Don knew instinctively
that the disease that caused wars was reason itself, the mind as it functions free of images. So that evening, Don brought with him newspaper clippings, little stories with images. The one I remember recounts a napalm attack by airplanes against a herd of elephants.

Magazine
Winter/Spring 2000

Bearing Witness


by Bert Stern
Professor of English Emeritus
Wabash College

Poets are only human, but poetry's a little more. It has a way of dissolving surfaces, breaking into a space where the spirit more truly knows its home. It does this by telling the truth of things that gets lost in the jostle and clash of the daily.

So, when I think of Don, it's hard to disentangle my feeling for the man from my feeling for the work. Roger Mitchell reminds me in his recent, lovely essay on Don in The Worcester Review that the man is a spare New Englander, working-class origins, refined by an Ivy education. "Kindly old Professor Baker," he liked to call himself in the later years of his long tenure. And Don was kindly. His voice could enclose you like a blessing. And wonderful eyes, that kept their twinkle even in the darker times. Don's generation, like my slightly later one, was a generation of dark times. One day he was a small-town boy, growing up, as he said in his poem "Home," in a neighborhood without "mystery, a father spading / a tomato patch, a mother setting / teacups on a card table." The next he was navigating bombing planes all over the world, in a cocky hat and flying jacket. Returns a hero, goes on to the Ivy League, and then he's a tweedy professor in a small Midwestern college in a small Midwestern town.

That's where we met, in 1958. Don was in place, along with Walter Fertig, Owen Duston, Howard German, and Bob Harvey. It was a sweet family, with flashes of brilliance. Owen's electric mind gave us our brilliance. Don was quiet, judicious. I always used to say that if you didn't know Don's work you'd know next to nothing about him.

Though you'd know something. You'd know that he loved language with peculiar precision. The best of our crowd were taught to be that way. We were children of that fin de si�cle moment when language, and art more generally, became religion for those who'd been robbed of other faiths. That was one of several things about Don that made him a teacher for me. Shakespeare had taught Don how to find the sound for everything. And his earlier experience as a novelist had made him a strong narrator.

Those two qualities became the matrix of his art. Don kept the conscience of language during a time when it was perhaps more susceptible to pollution than it had ever been before. The purity of language involves finding the right name for the right thing. It involves the elimination of all the public deceits and self-deceits that stand in the way of seeing what is there, in the outer world, in the inner one, and in that place in which the two become one—the place that language makes. And doing all that in the right rhythm. If you think that's easy, try it sometime.

In those early days a lot of habits from what we all knew as "the war" still lay spilled onto our lives. Don wasn't the only navigator on the faculty. Ben Rogge H'53 and Quentin Peterson—that's what they'd done in the war. And there was sometimes a kind of Edith Piaf atmosphere around the small band of Wabash's bohemians back then. People drank a lot, and danced. At the same time, we were sometimes war brothers. On Friday nights, for instance, the drinking part of the department would gather for a grading marathon. We'd each do a batch of freshman essays that evening, over a bottle of whiskey. (We'd grade soberly but with gaiety, in a way that was hard to do when you graded alone.)

When I left Wabash for a couple of years in 1965 to teach in Greece, that's the world I left behind. It was in many ways a good world. For the most part, we had genial colleagues who enjoyed one another. The general atmosphere was defined by a phrase Butch Shearer loved and I despised: "reasonable men can agree to disagree." At one of the first big parties I ever attended at Wabash, Jack Charles H'57 pulled me aside and let me know that there was a way we did things around here. It was a little like the Enlightenment recoil against "enthusiasm." Jack had somehow recognized me early as a potential "enthusiast," one who might take things too seriously and make a fuss.

In Greece, I smelled tear gas, experienced a military takeover, had students arrested, and heard for the first time that my own government had been instrumental in an overthrow that had no public support. I returned to America to find the country in more or less the same state of chaos that Greece had been in before the Colonels took over and dropped over everyone a blanket of silence. There were big race riots, with fires and shooting. And the resistance to the new war, the war in Vietnam, had become militant. Don and I found ourselves in the middle of the resistance.

Don knew, in his words, that there was "nothing worse than war." He and I developed a peculiar way of registering our dismay. Once a week, at noon, we would stand under the flagpole for half an hour or so. This vigil had begun as a kind of rally, but our numbers quickly dwindled, and before long it was only Don and I. We were acting, if I can say of so mild a protest, enthusiastically.

One of Don's finest moments, in my mind, came then. He'd agreed to debate George Lipsky about the merits of the war. Lipsky was a worthy opponent. He'd utterly swallowed the realpolitik scenario that Kennedy's Harvard advisors had woven around the war. It had to do with drawing lines in the dirt and daring someone to cross. We were drawing a line in Vietnam. I couldn't guess what Don would say, and he certainly didn't tell me in advance. The debate was quite an event. The chapel was full. Vietnam was a hot subject, and it felt to me like a heavyweight match. As between, say, the then Cassius Clay and the then Sonny Liston.

George, it turned out, was obliged to be Sonny. He had all the armament, it would appear. He spoke for reason. You couldn't have a war like the one in Vietnam unless you were a kind of fanatic of abstract reason. And that's what Don knew instinctively—that the disease that caused wars was reason itself, the mind as it functions free of images.

So that evening, Don brought with him newspaper clippings, little stories with images. The one I remember recounts a napalm attack by airplanes against a herd of elephants. Suddenly, the war had entered the room, naked of abstractions. I also remember George Lipsky's expression of shock and hurt. Don had barbarically not played by the rules. He'd failed to debate. Instead, he'd spoken a language ordinarily outside George's ken, the language that political scientists, and other scientists, tend not to recognize as a modality for apprehending human existence.

Don showed me in this debate that the power of language, as it was grounded in Don, was moral as well as aesthetic. It involved the practical application of imagination.

Vietnam opened in Don his great power for war poetry. And for Don, war poetry included poems on the fragility of our ordinary lives, a fragility that Americans were notorious for not noticing.

When we bombed Vienna
the smoke stood six miles high
and I smelled burned rubber
in the oxygen.

We took no souvenirs except
the splinter of flak that let
the blood and the shit out of Eddie Lewis.
("The Starlight at the Window")

When Don wrote those lines his war was 30 and more years behind him, but this new war raged. Back then there was an expression, "Bring the war home." It sometimes served as a rationale for violent resistance. But for Don, as poet, to bring the war home was to show its place in the imagination.

My own favorite of the poems in which Don does this is "American Summer," where Don finds his daughter "Huddled in the cellar / behind the lawn mower and the coiled hose." She's huddled there against bombs that in one sense aren't dropping, though when he tries to comfort her and lift her up, the windows flashed the walls tottered the explosions knocked us down choking in dust. When at last he does manage to reassure her and lead her by the hand up out of the cellar, they step

into the garden, to enjoy
the silver bees
the bursting pods
the roseflames of American summer.

There, in that double vision of the garden, with its bees as bomber, its blooms as flames rising from air strikes, Don catches powerfully the doubleness of American life, as we hang suspended above horrors that we inflict.

Don was a strong part of the moral history of the College. He lived in honest language in a world where language was every day more heavily enshrouded in lies. He helped me understand—and one needs all the help one can get—that the academic life can have the dignity of disinterested yet enthusiastic truth. Art bears witness, and the College where Don taught would have been enormously poorer had he not given it that witness.

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