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Volume 24, Numbers 3 & 4 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON'S DECORATION DAY DOUGLAS MITCHELL* Corrington's novella, Decoration Day, deals with legal matters only on the surface, yet the surface of the narrative and its underlying issues, particularly death and the threat of dissolution, are carefully interwoven. Corrington, as an attorney, personally confronted the disjunction between law and life, which he attributed to reductionistic views of the law. His ideas of jurisprudence were derived in great measure from the work of twentieth-century political philosopher Eric Voegelin, and Voegelin's Nature of the Law, a text Corrington assisted in editing.3 Decoration Day begins with Judge Albert Sidney Johnston Finch in retirement, withdrawn and detached. His wife died several years earlier, and Finch retired to his lakehouse, where he hoped to spend the remainder of his days fishing, listening to grand music, and reading ancient literature. He is a Southerner of the old school, of the William Alexander Percy mold with roots deep in Shreveport, Louisiana. His land is farmed by his godson Billy Wendell, the son of a close friend who did not survive the war. Judge Finch's peaceful retirement is first interrupted when Billy Wendell's wife, Loreen, comes to ask for the name of a lawyer to help her with a divorce. Later Billy arrives, with a legal matter of his own. It seems he's being threatened by a Pentagon bureaucrat over supposed interference in the Defense Department's effort to award a belated Medal of Honor for service in WW II to Gaspard Penniwell (Gee), an old African-American farmhand who lives on land that lies between the larger Finch and Wendell farms. Judge Finch can't turn Billy away because of a personal debt; Gee had helped teach the Judge and W.D., Wendell's father, how to hunt, shoot, and live in relationship to the land. Judge Finch reluctantly takes on Gee's case in trying to deal with the government's efforts to bestow an unwanted Congressional Medal of Honor on old Gee. The case is complicated by the fact that Gee thinks his most serious wounds were inflicted by an American patrol after he had killed a large group of Germans who had overrun their position. Pressed to take up legal work again, Judge Finch figures out, with the help of a dream, that what Gee told him the American soldier said before he shot him-"You made all this?"-was probably spoken by a non-native speaker. There was a Nazi unit operating under cover as Americans and the Judge decides that Gee was shot by Germans and not Americans. Judge Finch tries to learn more about the impending divorce by engaging Terry Novis to do some secretarial work on the Gee case for him.Terry is a gorgeous legal secretary and the "other woman" in the Wendell divorce. It turns out that Billy Wendell's involvement with Terry Novis is not romantic but he has turned to her as a person he can talk with about the fact he is dying from leukemia. Billy met Terry at the a clinic where they were being treated and the fact that they both have leukemia seems to have helped Billy get past his general inability to express himself. Judge Finch has not exactly rushed to get involved in these new legal matters. He takes his retirement seriously, indeed has withdrawn from his friends and is simply a man waiting to die. He fishes, listens to Brahms and reads Livy. A free man with no purpose, as he puts it, "No one living had any claim on me." (3). With life reduced to abstract perfection, he still has one remaining project. As he describes it: "For months I had been considering sitting down to write a treatise on legal philosophy. At an exalted level, From Logos to Lex to Law, I thought I would call it. It would probe the archaic depths of the legal tradition-not as a bag of statutes and rules, but as a spiritual structure. I could be certain that no practicing lawyer worth his salt would read it. I liked that." (6). Corrington here links Judge Finch's project to Voegelin's The Nature of the Law, a work the editors describe as "a reasoned invitation to restore holiness to the legal order."4 As a circuit judge, Finch made a lifelong effort to see justice done. And he elected against becoming a Federal judge because he "was not anxious to execute the laws of the laws of the United States as they were presently interpreted." (69). At one point, Finch, in the Federal court library, muses about the legal books that surround him: Panelled walnut and thick carpets, row after row of uniform tan volumes containing between their buckram covers a serial dumb show of human folly and greed and cruelty, stupidity, suffering, madness, pettiness. The Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, Supreme Court Reports. Two hundred years of our collective disagreements and wranglings from Jay and Marshall through Taney and Holmes and Black and Frankfurter--the pathetic often ill-conceived attempts to resolve what we have done to one another. Rowena [his maid] could have done better without a clerk. I swear she could. (90).Lawyers, when they get mentioned in Decoration Day, serve as mediators between the people and the arcane dictates of law that determine their fate. But Judge Finch, as it turns out, isn't much of a mediator. In order to avoid meaningful engagement with Loreen Wendell, he resorts to lawyerly obfuscation: "I said something. I can't remember what. Most likely one of those bromides that every last one of us called to the bar fabricates to keep from every accidentally saying anything