Nevada Humanities

Clay Jenkinson Article

Making Hay While the Sun Shines in Reno by Clay Jenkinson

My heart sinks a little at the prospect of how small the payoff is going to be for having spent 2007 - 2008 reading the works of John Hay and biographies of him. It has been a pleasure to study this remarkable but quiet man, but I know that the phone is unlikely EVER to ring for John Hay performances after the curtain comes down on the Nevada Humanities Chautauqua. It's not like working up Thomas Edison or Henry Ford or H.L. Mencken. They have name recognition. The phone would ring. Or at least it would be possible to persuade event planners to "take" one of them. If you have to start by teaching your hosts who the character was, when he lived, and why he matters, you are engaged in the arts of futility.

A one-night stand with John Hay. Come to think of it, it was a one-night stand with William Shirer, John Calvin, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Shirer (1904 - 1993), among other things, is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, one of the finest studies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The Rise and Fall was my father's favorite book. No, he was not a sympathizer.

So why have I chosen to do this time-consuming and short shelf-life thing-portraying one of the most obscure major figures in American history? Now I have to scrounge up a costume, and attempt to rig up a raffish set of moustaches. I have to practice monologue bits in the shower and on my afternoon walks. I have to memorize a bunch of passages in a prose cadence of another era. I have to compile a "John Hay Bible" of timelines, quotations, anecdotes, important incidents, facts and factoids, and perspectives on a range of issues. Who would do such a thing for ANY historical character? Who would devote hundreds of hours to so shadowy an historical figure? The fact is I'm not at all sorry I have taken on John Hay. He's an amazing man and he helps to fill a hole in my tatterdemalion education.

People often ask me how I choose the characters I portray. There is a back story for each of the characters I have taken on- Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson, John Wesley Powell, Rousseau, Francis Bacon, William L. Shirer, Theodore Roosevelt, Jonathan Swift, John Calvin, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and John Steinbeck. These stories of how I came to take on X or Y as a Chautauqua character would seem tedious to anyone else, but they matter a great deal to me, because they amount to a sort of intellectual autobiography or a map of my mental journey in the course of a strange and wayward life. In thinking about my encounters with Swift or Calvin or Powell I can remember where I lived, what was going on in my life, how I chose the character, what difficulties it presented, and how the character influenced my thinking and- in the case of some- my life.

My list of characters performed is long- a little embarrassing, in fact. I am almost in the league of Fred Krebs of Johnson County Community College in Kansas. He does a billion characters. Long ago I promised myself I would never have a full closet devoted to historical costumes. There is something wrong, surely, with having a rapier, a blunderbuss, an Elizabethan codpiece, tobacco pipes of various sorts, buckskin shirts, a bear-claw necklace, opaque pantyhose, the world's largest collection of dumb-ass shoes, wigs, moustaches, a range of eyeglasses, including pince-nez, and hats representing every era of history from the Ptolemaic world to the splitting of the atom.

There is a sad scattering in such a life.

For all of that, there is a second list of characters I would quite like to work up and perform- if there were world enough and time. My first love was the Jacobean preacher and poet John Donne. He preached his own funeral sermon- there's something eerily marvelous in that. He was the greatest Anglican preacher of his age, perhaps of any age, and he wrote metaphysical poetry that binds the erotic and the sacramental in a paradoxical continuum that bears some relation to the paradoxes of quantum physics. In fact, Robert Oppenheimer loved Donne's poetry. He would really have loved the 160 sermons, too, had he known them, because they try to explain the mystery of God by way of elaborate scientific ("metaphysical") "conceits." Oppenheimer named the atomic bomb test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, "Trinity," from his reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, which begins, "Batter my heart, three person'd God. . . ." Once, long ago, I knew a great deal about John Donne. Now (just now) I had to look up his dates: 1572-1631. More and more, I think about something the British lexicographer Samuel Johnson said in mid-life. He told Boswell, "I knew more at the age of 18 than I know now."

If I were starting over, if the Nevada Humanities Chautauqua were in its infancy, I'd want to take on the character of H.L. Mencken, America's greatest sarcast, 1880-1956. Sample? His definition of Puritanism: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." I've known a few people who meet that test. And Henry David Thoreau, my favorite American author. Walden is the book I read most frequently. Thoreau (1817-1862) is not a very likeable man. I had the hardest time convincing my students to admire his masterpiece. I admire him so much that I have a Thoreau quotation incised into the wall above my fireplace. It reads, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." It's Montaigne who had his favorite classical apothegms incised onto the beams of his tower at Bordeaux. He'd be fun to portray, too, but there's a phone that would never, ever ring.

