Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman
he was always a patriot. With slashing wit and Adamsian erudition, Gore Vidal, in his essays and historical novels, lit roads not taken, the America we might have had. Not a bloated bullying arrogant superpower but a modest republic whose citizens—not subjects—cultivate their own gardens.
That’s what Gore Vidal wanted. That’s why the empire-lovers hated him. Yet a century hence, Americans will still read, with pleasure and profit, for laughs and for edification, Burr and Lincoln and Screening History and those magisterial essays.
So long, Gore. I’ll be reading you in all the old familiar places.
I Clean My Gun and Dream of Galveston
The American Conservative, 2012
Is there a better antiwar pop song than “Galveston,” which Jimmy Webb wrote and Glen Campbell sang in the Vietnam-hued year of 1969? Therein, a young soldier daydreams of his Texas home by the Gulf and the girl he left behind. He describes the things he misses—“seawaves crashing,” “seabirds flying in the sun”—and confesses that “I am so afraid of dying” without seeing girl or Galveston again.
There is not a single note of preachiness or abstraction in the song. Yet in elevating home over foreign crusades, “Galveston” borders on sedition. It really ought to be banned under the Patriot Act.
I had hoped that Glen Campbell would sing “Galveston” when I saw him in concert at the University of Buffalo in the waning days of his morbidly (and accurately) titled “Goodbye Tour.” He did not disappoint—though he did forget the name of the composer, turning to his banjo-playing daughter (who looks like a young Laura Dern) and asking, “Who wrote this?”
Such are the spontaneities when live performance intersects with Alzheimer’s disease.
There’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to Glen’s horizon. It’s a long, long trail a-winding from Delight, Arkansas, to the Malibu Country Club. Aside from his signature song, the John Hartford-penned “Gentle on My Mind,” and those achingly lonesome Webb-Campbell collaborations—“Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston”; Jimmy Webb understood location, location, location—Glen Campbell churned out his share of schlock. He also made the worst acting debut in the history of cinema in the John Wayne version of his fellow Arkansan Charles Portis’s True Grit. (Portis, Campbell, Johnny Cash, Levon Helm, Senator Fulbright—Arkansas gave America a lot more than America ever gave Arkansas. A priapic president excepted, of course.)
In his daily life, by all accounts, Glen Campbell could be ungentle and mindless. But hey, “Wichita Lineman” is, as Creem declared, “one of the most perfect pop records ever made,” and Campbell cut a beautiful Christmas album which my mom played throughout all my childhood Decembers. That’s worth something; it’s worth more than something.
The mood of the milling preconcert crowd was somber, even funereal. The world is fading out of focus for Glen Campbell, a little more each day, and there was a hint of voyeurism about the whole enterprise. Dementia is seldom a hot ticket. Surely this show would fall somewhere between heartwarming and wince-inducing.
Campbell was never as cool as, say, Johnny Cash or John Doe or John Fogerty, but nor was he a lounge lizard or muzak-maker. I had assumed that the audience would be a mix of hipsters and the elderly, but hipsters were vastly outnumbered by hip replacements.
(Speaking of which, the title song of Campbell’s haunting valedictory album “Ghost on the Canvas” was written by Paul Westerberg of the late great Minneapolis punk band The Replacements. October turned out to be Replacements month in our family. Two weeks earlier, while on a tour of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School painter Frederic Church’s Persian-style redoubt Olana, I had noticed—how could I not?—that one member of our group was clad in leather and chains. He was strolling the grounds with his wife and his parents. His mom proudly wore a hoodie bearing his name and image: it was Tommy Stinson, another Replacement. When an old lady asked Mrs. Stinson about the silhouette on her sweatshirt, she beamed. “That’s my son. He’s a musician.” Aren’t proud moms great?)
Glen’s voice was rough, and despite a stage ringed with monitors he fumbled lyrics. But his fingers remembered the chords, and the filial cast of his band, which included two sons and a daughter (all from his fourth wife), seemed a real comfort to a man who in his most lucid moments must see premonitions of blackness and blankness. When his daughter good-naturedly interrupted Campbell as he started to play a song he’d finished playing a minute earlier, he grinned and said, “That’s why I brought my kids up good.”
After barely more than an hour, Campbell closed the concert with “A Better Place,” a simple and lovely song he wrote for his final album. Backed by his children, he sang:
Some days I’m so confused, Lord
My past gets in my way
I need the ones I love, Lord
More and more each day
Glen Campbell ended his last song with a promise that “A better place awaits/You’ll see.” Then his daughter took him by the hand and led him from the stage, into the darkness.
Summer Reading List
Counterpunch, 2003
Burr and Lincoln by Gore Vidal—America, by a true patriot and our greatest living man of letters.
The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey—An anarchist Western. In the film version (Lonely are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas’s jaw), screenwriter Dalton Trumbo shamefully changed the hero’s crime from rescuing a draft-resister to harboring a family of adorable illegal immigrants. Abbey: Brave. Trumbo: Coward!
The Octopus by Frank Norris, Giants in the Earth by Ole Rølvaag, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—The great American novel: take your pick.
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis—A regionalist dystopia by a Minnesota Firster. George Babbitt is a fool not because he is provincial but because he has bought into the lie of mass culture. If you drink at Starbucks and watch Sex and the City, you’re Babbitt.
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington—You’ve seen Welles’s butchered movie; now read the superior novel.
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry—The finest book ever written about a barber. Berry is the exemplary American agrarian.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury—Just lovely. My daughter and I read the opening pages (about the first day of summer) every summer solstice. Yeah, I know, dandelions yellow the yard in May, not June, but maybe things were different in Ray’s Waukegan.
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe and On the Road by Jack Kerouac—I loved these books when I was twenty-three, and I apologize for nothing!
The Adventures of Wesley Jackson by William Saroyan—An Armenian-American pacifist confronts The Good War and loses his career. Saroyan was a soldier when he wrote this charming story of a nineteen-year-old draftee who discovers that “our own army was the enemy.” Office of War Information commissar Herbert Agar—a turncoat bastard who had been a Kentucky distributist before going proto-Ashcroft—threatened him with a court martial and tried to kill the book. Saroyan nailed the chickenhawks but good: “when everybody else got shipped overseas they were still writing scenarios for films encouraging everybody else to face death like a scenario writer.”
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson—Inspired an aptly bleak album by one of my all-time favorite bands, Green on Red.
Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr.—Indiana golden boy writes 1,000-page Whitmanesque novel, then kills self. No one has read this book for fifty years, but I love it.
Crazy Legs McBain by Joe Archibald—Hey, it’s my list. Every fall I read this 1961 boys book about an unlikely college football star, a gawky kid who runs punts back ninety yards, makes one-handed catches, and piledrives the pretty boy-rich kid quarterback’s face into the turf. Go Bobcats!
American