Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2351

Letter to Heath and Spencer MacCallum from Heath’s grandson, Irvan O’Connell, with the Marines in Korea, MABS-12 MAG-12, FMAW FMF, c/o FPO San Francisco

December 12, 1953

 

Dear Popdaddy and Spencer,

I have just finished reading the book you sent me which arrived here two days ago. But it is unwise for any man to write about Burke and especially to quote from him. Isn’t it Hazlitt who described his style, ‘forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent’. I find myself scanning Kirk’s prose looking for the quotations. I liked his passage on Randolph, and it is well to remind men of de Tocqueville but these men are far better read than read about. But Burke is the clarion. It was my Junior year I found him.  If you have not read ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ lately, you must do so. Do not read it through, rather, mine it section by section. And remember that he wrote down those reflections in 1790, in the Kerensky stage of that revolution, when there had been no great violence. He speaks as if he were touched with some kind of magic that let him see what was to come in that revolution and in the two centuries that followed. The copy I brought here with me has an introduction by some Nineteenth Century worthy who admires Burke as he ought and apologizes for the man’s horror of democratic tyranny and his exaggerated idea of the importance of men’s property. Burke’s intuition and his common sense carried his thoughts on society way beyond any other man, at least anyone relying on those tools. You are the biggest influence in the things that I think. I’ll grant that. But that corrupt Irishman named Edmund Burke is far and away number two.

    I have been dealing with Burke just lately, teaching him to Jun and Pang and Lee, my friends here. These boys know English well; they are intelligent and some of them are learned in Chinese literature. But the English they read has come from textbooks, and the textbooks they are used to they have got from the Japanese. Now the Japanese are pagans, while the Koreans somehow are not. I will not explain this here; I do not type well enough. If you could look at a Japanese textbook that is supposed to contain the best of the tradition of English literature, you would know what I mean. I have looked at several; they are all the same: a piece from John Dewey, perhaps one from Julian Huxley, something from Bertrand Russell; and lots of passages from Herbert George Wells. He represents to the Japanese the best any of us have done or thought. That is what I mean when I say the Japanese live and move and have their being in utter darkness. Not so the Koreans. Of course they loathe the Japanese and all their works, and therefore include in their dislike the authors I have mentioned. Then too the Koreans have a certain difficulty in understanding why Russian Land Reform in North Korea is very bad, while this same reform, provided it takes place south of the parallel is progress. I could make these problems of theirs into a list. Basically they have trouble understanding why all the things that are obviously tyranny in the North are to be considered the temporary accompaniments of Pure Democracy when they occur in the South. They look at you and grin a little sadly and say isn’t that what the Communists say too. Though I am not being fair to Dr. Rhee’s regime which the people here actively support, if only because the State in the North combines a communist and Asiatic brutality that would startle Genghis Khan.

 

     I have been introducing my friends here to Burke and the Areopagitica, passages from Shakespeare, little bits of Eliot, but mainly Burke. I think John is in his tent now, turning him into Korean. For forty years this people, or the educated ones among them, planned and plotted for a free and democratic Korea. The missionaries had taught them well, and they knew that Pure Democracy and Self-determination and The Kingdom of Heaven were synonymous. To phrase it very mildly, their society has not developed as they expected these last eight years. Rather than question what they have been taught they have tended to look for some fault in themselves, trying to find what was the matter with themselves personally that kept Korea from turning into a little Switzerland. One of them told me he had felt a little ashamed of himself for thinking the same ideas he found in my books. All this has been a great pleasure for me. I seem to be fated to preach, if not one thing then something else; though it’s all the same to me.

     What have I been thinking about? A good deal, and you would approve. I’ve been musing on the same stuff. I have lots of time here, my books, and a room to myself. I’ve been thinking on just what is slavery or ownership; and how a thing ought to be defined by what it does, not by what you want it to do; how therefore a statute, a tax, a war, conflict are actually synonyms. Same old stuff. I know very well where I got it. Somewhere in that book you sent me Mr. Kirk tells how an idea must be sown in a man’s mind like a seed, Paul’s seed. The seed is placed there, and means little to the recipient and seems to die. Then something very much later causes this seed to burst forth. The man (or the boy) nourishes his new-grown idea and is proud of it as his very own. Only later when he has become accustomed to the idea and is reflecting on it does he see that it once came from somewhere else.

     I enjoyed your comments in the margin, Popdaddy. Send me some more books like that. It’s like having you visit. I keep on being more impressed with the old duality of chaos and order, though duality is not quite the right word; and how order can come out of that chaos. I like the part you have given man, showing how he can create. I like your medieval man, part animal, who can be part Godling. In the East one runs across the Rev. Dr. Malthus. I don’t know of any other answer to him. You have shown how men can live together so that they create more than they consume; then more people, I mean an addition to the population, comes to be welcomed, not dreaded. A Korean is not worth one of my bags of rice to another Korean. There is little society here in our sense. A man produces little; what is important is rice paddy. Even that has been ‘reformed’ so often that it has little value. If a man is killed it is no loss to anyone outside his family. I had not been around physical cruelty and revenge before. Now if the confiscations and taxes would permit one of the Koreans I know here to open a machine shop, as he is well qualified to do, and this country needs such a thing, then they would realize what a valuable man he was as they came to depend on him to fix the jeeps we give them instead of selling them for junk; and when he was murdered someone besides his family would mourn, and they would see that the next man who had a machine shop was protected because he did something for them. As this practice of serving one another grew, men would come to value one another. But you-all know all this. I am trying to explain why a neighbor’s misery is a matter of such unconcern to these people.

 

     Well, Good Night to you both. Write again. Thanks for the book,

 

/S/ Your Grandson Irvan

 

 

And a very merry Christmas to you both.