And Charles Dickens (1812-1870), my very favorite novelist in the world, and- in my view- one of the five or so supreme artists in the history of western civilization. The most magical paragraphs I have ever come upon were written by Dickens. When Harold Bloom declares that the greatest works of art awaken in us a sense of the "uncanny," he is virtually defining the genius of Dickens. And since Dickens spent a goodly portion of his life traveling around doing public performances and readings, it would make perfect sense to portray him. Moreover, Dickens was famously and gloriously long-winded. Finally, a character who positively demands my sort of verbosity!

When I think of heaven I think of the following scenario: Fabulous Burgundy white wine chilled right to the edge of iciness, in a bottle that never diminishes, but though I sip it for eternity, I never get more than the "enlivenment" that Jefferson regarded as the purpose of wine; perfectly chilled, perfectly fresh, jumbo prawns and the tangiest cocktail sauce ever concocted; a rocking chair (that does not drift around!) on a porch overlooking a vast and open plain with rustling cottonwoods nearby and meadowlarks and coyotes punctuating the silence, a light breeze that builds and ebbs and at times makes me feel almost-not-quite-just-about chilled, but never quite enough to seek out a jacket; and next to me, on an elegant shelf, the complete works of Charles Dickens beautifully bound, splendidly printed; and in the midst of all of this, finding myself in that elusive reading "zone" in which I could read on forever at a slow and sensuous pace and never grow tired or tired of the book. I'd start with Dombey and Son, for I have never read it, and I would read Dickens until I knew Dickens better than Dickens knew Dickens, until I had incorporated and embodied the soul of Charles Dickens. That's my idea of heaven. What's yours?

And my new love Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was himself a kind of Chautauquan, if by that term we mean someone who takes delight in disguising himself as someone he is not. Burton was one of the seekers of the source of the Nile. He was one of the world's most amazing travelers, explorers, amateur ethnographers, searchers. He made his way to Mecca disguised as a Sunni Arab at a time (1853) when it was death for an infidel to make the hajj. He knew 29 languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Farsi, Hindustani, Greek, Latin, Swahili and on and on and on and on. These were not smatterings or working knowledges. His Arabic was sufficient that he passed as Arabic among Arabs so zenophobic that they cut the heads off anyone who failed the shibboleths of Islam. He won the British imperial exam in the Indic language Gujerati after a couple of years of study, against others who made that one oriental language the central mastery of their whole lives. For this, Christopher Rigby, who also sat the Gujerati exam, never forgave Burton and did everything in his power to destroy him.

Late in his life, Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) translated the immense "Arabian Nights cycle" as The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night. Typically, Burton made sure the full earthiness, eroticism, and literary anarchism of the original found its way into English. No more complete translation has ever been produced, even now, and Burton's prose- though a bit dated- is still widely reprinted. He translated, for the first time in English, the Kama Sutra, which he regarded not as a manual of sexual positions, but as an "oriental" guide to pleasuring women in and out of bed.

Burton traveled all over the world, including to Salt Lake City in 1861, and in almost every instance, from Damascus to what is now Pakistan, he wrote a quirky, fascinating, ethnographically-rich, two volume account of his travels. A contemporary newspaper columnist said he was "almost certainly the most interesting man of the 19th century." I did not even know of his existence until two years ago. I kick myself for failing to notice so miraculous a character earlier in my life, because Burton would reward a lifetime of study. It would, too, be wonderful to follow his footsteps around the world. Now, even at this late date, I regard him as the single most fascinating individual I have ever met.

I want to perform all of these characters. And I want to take the characters I already know to higher levels. Most of the time I feel like Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He's the "rude mechanical" who wants to perform every part in the production of the tedious, brief, tragical play of Pyramus and Thisby being staged for the king. Unfortunately, my mind is like a short shelf of books. As I put new ideas and information in at one end, lots of things fall off the shelf at the other end.

