Books: Big Man & Little People

THE DIARY AND SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS OF THOMAS A. EDISON (247 pp.)—Edited by Dagobert D. Runes—Philosophical Library ($4.75).

“Awakened at 5:15 a.m. . . . tried to take another dip into oblivion . . . awakened at 7 a.m. . . . went to sleep again . . . Awakened at 8:15 a.m. [with] itching … head, lots of white dry dandruff . . . must read about it in the Encyclopedia . . . Smoking too much makes me nervous . . . Arose at 9 o’clock … I think freckles … are due to some salt of iron [in] low state of oxidation … A little dog . . . just came [in], face as dismal as a bust of Dante . . . dinner at 3 p.m. … I eat too quick . . . Commenced reading . . . don’t like Dickens—don’t know why … I must read Jane Eyre . . . Played a little on the piano . . . badly out of tune . . . Sardines [for supper] . . . could scarcely swallow them . . . This is Sunday … I will read the new version of the Bible . . . Encyclopedia Britannica [steadies] my nerves … To bed early . . . shut my eyes and imagine a terraced abyss, each terrace occupied by a beautiful maiden [but I] only saw [my wife] and Mamma . . . Sleep.”

Most of Thomas Alva Edison’s diary is like this day’s extract—an approach to all & sundry on a one-track even keel. Like his neat, snug handwriting, which seems exactly to reflect him, Edison’s way of life indicates no ups & downs—only a remorseless, meticulous line of continuity. Editor Runes has printed only a handful of Edison’s daily records (along with many of his articles and public statements), but they are enough to show what a strange assortment of things swam in the sea of cool equanimity that was Edison’s mind.

Like so many other distinguished men, Edison attributed his success to a physical defect. At the age of twelve, he was “lifted by the ears” into a train, and began to get deaf. Growing deafness soon drove him away from conversation and into the libraries which made a deeply read man of him. While normal hearers tussled with life’s “general uproar,” Edison came to love the state of “insulation” which enabled him to “think out my problems” in peace. And freedom from “meaningless sounds” steadily directed his ears to certain minutiae of sound that he could hear very well.

Advice to Wooers. Edison couldn’t hear the roaring of a train, but when two women who were traveling in it exchanged whispered secrets, he heard every word. He was deaf to the shrillest birdsong—unless it came over his particular amplifying system, the phonograph. He could hear the sharp dots & dashes of the telegraph transmitter, but he couldn’t hear a word over Mr. Bell’s primitive new telephone—until he took it in hand and helped make a more efficient instrument out of it.

He attributed his financial success to the fact that he had never been able to hear what a businessman said, and had consequently always demanded exact, written contracts. He even liked to insist poetry, with World War II; and very few professionals succeeded. One who has succeeded is Randall Jarrell, a highly skilled technical sergeant in poetry before he became a sergeant in the Army Air Forces.

Trained by two of the South’s finest literary craftsmen, Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, Jarrell was already, artistically speaking, trained down fine for the contest when he enlisted in the Army. His best poems about air force life and air warfare are memorable feats of rhetoric and feeling. One poem in Losses, for example, presents a carrier pilot as:

. . . The boy with a ball of coffee in his stomach,

Snapping the great light buckles on his groin,

Shifting his raft’s hot-water-bottle weight

As he breasts the currents of the bellowing deck

And, locked at last into the bubble, Hope,

Is borne along the foaming windy road

To the air where he alone is still

Above the world’s cold, absent, searching roll.

But the real war that interests this poet is always on—the war between the living being and his fate, between the wakeful intelligence and oblivious stupor, between cruel knowledge and soft illusion. Jarrell has had no difficulty in departing from the vein of “war poetry” into venturesome efforts at narrative, dramatic monologue and philosophic meditation. A few of his new poems are whacking failures. But a few of them belong to that order of writing in which profound things are said, profound spells cast, with the greatest economy of means. In “Moving” and “Lady Bates,” as in “Eighth Air Force” and “Stalag Luft,” his language is like a bright and beautifully handled lancet. He uses it, with the abstract compassion of a surgeon, to communicate such effects of true terror as this passage for a dead little Negro girl:

. . . Death, after the habit of command,

Said to you, slowly closing his hand:

“You’re a big girl now, not even afraid

Of the dark when you awake—

When the day you sleep through

Is over, and you awake,

And the stars rise in the early evening

An inch or two over the grass of your grave—

Try to open your eyes;

Try to reach to one, to the nearest,

Reach, move your hand a little, try to move—

You can’t move, can you?

You can’t move. . . .

You’re fast asleep, you’re fast asleep.”