Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

that oaks, as he shows them here, are assertive of their individuality and do not bend
away submissively to accommodate others in the grove their fair share of the light. 80 If
his intention had been either of these, there would be an elegiac quality to the subject and
it would stop there. But there isn’t and it doesn’t.
More likely than either of these motivations, Wood enlists this grove of oak trees to
invoke the ordinal number five, as on the fingers on a hand, which we first saw printed in
the snow in Village Slums, and the theme of masturbation. But what was there for Wood
about the oak, in particular, and/or the acorn? Our inquiry takes us back again to Munich.
As a durable symbol of the strength and resilience of classical, humanistic German
culture, Goethe’s Oak Tree stood in his hometown of Weimar. In 1919, the Weimar
Republic appropriated the oak tree—redolent of the poet’s, and by association, the postwar
society’s will to protect basic liberties like freedom of speech and the press, equality
for women and voting rights for all citizens—and illustrated it, verso on the new, five
Mark coin. When, in 1928, almost a century after the poet’s death in 1832, Wood stopped
in Germany to work on his war memorial window, he would have naturally seen
Goethe’s oak on the coin and, being himself of the same, liberal mind, taken empathy
with all its symbolic meanings.
The American Golfer: Portrait of Charles Campbell
1940
But for Wood, it was not just the tree, as
the symbol for humanistic dogma, which
caught his attention. The tip of the penis,
called the glans, derives its anatomical
name from the Latin word for acorn, so
called because of the similarity of the
way in which they emerge from their
respective sheaths.
One could surmise, given this enticing
convergence, that Wood had something
beside what was evident to say about
generic, presumably anonymous young
soldiers; about Campbell—to judge only
from his appearance, a conservative
man—and about Herbert Hoover, who
was just then the conservative, Republican Party President of the United States. To see
how he made this symbol work, we need to develop more context.
80 Wood is expressing a sentiment later noted in Robert Frost’s 1946 poem “A Young Birch”: “The only
native tree that dares to lean, relying on its beauty, to the air. (Less brave perhaps than trusting are the
fair.)”
50