Writer – Another Kind of Hero

I remember an old saying suggesting that once one
became a certain age one had the face one deserved. Although I have conveniently forgotten the ‘certain age’ noted in the saying, connecting the character lines etched into our faces with our tendency to laugh or worry, be happy or sad, makes sense as a bond between an approach to living and a most visible aspect of a human life – our faces. The most visible ‘face’ of a writer is the text he or she presents to the public, and I believe it, too, hints of a bond between an approach to life and the character lines etched into an author’s projects. I thought of this a few weeks ago when reading about the death of author Iris Chang. She had not yet reached that ‘age’ of obvious facial character lines, but the bond between her approach to life and her ‘face’ as expressed in her text is one she earned and deserved. In the eyes of many, it made her a hero. It may have also contributed to her early death.

Iris Chang, author and journalist, fueled an international protest with the publication of her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. The book was on The New York Times best-seller list for 10 weeks, and during that time sold half-a-million copies. In a 1998 interview with The Straits Times of Singapore, Ms. Chang described her reaction to this success and her reason for writing The Rape of Nanking: “I wrote it out of a sense of rage. I didn’t really care if I made a cent from it. It was important to me that the world knew what happened in Nanking back in 1937.” Although born and raised in America, Chang had a deep personal interest in telling this story. Her grandparents fled Nanking just before the Japanese occupation, and she had heard family stories of the massacre during her childhood. As an adult, she was unable to find much about the massacre in print. Although there is probably not a child today in much of the western world who has not seen grim photos of the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the systematic massacre at Nanking had been almost lost to history in China, Japan, and the West.

There were reasons for this silence. As Orville Schnell, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, reported in The New York Times story announcing Chang’s death, “She sort of threw the curtain back on a period that the Chinese Communist Party and the Japanese hoped was shrouded in official declarations of a new collaboration. But it turned out there was a lot of unfinished business.” Moreover, as Chang’s book illustrates, there were people who had lived through the events both in China and Japan waiting for someone like Chang to tell the story of that ‘unfinished business.’ Based on interviews with elderly survivors and on newly discovered and previously unpublished documents (in four languages), Chang tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers who performed it; that of the Chinese civilians who endured it; and that of the Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city but struggled to save almost 300,000 people from perishing in it.

The main outlines of the brutal massacre are well established. In 1937, the Japanese army captured the city of Nanking – then the capital of China - and the surrounding countryside. Within some 6 to 8 weeks, they not only looted and burned the defenseless city, but also systematically raped, tortured, and murdered as many as 300,000 Chinese civilians. What amazed and enraged Chang was that the story of this atrocity continued to be denied by the Japanese government. As Chang notes on page 200, “One reason information about the Rape of Nanking has not been widely disseminated clearly lies in the post-war differences in how Germany and Japan handled their wartime crimes. Germans have incorporated into their post-war political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, was guilty of war crimes. The Japanese government, however, has never forced itself or Japanese society to do the same.”

This sense of justice was at the core of Iris Chang’s approach to life and is visible in all the texts she presented to the public. Chang’s first book, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), was a biography of the Chinese scientist, Tsien Hsue-shen (Xuesen Qian), who came to the United States during the 1930s, but was accused of communist sympathies and deported during the McCarthy witch-hunt era. Tsien later guided the development of China’s intercontinental missile program. Following The Rape of Nanking, Chang published The Chinese in America, a survey of the Chinese in America, their accomplishments, and their 150-year struggle to be accepted. Before she took her own life, Chang was doing research on and interviewing American survivors of the prisoner of war camps in the Bataan peninsula after the fall of the Philippines during World War II. This topic is foreshadowed in The Rape of Nanking (p.173) where Chang notes that “Only one in twenty-five American POWs died under Nazi captivity, in contrast to one in three under the Japanese.”

