By Judith Fitzgerald Nov 24, 2007, 13:50 GMT
Historiography is notoriously malleable, for good reason. As Mark Twain succinctly noted, "The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice."
Toronto octogenarian Raymond Souster — retired banker, bodacious baseballographer, League of Canadian Poets' founding member and imaginatively coherent living legend in possession of a voice utterly unlike the contemporary chorus of fine and famous virtuosos dominating our stagnant pool of postmodernity — knows from poetry. And, prejudice writ fluidly. It shows.
In What Men Will Die For, the inimitable Souster tells and shows what he knows in one astonishing epic performance worth its weight in wallops. Intimately acquainted with the all-consuming shell games of contemporary n'existence, the shy guy's newest, a contra-poetic docudrama, packs one rat-a-tat-tattered punch even as it racks up a splendid TKO in all its goreous glory. War is hell; but, who the hell doesn't know that? War makes the world go wonkily around, as necessary as monetary systems or nuclear-family illusions. War happens. History records the prevailing hallucinatory version surrounding its faux-authority. Big Brother is Catching. History is blind. (David Jones's In Parenthesis illuminated precisely these features.)
Souster has his own approach to history. He nixes the preferred one-voice, one-perspective attack in favour of providing readers with a symphony of rich and diverse POVs, mindsets and loyalties, allowing room to examine all sides of events.
Events being, in this case, the dirty First Indochina War (1946-1954), regarded by many in France as la sale guerre not worthy of much public support, not surprisingly, since it followed hot on the heels of World War II. Japan lost its influence in the area upon its defeat. Ho Chi Minh assumed power as head of the Communist Party of Vietnam. Guerrilla war with French Union forces followed.
The larger ensuing war pitted France's Far East Expeditionary Corps (supported by Bao Dai's Vietnamese National Army) against the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The former gained some support from the US (whose military advisers began aiding the French in 1950); the latter was backed by communist China and the USSR.
The long and short of it? The Viet Minh succeeded in chasing the French out of Indochina.
(Not long after, Vietnam split with the Viet Minh controlling the north while Emperor Bao Dai presided over the south. Their conflict sparked the fuse for the Second Indochina War in 1959, the one resulting in defeat of the Americans and their South-Vietnamese allies in 1975 by communist forces of North Vietnam.)
Souster's contribution is a long work examining a protracted war which culminates in a spectacular French defeat at Dien Bien Phu 7 May 1954. In five sections, he sets the historical stage by providing factionary background and geopolitical context before chronicling the guerrilla war and focussing upon the final fifty-odd days at Dien Bien Phu's garrison (followed by the immediate aftermath of the French defeat).
Covering the war in exhaustive detail from both political and military perspectives, Souster's large roster of characters is enumerated in his "Voices in the Poem" Index found at the beginning of the work. All major players in the conflict — mostly French (alongside some Vietnamese) — are afforded platforms; each reveals a singular perspective on the war: Major General Henri Navarre, Colonel Christian de Castries, "Angel of Dien Bien Phu" Geneviève de Galard, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, to name a central few, are cast in start contrast with, say, Major Dr. Paul Grauwin's contrapuntally unembellished lament:
Wearing gloves and rubber aprons splattered with blood,but no masks, we laboured without a break for hours on end;cutting into stomachs, digging into flesh to remove bullets and splintersin every part of the body that one could imagine. As I toiled,I kept worrying about the fifty resuscitation patientsfor whom we had no blood to give. Even more worrisomewas the fact that we were down to fifty million units of penicillin,while actually needing a minimum of three hundred million.I felt that I was beginning to hallucinate; my mind was flashingwith images of shattered bones, sightless eyes,blown-off arms and legs mixed with muffled groans,the incessant ringing of telephones, the incoming roar of shells —how much more could I bear?
The voice dubbed "The Author As Amateur Historian" offers Souster's own interpretation of events; indeed, the "Amateur Historian" indulges in a fascinating rendition of a period of which, by his own admission, he was largely ignorant when he took up this task.
The meticulous result is a sprawling yet disciplined narrative which builds inexorably to its compelling climax. Without explicitly pounding on the keys, Souster's power-packed account will no doubt chillingly resonate among those of us in possession of an historical sense of combat's ultimate futility. The pair of World Wars, the Boer, Hot, Cold, Hellenistic, Holy and Korean Wars — wars without end, it seems — insistently supply the allusive play-by-plays supporting Souster's current preoccupations vis-à-vis What Men Will Die For.
Turning psychic and physical trauma into high-poetic drama, but one of the author's felicitously enduring skills (cf. 1984's Jubilee of Death), here tellingly shows exactly that roaring heart of darkness this world's generous creator sadly but all-too-truly knows.
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Judith Fitzgerald's Adagios Quartet: O, Clytaemnestra!, the concluding volume of her epic poem ten years in the making, has just been published by Oberon Press. The Almaguin Highlander currently writes "Leonard Cohen: Master of Song."
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