disk about twelve or fourteen inches in diameter and identified it instantly as the base of my mother and stepfather's wedding cake. Withdrawn from store as if from memory, this absolutely unevocative object struck me at once as preserved to me for some purpose. Something was to be made of it: but what? The well-made pointlessness of it provoked me. What could I impose upon its inertness? "He made the Earth upon it, and the sky and the sea's water, / and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness"? Not quite--though in my recollection the eleven-year-old child approached his task intent as Hephaestus. On the blank disk I inscribed with my drawing compass the circle of the globe. Now the intricate freehand work began, the laying out of North and South America, their isthmian articulation and Mexico hard to keep in proportion. The whole hemisphere I transfixed with a fouled anchor, and at the North Pole I sketched in an inexpert presiding eagle, its talons clutching Canada and Greenland. These things I painted with a hard bicycle enamel . . . --the continents black against the deep blue Atlantic and Pacific and a thick gold for the anchor and scarlet for the whole background surround. In the few months of my stepfather's service as the oldest first lieutenant in the Marine Corps (his World War I commission revived) this imagery had sunk deep in me. At Christmas I offered him this careful object as a coffee tray. Here, I think, in numinous awkward emblem was my first willing act of submission to him. So, anyway, we wordlessly interpreted it, for the rest of the war and indeed until his death in 1948. He and Mother took their after-dinner demitasse from this Shield of Achilles, and every evening it pleased me to see them do so.

John Carnahan Hammond was born in Chicago in 1898 and educated there and at Harvard College in the class of 1918. In his twenties he settled in Manhattan where he worked in the trust department of a large Fifth Avenue bank. The dimness of this history gives a false impression, as does the fact that in 1939 when he and Mother met he was at forty-one still a bachelor. John was sensitive, I think, to the suspicion that this bachelorhood of his was likely to arouse; a general touchiness on the subject of homosexuality now and then expressed itself vigorously, as in the austere view he took of Mother's exceedingly respectable cousin Frazier and his friend Bill. As to the essential point, Mother--in general no fool in such matters and in this particular case entitled after all to an expert opinion--once made it clear to me that there was no doubt at all: quite the contrary.

Prolonged youthful exposure to the New York theatrical world may partly explain such failures of sympathy; may explain, too, by reaction, my stepfather's choice of comparatively humdrum profession (though life as seen from a desk in the trust department, he always insisted, exhibited more variety than outsiders might think: human character lit from odd angles; unexpected motives, appetites and obsessions confidingly displayed to the holder of the purse strings). John's father, Percy Hammond, wrote drama criticism for the Herald Tribune, and had earlier performed the same function on one or another of the Chicago papers. Percy was in his day (he died about 1936) something of a power, to some degree a maker and breaker of reputations and theatrical success. Nowadays he is remembered, if at all, for an occasional phrase resurrected in this or that compendium of wit--for example his definition of drama criticism as "poison from contented rattlesnakes." Percy seems to have been, in fact, the least contented of rattlesnakes. At the end of his life, a widower, he lived forlornly in the Algonquin Hotel, where John bore him company, or in the house in East Hampton. He had come to hold in perfect undistinguishing contempt the whole apparatus of the commercial theater--actors, actresses, playwrights, impresarios, producers, new plays, old plays, musicals, reviews, tragedies, light comedies, the Provincetown Players, the works of Odets, Anderson and O'Neill; yet four or five times a week he was still compelled to attend these productions and compose in the middle of the night paragraphs of readable prose discriminating among their pretensions. A seat on a Broadway aisle was perhaps the wrong place for a midwestern Republican moralist, however genial he might be by nature.

Some of this rubbed off on his son. The house in East Hampton was full of reminders of those days. On the bookshelves time seemed to have

I imagine the pages covered with words in his tiny, beautiful, perfectly illegible hand. In fact, not a page, not a paragraph or sentence survives. Did nothing he wrote survive his ferocious scrutiny?

stopped in the mid-thirties. Unopened review copies of plays and theatrical biographies and memoirs decayed there, the bright, insistent dust jackets peeling and flaking through years of the Long Island damp. Those not pilfered by generations of summer tenants my sisters and I at last sold to a dealer for a disappointing sum. Chests and drawers were full of photographic mementos of extinguished celebrities, their undying devotion signalized in swooping autograph. These, too, gradually disappeared with the tenants, leaving as residue only a melancholy museum of the absolutely forgotten. About these old days my stepfather had little to say--and almost nothing good. In Mother's recollection, mention of certain names--the impresario David Belasco, for instance, or any Barrymore what-ever--would for reasons not clearly explained provoke expressions of real horror, unqualified detestation. Fools and timewasters all, or almost all, my stepfather seems to have thought.