true or useful, to serve in a hundred situations passably, and never well in one." (5). As William Domnarksi notes, lawyering, in Corrington's legal fiction is "at odds with love, with human relationships."5 Indeed, Finch's memories of judging aren't all that wonderful as he remembers with disgust the dregs of society that passed through his courtroom. Finch remained a thoroughly unreconstructed state circuit judge in Shreveport, rendering his decisions for a culture of land, blood, and tradition. He gained a reputation as "Old Iron Ass," but had the admiration of observers like Terry Novis, among others. She remembers one of his cases in great detail, one in which he ruled for the defendant on the grounds that the court could not "suffer manifest self- interest to make use of the instruments of justice to work injustice," a decision upheld in appellate court, though on different grounds. Terry tells Finch: "It was . . . right. It's . . . what all of us want, isn't it? . . . You made the law live." (73). Indeed he had, but a great disillusionment with the law had settled with his retirement after his wife's death-he has walked away and washed his hands of the law. Finch, with his ideals about justice, has been fighting a rear-guard action against the corruption he finds all around him, including the legal system. Something of a Stoic, with a "great capacity for pain," he seeks "the brightest mountain peak from which to look down, observe, and laugh." (75). His "touch of steel" has left him with few skills in the intimate dealings with weak human souls, as he finds when he takes up romantically with Terry Novis. Finch has become a "sleepwalker," but the new engagements as a lawyer challenge his withdrawal. Rigorous in the law courts, Finch has shrinked from looking closely at himself and has relied on his Stoic force of will. "I have never quite had the heart to begin a self-examination that, for me if not for all of us, must end in disillusion." With the new worldly engagements, he seeks "some kind of answer, some kind of understanding that would not do violence to that diminishing hoard of things [he] still believed in and held to be enduring and inviolate." (60). The pressure of events forces Finch to emerge from the stasis of his retirement to confront the dynamic terms of his existence.6 Lacking any transcendent ground for society or the self, Finch struggles with the threat of dissolution and the cold, mechanistic universe of materialism. As he drives to visit Gee, Finch reflects on the ravages of time: I had been ruminating since the night before on time past, on what had been good and what had been lost. On Victoria and Will D., on old W.D. and my mother-on the very structure of my own life, chipped and cracked and falling away into the abyss of time with each day passing, with each other life impingent on my own moving from this world into the mode of non-existence. (34).In spite of this foreboding, Finch, with his deeply traditional sensibilities, is unable to accept the final implications of the universe as simply matter in- motion. Something, he insists when pushed, will endure. Billy, after telling Finch the news about his leukemia, engages in a rather strange meditation on how things pass away, on what is truly real in the human place in a larger scheme of things. -We come in and we go out and we don't know a damned thing more going than coming. Except nothing lasts. When I was down to the university, this geology professor told us . . . -I know what he told you, I said shortly. -He was a goddamned liar. They don't hire them to teach any more if they're not liars. -No, Billy said softly as if he already knew something. -Even this land is gonna go one day . . .In Shreveport society, the threat to the land is a threat to the reality of society itself--to family, tradition, culture, identity. Without the consciousness that encompasses a full reality, Finch is left facing "a world without a soul, seeing with desperate clarity for the first time the crude machinery of reality rasping and clattering." (61). At one point, Finch stands on the shore of a lake watching a fisherman in a bateau work his lure. He sees in the fisherman "some fusion of us all-my people, myself, old W.D., Will D. and Alethia, Billy, Loreen, Gee, Victoria. I wanted to want nothing but the assurance that no matter who of us came or went, the land, the water, the sun and trees would stand forever with one-any One-to perceive them, to treasure them above the distant sweating cacophonous self-betrayed bricked and girdered and asphalted other anonymity that could not possible stand." (118). He goes on to say, "So I reckoned. But in fact I wanted more." Finch, realizing the cost of his withdrawal, now wants an experiential validation that will include human consciousness in its scope. Identifying with the fisherman, Finch begins to see beyond his stoicism: I could sense how the spinning rig would feel under my hand, the smooth gliding boat beneath me. I could feel the small minnow dancing at the end of my line and the power deep in the water that might reach suddenly up into the light, take down the minnow and begin the soundless struggle again. He's not doing it right, I heard myself whisper to myself. Damn it, you've got to get in close, you have to brush the shore, risk the bait. You can't just stand off and throw . . . (118).The price of Judge Finch's recovery of a sense of order in the world around him is a painful confrontation with the injustice, the disorder, in his own soul. As Judge Finch begins to work with