The summer before my senior year in college I began to plan my senior thesis, a large project which would, if successfully completed, allow me to graduate either magna cum laude or summa cum laude, which mean, respectively, “with great praise,” or “with the highest praise.” But I was an English Literature major with an emphasis on creative writing, which meant that my diploma could have been inscribed with discinctaque in otia natus. That means, if my dictionary of Classical Latin insults is correct, “Born to lounge around in naked sloth.”
I was not discouraged. I conceived, during a hot August of firefighting, a unique project. I was going to freely translate T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem The Wasteland into the cowboy dialect of Owyhee County, Idaho. No doubt I had been inspired by the poem’s lines “Here is no water but only rock/Rock and no water and the sandy road…”
I had already come up with a good translation for “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It was “Be afraid of a hat full of cow shit.”
Eliot had mentioned broken images. Owyhee County was full of them. He had mentioned women old before their time, domestic violence, the cruelty of April mud, unreal, barely visible cities, riverbeds full of empty bottles and cardboard boxes and cigarette butts. I had seen them all in Owyhee County. Eliot described unfeeling lovers, “the agony of stony places,” and “dry sterile thunder without rain.” That was Owyhee County, sure enough.
My academic advisor took one look at my proposal and, in an act of mercy, turned it down flat. “Your thesis, even if you pull it off, will offend the members of your thesis committee, who will have all studied Eliot but lack even his limited sense of humor. They will not pass you. You will not graduate, and you will get drafted and go to Vietnam where people without college degrees are sent to die in rice paddies.”
He pointed out that I had a B average in my classes, which meant I could graduate sans thesis with a plain old cum laude, which meant “with praise.” You could graduate with praise just by showing up in class during that spring of demonstrations and riots, and so I gave up my dreams of higher things, came home to Idaho at the end of classes, and forgot about translating Eliot. I received my cum laude-inscribed diploma in the mail a week after skipping graduation.
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One of my classmates, also from Idaho, had had his thesis proposal quickly approved. He was from a Mormon community in the southeast corner of the state. A deceased citizen had written a trunkful of unpublished novels about his town and its families. My classmate proposed that he read through the manuscripts and catalog and annotate them. This was the sort of project senior theses had been designed for.
My classmate contacted the family that had inherited the trunk and asked permission to go through it. His request set off a literary and academic disaster. The writer’s son began reading his father’s work and recognized that long-suppressed community secrets were being told. Instead of the novels being brought into the light of day—the initial publications, the rave reviews, the posthumous honors, the literary pilgrimages to the suddenly adulterous beaches of Bear Lake—the trunk and its contents were burned. My classmate didn’t get to do a senior thesis either.
I have thought about the long nights that unknown writer must have spent on his novels. I imagine a 2 a.m. candle guttering out near the end of a chapter, a new candle lit, a new chapter begun. I imagine a writer’s life in a community that was highly suspicious of writers, of secret-tellers, of witnesses to sin and embarrassment. I reflect on the terrible vanity of guilt, which makes us think that our sins are our own instead of one more instance of two hundred thousand years of compulsive human behavior. I contemplate our all-too-human desire to erase the parts of the past that we wish had never happened.
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My great-grandfather was the sheriff of Blaine County, Idaho. He was a pillar of the community. He brought the rule of law to Hailey, Idaho, when it was a frontier mining town. I can say that among his three generations of descendants, no one has been as important to a community as he was. I know very little about him because our family lost almost everything it owned during the Great Depression, and a lot of family stories ended in tragedy during that time, and nobody told them to me.
I also know less about my great-grandfather than I might have because of one of his successors in the sheriff’s office.
That sheriff, who shall remain nameless, was in office when I was growing up in Hailey. I remember him as a kindly, low-key man, one who preferred to deal informally with criminals, usually by identifying who was bad to the bone and who was simply making a mistake. Drunk drivers were driven home in the sheriff’s car. Thieves were forced to make restitution without ever seeing a judge. Murderers were advised to leave town.
