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No sacrifice is too great for the struggle against war.
-Bertolt Brecht, on what should be demonstrated by a production of Mother Courage
I became an antiwar activist in April 1968, when a police officer gave me a black eye with a billy club during the protests at Columbia University, but a committed pacifist only in April 1987, when my wife and I began refusing to pay the military percentage of the tax we owed the 1RS. I have been a committed aesthete, experiencing and valuing what Nabokov calls "aesthetic bliss"-"a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm"-for a long time, so long that I cannot remember a turning point.
Every once in a while those two commitments are in harmony. I felt that harmony when I heard Robert Lowell read at an antiwar rally at Barnard College in the late 1960s, and when I watched Daniel Berrigan improvise a beautiful meditation on risk during a war-tax resistance action in Colrain, Massachusetts in the late 1980s. I feel it whenever I reread John Woolman's Journal, or Martin Luther King, Jr.'s sermon against the Vietnam War, or Muriel Rukeyser's poem, "I lived in the first century of world wars."
More often, though, the two commitments are at odds. Sometimes I feel that tension as a wish: to have imaginative literature put its whole wisdom to work against war. Sometimes as a challenge, whenever a great work of literature seems to me to be dependent on the existence of war, or to proclaim or presume its inevitability. Sometimes as a disturbance and irritation, whenever a work of antiwar literature turns out to be second-rate, or, at a gathering of the nonviolent left, second-rate literature is praised or performed. And most often as a set of questions: about what sorts of excellence antiwar literature can and cannot have, and about how and why writers of literature do and do not depict antiwar action.
The present essay emerges from both the harmony and the tension. Each of the two commitments rides herd on the other and keeps it from the excesses it might otherwise lead to.
Antiwar literature turns out to be a surprisingly capacious term....