Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Adak, May 29 1944 -- "tundra is strange, springy stuff"



Rosa Darling… 

Yesterday morning I went over to the library again instead of trying to sleep. Sunday is the one bad day of the week for the graveyard shift in operations and signal intel. The difficulty is partly psychological—there is some envy for the men in the other branches who have the day off. But most of the trouble is verbal.  Sunday is the one day everyone is not off at work and with men arguing all day long about when the war will end and how many stripes a lieutenant commander in the Navy wears and whether Shirley Temple is a virgin and kindred weighty subjects, Morpheus is a mite shy.
 
Before going down I took the portable over to personnel so as not to bother the guys who were still sleeping in the hut and typed out my notes on the books I was taking back—“The Men Who Make News” and “Asylum.” I will send carbons of the notes down under separate cover.

The library is separated from the ACS grounds by two ravines and a hill. When I arrived here it was possible to cross both of the ravines on snow bridges, but now only a few dirty patches of crusted snow remain. A regular bridge crosses one of the streams, but the other is unspanned. This leaves a choice of a long walk along the roads or a short one across the tundra up a hill around the end of the ravine and downhill to the library. I love this walk. 


Tundra, or muskeg, is strange, springy stuff. It is covered with grass, about eight inches long, thick and yellow-green. A surprising variety of small green plants none more than four or five inches high, stick up through the grass, which lies flat against the humpy, water-soaked ground.  Today there were about half a dozen small birds, grey-breasted and with brown and black backs, flitting around and singing in short bursts. They looked like streamlined sparrows, flew a little like the Danube flitters, and their songs were beautiful. At least they sounded beautiful, although it may just be that I haven’t heard a bird for so long. I don’t know what they eat, or where they go in the winter. They seem too small to fly south. And as for their current diet, I believe the sailor was right. There are not worms in the ground here. They would drown.

The wetness of the muskeg is unbelievable. Near the surface, on a dry day, the ground is merely damp. But a few feet, even a few inches, below the grass lies a mass of mud. Cutting across the fields today I came on a series of slit trenches. They were all three-fourths filled with water. 

The library is, as usual, almost deserted. The only other occupants were the librarian, a quiet little fellow who does not like to read, and two Negro sergeants, one studying the New York Times of six weeks ago and the other bowed over “Hell on Ice.” The radio was playing a Firestone classical music program you and I heard in the states, last February I believe, and it was very quiet.

I took a long time in picking out a pair of books to replace the two I returned. My choice finally fell on a novel by Maugham—a mystery book of foreign spying based on Maugham’s experiences in the British intelligence office in the last war, and another journalistic study called “The Comics and Their Creators.” Still out from my last trip down are Quintella’s “A Latin American Speaks” and Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”


The later is my current reading choice. I believe it is the first novel I have read since coming up here—except for Melville’s “Typee,” which I would just as soon forget. As such, it is something of a vacation, although far more serious reading than much of the nonfiction I’ve assimilated recently. The story deals with the Moscow trials. The hero, or rather, the protagonist, is an old revolutionist arrested as an obstructionist. The story is of his thoughts during his time in prison awaiting execution.
 
Koestler can write. He makes his tired, disillusioned old revolutionary extremely believable. He makes his dialogues with his old friend and untired revolutionary jailor believable in spite of the fact that they are wrestling continually with the problems of ends and means. And he makes the trials—there is no portrayal of the trials themselves in the story, only references to them by the two chief characters—come to life and be no longer abstractions but real terminations of real lives. Try reading it. I am sure they have it, and Koestler’s later “Arrival and Departure” at the University Rental Library.

The remarkable thing about the book is the understanding it gives of a type of mind which has always baffled me: the mind of the humanitarian revolutionary who for the sake of humanity countenances, or even instigates, the slaughter of humans.


I’ve gone on so long about the books that I haven’t time to tell you what a marvelous thing it was after coming back from the library and taking a nine-hour nap to find beside my bed the letters Herm West had brought down from the mess hall—four from you (two letters, two enclosures) one from Dad, one from Nate Krems, and one from Bill Fett. I’ll talk to you about them tomorrow. 

