 © Paul Dusenbury, Collage by Steve Rowse
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Reflections on War Against War! Click to read Click to |
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© Paul Dusenbury, Collage by Steve Rowse
|
Reflections on War Against War! Click to read Click to |
Reflections
on War Against War!
I was not wounded in Vietnam but after I came home. It was an accident, something I
was holding in my hands exploded. My flesh opened but did not bleed, at least not
immediately. I could see bone and tendon in their pristine whiteness. Miraculously, I was
not blinded.
In the years since, I have not been able to explain to my own satisfaction what it was that seeing part of my skeleton meant to me. I know the bit about facing my mortality, I’ve heard it a thousand times. That isn’t it. Shortly after beginning my tour in Southeast Asia, I recognized that I would not live through the year. While obviously I did, that kind of deep-penetrating fatalism has not left me. Death is the natural state, life the anomaly. I’ve not been able to uncover an argument to convince me otherwise.
So the issue is not one of mortality. Rather, it has to do with disfigurement. Not the stark fact of disfigurement, but with witnessing a thing that parodies life. In this case, what I saw was some of my internal works: the parody came from the knowledge that they were part of me. I was still alive but I had no control over this thing that was happening to my body.
All of this is by way of introducing War Against War! by Ernst Friedrich. The first time I saw this book was on a perusing trip to the University Book Store in Seattle. I had never heard of it, never seen a review of it. I think the illustration on the cover is what drew me. The drawing shows a soldier overcome by what I assume is remorse at having just killed another soldier, presumably his enemy. There is more to the illustration but the remorse is what attracted me. When I got blown up, one or two people accused me of having done it to myself, so guilty did I feel at having survived the war when most of my friends had not. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Memory is selective and there is such a thing as survivor’s guilt. Still . . .
So I picked up the book and flipped through it, beginning at the rear. It is at the rear that the most horrible of the photographs are. I do not want to take away from their impact, should you see them, so I am not going to describe them in detail. I want to say, though, that the worst of them are of men who, at least physically, survived their wounds. That is, they were alive when the photos were taken following the end of World War I.
Since seeing these photographs for the first time I have thought much about the time I spent in an army hospital. I’ve written about parts of it in my novel, The Negligence of Death, but I don’t think I captured the appreciation of the enduring damage that a wound can visit on the human body. Even the smallest of affronts leaves permanent effects. I suspect that because most of us Americans have been removed from the scenes of combat—I do not mean motion picture or television scenes, but those the movies or TV pretend to represent—for so long, war not having been fought on us soil for many generations, that we tend to believe that the professions of medicine and pharmacology can make everything better, that is, as it was before the injury.
In my own case, apart from the scarring, I lost most of the sense of touch in my left hand. A minor loss, really. A friend was shot in his right shoulder. He lost the use of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. Probably not a major loss. One bullet did it. Another bullet took away the entire left arm of another man. Granted, it was a larger bullet, or maybe a ricochet, than the one that severed the nerves in the shoulder of the first man. In the movies I grew up on, these would be called "flesh wounds." When a character had a flesh wound, he winced, gritted his teeth, and continued fighting. Sometimes he limped for a few frames if he had a leg wound.
The photos in War Against War! show what can be done to the human face. Facial wounds are the worst to view because we see our own faces reflected in others. The idea of parody again comes into play here. The faces shown in these photographs are our faces as they might have been or may yet be. It is mostly luck, I believe, that determines who will lose his life or his arm or his eyes. Once we are committed to war, we as individuals have little to say about what befalls us.
War Against War! is propaganda. It does not pretend to be anything but propaganda. Originally published in 1924, it was a response to World War I, to Europe’s making of itself an abattoir. The book was intended to help build an antiwar movement. It is anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and pro-socialist. In the light of all that we as a species have done to one another since the first world war, I have to consider the author naive. In the late twentieth century, it is apparent that the socialist countries are not less bloody-minded than the capitalist ones. Such a strong ideological statement as Friedrich presents in his introduction to the book will have the effect of reaffirming the common stance of those who already believe in socialism but, I suspect, will alienate those who do not.
War Against War! is much too important a book to be given over to ideological factionalism. The photographs speak honestly to all people regardless of class, nationality, or political prejudice. This book deserves the attention of every person who can think or feel.
Profile
In 1984 Jerry had been broke and in graduate school and without any visible means of support. A good time to start a publishing company, Jerry decided. So he teamed up with Les Galloway, an older writer whose unpublished novel, Forty Fathom Bank, was a fantastic piece of writing. Jerry and Les scraped together a few shekels. But what of the technical complexities involved in book production? That’s where Everett D. Greimann came in.
In 1969 Greimann had opened Bozotronics on North 36th in Fremont. Bozotronics specialized in the repair of amps, sound systems, electronic keyboards, and guitars. Its logo, painted ten-feet high in green on the side of the building, featured a big, shaggy, dog-pound dog panting out from beneath a tag that read: "Bozo." In 1979 Greimann bought an Itek quadratek photo typesetter—one of the first computerized typesetting machines—and set up Dataprose as a separate business upstairs from Bozotronics. Greimann supported himself with commercial work and then made his expertise available to local poets and novelists at cut rates. Fremont in those years was a haven for artists, slowly aging hippies, drugsters, and penniless poets who hung out at the Still Life in Fremont coffee house and at Yak’s deli where you could get a pile of teriyaki chicken on rice for a dollar.
In 1984 Jerry did not have a desktop publishing system, but he had Everett. And Everett did more than typeset: he guided the young publisher through the shoals of book production, advised him on printers, paper, artwork. Contemporary desktop publishers, looking back, may regard this as a golden era. Now that desktop publishers all have PageMaker, FreeHand, and Photoshop, paradise is lost. We can do it all—by ourselves, at home, at night. So we never get any sleep. And we have to keep pouring out thousands of dollars for upgrades each year. And we get edu-stress from forcing ourselves to learn printing presses, dot gain, screen angles, paper, ink, type, page design, film, Iris prints, press match proofs, comps, separations, and all other manner of interesting, exhausting arcana.
Four years later Jerry was working for the Census Bureau, counting houses and people. The other sixteen hours of his day were divied up minute by minute, each parcel of time devoted to a publishing task or reserved for those few, inescapable lost hours that human beings must devote to eating, sleeping, and commuting to work. Jerry’s was an incredible regimen which he kept up week after week for years at a time. The results: in seven years Jerry published twelve books, including Infra by Seattle writer Ron Dakron and a historical novel about the English peasant revolt: The Confession of Jack Straw by Simone Zelitch.
In March 1994 I got back in touch with Jerry. I had questions, he had answers: Cune Press was the result. By now Black Heron Press had achieved one "bestseller": When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man by Robert Gordon. Jerry was doing final edits on Publishing Lives—interviews with Northwest publishers, a hymnal for grassroots publishing. Jerry was working with children in an institution for juvenile felons. More satisfying work than his earlier gig, but one which left him exhausted. Hence the contradiction that is Jerry Gold: he’ll talk to you for hours, giving all kinds of helpful advice, an Everett Griemann for our times. On another day Jerry will be clipped, inaccessible, rude: parceling out his time, facing hours of work with only minutes at his command, worried, probably a little panicked, definitely unavailable.
Since 1994 our nation’s major presses have collapsed. By that I mean they largely have lost their ability to discern good writing that will appeal to the public and to edit it into shape—they have degenerated into distribution and marketing machines. Now large presses cruise regional bookfairs looking for self-published titles to snatch up. The grassroots publishing movement is exploding. And Jerome Gold is looking more and more like a man who was ahead of his time.
—Scott C. Davis
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