The War With No Winners

One of my later-life heroes is poet George Oppen, born in 1908 to wealth he found he had to renounce for a life of self-endowed wandering with his wife, Mary. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he became a leading voice of the Objectivist Poetry movement inspired by Williams Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. After publishing one book, "Discrete Series," he became involved in politics and stopped writing. Oppen, a man of impeccable integrity, felt that politics would demand of him a subservient verse that would become a pack mule or water boy under the burden of ideas and causes when the job of poetry was to be a record of true perception and clarity--an encounter with things seen each day and a placement of mind in their midst. So he put pen aside and went to upstate New York and organized independent dairy farmers against the Con Agras of the time. Although Oppen hated war, he briefly debated joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fighting in Spain. But he felt that he could accomplish as much at home helping farmers.

In November 1942, Oppen, now 34, enlisted and was sent to Europe where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. When a mortar shell exploded in or near a fox hole where he was cowering with two fellow soldiers, he was badly injured and the others killed. Survivor's guilt hounded him the rest of his life. Around 1950, when the FBI came after him for pre-war Communist Party activities, he and his wife fled to Mexico where they lived with fellow artist exiles and outcasts. During that time, Mary underwent psychoanalysis. She alludes to marital strain in her autobiography.

After returning to America in the late 1950s, Oppen resumed the practice (and for him it was a practice) of poetry, publishing with New Directions in 1964 and winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Around 1978 he exhibited the first signs of Alzheimer's, which ultimately killed him in 1984.

The following is a brief, harrowing, exalted statement about war that he wrote for a magazine called West End around 1974. This is the first and only time I have ever seen a moral koan enacted in words before my very eyes. Oppen, who was Jewish, felt he had to fight against Hitler, but also felt the guilt of having to kill other men. Yet not killing in the circumstance would, he intimates, have left him with a deeper guilt. Thirty years later, he was still grappling with the conundrum. Thirty years later, he still had to take up arms, still had to reprise the deliberations that led to that decision. God bless this wonderful conscience-stricken man who has taught me so much about poetry these last few years.

This is one of the most astonishing pieces of writing I have ever seen and I beg, beg, beg you to read it.


If I did not resist a force--a force such as the force of Hitler--a force that would have exterminated almost all those I know, friends, daughter, Mary, nieces, grand-nieces, grand-nephews, radicals, liberals, the poets-
If I fought, and fought to kill, I would suffer guilt, the guilt of guilt AND the guilt of fear, the desire to run, the guilt that I've told of [survivor's guilt], the guilt of the foxhole (and who does fight? The deceived, the idiot, the stupid and also those with no choice, those who must be heroes to refuse the crime)
If I killed, I would suffer guilt. If I did not, I would suffer . . . I don't know a word, a name for what I would suffer
--that I did not exist and never had, the terrible knowledge of a fake, a lie, that nothing had been as I said, pretended, that I had loved no one, that those who had loved me or anyone like me had deceived themselves, pitifully, tragically had deceived themselves, had drawn the simplest, delusory mere warmth from my presence, had been deceived, betrayed, demeaned, had given all they could give for nothing, to nothing, had been nothing--In the last moments they would know this. Die like me, or fight with nothing, without what they had thought was themselves, without a past, with nothing. Thrown away, unloved, shamed, degraded
--stripped naked, herded into the gas ovens. Think
Think also of children. The guards laughing.
Yes, we deceive ourselves Better, we say, to aim a rifle at an unknown man and pull the trigger. Carefully, if we can Or release bombs from the air. He, like us (he, the target) has "his own" army, the children will display the medals We deceive ourselves with these things, but the other? We cannot do it The children cannot die alone. There must have been a father, a mother, there must have been friends, there must have been someone.

George Oppen, "Non-Resistance, etc. Or: Of the Guiltless," from Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, edited by Stephen Cope, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007