John admired Percy's writing about the theater and spent a year or more choosing and at his own expense seeing through the press a posthumous selection entitled This Atom in the Audience. (An earlier volume, But Is It Art?, had achieved commercial publication.) Even so, John thought his father's talents had been trivially employed. At the end of World War I, Percy had briefly launched out as a commentator on great affairs, a journey to Europe issuing, I seem to have been told, in a series of articles on the consequences of the Peace. At the end of World War II John nursed similar ambitions. For two years, day after day in the attic in East Hampton, he sat at a table trying to spin out--from what basis of knowledge, after what model?--some work of political opinion. I imagine the pages covered with words in his tiny, beautiful, perfectly illegible hand. In fact, not a page, not a paragraph or sentence survives. Did nothing he wrote survive his ferocious scrutiny? Everywhere in the Township of East Hampton, from Wainscott to Georgica to Amagansett, typewriters clacked away pouring out stories and articles for The New Yorker and The Atlantic; on the beach at the Maidstone Club, the editor of Holiday relaxed from his labors, and in every hovel in Springs new paintings dried like laundry. Did John's day after disciplined day up in our attic produce absolutely nothing?

Perhaps this is a melodrama of my own composing. In any case, my stepfather's delusion, as perhaps it must be called, diminished quietly, transforming itself into the wish to edit a country newspaper. If one could not advise the world, then perhaps a village somewhere. . . . In October of 1947, he bought the Clinton Courier and settled us in that upstate village; began to work himself in as the paper's editor, and sole reporter, and the proprietor of a print shop. In February of 1948 he was dead at fifty of a single hammering heart attack.

For the two or three years until Mother managed to sell the business, I worked for us in the summer. For those few months, the work in the shop itself exercised a fascination. Not that I was ever trusted to perform it myself. In even this most primitive of industrial organizations an implicit distinction between blue- and white-collar work prevailed and I "belonged" in the office in front with the young couple Mother had hired to run the show, not in back among our three craftsmen; with the typewriters, that is to say, not with the typesetters. But I could watch and I did. From the jaws of the hydraulic press, a journeyman's left hand extracted a printed business card, his right at the same time feeding in a blank, his fingers escaping hundreds of pounds of pressure twenty times or more a minute. Out of hours of this dull and dangerous deftness we were all to make a little of our living. In the very back of the shop stood the Kelley press, an especially valuable and delicate piece of equipment. Here were printed flyers, business forms, the occasional booklet. Paper flew through this machine, shuttling to and fro on little fabric belts; ceasing abruptly; starting up again; each sheet passing at last over a bed of flaming gas jets that dried the ink. The heart of the shop, it seemed to me, was the composing room, where stood our pair of Linotypes, antique and unreliable. At the keyboard, Al or Bernie conned his copy, and out of the large, roughly trapezoidal magazines the brass matrices descended one by one with a slow jingling clatter. Delicately tapering spacing bars justified the line, cast now, at the turn of a handle, by a trickle of molten lead from the lip of the tiny open furnace, its surface a crinkled silvery scum. Spatters of this metal speckled the floor. Line by line, this week's editorial or Miss Minnie McNamara's social notes from Vernon Center solidified; the graduates of Clinton High School, their names correctly spelled, collected in the waiting tray or galley. At the Stone--traditional center of the printer's mystery--the foreman, Bernie, composed the front page according to the editor's dummy, setting the heads by hand from fonts in sloping ranks above him. With a roller, he inked the locked form and spread across it a sheet of dampened paper; with a soft mallet he pounded each inch of surface and at last, pulling a final proof, displayed the week's work for our gratified attention. On the ancient Babcok rotary press in the basement, the paper was printed one side of the sheet at a time. With a flick of his wrist, the pressman attached each sheet to the huge cylinder and the forms on the flat bed trundled to and fro. The printed sheets were now fed into the trimmer and folder, a chattering, clanking complexity of pulleys, wheels and knives forever jamming. Out of the other end of this ingenious process emerged copy after copy of the Courier, smart and smug as Sunday's New York Times.

