Preservation and the denial of death

Kaye and I enjoy living in an old house and a community that blend the old with the new, the present with the past, the real with the imaginary, leading us to reflect upon the ageless issues of life and time and mutability.

By Robert Hamblin

A heroic resistance to time and death, as Ernest Becker has persuasively argued in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Denial of Death," is one of the distinguishing traits of the human species. Unlike other species, we learn at an early age, perhaps from the death of a pet or, more tragically, a family member or close friend that we are doomed to die. Yet we resist such knowledge with all our mind and might, believing when we are young that we are invulnerable to death and convincing ourselves when we are older that we live on after death.

A belief in death, burial and resurrection lies at the heart of all religious myths, from the Egyptian story of the phoenix, which torches itself into extinction so that a new phoenix can rise from the ashes, to the Jewish captivity narratives of defeat and triumph, to the Christian faith in the resurrection of the dead, to the Native Americans' dream of an afterlife in a happy hunting ground. Skeptics see all such notions as mere wish-fulfillment, a happy illusion grounded in an unwillingness or inability to accept the harsh reality of our total annihilation. But illusion or not, we cling to the hope that we are deathless, that something can and will survive from our time-ravaged and broken lives.

This denial of time and death finds expression in many of the everyday actions of our lives, most of which we perform with no recognition or awareness of their deeper implications.

We collect antique furniture and cars and stamps and old movie posters and books and baseball cards, by so doing keeping alive not only our personal memories but also tangible artifacts that we are unwilling to surrender to the dustbins of history.

We preserve our children's curls of hair and bronzed baby shoes and make scrapbooks of family vacations.

We build museums to house relics and halls of fame to perpetuate the memories of past heroes.

In the often overly dramatic language of sporting events, the litany of our secular religion, we celebrate teams whose "do or die," "now or never" efforts ward off elimination and "come back from the dead" to claim miraculous victory.

And we encourage and promote the preservation of our national, regional and local landmarks.

Americans, by and large, have been slow to embrace the joy or even the need of historic preservation efforts. A New World in rebellion against the Old, occupying a continent with seemingly unlimited vistas and resources, we learned early on to disparage the past and to respect only invention, innovation, newness. Having no history, we had no need for history. As one of our ultimate founding fathers, Henry Ford, insisted, "History is bunk." Or, as Huck Finn, the embodiment of our national consciousness, said, "I don't take no stock in dead people." Or places, or towns, or buildings. So we move on, abandon, tear down, throw away, forget.

Not all Americans, of course, have felt this way. John Muir, who died in 1914, devoted his life to promoting a respect for wilderness and leading in efforts to create a number of national parks, including Yosemite. The work of Muir and other like-minded individuals led to the creation of our National Park Service, whose first director, Stephen T. Mather, extended the nation's commitment to establish and preserve sites of "scenic, scientific, and historical significance." But preserving natural wonders or battlefields or national monuments is one thing. Preserving buildings, particularly at the local level, is quite another. Many Americans who would never dream of defiling or destroying our natural treasures or national monuments think little of tearing down buildings that are crucial to a sense of local history. Buildings, always subject to being trumped by the latest notion of what is typically called progress, are all too often the unloved and unwanted stepchildren of preservation efforts.

Kaye and I came to a heightened awareness of preservation efforts during the time we spent in London, where I taught on two separate occasions in the Missouri London Program. The British are obsessive about their national history and landmarks, as well they should be. Castles and thatched roofs dot the landscape. In London almost every street features houses marked by blue plaques that designate historically significant buildings. Prince Charles has become somewhat notorious for the zeal with which he defends the historic authenticity of the borough of London, opposing skyscrapers and glass and steel buildings in the oldest part of the city. And one has only to look at what the British Airways Eye and the new lord mayor's office have done to the traditional London landscape to understand the legitimacy of Charles' concern.

But I was already learning something about preservation before I ever heard the term "preservation order" or saw the Tower of London or Dickens's home or the famous reading room in the British Museum.