I know this latter because a dead woman was found in a local motel sometime in the early 1950s. She had been tied to a chair, and was still tied to it when discovered, but beyond that I have discovered few details. When her body was found, several young men, sons of prominent citizens, left the valley and stayed away for almost a decade. Then they came back and took their place in the community, no questions asked.
Check that. Questions were asked. The men who were asked the questions reacted badly. They said things like, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” or “You have no proof.”
When the sheriff was near the end of his time in office, he burned all the written records of the Blaine County sheriff’s department, my great-grandfather’s notes among them. He did so because there were still families in the valley who were the descendants of people mentioned in those records—criminals, some of them apparently bad to the bone. He did it, he said, to spare the feelings of the good people who had bad people in their ancestry. Also because his son was one of the people who had left town after the murder of the woman in the motel.
Is this story true? It’s hearsay. It seems true. I lack proof. It’s hard to reconstruct burned records.
Do I know what I’m talking about? Maybe. Do I wish I had the sheriff’s office archives, including the 19th century records in my great-grandfather’s handwriting? Yes. You can learn a lot about people by reading what they write.
T.S. Eliot’s body of writing reveals that he turned into a right-wing crank toward the end of his life. It’s hard to uncritically appreciate his genius, because we have come to know the sort of harm right-wing cranks can inflict.
The sheriff who burned the records knew the hazards of writing things down better than I do. He knew that public records could visit the sins of the fathers on their children and vice versa. He took the kind of action a low-key, don’t-want-no-trouble peace officer would take, and burned the history entrusted to his care. I wish he hadn’t done it. No doubt anyone who left Blaine County after a murder is glad he did.
The community that sheriff protected, its innocent and its guilty, is gone now. Almost everyone I went to high school with has been forced out by gentrification.
I have a collection of high school yearbooks that tell a cheerful story of what life was like in Hailey’s high school from 1964 to 1968. But the perspective of half a century reveals generations on the verge of destruction, people who had no idea of the money, the power, and the bad-to-the-bone gentrifiers who were about to take their place. Nobody would burn the sheriff department’s records now. No one is left to be shamed by histories long forgotten.
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As an undergraduate, I studied T.S. Eliot and other modernists, people who had focused on the decline of civilization after the first world war, and who had described a world where the sacred had lost its meaning. Banners and flags had become faded rags. Religious icons had become souvenirs of vacations. Ritual had become parody. Entropy was the engine of history. Everything worth saying had been said, and the walking dead were no longer metaphors.
By the time I got to grad school, postmodernism had become the reason for English Departments to exist. If I may simplify, postmodernism demonstrated again and again that reality could be gentrified, that communities could lose all meaning, that memory could be replaced by stage sets, that history could evaporate without residue. It was possible to be free of the past, and T.S. Eliot’s sad self-images of age and absurdity could be ignored. Shame and loss had lost their sting. Nothing, not even family stories, had been possessed in the first place. Stories were fragile, decaying constructs. Truth itself was a construct, an oppressive one.
I am enough of a postmodernist to see that substance is being sucked out of our lives by artifice and falsehoods, and enough of a modernist to believe that the world I was raised in has ended forever. Modern and postmodern scholars have worked together to destroy meaning and, as collateral damage, English Departments. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to believe in. It does mean that the ideas we once held sacred are no longer embodied in long-cherished signs and symbols.
An example: once Donald Trump has wrapped himself in the flag, you need a new flag. Dry-cleaning isn’t going to cut it.
You can, however, believe in stories. They exist, whether they’re fragile or not, and they provide a sane way of going through life. They provide for one thing happening, and then another. They place causes before effects. They turn unthinking reflex into thoughtful contemplation. They still make meaning. They’re as real as you are. If you don’t believe me, wait a hundred years, when you might still live as a story if you’re lucky.
It's probably not a good idea to destroy anyone’s story, and it’s positively evil to do what that old sheriff did with the department records and what the heirs of the Bear Lake writer did with his manuscripts. That’s a kind of murder, and it ends in exile whether you leave town or not.
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I still tend to translate Eliot into Owyhee County dialect, which doesn’t improve his poetry. But it’s hard not to use that broken landscape and its stunted language as shorthand for what exists of the country and the world I loved and still, in memory, love.