But for how long could all this have engaged and satisfied my stepfather's complicated middle-aged attention? Its value and interest to me is clear enough. For instance, it was good to learn early on that what one so artfully composes at a typewriter must enter the world as an article of manufacture. But the barebones clarity of this demonstration

Perhaps my stepfather's resolve would have survived such moments. . . . In disciplined middle-age, he would have known that even one's dearest projects are rich in boredom.

depended on an outworn technology on the brink of extinction. Here the work of eye and hand, of the muscle power and dexterity, lay open at every step to my unreflecting adolescent view: an articulated series of elaborations upon the Simple Machines--levers and pulleys, wheels and gears and screws--operating in train to obtain productive Mechanical Advantage. Even the electricity the Niagara Mohawk Power Company supplied, deriving as it did from falling water, divided us only an abstract step or two from the nineteenth century. One imagines the whole shop on Kirkland Avenue on display in some notional Museum of Antique Technology--and moving between the Linotype and the composing Stone a ghostly Al and Bernie in their inky aprons (and I am there, at seventeen, sweeping the oily floor with my lazy broom).

In hard fact, without the capital to clear all this instructive past away, here was a business failure in preparation. This my stepfather would have soon suspected. No one supposed the newspaper itself would make any money; breaking even could be counted success enough. Its point was, essentially, to advertise the job printing operation; but how many business cards and grocery store flyers would it take to pay the wages, let alone support us? We worked on the narrowest of margins. On slow afternoons I stood on doorsteps all over the township trying without much success to collect the tiny bills due us. To my shame I was offended by the pettiness of our necessary calculation. Would it for long have been otherwise for my stepfather? And how about the newspaper itself, its writing and publication? That, of course, was where we had invested our fantasy. Even to me, two or three summers of the Courier were enough. To see into print my sentences on Mr. Claude Hinman's lush fields along the Deansboro Road or the recent doings at the Malleable Iron Works in Westmoreland at first exhilarated me, and I did not care that my editorial advice to the merchants of West Park Row was coolly received. But these gratifications began to pall. One hot August afternoon I sat at the telephone taking down the names of the twenty-five or thirty attendees at the Dawes Milk Company's annual picnic. At the beginning of the conversation, I thought I wanted to become a newspaperman. At its end, I would not have accepted the editorship of the Washington Post.

Perhaps my stepfather's resolve would have survived such moments. He was no self-regarding boy impatient of the heavy world's refusal to thrill him every day. In disciplined middle-age, he would have known that even one's dearest projects are rich in boredom. I wonder, though, whether all that antique machinery back in the shop hadn't something to say to us beyond the strictly economic bad news. Perhaps we, too, were out of date and the failure preparing itself was more intimately our own. A country paper--perhaps this best thought we had had about the future was unredeemably nostalgic. One mustn't press the notion hard; but it seems to me now that for a generation or so we had been losing the knack of the modern. What we preserved was indeed treasurable, but in more ways than one we had depleted our capital. Perhaps, as my stepfather once suggested, he ought to have moved us to Alaska, leaving all of our old houses behind. That would have been an American thing to do. In the event, he sat bolt upright in his bed and died, mooting the question.

The Examined Life "Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn." --Rebecca West, A Train of Powder Surely there are certain of you You have left behind you Whom you would welcome? But which are they? Where is the boy who looked after the sheep? He is under the haycock. He has gone Where they go after you count them. Even so, none of you would ever come Pert and whistling to that door Like the mailman careless of the terrible Letter he leaves you, the news That shakes in your hand on the rattling paper. No. You will come to you Like the doctor Heavy with what he has to tell you. His hand turns the slow doorknob. He cannot bear what he faces. --John N. Morris, from The Glass Houses (Atheneum, 1980)

ride and Prejudice was Gunnery Sergeant Dod's favorite Jane Austen novel. The grounds of this preference of his made me think of Mother. Jane-ite chat about any of Austen's books--what she called the personages-in-parsonages view--made Mother restive. Sergeant Dod, like Mother, found that this one of all the novels most clearly illuminated life as day to day he found it.

In my snobbish college-boy way, I was surprised that a machine-gun platoon sergeant should entertain a passion for this or any other literary author. Luke Short, a writer of westerns said to be admired by President Eisenhower, that former military man, was just conceivable. Or, at a stretch, Rudyard Kipling. In our cantonment on the edge of Nara, the ancient capital of Japan, the Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, was playing out a version of the English in India. In the Imperial Army barracks to which we had succeeded we had constructed a facsimile of American life, but unignorable Japan swarmed twenty feet outside the gates. On dawn-conditioning marches we issued into the silent city. Past the shuttered bars and whorehouses we carried our heavy weight of knapsacks and haversacks, of mortars and machine guns among the shrines and lanterns lining the sacred way that rose into the holy mountain from which Jimmu Tenno, the first of the emperors, had descended. On state occasions the three battalions of the Regiment rendezvoused in the great park among the sacred deer, divine messengers. Parading before the Todaiji Temple we occupiers impressed, or so we hoped, our audience of (so the jargon went) "indigenous personnel." Within the temple stood the enormous eighth-century Buddha--the largest bronze casting in the world until, with unintended and meaningless irony, it was excelled, at least in weight, by the Marine Corps' Arlington Cemetery memorial to the flag raising on Iwo Jima. Toward this point of assembly we lieutenants marched at the head of our platoons, and as we passed them, elderly civilians in kimono made deep obeisance, as to our predecessors ten years or so before.