I grew up on a Civil War battlefield, Brice's Cross Roads in northeast Mississippi. Even though at that time the site, which included a monument and a small memorial park, was located on a gravel road six miles off the main highway, a steady stream of visitors -- academic historians, Civil War buffs, newspaper reporters and curiosity seekers -- found their way there in all seasons of the year. Most of them, at some point during their visit, stopped by my parents' general store just across the road from the monument to purchase a snack or a soda and to seek directions or information. Often those directions sent them a quarter of a mile down the Guntown road to chat with Samuel Agnew, a farmer whose grandfather, the founding pastor of the community's Presbyterian church, had been an amateur historian who kept a ledger of the history of the place, including the famous battle, and whose house was a veritable museum of historic relics. So I became aware at an early age of history -- its people, places, events and artifacts -- and individuals who had an interest in studying and preserving it.

Moreover, since 1978 I have collaborated with my best friend L.D. Brodsky on projects relating to his world-class collection of William Faulkner books, letters, documents, photographs, and other memorabilia. Brodsky started collecting Faulkner artifacts in 1960 while a student at Yale. In the almost half-century since, he has traveled the world seeking out Faulkner relatives, friends and professional acquaintances who might have keepsakes of the Nobel Prize-winning author.

In Sulphur Springs, W.VA, in the home of one of Faulkner's high school classmates, L.D. rescued from a stack of papers headed for the trash bin the original cartoons that a 16-year-old Faulkner had drawn for a proposed school yearbook that was never produced. In Hollywood, in the basement of a home of a fellow screenwriter in whose house Faulkner boarded for a time, L.D. uncovered the early drafts of Faulkner's 1942 screenplay, "The De Gaulle Story," that Faulkner had left behind when he quit Hollywood and returned to Mississippi. Time and time again, in his efforts as one he calls a "sleuthsayer," L.D. sought out signed books and handwritten manuscripts and unpublished letters and wills and snapshots and brought them home with him to Missouri.

And in 1985 he placed everything he had collected by and about Faulkner in the Rare Book Room of Kent Library on the Southeast Missouri State University campus for scholars all over the world to see and use. And they do. Since the acquisition of the Brodsky Collection and the creation of a Center for Faulkner Studies, Southeast has hosted Faulkner scholars from Canada, Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, England, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Romania, as well as all points of the United States. Preserve it and they will come, as W.P. Kinsella might say.

Perhaps not coincidentally, for the first decade of my collaboration with L.D. on his Faulkner collection, he lived in Farmington, Mo., in a three-story, Victorian, "steamboat gothic" house with a large encircling front porch not altogether unlike the one on the Harrison House in which Kaye and I now live. A collector of antiques as well as Faulkner memorabilia, L.D. had furnished his home with period pieces, and stepping through his front door was like entering an earlier time in history. As it turned out, my many visits to that Farmington home were an unsuspecting foreshadowing of my residence now in a similar Victorian mansion. And one of the antiques that graced L.D.'s Farmington home -- a W.W. Kimball pump organ -- now sits in the parlor of the Harrison House, a gift from L.D. to Kaye and me.

But here is the strangest coincidence of all. For the past 23 years every time I've walked into the Rare Book Room, which I've done almost daily and often several times a day, I've walked past a large bas-relief image of Charles Harrison on a bronze plaque commemorating the gift of the Harrison rare book collection to the university. And all those years I could never have suspected that one day I would live in the house owned by his parents and shared by Charles himself in his early adulthood.

Heraclitus once said that you can't step into the same river twice. But like most claims, that is only a half truth. Yes, change is an indisputable fact of life, and that change is as constant as the moving waters of the Mississippi, which we can view from our house. Nevertheless, there are, happily, some things that remain: the river itself, the town, an old building here and there, historic artifacts, memories, stories. And at least a few people in every generation who love and appreciate them and seek to preserve them for posterity.

Robert Hamblin is professor of English and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University. He and his wife purchased the William Henry and Lilla Luce Harrison house at 313 Themis St. in 2003 and have since restored it and placed it on the National Register of Historic Places. This essay is an excerpt from a book, "This House, This Town," that Hamblin is writing about his involvement with the Harrison House and downtown Cape Girardeau.