Notes from One Friend's Bedside Table

Michael True, professor emeritus, Assumption College, recently taught "Nonviolent Direct Action: An Introduction" at Columbia, and will teach a similar course this fall at Holy Cross.

Trying to keep one's head straight in this nutty, even pathological culture, one sometimes forgets the inspired and forceful work of artists and writers, in that "other" American culture. In recent months, I have had the good fortune to read several books informed by a commitment to justice and peace-beautiful in themselves, as well as sustaining in the struggle.

Biography: A line from one of William Lloyd Garrison's many poems sets the tone for Henry Mayer's immensely readable and fascinating historical biography, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1998): "I have need to be all on fire,/ for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." As the most significant study of a nonviolent activist since Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years: 1954-63 (1988), Mayer's biography of Garrison deserves a careful reading by anyone interested in movements for social change.

In a detailed, exciting account of Garrison's life, the reader follows the "sweet-faced scold...punning and wisecracking his way through the movement's endless meetings, bustling about his kitchen serving food to his young children..., remarking when his daughter Fanny warmed her hands on the great bald head that a hot-blooded fanatic was at least good for something."

That sentence, from the preface, prepares the reader for the suspenseful narrative that follows, beginning with Garrison's career as a journalist and abolitionist in Baltimore, then Boston, where he drew many remarkable men and women into the movement, particularly Abigail Kelly Foster and Frederick Douglass. In the process, Mayer places Garrison within the long tradition of nonviolent activists, from l7th and 18th century Quaker agitators, such as John Woolman, to 20th century agitators, such as Daniel Berrigan and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Mayer's sympathetic and informed account of a major figure in the history of nonviolence (whose work was important to both Tolstoy and Gandhi) is told against the background of the long, difficult, almost paralyzingly complex effort to end slavery in the US. Few novelists or historians bring such an informed, subtle, yet penetrating understanding of how social change takes place in this violent culture, often as aggressive and imperialist in the 19th century as it is today.

Poetry: Denise Levertov, The Great Unknowing: Last Poems, New York: New Directions, 1999. These forty poems appear in the order they were left by Levertov, at the time of her death in December 1997. Although not as unerringly skilled as several earlier collections, particularly Candles in Babylon (1982) or Evening Train (1992), this latest collection reflects the poet's accurate eye for the natural world and extraordinary insight into the transcendent world beyond. In "Translucence," for example, she speaks about "the source/ of unconscious light in faces/ I believe are holy...the great unknowing" being "part of their holiness."

A brief note on the text, by Paul A. Lacey, Levertov's literary executor, is a fitting epitaph for one of the truly great poets of the postmodernist period. Her aesthetic sense and "scrupulous attention to the details of a poem" remained unerring to the end.

Fiction: At the risk of recommending a novel that readers know already, I must nonetheless mention, also, Wheat That Springeth Green (NY: Knopf, 1988), by the late J. F. Powers, who died in early June at the age of 81 in Collegeville, Minnesota. A draft resister during World War II, master of the modern short story, and winner of the National Book Award for Morte d'Urban (1962), Powers left a relatively small, but highly distinguished body of work, admired for his subtle wit and perfect ear for dialogue by Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, and Flannery O'Connor, among others.

Powers' second novel, Wheat That Springeth Green, is about a middle-aged priest working modestly, but purposefully to join the community of saints, amid the daily hassles of parish life in small town Minnesota. His co-conspirators, during that awesome, tumultuous year, 1968, include a young "hip" curate, various towns-people, and a young man struggling with the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war.

Nonfiction: A stunningly informed and useful book for anyone involved in resistance is Francis Anthony Boyle's Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Transnational Publishers, 1988). Published in paperback as a "special edition for pro-se protesters," it is essential reading for all who choose to defend themselves in a court of law. Prefatory notes by Sean McBride, co-founder of Amnesty International, and Richard Falk, Princeton University, as well as the principal text, list many examples of US contempt for international law around the world.

Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois Law School, cites chapter and verse, recognizing the right to nonviolent civil resistance in the US Constitution, as well as relevant trial documents on human rights abuses and the illegality of nuclear weapons: the Nuremberg Principles, Genocide Convention, Geneva Conventions, and the UN Charter. Although necessarily somewhat technical in its citation of specific laws and conventions, the text is written "for the laity," and exhibits the good will and strong commitment to justice that informed the author's expert testimony at the trial of the Gods of Metal Plowshares last fall in Greenbelt, Maryland, Federal Court.