1975 I’m sitting in a shoe box sized apartment on E. 74th St. in Manhattan. No car. Haven’t been out of the City in months. NJ friend calls. Taking the family car to Gettysburg. The battlefield? Yeah.
I’m not interested in American History. It’s that generation. English History yes. Russian History yes. Never took an American History course in college. Lots of English literature. Russian literature. No American literature. As an English music publisher said in 1962, “So what’s from Liverpool?” In 1975, I thought, “So what’s from America?”
But a car was a car, a trip out of NYC was a trip out of NYC. If my pal had been headed for a chewing gum museum I would have been game. Three of us set off for Gettysburg. We arrived. Clambered around in the fresh air and sunshine. Novel stuff after months on the Avenues. There was a little sign in the woods. Something something …these rocks were piled here by Union defenders the afternoon of July 3, 1863.
I was stopped literally in my tracks. The permanence of something so transient was a shock. NYC, where permanent things, huge buildings, hotels, apartment complexes, come and go like soda cans. Somebody takes this field pretty seriously I’m thinking. Of course I knew about Pickett’s Charge, of course the Gettysburg Address. But this was American History – all huffing and puffing. None of the courtly drama of European History.
I picked up a couple of books on Gettysburg at the Park bookstore. About five years later I looked up from Civil War literature and tried to read a novel. I thought, why am I reading this made up stuff? Why does anybody? They’re somebody’s daydream. This Civil War stuff really happened. These massive personalities actually lived. Actually did these things. That rocky little wall on Little Round Top that they scrambled to erect still exists. The Civil War isn’t sullied over with the pale cast of intellectuals’ thoughts. It lives and breathes, it’s bathed in sunshine and washed with rain. It’s characters lie in gigantic monuments or in nondescript forgotten graves. But they’re there, and they were, and they matter. A lot.
I plan to talk about them. And other American things that matter. Some maybe not so much.