All my love,
M

Umnak, 28 December 1944 -- "three months, three weeks, three days"

Darling Darling…

Except for not getting a letter from you, or an answer to my Christmas telegram in which I asked you to wire me, this was a very nice day. What do I have to do to get you to write or to wire, little one? I’d like to come down there so that you wouldn’t have to bother, but really, I can’t.
 
"Future of the Falcon (early version 1), 1947, Gordon Onslow Ford. Weinstein Gallery     

 
I really shouldn’t complain for the mail brought many nice things. There was a package from Mom [Rosa’s mother, Jessie Northcutt]; a book called The Feather Merchants and a box of Almond Roca. There was a stack of Oregonians, two New Republics, and a Harpers. In the letter line there was a nice one from Gordon, which I enclose. [Gordon Onslow-Ford was a Surrealist and Impressionist painter, friend of Andre Bretón and Gertrude Stein. He and his wife Jacqueline lived in Patzcuaro at the same time as Murray and Rosa in 1942: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Onslow_Ford]  

But the high spot was the arrival of one of Bill’s [Bill Fett] Mexican watercolors, “The Blue Flower,” a really beautiful job. I’m still trying to figure out where to hang it. The painting reminds me a great deal of the New Year’s one he painted at the Patzcuaro Shangri-La. I so wish we could see it together, little darling, but it makes me feel close, just being kin to those we have on the houseboat walls.
Mexican watercolor, Bill Fett, c. 1944

And tonight, instead of the rather weak symphony we usually have in the middle of the week, there was Toscanini conducting Beethoven’s First and Eighth. To make matters perfect, there was some trouble in the operating room and the maintenance man who usually butts in on Brahms to tell me that there is going to be liver for lunch or Friday was off at work. I don’t remember being impressed by the First before, but today I found it wonderful, especially the third movement. 

Later there was a good comedy program on the radio, the first that I can remember in a very long time. It was a shortwave special for the services, and Danny Kaye did a one-man satire on soap opera …I laughed until I cried. No one else thought it very good, though.    …

I did not get in quite as much writing today as usual. I’m on KP this week, and since it is the midnight dish trick, I work alone. It takes a bit more time than usual. But I did finish a draft of the first three pages in “The Sea” section. I think this part will be of special interest to you. It branches off into a history of the Pribilof Group and a review of the big Bering Sea diplomatic controversy which at one time threatened to involve us in war with Britain. I find the material fascinating. (You’re fascinating, too.)

Did I tell you, in my rehash of the mess here Christmas Eve, that Art Wyle, our GI character with the sailor stride, was roaming around glassy-eyed assuring everyone he was Linda Darnell? 

The radio just announced there is fighting going on on an island in the Danube within the Budapest city limits. It makes the idea of a bull in a china shop seem socially meretricious.

After today three months, three weeks, three days,
M

from Phyllis Goldschmid, December 26, 1944 -- "Otto came home and made some DDT"








Rosa took this picture of Phyllis (Gallup) Goldschmid, her dearest friend.








Dear Murray, 
 
The temperature is between 30° and 40° and we are out of oil and there is a bit of snow on the ground so I feel that the time is at last propitious to write to you. We have enjoyed your letters so much that we have felt that an ordinary note would not be a proper answer, but with this physical conditions in which I am typing to keep my blue fingers from becoming completely stiff…we feel very close to you and will try to write you a letter. Part of our delay too has been due to the fact that I have been caught in some divinity fudge for the last week and have hardly been able to get away. Every time I touch this sticky mass to coax it into some form it reaches out and grabs me so that it is difficult to free myself. Perhaps you should send a request for the stuff so that I can bottle it and sent it you and you can pour it out on some iceberg and let it harden.

We tried to call Rosa yesterday when we were in Seattle, but not one, as we had feared, was at home. We are trying to get her to Shelton for New Years, but we are not sure yet whether she may come. We wish you could prevail on her to move down to Shelton. It’s so much nicer than Seattle and we would enjoy her so much. …

We received an impressive card from Mr. Luce which we at first thought was his gracious way of telling us that our renewal to Time had been accepted. On further examination, however, we learned that it was a subscription to Fortune from our esteemed friend in Alaska. Otto was so impressed that he wanted to order the Journal of the American Chemical Society for you …. We were both of course delighted….

