This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
12/20/2017 11:01 PMIt began as a quest for a gift, for the middle son whose Dec. 23 birthday is too close to Christmas for it to feel special; it ends with a story of war and survival, prose—both lusty and wise—and an unexpected inheritance.
On Dec. 23, 1944, there was another 19-year-old, a middle son, who was not celebrating a birthday. He was instead in the Ardennes Forest, smack in the middle of one of the bloodiest and one of the largest battles of World War II, the Battle of The Bulge. Although on that day, two days before Christmas, he became saturated with shrapnel, some of which remained lodge in his throat and eye and causing him trouble the remainder of his life, he survived.
Many wondered how—including him.
From a hospital bed in France, he pondered the “how” in a letter written to his older brother in the states. Here is an excerpt from the recently discovered correspondence:
The Jerries have your volume of This is My Beloved. When I came over here I threw away everything except three items; my writing folio with all the family pictures in it, the two books—This is My Beloved and A Shropshire Kid. I took those three things with me because I thot they would be a big help when I got to feeling too low and not wanting to fight anymore. They were a nuisance to carry, but they were well worth it. Things become vague after a while—you can’t remember why you have to live by your ability to shoot a rifle first and straightest—you can’t remember why you must fight night and day, week after week, why you must sleep and wallow in the mud, etc. When that happens you get so you don’t give a damn about much of anything, which certainly leads to personal trouble. At those times I would take out my moral boosting units—my pictures and my two books, and then I would remember. I’d look at the snapshot of Martha in her canoe and I would start dreaming, and then I would tell myself “you want to go back to that, don’t you lad?” and I’d say “Yes.” And then I’d say “Well, the best way to get back to it is to fight with a will.” And after a series of such thots, I’d be O/K again.
This teenager who lived become my father. We never saw him reading anything except the newspaper, and the minutes from town council meetings. Because he was the mayor of hour hometown, they were delivered by hand every Friday night, for nearly 30 years.
To learn that your father—who read without emotion and spoke but rarely—coveted poetry was akin to the Back to the Future movie concept in which you meet your parents as high school students. We look to our parents to inform our lives, with our slates that begin blank. We are hungry for the codes that might someday help us make sense of it all. Hearing of these two books was like getting one number closer to the combination, in which life’s lock might find its order and drop open a treasure of answers.
Parents are shrouded in the power of influence, whether it is welcome or not. And even though it came later in life, I happily welcome the influence.
My mother read voraciously, spoke with style and adored poetry, and my father adored her, so it was with a great warmth that I recall her often reciting:
XIII
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas,
But not your heart away;
Yet, I was not aware it was excerpted from A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman. This collection was easily purchased and ready to be wrapped.
This Is My Beloved, by Walter Benton, published in 1943, on the other hand, proved to be elusive; it couldn’t be ordered from the local book store, it was absent from library catalogs, even on Amazon it was a 10-day delivery. My curiosity became obsessive.
When a slim book bedecked in a jacket of calligraphy and flowers arrived, it seemed to ask to be handled lightly, as though delicate words might be swept from the pages. With a sigh, I opened the book to a random section and began to read. Within three pages, I shut the book with a gasp! Indeed, the cover belied its contents. I was awakened from my Norman Rockwell image of my father’s small town life, not unlike reading Call of the Wild after a steady diet of Disney fiction.
Here are some of the reviewer’s comments:
“I certainly don’t find these poems pornographic…” Louis Utermeyer
“Those who seek to drag any honest writing through the gutters of their own minds will do the same with this…” William Rose Benet
But this was one of the three items to carry, even if it proved to be a nuisance. It all comes together in the beginning of:
This is My Beloved
Because hate is legislated…written into
The primer and the testament,
Shot into our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins//
I need love more than ever now….I need your love,
It is so clear that an older brother would want his teenage brother, who may never live to experience passion and the complexities of love, to at least know about it. And at a time when there seems no point to going on, there will be love.
The older brother bequeathed a book to the younger, who became a father to four. His daughter became a mother with three sons, one born too close to Christmas to feel special. As much as we know who we are by the color of our eyes, the shape of nose, and the size of our earlobes, we also inherit our past. What you do with your inheritance—well, that is up to you.
My, how I would have enjoyed discussing both these books with my father, but this Christmas I can instead attempt to engage my sons. And as we pass through life we will tell the story of our inheritance, of some wise and lusty prose that gave a 19-year-old the will to see another Christmas, that we may all be together to see another Christmas.