Gee, whom he has not seen for several decades, he experiences memories long suppressed; there is an overwhelming sense of "bad faith rotting his soul." (77). At the first mention of Gaspard Penniwell's name, Finch deals with memories which are "like a genie from a bottle, misty and undefined." Finch's efforts to withdraw, to rid himself of the world, is undermined by Gee's story of his wartime injuries and the extent of his wounds (physical and psychological). Whatever peace he may have found in isolation is further threatened by what he now knows was his effort to walk away from Gee when he was still a young man. Finch had last seen Gee when they both visited the hospital to see Billy Wendell's father when they were still both young men. He slowly admits to himself the significance of his repudiation of Gee. "I had turned then [in the hospital room] and left him there with the dead. To have done it once with an infamy; to do it twice I reckoned must be the death of the soul." (52-53). Finch now has no credible sanctuary, no "enduring and inviolate" retreat; he faces the choice of materialistic nihilism or full engagement and the effort of atonement, however partial. Gee is Finch's link to the past and a means for participation in the present. Turning away from Gee was a fracture point in his personal history. It was Gee who had taught Finch hunting and fishing, and, it now seems, much else. They had subverted the recognized order in a segregated South with Gee. Gee was Finch's generational link to the best of a South still flawed, but changing. However, just as his actions on the bench, and his private life had left their mark, they had seemingly severed him from a deeper connection with his own traditions, leaving him with an abstracted past of "bare bones and the acrid air of old times." Through his reengagement with Gee, his recognition of how he had wronged Gee by ignoring him all these years, and a new relationship with Terry Novis, Finch begins to experience meaningful participation in history again, "imbibed, ingested, lived with, grasped." Late in the story, Judge Finch realizes the mistakes in his relationship with Gee and expresses a new understanding of the world: I was surely coming to doubt the possibility of moving aside and watching the world and time go on as I stood by. Observing. Something Einstein had proved with the special theory: there are no privileged observers. The observer is part of the observation. Not because he wishes to be or chooses to be: because he must be. Because he is the observation. Observation? Revelation? (118).The revelation is of the mystery of the real-this strange relation between transcendent reality, the source of order, and that which is ordered, with this phenomena called consciousness somehow in the middle. Finch asks: "Word passes. Lord, is it so? Are we ourselves the revelation?" (111). As he walks out early one morning, he thinks about "the new shape of the world he was about to encounter and create." (132). By virtue of his new involvement with Gee, Terry Novis, and the Wendells, Finch reevaluate the true relation of law and life he has been forced to work with as a judge. In an earlier form his isolation, as a judge, he had become what he would call a "bad priest" who must struggle with his office.7 After meeting with Gee, he says, "I felt like a priest bereft of faculties, one who stood at the shore of a slow-moving ocean of pain, tide coming in, still water strewn with the wreckage of human hopes and dreams." (58). In taking upon himself the burden of consciousness and the struggle of the soul, Finch comes to realize that "even a bad priest can absolve. Can administer the sacraments." He has recovered as a man what he had lost sight of as judge, and what he had been seeking in the abstractions of his planned book on the law. By attempting to recover what Corrington calls "the rhythm of order" and still do justice, Finch experiences a new ordering presence, a new meaning in his life. He dreams he has resolved Gee's ordeal and the dream leads to a profound revelation, phrased as an answer to the SS trooper's question "You made all this?" : "It's ours, every grain, every atom . . . We made it all." (131). Corrington presents Finch as a man reordering his soul, while coming to grips with a modernist society. As Corrington writes in a letter, "The structures of order have passed from external institutions into the souls of those who still listen for the Logos and try to keep it."8 The simple opposition between love and law is woefully inadequate to deal with the complexity and profundity of Corrington's portrayal of Albert Sidney Finch. For Corrington, philosophy can never be reduced to abstractions. It must concern the soul, and its wanderings, and the tension in a man's life when the soul must deal with the world. By the end of Decoration Day, Finch has learned this lesson, and his never-to-be written legal treatise might be written after all. Law cannot be sectarian; it cannot be secular. Law as a reflection of the order of the soul cannot evade its involvement with the Whole. There is no such thing as pragmatic law, or law based in the constant convulsions of a confused society. Either the law goes to the Ground, as knowledge of the Ground arises into history, or it is not law at all. Corrington to William Domnarksi (undated), quoted in Domnarski, "Corrington's Lawyer as Moralist," in Mills, supra note 3, at 148. 8. Corrington to William Domnarski, undated, quoted in Domnarski, "Corrington's Lawyer as Moralist," in Mills, supra note 3, at 154. |