And there is also Britain's Winston Churchill (1874-1965), one of the most amazing men who ever lived. I would never under any circumstance try to portray him. I would not feel equal to it. It would to my mind be sacrilege for some mere "player" to attempt to embody the man who saved Europe. But if I had talent enough to do it, if I could snap my fingers and become any historical character from all of history, in a way that would bring that man to life so completely that nobody who saw it would ever forget it, that person would be Winston Churchill. I have been reading about him today, in a biography of Harry S. Truman. He does not come off well at the Big Three Conference at Potsdam (July 1945)- Truman found him wordy, unprepared, pompous, and too sure of himself- but there is magic in Churchill even when he is running on one or two cylinders.

John Hay would not seem to exist on the plane of Donne and Burton, Thoreau or Dickens. True. So why Hay?

I choose characters for several reasons- because I am asked (Jefferson, Powell, Calvin); to fill out a Chautauqua roster (Oppenheimer, Rousseau, Steinbeck); because I actually know something about the historical period in question and therefore feel a kind of professional obligation or opportunity (Rousseau, Bacon, Calvin); or to plug one of the many, many holes in my education (Oppenheimer, Powell, Shirer). Or, as one of my favorite former Chautauquans,"Levi Davis, Buffalo Hunter," used to say: "at the time it seemed like a goooood idea."

After I had the honor of meeting Carl Sagan at a White House event, I decided to read his books. In one of them, he says that anyone who doesn't know something about quantum physics has not really come to terms with the 20th century. Preferring to come to terms with the 20th century than to face that judgment, I took on the role of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the course of a long and really satisfying reading program, I came to terms with Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb and the decision to use the bomb, and a good deal more. Several times I screwed up my weak brainpan to the sticking point and made a run at quantum theory. I read half a dozen books, from Quantum Physics for Complete Idiots and The Dancing Wu Li Masters to more serious books like Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century. No use. I may as well have walked in cold to take the Gujerati exam at Oxford. I can say two or three minutes worth of vaguely intelligent things about quantum mechanics, but I don't have the mathematical capacity (or frankly the IQ) to claim to have "come to terms" with it.

I'm comforted by a statement made by the greatest of the quantum physicists Neils Bohr: "Anyone who says he understands quantum physics is lying." Fair enough. But slender consolation.

By the standards of Schrödinger's Cat and quantum indeterminacy, John Hay is a breeze. His poetry is not, like Donne's, metaphysical. His prose is perfectly clear. He was not, like Rousseau, a towering egoist. He was not darkly wedded to infantilism and the scatological like Jonathan Swift, whom I adore, and whose Gulliver's Travels with all of its coprology and "excremental vision" is one of the world's greatest books. His politics are not impenetrably Machiavellian like those of Francis Bacon. He was not fatally self-divided like Oppenheimer and- much worse- Meriwether Lewis. He did not find a way to live with the whoppingest contradiction in the world, like the liberty-loving slave master Jefferson.

Hay's outlook is ascertainable. His perspectives on the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the great men he worked for and with, the international situation of his era, and America's place in the world arena are all perfectly clear. Aside from his liaison with Mrs. Lodge, he was a man of great integrity.

And he not only fills in an important gap (gulf) in my education, but he connects two of my heroes, Roosevelt, for whom my admiration is huge, and Lincoln, who is to Roosevelt- in depth, moral courage, consciousness, and dignity- what Roosevelt is to Warren Harding. I challenge anyone to read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address or the Letter to Mrs. Bixby and then nominate anyone else whomsoever as having possessed a profouder insight into America and its possibilities.

When we began to conceive this year's Chautauqua, we decided-first-not to try to seek a Lincoln. Lincoln pretenders are legion, especially now in the bicentennial of the 16th president's birth, but in my experience most of them are all top hat and no soul. We decided to explore and celebrate and challenge and come to terms with Lincoln by way of people around him, and by concentrating on what he wrote and said rather than how he looked. We believe that in doing so- in letting Lincoln's absence speak more eloquently than any presence could achieve- we will get closer to the heart of his achievement and his greatness than if some lookalike tried to embody that which has eluded all but the great original and- often enough- even him.

Hay knew Lincoln as well as anyone. He's my Abraham Lincoln window. And I wanted to try to make sense of anyone who could call anything a "splendid little war." I was attracted to Oppenheimer, in part, because I wanted to learn more about a man who could see the atomic bomb go off and say, "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."

The phone is unlikely to ring. But already I know a great deal more about one phase of American history than I did when I started reading First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power and Patricia O'Toole's delightful The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friend, 1880-1918.

But my goodness this is a lot of work.