In 1964, we were getting ready to take a freighter to Europe
and re-create Rosa and Murray's honeymoon kayak trip down the Danube, when
Murray was diagnosed with cancer. He had surgery removing most of his stomach,
and was advised to wrap up his affairs. Taking Rags's advice, he booked another
freighter berth and we made a shortened Danube trip, from Ulm in Germany to
Bratislava in (then) Czechoslovakia, later that summer.
Dear Murray,
I just got your stoical and very funny letter from Tacoma
General Hospital near Wright's Park, Tacoma. It is not that I expect trifles
like possible cancer operations to stop you, but it is absolutely miserable to
get held up by such a thing at any time and particularly just at this time.
There are inevitably other times and better times to come, but. On the other
hand can you get the next ship? There's nothing like a sea voyage for a convalescence.
The sea voyage for me is that thing that I always intend to
make but never manage. It is the same right now. I have a sort of offer from
UNESCO to be a "consultant" to some sort of new seminar system for Asian
journalists in Manila. But this depends upon a loyalty check in the U.S. and
the approval of the Philippine government. I got the forms for the loyalty
check about two weeks ago and after searching out forgotten street numbers
going back half my life finally got the forms off in one week. ... I gave your
name as a reference --for loyalty--so you may get a call from the FBI. Please
do not slug that agent. Please do tell him that you have often tried to
nominate J. Edgar Hoover for president. But in any case there is never going to
be time for the sea voyage since the job evidently begins late in June. It is
supposed to be for six months and I don't know then whether we'll come straight
back to Madison or can get something for the second semester.
...
Your mention of Terry Pettus makes me think a long way back
when he was drama "critic" of the Tacoma Tribune and had a moustache
and wore a camelhair coat. I've never seen him since. Bill Ames at the
university journalism school has just done something like a book on the Seattle
PI strike. He told me he talked with Terry and referred to him in terms
something like, "a fine old gentleman," which took me aback. [Rags
was younger than Pettus, but not by enough worry about being a fine old
gentleman by association.] I do remember Terry's father on our Academic Freedom
committee. I listed this committee among the non-religious and non-political of
my organizations, and called it a "social action" group. That is, I
listed it on the loyalty forms. It will stick out, of course, because it is the
only organization in which I had to list myself as an officer.
I just heard a train whistle here and it made me think of
hearing train whistles and mistaking them for boat whistles on the 11th Street
Bridge. [Like Murray, Rags had worked as a tender on the 11th Street
Bridge--now the Murray Morgan Bridge--in Tacoma.] From the bridge a train
whistle always sounded a little strange to me, suggesting travel and other
places. Hearing the same sound in Madison suggests nothing but a train in
Madison. I have tried several times to figure out why Madison has so little
excitement for me and Tacoma so much. Today was not untypical of Madison. I had
lunch on the terrace by the lake and watched three shells of eights race.
Beyond the shells, several dozen sailboats were moving, and the Rescue
motorboat was streaking out to pick up a couple over-enthusiastic sailors. A
little later, I saw the serious left-wing students parading around the capitol
at the square, carrying signs "Go Home from South Vietnam Yankees."
On the way home I stopped and fished for 15 minutes, etc. I keep saying: it is
a wonderful place, really wonderful. Anybody would be delighted to be in this
wonderful place. And of course, I am, I am.
I don't know whether four years is such a long time for me
to stay anyplace and that I have reached my limit, or that I was just hooked on
Tacoma years ago and still am. But why was I? I hear quite often that going
back to the home town is dreadful--you can't go back, etc. But I have always
liked to go back. I think I have figured out part of my feeling about Tacoma
and the region. It is that I have a sense not only of the physical place, but
also of what happened there in the past. All of my childhood I was aware that
where I played--in Puget Sound gulch, or at Dash Point, the Indians had been
there before me. And this was mixed up with fragments about Job Carrs cabin, and
the sailing ships that docked at Old Town, and the mills with their sparks at
night.
In Wisconsin I have no sense at all of anybody having lived here or
anything happening here. If I find that the effort I intend to shortly make to
get to the University of Washington is not successful, I will begin to read
Wisconsin history. Maybe that will help, but I know it will not be the same. It
was not only the vague historical impressions I wove into my awareness of
Tacoma (I remember now that many of the impressions must have come from the
Historical "Museum"--especially old paintings (one of Indians with a
fire on the beach). It was also a kind of faking of Tacoma as a setting for
what I read. I always imagined Wrights Park as Hyde Park. If I needed a doorway
of the mansion in Kensington, I used the doorway of some big house maybe on Yakima
Avenue, or of course for a mansion, the old Rust house.
So part of my
attachment to Tacoma was my sense of what had happened there on those beaches
among those trees. But part of my feeling was for what never did happen there,
but only in other faraway places or perhaps only in books. And the second
feeling, the faked up one, was if anything stronger than the first. If
knowing-sensing the history makes a place more real and meaningful, then does
bringing in what isn't there at all, make it less real? The Tacoma that is real
for me may not be real for anybody else. So I have always felt justified in
acknowledging that my feeling rests on a neurosis that I indulge and never want
to get rid of.
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