The brutal details of these events, added to the pitiless horrors following the fall of Nanking, surely contributed to Chang’s depression. In a Reuters news release, Holocaust historian Rual Hilberg admits that small episodes of individual tragedy affected him especially strongly. He said he became sickened after doing research on the fate of a Jew who sued the Nazis for the right to purchase coffee. In the same news release, a historian of Stalin’s reign of terror, Robert Conquest, said he, too, was severely affected by smaller episodes amid larger tragedies. Only the passion of a hero can face these savage episodes in human history repeatedly in order to tell the larger story through painful, brutal, individual stories of senseless pain and death. Although time and attitude may leave us with the facial character lines we deserve, not all heroes find the ends they deserve. Not all heroes survive the ordeal. Iris Chang died by her own hand. But her texts, marked by the character lines etched into the search for justice that drove her approach to living, will not die. They become a line in our own social character that we should cherish. As the Washington Post noted in its February 19, 1998, review of The Rape of Nanking: “Something beautiful, an act of justice, is occurring in America today concerning something ugly that happened a long time ago and far away. The story speaks well of the author of the just act, and of the constituencies of conscience that leaven this nation of immigrants.”

Jian Leng, Assistant Director
The Center for the Humanities

Creating programmes for a choir that generally sings without instrumental accompaniment is no easy matter. To use a gastronomic analogy, a typical choir’s ‘menu’ would feature madrigals as an appetiser, followed by an entrée of folksongs with a side order of spirituals, and culminate in a soufflé of a pop song arrangement. Mouth watering? Perhaps on occasion, but not the right recipe for building and retaining an audience over a series of six programmes each season. Yet for the past sixteen years that has been my challenge, as the artistic director of the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus. It has been my responsibility to maintain its distinctive character reputation - as the premier independent a cappella choir in the Midwest - through the quality of both repertoire and performance.

Recognising that even St. Louis has a finite number of ‘hard-core’ choral enthusiasts, I have tried several ways to expand our base of supporters and raise our profile in the wider artistic community. One approach has been to put together unusual repertoire in a thoughtful and even provocative manner, using a single theme as a starting point. Puns have abounded in the fashioning of titles, I must admit, as in Going for the Jocular. In this concert we presented humorous songs, such as William Schuman’s arrangements from the Sears Roebuck catalogue entitled “Mail Order Madrigals,” and musical witticisms, like a pastiche setting of the mass using melodies from The Sound of Music.

Once I’ve devised a series of possible concert themes, I must arrange them in a coherent sequence, maintaining variety and accessibility for performer and audience alike. One would soon run out of singers and listeners if consecutive concerts were too similar in repertoire and theme. In recent years I have placed individual themes within a wider unifying context. Two years ago our season bore the title Great Musical Cities, and used works written in, and about, particular cities to conjure a ‘sound portrait’ of Rome and Jerusalem, Vienna and London, and Venice and Cork. Following the success of that series it was vital that we find an overarching theme that would hold a similar appeal. The result was an investigation - over two seasons - of how certain poets have inspired great music, and this, I suspect, is what particularly interests readers of The Figure in the Carpet.

It has always struck me how some authors have elicited numerous musical responses, while others have remained largely unsung. Perhaps their verse contained such musical overtones that to set it to music might seem redundant, or perhaps its subject matter did not fire the musical imagination? Among my final list of poets, this seemed to be the case with Browning, whose dense imagery and sheer verbosity put off most composers. However, because there were a few outstanding settings by Granville Bantock, a major British composer of the inter-war years, I ploughed ahead. Eventually I decided to pair Browning with Goethe, which offered some fascinating comparison not just textually but also musically. Another ‘shared’ programme was performed recently, in which we contrasted settings of Catullus, from ancient Rome, with those of his great influence, Sappho. For this concert we commissioned a rising star on the Australian music scene, Clare Maclean, to set a Sappho poem in the original Aeolic Greek, which our singers then had to learn!

