Camp Concentration/Book One: May

Summary

Louis Sacchetti's first journal, beginning four months into his five-year sentence for unspecified anti-war activities. Louis describes his guards and cellmates, and briefly mentions the political situation on the outside. During a brief illness, he starts writing poetry again.

May 11

President McNamara

Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and one of the chief supporters of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. A former automotive executive who had also served in the Air Force's Office of Statistical Control, his reputation as a modernizing technocrat, whose intellectual justifications for his policies became increasingly disconnected from reality, makes him an ideal President for Camp Concentration.

Disch never states how far in the future Camp Concentration is set, or how long the unnamed war in the novel has been going on. Given McNamara's support for the "Domino Theory" of a global anti-Communist struggle, it's possible that the Vietnam War simply never ended, and has expanded into other parts of the world.

"tactical" nuclear weapons

The possible use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam was a subject of much internal debate in the Johnson administration. McNamara was strongly against it, but continued to speak of it publicly as a possible last resort.

May 12

The House of the Dead

An 1861 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, based on his experiences in a Siberian prison camp.

a dream of Philip Johnson (Grand Central Bathroom)

Johnson was a leader of the Modernist "international style" of architecture for much of the 20th century. Grand Central Terminal is a New York City railway station built in 1913.

May 13

The Hills of Switzerland

Disch's 334 mentions a film with the same title, although for reasons that will become clear by the end of the novel, 334 cannot be set in the future of Camp Concentration.

May 15

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita

From the opening of Dante's Inferno, in which the narrator finds himself "midway upon the journey of our life" (in Longfellow's translation) shortly before descending into Hell.

Non serviam

Latin: "I will not serve."

his casuistry ... retrograde Irish Thomist

Thomism is the religious and philosophical tradition of Thomas Aquinas, who will be referenced many times in Camp Concentration. Casuistry is a style of argument in the tradition of Aristotle, based on discussing specific real or imaginary cases that illustrate an ethical dilemma.

May 16

burn blighted trees. A new virus, or one of our own

Chemical herbicides such as Agent Orange were used to destroy forests in the Vietnam War; here, biological weapons have been developed for a similar purpose (or have accidentally had the same effect).

May 17

in Genet, for instance

Jean Genet's fiction often portrayed homosexuality, especially in prison, with unusual explicitness for his time.

Sacchetti's distaste for homosexuality is in contrast to other aspects of his character that are quasi-autobiographical: Disch was also a poet and a lapsed Catholic, but was openly gay (though not openly so in his early career, prior to Camp Concentration).

Fifteen Famous Fatsos

Of the names Sacchetti suggests, Samuel Johnson, Alfred Hitchcock, Aquinas, and Norbert Weiner were somewhat obese. The historical Buddha probably was not, but is often confused with the plump Chinese folklore figure Budai. "Salinger" and "Melchior" are less clear since there are many famous figures with those names, but based on Sacchetti's physical criteria and the sort of people he finds noteworthy, they may be the former White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and the opera singer Lauritz Melchior.

May 18

neo-Millsians

John Stuart Mill was a political philosopher who argued in favor of individual rights and liberal democracy, though he also believed that an intellectual elite would naturally exercise more influence than other people. In On Liberty, he argued that even in an apparently free society, "everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship" due to their unconscious deference to social class and custom.

Eichmann was noted as an "expert" ... he spoke Yiddish

Adolf Eichmann, Nazi administrator who managed the transportation aspects of Hitler's genocide. During his trial for war crimes, Eichmann claimed to have learned fluent Hebrew and Yiddish, though it's not clear whether this was true.

Youngerman's case

Youngerman is not a historical figure, but a literary colleague of Sacchetti whose lack of political outspokenness has apparently preserved his career (he edits a magazine that later publishes Sacchetti's work).

May 19

Auden observes somewhere (in the "Letter to Lord Byron"?)

Sacchetti is thinking of this verse:

Professor Housman was I think the first
     To say in print how very stimulating
The little ills by which mankind is cursed,
     The colds, the aches, the pains are to creating;
     Indeed one hardly goes too far in stating
That many a flawless lyric may be due
Not to a lover's broken heart, but 'flu.

The Silkworm Song

This poem later appeared in Disch's collection The Right Way to Figure Plumbing.