My pleasant capybara...
... I am feeling quite good. Tonight already I have finished
five more pages of "The Fight in the Fog," carrying the story of the
campaign up through our occupation of Adak. Some of the writing is good and
some not so good, but at any rate it is progressing. I will be through with
this draft by the time more orders are in, barring the unexpected.
...
I found the copy of the Times in a wastebasket here the other
day. No one knows who it belonged to. We've been having a lot of fun reading
it, especially as two pages are devoted to reviews, which are very urbane and
quite pleasant. One, on a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the
Haymarket, says:
 |
| Max Adrian in 1944: not '14 |
And then there was Puck. Mr. Max Adrian is a brilliantly
clever actor who never fails to delight me. I remember his witty cozenings as
Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, and the superb fatuousness of his Sir Ralph
Bloomfield Bonington in The Doctor's Dilemma. If I were casting a play about
Dr. Johnson he would be my first choice for Boswell. But I submit that none of
these is Shakespeare's fourteen-year-old leading his victims through bog,
through brush, through brake, through brier. Mr. Adrian did brilliantly, of course.
But it was the garish brilliance of a Mordkin or a Nijinsky, putting on a
rehearsed glitter to hide the fatigue of a world-tour of Petrouchka, followed
by L'Apres-midi d'un Faune.
There was also a review of Guest in the House, which I like
for several reasons. One of them was that the movie is now on our enchanted
island, and Gene and I went to see it. As I remember the play it was not bad.
But the movie is incredibly bad. One of the bad things is, strangely enough,
the good photography. The photography has greater depth than any I can remember
(which is good) and there was some very interesting use of distortion and
strange angles. The main trouble was that most of the time there seemed to be
no reason for the camera to be peering at the actors through the window, out of
the ceiling, from under the bed and perchance from the handle of the vacuum
cleaner. When the angle had significance to the presentation of the scene, this
sort of thing was excellent. But most of the time the photographer seemed to be
shouting, "Hey, look, I can keep the bannister in focus in three feet and
have Ralph Bellamy pretty sharp at fifty. Not bad, eh?" ...
Dave just dropped in and work on Gene's Symphony and this
letter stopped while we got off on a wild discussion of Dostoevsky. Dave is
reading The Possessed, thinks it wonderful and claims all the characters are
credible. I maintained that I could not believe the mysticism of some -- and
you can imagine what that led to. A gripping of fog and a wrestling with
semantic confusion in which we all belabored mysticism, each other and such
assorted characters as Saroyan and Mary Baker Eddy, before coming to the
conclusion that we (1) did not know what we were talking about and (2) agreed
completely anyway.
I have grown to like Dave very much, although it always
comes as something of a shock to me when he says something like, "You have
a beautiful tibia, Murray." He is the best-read man I have encountered
since Howard [Daniel], and he has a highly developed social conscience. He is
always trying to do things for the general good. For instance, a non-coms club
is being formed on the island. Dave disagrees with the idea of distinction
between non-coms and privates and pfcs, but he went to the organizational
meetings -- and will join. His idea seems to be that of boring from within. He
came back from the first organizational meeting elated. He had nominated a
Negro for vice-president, his nominee had nominated another Negro and another
socially conscious character had moved nominations be closed. This, Dave felt,
was a big step forward in race relations, and it certainly was cause for some
satisfaction. Another triumph came when the rule was adopted that while a non-com
could be admitted to the club if he were not a member, all privates and pfcs
could be brought as guests of members. So Dave was happy. But he came back from
the second meeting a bit upset. The boys had tried to revoke the
pfcs-and-privates-as-guests provision. Before someone broke the news gently
that unless the provision was kept Special Services might refuse to kick
through with a few thousand dollars for the club, the vice-president had taken
a firm stand against having the low graders as guests, explaining, "I
worked hard for these stripes and I want something out of them." The final
decision was to keep the private proviso as it was but to have a gentleman's
agreement about exercising it. Perhaps [
] a non-coms agreement. Anyway, Dave was unhappy. Me? I get a sort of
sardonic kick out of it. I guess I need a trip to Shelton.
I love you very very much my tender one. I miss you
achingly, at every moment, and even twenty-six days can seem a series of
eternities ... I adore you.
Your, M
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