These singers are our greatest asset, of course, and they have long proved themselves up to a challenge. Some months before their rendition of Sappho, they had given the world premiere of a setting of Horace’s “Ode to Dellius,” which the British composer David Matthews set, using classical Latin pronunciation. This was the highlight of an entire programme devoted to the great Augustan poet, whose most infamous tag, “carpe diem,” was also set to music, by the Czech composer, Antonín Tucapsky.

Other poets in our series have included Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, Rainer Maria Rilke, and St. John of the Cross. Excerpts from the last two of these are featured on our most recent compact disc, Songs of the Soul, which will be released in Europe in early 2005 by the Swiss label, Guild Records, and made available in the USA through our web site, www.chamberchorus.org.

The last three poets sung this season take us from my own country, England, and finally bring us to my adopted American home. Our February 13th concert features settings of the great Anglican poet John Donne, presented in Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral downtown. Then, on April 3rd, at Grace United Methodist Church – close to the WU main campus – we will present some enchanting settings of Tennyson. A very obscure work on the programme will be “The Lady of Shalott” by the now forgotten Wilfred Bendall, who gave up his own composing to act as Sir Arthur Sullivan’s amanuensis. Another novelty will be “Songs of the Princess,” written by Gustav Holst for his students at St. Paul’s Girls School, to be sung simultaneously in multiple rooms! Finally, for an examination of Whitman’s influence upon composers of this century and the last, we move to Kirkwood’s Grace Episcopal Church, a distinctly American setting with its architecturally clean lines and Tiffany glass. Here, on May 15th, you can hear both established versions of Whitman, by the great American composers William Schuman and Roy Harris, together with a fresh response to his imagery, a new setting of “The Unknown Region,” written for us by the British composer Sasha Johnson Manning.

There is insufficient space in this article to discuss in greater depth how each of these poets have inspired their composers. However, it should be obvious that particular metrical schemes, such as sapphics or iambic pentameters, may suggest certain rhythmic patterns. Thus our Whitman concert will reveal composers reacting more to imagery than a narrow sense of ‘beat.’ However, through our earlier programmes we have already seen how not all composers are slavish to their lyricists. For example, despite his initial training in classics, David Matthews avoided Horace’s verbal elisions in favour of the clarity of each and every Latin word. Of course, the question of whether there is a commonality in the reaction of these composers to individual poets rests with the audience. Indeed, it has been a fascinating by-product of this ‘poetic’ series to learn how differently our singers and listeners have responded to the same piece, hearing anew familiar texts and debating how well the music suits them. Such reactions confirm that the Chamber Chorus remains true to its lofty mission, “not merely to entertain, but to educate and inspire.”

Philip Barnes is artistic director of the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus.

Conversation: What is a Child?

Professors Gail Boldt and Cynthia Lewis of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Program in the College of Education at the University of Iowa will present a Conversation, What is a Child: A Discussion on Contemporary and Conflicting Views of Children and Childhood, on Monday, January 24, 2005, at 4:00 p.m. in the Formal Lounge of the Women’s Building on Washington University’s Hilltop Campus. This will be the first in a series of events in 2005 at Washington University to publicize the new interdisciplinary minor in Children’s Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Lawrence Cohn Literacy and Learning Laboratory and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

Translation Series:

Symposium: The Many Faces of Carmen

Participants will discuss critical issues that arise when a literary character, in this case Carmen from Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, is re-interpreted through various media, including opera, theatre, film, and dance. The panel will feature Dan Friedman, Dramaturg at the Castillo Theatre, New York City; Evlyn Gould, Professor of Romance Languages, University of Oregon; Dolores Pesce, Professor of Music; and Jeff Smith, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis. A screening of Carmen Jones and Carmen: a hip hopera will take place in conjunction with the symposium.

This event is co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and the Music Department of Washington University in St. Louis.

Film Screening: Sunday, January 30, 1-5 p.m.
Music Classroom Building 102

Panel: Monday, January 31, 2005, 7:30-9 p.m.
Lab Sciences Building 300

The Center for the Humanities Advisory Board 2005-2006