Manuel would indeed make a good hero for a book. He has no doubt written that his wife is coming to San Fran and that he is to open a shop for Gump’s at Carmel in conjunction with the Lanz dress shop. At the time of our visit with him he was a little disturbed at the attitude of the Lanz management toward him, as a Mexican, but we hope they got over it. No doubt you have also heard of the involved pottery situation which we attempted to explain to Rosa although neither Otto nor Phyllis could agree on the details for we had a slight difficulty understanding everything he said, and he was so nice we didn’t like to make it difficult for him to explain. We hope that everything turned out well though.

I don’t know whether we have written to you since the nice Mexican, Miguel Arce, visited in Shelton as a chemist from the rayon plant in Mexico. He was very charming and nice, but quite different in many respects from Carmen and Manuel in that he was about thirty years behind the times in his political philosophy. His family had apparently lost part of their land in the revolution and while he was eager for Mexican development he had a very paternalistic attitude toward the Indians. Otto found him much more like a European than almost anyone he had met on this continent.

Visiting her at the same time was a wonderful Frenchman who is the South American representative for Rayonier. He had been a French liaison officer with the British Army before Dunkirk and told marvelous stories of his experiences. As a point of great pride he pointed out that it had been the French Army which had made the evacuation possible. He was very much impressed by the British officers’ habit of maintaining full dress dinners during the entire retreat.
 
We may also not have written to your about our nice vacation to Berkeley to see Helen and Fred and their two nice children. Otto spent a lot of time at the University and came home and made some DDT. From what I can understand it is not difficult to make, but due to the war uses of Freon and the stuff that DDT is generally suspended in, he had to use ether. It is certainly effective, but Otto made just a bit…enough to line a glass and spent days catching mosquitoes in the glass to then watch them become paralyzed and die. From this example I am convinced that it is not a very efficient method to catch insects.

I have been reading one of your books … one of the best I have read since War and Peace… Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I won’t rest until Otto takes me to Yugoslavia… it sounds marvelous and she writes so well with just the right mixture of ideas and activity in her material and structure and charm in her style. 

Otto has given me a book, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland, written by a theoretical physicist, Ganow, in the hope that I may learn something about science. The book is dedicated to Lewis Carroll and follows somewhat in his patter with Alice and the writer is obviously trying to make quantum theory and the theory of relativity as simple as possible for people like me. The pictures are very pretty though.
 
Tonight James Thurber’s “Private Life of Walter Mitty” was done on the “This is My Best” show…I hope you heard it. Last week Corwin’s “The Plot to Get Santa Claus” was done on the same program with Orson Welles as Nero….
…..
Yours,
Otto and Phyllis

Umnak, 23 December 1944 -- "somehow very near to you tonight"

My sweet slumber bunny…

It is four o’clock Saturday morning. I am just back from a long walk in the dark. The night is very clear. A half-moon went down behind the mountain while I was walking, and the stars came out with a Danube brightness. The Bering is black and mysterious, and the outline of the hills so intense they seem to give off black light. Just as a I started back a very thin light snow began to fall from the cloudless sky. It is still falling and somehow it reminds me of our seagull at the Heranger bar. I am very lonesome but somehow very near to you tonight. Your alarm is probably going off now.
I had one disappointment during the day (besides the war news, which I won’t discuss). One of the local lads who was sweating out transportation for his furlough had promised to take you the be-booted nightgown which that sad Sterns outfit misshipped to me here instead of to you. But his plane call came suddenly and he did not remember to take it. So now I know you won’t get it for Christmas. We can’t send Christmas wires. So I can’t even greet you, my sweet. I hope you got the other present from Rusek’s in time. Or the novel.
My writing on the new opus [Bridge to Russia]is progressing much faster than I had expected. Ted Godfrey, who read the first part today, claims to find it interesting and while I do not trust his candor I am pleased. I am enclosing the preliminary drafts of some more of the section on “The Land.” Give me the comments as soon as possible. And incidentally, send up my copy of Howard Handlemann’s Bridge to Victory, which I can use now. I think if you mark it book you can sent if first class mail quite cheaply and the first class mail usually comes air mail.

