January 2011

The war’s-end anniversaries are over now. In a sense, they were over on June 6, 1994, with the commemorative ceremonies that drew the nation’s gaze back half a century to the Normandy landings. Last May, the 50th anniversary of Germany’s surrender went by with scarcely a ripple; the big date was August 6, 1995, and it climaxed a tormented debate shot through both with self-reproach and self-righteousness about America’s dropping the atomic bomb. A few days later, walking through Washington Square Park one sweltering Tuesday evening, I passed two old men wearing uniforms and combat ribbons. “Huh?” I thought, and then: “Oh, it must be August fifteenth.”

That was the extent of the celebration I saw last V-J Day. The D-day services had looked back upon the triumphant breaking of Hitler’s legions; but much of the public debate that marked the actual end of the war cast a bleak, hard light forward onto the uncertainties of our own time, as incarnated in the dreadful weapon we built and used—criminally it was said again and again (although not, I’ll bet, by those two old soldiers I saw in the park).

Lovecraft introduced one of the central characters of his so-called Cthulhu Mythos in the prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920):

“Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences —of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.”

A vivid sense of place pervades almost all of Lovecraft’s work. In “The Festival” (1923), he describes the eerie New England town of Kingsport :

Among the presents that came Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s way during the Christmas season of 1936 was a skull from an Indian burial ground. The gift was appropriate for a lifelong connoisseur of the weird. It was also a portent: Less than three months after receiving it, Lovecraft died of cancer at the age of 46.

At the time of his death, H. R Lovecraft was virtually unknown outside the readership of a few pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. Today, more than a century after his birth and nearly 60 years since his untimely end. Lovecraft’s stories enjoy an astonishing popularity. Much of his fiction remains in print in both hardcover and soft. His stories have keen adapted for radio, movies, and television and have served as the subjects of academic theses and scholarly papers. Widely translated, his work has an enthusiastic following in Japan, and intellectuals in France and Spain consider him a neglected genius of American letters.

On August 30, 1945, just days after Japan capitulated, ending World War II, Douglas MacArthur first set foot on the island nation, to set up temporary headquarters at the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, and to set in motion a unique experiment that, little more than three and a half years later, would cause me also to spend my first night in Japan in the New Grand.

We surely passed our time there differently. While the general doubtless worked on implementing his plan to democratize Japan, mine was less defined, but I remember it included preparing to enroll in school and wandering about Yamashita Park, across the street from the New Grand. But then, what else might be expected of a ten-year-old?

Half a century ago next February, George F. Kennan sent a telegram whose consequences have vibrated through our lives ever since. Kennan, temporarily in charge of the American Embassy in Moscow while Ambassador Averell Harriman was away, had become increasingly vexed by his failure to make Washington understand what he believed to be the Soviet Union’s international intentions. Then, in mid-month, he received a routine request from the Treasury Department, which wanted him to explain some instance of Soviet intransigence about the World Bank.

“The occasion, to be sure, was trivial,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs, “but the implications of the query were not. . . . It would not do to give them just a fragment of the truth. Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it. ”

It was a roller-coaster war: North Korea invaded South Korea in June of 1950, pouring across the 38th Parallel, smashing the unprepared South Korean forces, and within days occupying all of South Korea except for a small ring around the port of Pusan.

In early 1955 I was a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force stationed at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina. Our base’s basketball team had been invited to Havana to help the Cuban national team prepare for the Olympics. Having no qualifications for anything relating to the game of basketball, I had nevertheless managed to get myself assigned to go along as team “trainer.” I had no idea what duties that entailed, nor did I care. There were few places in the world as exciting as pre-Castro Havana. I was going. That was enough.

I was vaguely aware from a recent story in the press that Ernest Hemingway lived near Havana, but that fact held no significance for me. Celebrities, as a rule, did not go to great lengths to seek out the company of lowly lieutenants; but fate was about to change the rules.

For details on events of the 1995 Candlelight Strolls, contact the Strawbery Banke Museum (603-433-1100). The Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce (603-436-1118) will provide information on nearby attractions and accommodations. I enjoyed staying at the Sise Inn, a Victorian building beautifully decorated for Christmas and only a ten-minute walk from Strawbery Banke (603-433-1200).

Candlelight Strolls take place on the first two weekends of December, Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. Adult admission is twelve dollars, but special rates, including one for families, are available. Each day’s events begin around 3:30 P.M. , an hour or so before dusk. It is very pleasant, however, to pay the place a visit in the morning hours, when there is no admission fee and it belongs to only a few dog walkers and joggers and when its cast of characters, those who once inhabited the houses, seem still to be slumbering in them.

The days leading up to Christmas in the old New Hampshire coastal town of Portsmouth have a refreshing quality, even an astringent one at times. And on a weekend’s visit you won’t be forced back into a specific—and sentimentalized—era. At the annual Candlelight Stroll hosted by Strawbery Banke, Portsmouth’s thriving restoration, three hundred years tend to bump up against one another. This is by design, as the curators work to demonstrate the varying ways in which New Englanders of many centuries experienced Christmas.

I have a confession. Last year, when Americans were asked to help feed the survivors of civil war in Rwanda, I had to go to the atlas to find out where Rwanda was. Like most Americans —including, I am sure, most of the 30,000,000 or so of African descent—I know almost nothing about what American and European writers in my youth still called the Dark Continent. Somehow, Americans in the thick of African rivalries seemed an anomaly. After all, unlike the British, French, Italians, Germans, Portuguese, and Dutch, we had never had a colony there.

Which only shows how easy it is even for trained U.S. historians to forget or ignore the realities of Africa’s past. I had to be reminded that there was actually a governmentassisted private adventure in American colonization there when the United States itself was young. The result was an African republic, now one of the world’s oldest at 148 years, whose government meets in a city named for our fifth president. I speak, of course, of Liberia, whose capital, Monrovia, is named for James Monroe.