One by One

Last night, my wife and I were overwhelmed by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Palladium.  Britten, a pacifist, combined in telling fashion the latin mass for the dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, the poet best known for "Dulce et Decorum est."  Neither of us had heard the complete piece before, but we were excited since one of our daughters sings in the Symphonic Choir, a neighbor is principal flute in the Indianapolis Symphony, and my wife had trained many of the singers in the Indianapolis Children's Choir.  The work, for orchestra, chamber orchestra, chorus of over a hundred with three soloists, plus a children's choir, is a powerful and moving piece with its juxtaposition of the requiem mass and Owen's pacifist poems, and the audience sat in total silence for nearly a minute after the final "amen" died away.

This morning, those lingering motifs and words haunt me as I continue revising my manuscript, To Strike a Single Hour, a civil war novel intended to find a potential truth amid the puffery of P. T. Barnum's "Spy of the Cumberland," Pauline Cushman.  I've draped my narrative over a bare skeleton of the little known "facts" about the brave and steadfast heroine, a woman who, unlike "...the milk-and-water women of the day, whose only thought is of dress and amusement, but one of the women of old, whose soul was in their country's good..." threw herself, according to Barnum's commissioned vanity biography of her by F. L Sarmiento, into the breach with nary a hesitation.

I recall discovering Pauline Cushman probably seventeen years ago and being surprised at how little information existed about her, and I was overjoyed when I managed to find a copy of Sarmiento's 1865 biography, titled The Union Spy and Scout.  Until, that is, I started reading.  The edition I have is 374 pages long and, while on nearly every page Miss Cushman is hailed in heroic terms for her patriotic exploits, the details of those exploits are repeatedly avoided.  Sarmiento consistently fails at a fundamental task of the writer--that of selecting what to include and what to delete.  In nearly every case, in describing Pauline's heroics, he spends far too many words on the buildup, including horribly insulting eye-dialect, and then, at the critical moment where the true conflict arrives and we hold our breath for our heroine, he pulls a cheap trick and says something like "but the reader knows too well the details of this adventure, so we will not trouble to repeat the tale."  Really?

As I continued my research into the beloved Ms Cushman, it struck me that the constant glorification of her patriotic heroics, coupled with a relative lack of specificity in those actual exploits--capped off by the fact she had been an actress and, at the time of the biography, worked for Barnum at the American Museum in New York--might indicate that someone wasn't telling the whole truth, or maybe not even a little truth!

Might it be possible to write Pauline's "story" and find some deeper vision in Americans' thoughts on the Civil War, some juxtaposition of duty and coercion and truth and, yes, some level of selflessness indeed?  Had there been antiwar sentiment or at least ambivalence about the shedding of blood instead of solving the nightmare of slavery through intelligent cooperation and compromise?  How did people really feel back then?

So, this morning, as I recall the gut-twist and breath-clutch of Britten's music, showing the requiem in new light, counterpointed by Owen's words, I remember reading what the composer said after the 1962 premier of the work: "I hope it'll make people think a bit."

Exactly.

Thus, some words of Wilfred Owen, used as part of the "Offertorium" movement of the War Requiem, to think about:

Parable of the Old Man and the Young So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, and builded parapets and trenches there, And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son. When lo! an angel called him out of heaven, Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, Neither do anything to him. Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one. Wilfred Owen