I had a letter from Tom Boland of Camp Adair today. He is still somewhere in Italy and says he envies me the security of the Aleutians. I’ll send along the letter as soon as I’ve answered it, but there is one quote I liked well enough to copy:
“I walked down one of the streets of Florence and came upon the Duomo or chief church…Quite breathtaking the first time. I was drinking in the beauty of the church and the Italian atmosphere when one of our sound trucks rumbled into the center of the plaza and started to play Poinciana by Benny Goodman’s band."
Which reminds me that I forgot to tell you about our last movie. I wouldn’t bother, except that it was good. It was a British horror story, released the Paramount, and why they let it out I’ll never know because it again shows just how much Hollywood hasn’t learned. The story is in the Frankenstein-Dr. Jekyll tradition. A pair of scientists get an idea of a way to achieve eternal youth, the only difficulty being that it involves an operation which usually results in the death of the cooperating party. Instead of the usual hocus-pocus of laboratory and repeated quick changes, the director lets the horror be built up by the always impending threat of a change. Everything is understated. Which makes the sudden aging of the protagonist, when it does come, all the more horrible. Also, there is the very unHollywood touch that when the girl sees him at ninety she is still in love with him and does not bug her eyes, heave her breasts adroitly and get out half a lurch ahead of an octogenarian rapist. The title, in case it comes to Seattle when you have an hour and a half free, is “The Man on Half-Moon Street.”

I’ll write again tomorrow, my lovely. Now I get back to work on the new book. You are adored, always and always.
 M

Umnak Island, 19 December 1944 -- "a possible book on the Aleutians"

My Cherubic Chipmunk …
 
I am enclosing a carbon of a first draft of a part of a chapter on a possible book on the Aleutians [published in 1946 as Bridge to Russia]. The material is mostly gleaned from “The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” written by Robert F. Griggs for the National Geographic Society. Let me know what you think of it, hasta pronto.

The general idea that I have now is for a highly popularized account of the life and the land up here. It could be divided into five sections: the land, the sea, the men, the animals, the war. Each section would be a series of sketches, more or less like the one enclosed. This would leave the way open for a more ambitious project if the Guggenheim people get generous.

The next sketch will be on Bogoslof, the disappearing island.
Boiling mud on Bogoslof, also known as Agasagook, in 2018.
Nora Rojek USFWS.



Today brought more mail, including one for me. It was from Bill Fett, who seems to have found a home on Orcas. He wrote on pink paper, had parenthetical statements enclosed within parenthetical statements and left me with a feeling of considerable confusion. Also anticipation, for he says he is sending up something called “The Blue Flower” to me. He mentioned it in a postscript and seemed to think he had described it earlier in the letter, but I’m damned if I can find any mention of it, at least by that name.

I have just finished reading “This Simian World” by Clarence Day, who I am told had a rather interesting life with his father. It is his first book and is dedicated to the rather obvious thesis that we are what we are because we descended from monkeys rather than from other animals. In the forepart of the book he imagines the world if men had descended from other types of animals, and why other types failed to gain mastery. Parts of it are charming  ....

And this is the quotation from the title page:
“How I hate the man who talks about ‘brute creation’ with an ugly emphasis on brute…as for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees, and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and amphioxus, fish, dinosaurs, and apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden.”   -- W.N.P. Barbellion
The news is on now, and the announcer has just told of “massive air blows” at Ulm and Bratislava [both Danube River towns that Rosa and Murray visited by kayak on their honeymoon in 1939]. I am very lonely and I need you very much….
M

Umnak Island, 9 December 1944 -- "early in the game I offended him"

Hello Rumpus the Rabbit…
 
Today’s long-awaited mail delivery brought a nice letter from Myrtle [James] and a P-I clipping from my busy sweet. Myrtle, with myriad ejaculations reminiscent of Father Divine, told about the trip to the San Juans, and I expect a full report from you, sooner or later. 
 
