Good Ol' Dead People

I never wanted to read Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology." Somewhere in high school, in my mind it got inextricably linked with things like "Our Town" and Norman Rockwell paintings and "American Gothic."

You know what I mean, all that stuff made by white people wishing for a time when all of white America was just more, you know: white. When everything was perfect and idyllic a hundred percent of the time, and if there's living and dying, it's the way of things, but it better all be white living and white dying because that's the way it's always been and devil take the hindmost if the good Lord's willin' and the creek don't rise.

So when I picked up "Spoon River" by chance and found it to be remarkably clear-eyed and gripping, you can imagine my surprise. It's basically a collection of epitaphs for the townspeople of the fictional Spoon River community: people of all ages, careers and points of view get represented. And the craziest thing of all is how completely opposing perspectives each get their fair due.

You've got jingoists and disaffected soldiers, the pious and the irreligious, psychotic unbalanced murderers and the psychotic unbalanced judges who pass sentence on them. They all have distinct and clear voices, all telling you a story you can empathize with or at least enter into their mind for a moment. Some smack of Poe or Hawthorne, others of Emerson or the Alcotts, and a few have the crazy-as-an-out-house-rat logic of Flannery O'Connor. 

It's definitely the best piece of literature I've read that's inspired by epitaphs of ancient Greece. But after Masters, there aren't many people brave enough to try it. Here are two of my favorites from the anthology.

Father Malloy

Edgar Lee Masters

YOU are over there, Father Malloy,
Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,
Not here with us on the hill--
Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision
And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.
You were so human, Father Malloy,
Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,
Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River
From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.
You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand
From the wastes about the pyramids
And makes them real and Egypt real.
You were a part of and related to a great past,
And yet you were so close to many of us.
You believed in the joy of life.
You did not seem to be ashamed of the flesh.
You faced life as it is,
And as it changes.
Some of us almost came to you, Father Malloy,
Seeing how your church had divined the heart,
And provided for it,
Through Peter the Flame,
Peter the Rock.

Harry Wilmans

Edgar Lee Masters

I WAS just turned twenty-one,
And Henry Phipps, the Sunday-school superintendent,
Made a speech in Bindle's Opera House.
"The honor of the flag must be upheld," he said,
"Whether it be assailed by a barbarous tribe of Tagalogs
Or the greatest power in Europe."
And we cheered and cheered the speech and the flag he waved
As he spoke.
And I went to the war in spite of my father,
And followed the flag till I saw it raised
By our camp in a rice field near Manila,
And all of us cheered and cheered it.
But there were flies and poisonous things;
And there was the deadly water,
And the cruel heat,
And the sickening, putrid food;
And the smell of the trench just back of the tents
Where the soldiers went to empty themselves;
And there were the whores who followed us, full of syphilis;
And beastly acts between ourselves or alone,
With bullying, hatred, degradation among us,
And days of loathing and nights of fear
To the hour of the charge through the steaming swamp,
Following the flag,
Till I fell with a scream, shot through the guts.
Now there's a flag over me in
Spoon River. A flag!
A flag!