Thoughts on Writing King Philip’s War Many Years Later

I have been reading Old Truths and New Cliches, a compilation of essays by Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, just out from Princeton University Press. The wily author and individualist makes the case that there is no such thing as being “an international author.” A writer is part of the folklore and living history of his or her own people. You should not only “write what you know,” he says, but the story that only you can write. Unsurprisingly, the example he used of what made him so uniquely capable was his knowledge of the place where so many of his stories began—at 10 Krochmalna Street in Warsaw, his childhood home. In another essay, he traces the source of his cosmology and philosophy, recalling looking out the window of that house at night to view the sun, the planets and the stars, and the millions of light years in between earth and afar, and the fly with the thousand eyes that set on the railing. All these things caused him to brood about the mystery of the big questions: what is the nature of the universe? Was God who was all present part of evil, too? The answers, Singer says, came not from philosophy or traditional Judaism, but the Kabbalah.

King Philip's War was a story that I knew from my own childhood.

Writing is a coupling of memory and imagination, and the landscape you carry with you becomes part of your work. What a writer absorbs in memory imprints itself as part of the DNA or wallpaper of every page. The poet or novelist, like the painter, fills the corners of the canvas with what is familiar. The natural world that I detail-streams and falls, trees and trails, the weather or how nightfall becomes "a moving mass of darkness fat as hills"-are as much of the story as any character. And if you spend anytime in the pristine outdoors in this country, it is hard not to be aware of those who came before. As I walked into the woods or hiked along the foothills and trails, I could sense the spirit of other peoples. For one thing, so many of the places were named after the Algonquians or to events associated with King Philip's War. The place names have personal meaning to me. Lake Massasoit was a stone's throw from my elementary and middle school. King Philip's Stockade, the name given for the bluff from where the attack on Springfield was launched, is one of the most prominent locations in my hometown. My mother-in-law lived on the mountain above "Bloody Brook" in South Deerfield, the scene of one of the most brutal massacres, and not far from Turner's Falls where Captain Turner was killed.

I sought to tell the story of King Philip, sachem of the Wampanoags, who ended a prolonged period of peaceful coexistence with British settlers by leading one of the bloodiest wars in American history (1675-78). The war led to attacks on half the towns in Puritan New England and to the annihilation of the New England Algonquians

Philip was compelling to me not because of the war, but because of the battles I imagined must have taken place within Philip himself. How could he be true to his father's legacy and to carry on that great tradition in a world where his people were increasingly adopting new ways? How could he find peace and harmony when the natural world he loved was being taken away? How could he lead his people through their most turbulent times, when he was so young and not intended to be a leader? How could he do what was right, when there was no clear roadmap to follow and when others-including those he loved-would be hurt? These kinds of battles, as Auden said, are what make poetry.

Origins of the book

Faulkner said that he began The Sound and the Fury with a single image-looking up a tree at Caddy Compson's muddy drawers. For me, the origins of King Philip's War come from a strategic maneuver when Philip fled his homeland of Montaup. Rather than try to carry everything away, he had his followers strew what they most valued across a broad field to delay his pursuers whom he knew would stop to gather the spoils. It gave me a sense of Philip's cunning; I began to systematically explore who Philip was and what was it that he left behind. That episode became the first poem of the book.

Philip wasn't a large work as I wrote it; it was written in couplets and quatrains and set pieces that, as I got a sense of the story, were combined to make the larger whole. For me, every poem starts out as a sprint and sees how far it can go. I think I subconsciously learned this style of writing from one of my teachers, John McGahern, who had a technique that he called the "tuning fork." He would consciously write a page of his most vivid and evocative writing, and work to make subsequent pages match the pitch and intensity of the single page.

Guiding impulses

What guided me was the lyric impulse and capturing what one loves through the lens of loss. In the case of King Philip, he lost everything—his family, his tribe, their way of life that his father sought peacefully to protect. And I knew the history well enough to mark the deaths of all of those he loved, one by one.

I was also aided by celebrating the different passages of Philip's life. As he leaves childhood for marriage and fatherhood, as he endures the death of his father and brother, as he takes charge as the leader of the tribes and faces death, we understand what he loves and values by what is lost for him—and our world centuries later.. His most intense-almost operatic-feelings emerge around the changes in his life.

I saw Philip as a tragic figure. I doubt that Philip had any other choice but lead his people into war. At a certain point, the inevitability of Philip's actions after he took the mantle of leadership makes his adult life seem a kind of death march, gaining poignancy as it winds toward its inevitable conclusion. But there is another view of tragedy at work. D. H. Lawrence once wrote something to the effect that "true tragedy ends in triumph, and is a great kick at suffering." My goal was to make Philip real and hope that readers might sense something of their own mortality in his, and to think about the fate of our own civilization.

There were three other things that influenced me as well.

First, I was immersed in some of the accounts of settlers and explorers and some of the native legends that gave me a good feel for the world they lived in and some of the language of the time. Roger Williams' Narragansett dictionary gave me a clear sense of how the Narragansetts communicated in daily life. I also had read John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks many years ago and picked up a sense of the figurative richness of the Sioux language. But I would say that a significant source of some of the writing is my affinity with the ancient world and from writers I admire from the 17th century and beyond-certainly Chikamatsu, Japanese nature poets, some Shakespeare and Sophocles. I also admit to having channeled Anthony Hecht in a few places (in writing about Philip's son and crows)

Second, when the words wouldn’t come or wavered, I could rely on Philip’s voice for its sustained consistency.  Writing from the point of view of someone so long dead, so little understood, and so silent for centuries by its nature requires a form of collaboration as weird as séance. Philip's voice came to me from beyond, or-more correctly-speaks across centuries. All I could do was listen to what I heard and imagine what he felt and how he might have reacted.

And the third and final thing that gave me an understanding of Philip was the politics of the George W. Bush era. The hidden impetus was my visceral reaction against many things I saw—a would-be theocracy that sickened me, the nation’s foolish land-grab in Iraq based on false information, our continuing degradation of nature, and our attempts to sell our shared heritage and "commons" to the highest bidders for private use also plays into the narrative.

My personal feelings, of course, had to be buried into the bondo and wiring of this vehicle. Otherwise, this would not be poetry but another rant or screed in the blogosphere-a medium more useless than poetry. A writer like Wendell Berry could easily pull it off;  I knew I couldn’t I think that what saves the piece from polemic is that my own political concerns are expressed exclusively through Philip's situation and the 17th century. I was lucky to have the distance of a few centuries.

I am not sure what the book has to say to us today. The only thing I can hope for is that, even after 20 years, more people will somehow find this work and find something that speaks to them.

And I realize that some may charge me with cultural appropriation. Some will question the fact that I—as a white person who grew up in New England with all the benefits of what the settlers did to native tribes—have no real standing to write about this brave man and this subject matter. They would be right. But this is where I may differ from Isaac Bashevis Singer. Enough of Philp was in me to make it possible for me to write about the experience in ways nobody else could. In verse, at least.

I don't think that only Jews can write about the Holocaust. To me, genocide and the state of the world is everyone's business.  The tales cannot be told enough.