And do tell me more about your newspaper and picture work, little lover, for you must remember that you are the one now fully in the professional swim, and I want to know how we are getting along, stroke by stroke, as in the Aberdeen narrative that made me so envious. Yesterday I wrangled from one of our soon to depart comrades a copy of Shakespeare he had intended to read in enforced isolation. The first sonnet I tried expressed how I feel about my careerwoman’s frantic pleasures:
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;
For whatever beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,
Or any of these all, or all, or more,
Entitled in thy parts do crowned set,
I make my love engrafted to this store:
So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,
Whilst that this shadow dost such substance give,
That I in thy abundance am suffic’d
And by a part of all thy glory live.
Look, what is best, that best I wish in thee;
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!
Going from the sublime to the Day of the Dead, I must report that the book is only one page longer today than yesterday. That page was done five times last night before giving up. In a few minutes I will tackle it again. But in the meantime, a report on a bull session.

After knocking off writing last night, I had a long talk with Tookie the Texan. I have told you before that he is a strange, moody youngster, intelligent, introspective and uneducated. His is always locked in dubious battle with melancholia, and consequently as unpredictable in his moods as the Aleutian weather. Last night, for the first time, I learned a lot of his story.

He is the youngest  of seven children, all but two of them boys. His family life was out of the ordinary. His father was a trapper in Louisiana, a skilled mechanic in the Texas oil fields. Tookie knows nothing about his paternal grandparents. His mother, from a conventionally poor, conventionally genteel family, was a school teacher. She was thirty when she met her man, and after a quick courtship married him. In the next ten years she had seven children and other disillusionments. For as Tookie puts it, “Daddy could earn money, but he was just damn no good, just a damn no-good.”

Daddy, it seems had a penchant for traipsing off with trollops. Whenever he met a particularly pleasing whore he went off to live with her awhile. He made good money. At one time, trapping muskrat, he was averaging a sturdy hundred dollars a day. But the family got little of it. In fact at the very period that the furs were flying thickest for Daddy, Mother had sold all the goods her family had given her, spent all the money in the bank, mortgaged what was left of the property and had to deposit four of Tookie’s brothers in an orphanage.

One of Tookie’s early memories is of his father threatening his mother with a knife. She had refused to give him a divorce so that he could legitimize a relationship that was strictly commercial. This incident ended with Daddy being beaten up by his two oldest sons and thrown on the lawn, along with his belongings. But he came back a few months later, temporarily reformed but unrepentant, and a few months after that proudly told his wife of the birth of a bastard.

Tookie says, “There is only one thing I respect my Daddy for. He never was ashamed. When he was living with a whore, he told everyone, and if they didn’t like it, it wasn’t all he told them. And he was very polite. He came in the house one day with blood all over him. It wasn’t his blood. He said to Mother, ‘Really I am very sorry to bring blood into our house. I will try to see that it does not happen again.’”

You can, of course, hear the Oedipus overtones in all of this. But they are not as loud as might be imagined. For out of this strange family relationship came a kid with as nasty an attitude toward conventions as anything spawned outside of Sydney [reference is to Howard Daniel, from Sydney, Australia]. The only thing lacking to make Tookie a really interesting person is some sort of an education. I have been trying to interest him in reading, but early in the game I offended him regarding books and he stubbornly steers clear of any and all suggestions.

But his independence is wonderful and he has a definite personal integrity. Consequently he has the weirdest assortment of friends of any man here. I envy him his collection, although, I must admit, I detest most of them. There is Johannsen, the anti-Semitic Norwegian; Tookie is the only man who even speaks to him. Then there is Hoopes, our only stripe-conscious non-com, whom most shun but Tooke defends. I must include myself, for certainly my circle of popularity is limited. And now that everyone in the place is disgusted with the frenetic Pole, Tookie defends him, too.

He gives the local Babbitry a bad time, from Leedom down, for he barefacedly defends things he detests and relishes in their agreement. The worse the show, the more he praises it and the more he enjoys agreement. Our amiable Alvin [Al Hesse] he gives a particularly bad time, drawing him from agreement to agreement until Al finally realizes his leg has been pulled and disagrees on principle, only to find that he really is disagreeing with something he believes. I might mention that Martin was Tookie’s first friend here. Also, Tookie hates Texas.
Less than four and a half months now, Nunny,
M