By Stuart Mitchner

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older….

—Ezra Pound, from Rihaku

The August chapter in my desk copy of The Book of Days for the Literary Year begins with those lines from Ezra Pound’s translation of Rihaku’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915).

Here in the first week of August, my eyes are like Rihaku’s paired butterflies, they hurt me, but I grow younger, not older, as long as I have Robert Schumann’s “Träumerei,” or “Reverie,” the seventh in a series of piano pieces about childhood (Kinderzenen op. 15). Another proven remedy for soothing sore eyes is to settle down on the chaise with Taylor Swift’s “August,” an enchanting song enchantingly sung that might have moved Schumann, the way her voice rises with the long lovely line, “But I can see us lost in the memory, August slipped away into a moment in time,” the loss she makes you feel with the thoughtful downcast melancholy of “it was never mine.”

Melville’s Sparrows

Meanwhile, eyes and ears sufficiently soothed, I’m slipping away into thoughts of the first six days of August, of August 1, 1819 and the birth of Herman Melville, who once told a friend: “I am mad to think how minute a cause has prevented me hitherto from reading Shakespeare. But until now, every copy that was come-atable to me, happened to be in a vile small print unendurable to my eyes which are tender as young sparrows.” I can hear Taylor Swift singing come-atable to me, that awkward little invention of the moment. Like the bottle of wine that slipped away with August, the edition of Shakespeare Melville found, with printed words “as big as muskets,” brought Lear and Hamlet and Macbeth into his Pittsfield study as he began to ascend the mountain of Moby-Dick.

On the second day of August 1869, George Eliot began work on Middlemarch; on the third day in 1924, Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack, taking his epitaph from Spenser’s Faerie Queene: “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please”; on the fourth day of August 1792, the poet of the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was born; on the fifth day in 1850, Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he will dedicate his masterpiece; and there’s no room in The Book of Days for the sixth day of August, 80 years ago, in Hiroshima, as many as 100,000 dead there and in Nagasaki …. it’s inconceivable.

Schumann’s Dream

And don’t forget the composer of “Träumerei,” who died two days short of August, July 29, 1856, and once wrote to Clara Wieck during their courtship, “we shall indeed lead a life of poetry and blossoms, and we will play and compose together like angels, and bring gladness to mankind.”

What could one small piece of music “bring to mankind”? Composed in a house destroyed in the bombing of Dresden a century later, “Träumerei” has a searching quality, poignant, thoughtful, haltingly, bravely dreaming, finding its way to a concentration camp, played for the amusement of Dr. Josef Mengele (“I suppose he was a musical man,” said the Auschwitz survivor and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in a 2005 war’s-end anniversary interview). And the same musing melody that apparently pleased the man they called the Angel of Death was aired on Radio Moscow on the 50th anniversary of VE Day, in addition to being played 24/7 at war memorials all over the country, including the one in Volgograd/Stalingrad. On YouTube you can see a clip of 83-year-old Vladimir Horowitz during his 1986 concert in Moscow. Ending his performance, the exile who had returned to his homeland played “Traumerei” for an encore.

Wantanabe’s Song

Having just checked the “Cathay” section of my copy of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems (Faber & Faber 1928), I found that Rihaku is actually the Japanese name for the Chinese poet Li Bai, which takes the edge off my plan to transition from an ancient “Japanese” poem to Schumann’s reverie and finally to the song sung by a dying Tokyo businessman in Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Ikiru. One of the most moving closing scenes in cinema shows Mr. Wantanabe (Takashi Shimura) sitting in a swing on the playground his dying-wish determination alone made possible, singing an old song (“Gondola nogata”) about the shortness of life while snow softly, luminously falls around him. “Sing it in a way that makes it sound otherworldly” Kurosawa told Shimura, who said apropos of playing the role of the dying man, “There were times when I gave my all, squeezed out all I could give until I had given everything and had nothing left….” The phrase “squeezed out” could also describe the harrowing effect the actor achieves with his voice, using the “raspy falsetto” of cancer patients he’d spent time with during the production.

Hamaguchi’s’ Hiroshima

In 2022 when Vladimir Putin was bombing Ukraine and cities like Mariupol were being been razed to the ground, including the theater where Chekhov’s plays were performed, I was watching Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film Drive My Car, which was filmed in Hiroshima. Throughout the film, on drives between rehearsals for a Japanese presentation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, you’re aware of a big, handsome modern city of wide boulevards, parks, rivers, bridges, and spectacular views of Hiroshima Bay. Of course, it’s impossible not to think about the mesmerizing 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alain Resnais, who said, “In Hiroshima, more than in other places, what matters is to live….one feels a violent desire for life, a will of sudden sensations.”

Speaking at an Academy Awards press conference, Hamaguchi said, “Hiroshima guided the story where distraught people seek to find hope.”

Wartime Childhood

Once upon a time a little boy in Indiana crudely sketched a monster with a Chaplin mustache named Hitler and an evil wizard from the Land of the Rising Sun named Hirohito; the little boy also innocently enjoyed drawing Swastikas and fighter planes with rising suns on the wings and grinning pilots in the cockpits going down in orange-crayoned explosions of fire, easiest thing in the world to draw when you’re 6 and your taste in literature runs to Classic Comics and Donald Duck. Later the boy grows up and goes to India, where the right-facing swastika means prosperity and good luck, unlike the left-facing swastika favored by Nazis and neo-Nazis.

Even as I write about that “little boy” with no ironic intent, I can’t help thinking of the name Los Alamos gave to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The detailed Wikipedia back story under “Little Boy” has cinematic overtones. At first the bombs were named according to their shapes, the Thin Man (Hiroshima) after Dashiell Hammet’s detective novels, and the Fat Man (Nagasaki) after Kasper Gutman, a character in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, played massively and magnificently by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 film version. As for the significance of “Little Boy,” which is still the presumptive name for the first bomb, I’ve yet to find an explanation, if anything, the accompanying image looks “very like a whale.”

Two Small People

You can find the semblance of a little boy (and little girl) in Taylor Swift’s “August,” with its wishful lament “Back when I was livin’ for the hope of it all (for the hope of it all).” In the first stanza of Pound’s translation of “The River Merchant’s Wife,” a girl “played about the front gate, pulling flowers” while a boy “came by on stilts, playing horse…. Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.” At 15 the girl “stopped scowling” and desired her dust “to be mingled with yours, for ever and for ever and for ever.”