Page 166 "...the river valley made safe by the Roman general Marius..."

Left: a bust of Marius; Right: engraving of Marius in Carthage.

[Gaius Marius was a Roman general and statesman, noted for his dramatic reforms of Roman armies, authorizing recruitment of landless citizens, eliminating the manipular military formations, and reorganizing the structure of the legions into separate cohorts.]


From page 166 of the book:  "...He looked up to the clear, night sky which brought him to this ancient river valley made safe by the Roman general Marius, against the barbarians, two-hundred years before Christ.  He watched the stars hold forth as Marius might have done before he crushed the Teutons, and he asked the ungrateful night horizon to help him fight his trepidation."
 

Page 164 "...Owen's Civil War General George Thomas at the battle of Chickamauga..."

Clockwise from top left: Painting of the battle; General George Thomas;
Thomas Nast rendering of "Lt. Van Pelt Defending His Battery";
Photograph of the Chickamauga countryside at time of battle.

Page 164 of the book: "...There I was, standing up to the seminal representative of my faith, not cowering but vastly lost within my untried courage. What was I doing arguing with a priest? I thought of Owen's Civil War General George Thomas at the battle of Chickamauga, Tennessee. Outnumbered 2 to 1 by the Confederates, he held his ground against Longstreet's crushing advances, placed like Shelby Foote said "between an anvil and a sledge." He was The Rock of Chickamauga. It was there, in front of Revenant, that I held my own ground, although I resembled nothing like a rock, and nearly folded between this spiritual French blacksmith and the door."

Page 306 "...Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!"

Three views of William Faulkner, Nobel Prize-winning
author of "Absalom, Absalom!" and "The Sound and the Fury"
"Light in August" to name but a few.

Three editions of "Absalom, Absalom!" and a tomb.
The tomb is the presumed resting place of the
Biblical son of King David, Absalom.

It is now time to speak of William Faulkner, whom I reference in Chapter 17 of “The Long Habit of Living.”  Why is Faulkner, and especially his novel “Absalom, Absalom!” so important to me?  This novel, more than any other, although with the inclusion of others, set the tone for what I was to write from 1979 on.  It set the tone for subject matter, for style, and for complexity.  I even wrote huge sections of my book in italics, as when the Joseph Sarjevo (the father) character  speaks, since he’s speaking from the past, from the grave so to speak, as do large sections of Faulkner’s book appear in italics when the two narrating characters, Shreve and Quentin, discuss the long 19^th-century story of Thomas Sutpen, and Rosa Coldfield, and the Compson family ancestors, and the voices of the past intermingle with the present.  It was this novel that spoke to me about the construction of the Sarjevo family and how to use the dead to speak to someone who was not blood kin but who “saw” in his own mind the tortured love and death of someone like Owen’s father and mother, and Owen’s tortured soul’s death during and after the fratricide conspiracy, mixed with the religious battle between Monsieur Ebert and Father Revenant, and Walter’s internal moral strife.

And let us not forget the importance of Faulkner’s title “Absalom, Absalom!” Go to the Old Testament Second Book of Samuel, verses 13-19, and you will discover an errant son of King David, a son who killed his own brother Amnon, and then died a miserable death as well.

And the king was much moved,

and went up to the chamber over the gate,

 and wept: and as he went, thus he said,

 O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!

would God I had died for thee,

O Absalom, my son, my son! (2 Samuel 18:33)

I was mobilized by the time changes in “Absalom, Absalom!”, by the blend of past and present voices executing those time changes; they burned themselves into my brain, as did the prose of my other favorite Southern writer William Goyen, and his book “The House of Breath,” which, I believe, is one of the most prosaic and lyrical works ever written by an American.  Being so taken by the language of “Absalom, Absalom!” when the television series “Brideshead Revisited” began to air on PBS back in 1981, I wouldn’t watch it at first, because I thought Jeremy Irons’ voice, narrating Evelyn Waugh’s prose, would influence my own Faulkneresque writing: because, you see, I thought “Brideshead” was so beautifully written as well, and here were two profound voices coming at me from different angles, but still telling the story of family, of errant sons and distant fathers.  It was one hell of a literary and auditory confluence.

So there were Shreve McCaslin and Quentin Compson in their Harvard college room, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, Owen Sarjevo and Walter Vann in Illinois, and Joe Savino talking to me at Bradley University--one talks, the other listens, learns, understands, or doesn’t, but the revolving parallels in those books and in my own life had found, as William Goyen says, “a transient homage,” and “bore the haunting question of ancestry.”

Over the years, the telling of family stories, from all of my friends and family to my friends and family, would pass through me and be held as “…a scar of resemblance, ancient and unchanging through the generations...and would make [my] own face longer than the stamp of any stranger’s honor….”*

(*) William Goyen, The Faces of Blood Kindred.  New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1953.



From page 306 of the book:  "...I shook my head in disgust at Daudet, that evening, and spoke of Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, who egregiously intones, "I don't hate the South! I don't hate the South!"  "Now that's more like it," Ebert had exclaimed.  It was remarkable how many parallels existed between the South of the United States and the South of the Fifth Republic.  I was sure we would be taking part in all of them, one way or another."

Page 138 "His father was a blue-jacket..."

Clockwise from top left: the 7.2 rocket; preparing rockets for launching on DDay; a row of rockets ready for fire (early prototype version). This was the "Woofus" rocket launcher; a converted PT boat into rocketboat; the lone sailor statue at the Navy Memorial in Washington, DC.