Sergeant Dod wasn't interested in the imperial theme. On a little table in his Trappist's cell of a room in the Dog Company barracks the several volumes of Austen's works in R. W. Chapman's Oxford edition, braced by a pair of burnished brass shell casings, declared his exclusive allegiance. She spoke to him directly. A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife? Of course. This in the end, after all her ironizing, was Austen's own view. But for Dod, as well as I could make him out, her sentences were absolutely and immediately transparent, the medium invisible as glass. What Dod admired about all her books was that they were "realistic"--the unhelpful word he used. I gathered that he meant by this that the novels offered a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humors and the changes of fortune to which it is subject as he had observed these things in his South Dakota childhood and his years as a Marine infantryman. These lively or lifelike images hadn't to be photographic. The discipline in Wickham's regiment would have struck Dod as implausibly easygoing even for a militia. The Captain Wentworth of Persuasion can't have much resembled the naval officers Dod encountered on his tour of sea duty, and in Mansfield Park the feeble Lieutenant Price, Fanny's father, may have seemed a slander on the Marines. Like Sergeant Dod and me, the characters in Austen's books inhabited a hierarchical world in which official distinctions among persons--detailed, public, explicit--seemed at first glance sufficient to describe social reality. In fact, of course, except formally, a neophyte like me was no more Dod's superior than Sir William Lucas was Mr. Darcy's or Lady Catherine was Elizabeth Bennet's. The art was to tell when the formal considerations came into play and when they didn't. No one inside the system could afford to be deceived by its apparent simplicity. Arcane traditional expectations and taboos--assumptions the more powerful for resisting clear statement--immensely complicated the moral scene, and honor and self-respect depended on one's skill in negotiating their sometimes conflicting claims. True enough, one shouldn't mistake the Fourth Marine Regiment for Emma's neighborhood of Highbury. Still, a dose of the military life can be useful to a reader of Jane Austen and in the airtight customary world of the peacetime Marines, Sergeant Dod wasn't wrong to think she spoke pretty plainly to his condition.

These things Sergeant Dod and I couldn't discuss. For me to have touched more than glancingly on such matters would have struck Sergeant Dod as a breach of good manners. Manners in this sense had nothing to do with "military courtesy." In the sense I mean, manners were a serious business, the means by which in the forced intimacy of barracks and BOQ one maintained the illusion of leading a private life. This was a matter of elaborately not noticing whole ranges of one another's behavior. The senior NCOs, respectable as any village, enforced the rules mercilessly. In the shelter of a system of conformities almost any eccentricity might be tolerated. A taste for Jane Austen was the least of it. This was one of the attractions of the regular service, and officers too felt it. The Marine Corps--no doubt the Army and Navy too--stood aside from American life, operating in parallel outside it. Ambitious men might master the service, and with luck and application survive to receive its ideal rewards. I was, in wish at least, just such a young officer, but somehow it was borne in upon me that I was one for whom the military was not a calling but a refuge, a social space where one might negotiate a private truce with life. Never again, except in my first years of teaching, would work so thoroughly engage me as did my month in a rifle company; here was the soldierly life at its best. Yet I dimly saw that twenty years or so down the line I would have become one of those tolerated, unpromotable majors and lieutenant colonels serving out his time, Happy Hour after Happy Hour in the bar of the officers' club at Quantico: ammunition safety officers, superintendents of buildings and grounds, assistant editors of The Marine Corps Gazette. These Charlotte Lucases had married Mr. Collins, and, Happy Hour after Happy Hour, they repented of the bargain. Perhaps I too would disappoint myself; but not precisely in this fashion.

In the event, I wasn't to have a choice. On rotation to Korea, under the eye of Sergeant Major Force I signed my acceptance of my change-of-station fitness report. The Colonel's brief paragraph of not unsympathetic assessment concluded, "This intelligent young officer's interests are not Marine Corps peculiar." Exactly. So much, then, for the active life, or this obvious form of it at any rate. The Marine Corps was not to be my sheltering workplace. I would have to make my way inside another sort of institution. Perhaps then it was time for me to send off for some graduate school catalogs.

(These excerpts appear courtesy of Anne Morris, who reserves all rights for future publication of this memoir or any part of it.)

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