Photo of the rocket boat courtesy of Mike Virgintino and http://www.suite101.com/

For further reading, I suggest: http://www.suite101.com/content/rocketboatmen-are-unsung-heroes-of-d-day-a216545

Interesting note:  The statue of The Lone Sailor is constructed from pieces of copper sheeting, spikes, hammock hooks & other fragments from the post-revolutionary frigates USS Constitution and USS Constellation; from the USS Hartford (flagship of Admiral Farragut in the Civil War era), from the USS Maine, the USS Ranger, and from the USS Biloxi, as well as from USS Hancock the submarine USS Seawolf.

More:  Receiving little attention over the last 65 years, rocketboatmen were the first Navy crews in daylight to approach the Omaha and Utah beaches. They deployed 30 minutes before the first wave of infantry troops. Some left their flat bottom boats and fought head-to-head with the German machine gun nests, successfully neutralizing them. Many of those brave men took their war stories of that day with them to their graves.  One rocketboatman, Yogi Berra, beloved baseball star...got closer to the beach than the hitter is to the left field wall in Fenway Park. “Nobody knew about rocket boats. We were a secret mission as part of the invasion. We moved quick, shot rockets 300 yards from the shore, and didn’t have time to be scared.”
(Text copyright by Mike Virgintino.  Used by Permission.)

From page 138 of the book:  "...His father was a blue-jacket, in line for a petty officer rating when he'd operated what was described in 1944 as one of the "most secret of naval weapons," and which had played a key role in the blasting of German defenses along the French beaches of Normandy. They were large landing ships, redesigned from carrying tanks to providing rocket fire as primary bombardments began prior to the landing of Allied troops. The noise of those rockets, firing 60 times a minute and never ceasing for hours, had nearly driven him crazy. Hours on end that even plugs and heavy muffs over his ears couldn't dim the noise. His skin had absorbed the blasts as the missiles sped out of their cylinders, never ceasing, always louder and louder."

Page 142 "Next to it hung Mantegna's "Dead Christ"

Andrea Mantegna's "Dead Christ," c. 1500, tempera on canvas, 27' x 32"
An excellent example of foreshortening, a process of perspective used on the human figure.
It creates confrontation with the viewer and a psychological mood.

Caravaggio's "Conversion of St. Paul"
1600-1601; Oil on canvas
Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popola, Rome

From page 142 of the book:  "...Why didn't Owen tell Sylvester about what Thomas had intended to do at the outset of the plan? I'd looked to my print of Titian's "Man With a Glove," which hung in the center of the wall facing me. I'd bought it in front of the Museum of Modern Art one day while shopping with Sarah. That portrait had grabbed my attention like a hook; I was in love with the man's eyes. Next to it hung Mantegna's "Dead Christ," with its foreshortened perspective of the Savior's body: the feet were in the foreground, drawing my eye backward toward His head, as if I were watching an MRI being performed. To the right of the Titian hung Caravaggio's "Conversion of St. Paul,” the second one, with Paul lying on his back, limbs raised upward, facing his indifferent horse. I'd begun to refer to these objects within their and my own immediacy as consolation against my sometimes ungovernable states of mind: I'd known from way back, from deep inside my Connecticut backwoods, that I'd stepped on the perimeters of lunacy and needed a standard by which to measure myself."

Page 131 "...Harry Haller's attic room in Steppenwolf"

Clockwise from top left: Max von Sydow as Harry Haller in the film "Steppenwolf";
the movie poster for "Steppenwolf"; the nobel-prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse.




From page 131 of the book:  "...There were scattered sheaves of paper and a glass with the dried residue of inexpensive brandy or bourbon on the bot-tom. I thought of Harry Haller's attic room in Steppenwolf. Here was a retreat and a torture chamber in one."

Page 131 "...the books of the American Civil War like Joshua Chamberlain..."

From top to bottom, left to right:
Joshua Chamberlain, his book "The Passing of the Armies," Moxley Sorrel;
Sorrel's book "Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer," James Longstreet,
Longstreet's book  "From Manassas to Appomattox"
Shelby Foote, his book "The Civil War"

From page 131 of the book:  "...Below the picture was Owen's desk: a small table clut-tered with books of the American Civil War like Joshua Cham-berlain's Passing of the Armies, Moxley Sorrel's Recollections, James Longstreet's From Manassas to Appomattox, Shelby Foote's trilogy, and a dozen other volumes lending nourishment to his infatuation with this subject."

Page 8 "Owen had asked me to meet him in Long Island City..."

Kennedy

Welcome to Long Island City

Coming soon...

Spires and stacks

(This is the kind of day, back in May 1978, when Joe Savino
and I were walking along Northern Blvd., before we'd
stopped at a diner at 36th Street, the day we heard the
news from his cousin that their grandmother had died.
We were out of work at the time, and were searching
the neighborhood factories for possible jobs; miserable
responses, questions falling upon deaf ears.  At 6:30 a.m., we
knew that something terrible had happened.  When
we got back to the apartment in Jackson Heights,
Joseph Centrone telephoned and gave
 us the news about our beloved Benedetta Savino.)




N train

 























From page 8 of the book:  "...Owen had asked me to meet him in Long Island City, at a diner near 36th Street on Northern Boulevard.  Like I said, I wasn't in the habit of meeting people anywhere before sunrise, but his summons had had an affliction to it, an exhaustion.  With the blue shadows of dawn and the somnambulists dotting the streets of this warehouse district, I met Owen on a corner of the boulevard which was spotted with a pack of junked cars."


(The above photos of Long Island City are courtesy of npzo on Flickr.  Used with permision.)