Umnak Island, 31 October 1944 -- "a mood and an attitude"

Our mountain is black in the twilight, but haloed with pink clouds. The swamp is yellow, as is fitting for Hallowe’en, and where the meandering streams shine in the light the water looks like ice. Perhaps it is ice, for the air is clear and cold and the ground crackly. Never was there a day more invigorating—or more wasted. For the radio has been full of Churchill’s speech predicting no end of the German war until next summer then another year and a half against Japan. And except for the Republican irreconcilables who believe the whole thing a Roosevelt-Churchill election frame-up, we are all blue. My main consolation is that in 1918 the Allied high command was planning its summer offensive for the next year and was incredibly surprised when the Germans folded. 

It seems to me that while the military leadership in this war has been on a higher caliber than last time out, the political-psychological offensive has been puerile. Last time we offered the Fourteen Points, which serve to split the German home front, whereas this time the cry is Unconditional Surrender, which can do nothing but force the Germans in cohesion.

The columnists keep saying that the German army has to be defeated in the field so that it cannot again tell the German people that it was stabbed in the back. This, it is argued, will break the power of the army. It seems to me that we are fighting more than the German army; we are fighting the entire German nation. And if we can cajole them into quitting, it doesn’t matter whether we do it by sheer force or by psychology. And if we intend to rely on the psychological effects of defeat to keep them down, we are not going to keep them down at all. If German militarism is to be repressed it can be done in any of three ways: (1) destroying Germany, (2) confronting Germany with such a preponderance  of military force that future aggression would be impossible, or (3) healing the economic wounds of the continent so that the main causes of wars are removed. Those are the main possibilities, and they remain the same whether Germany’s armies revolt or Germany’s home front collapses. Only if the Big Three fail to agree on postwar policy will it be possible for Germany to try again. And if the Big Three fall out, one of them will inevitably try to build up Germany as a counterbalance against the others. If that happens, it won’t matter what caused the end of the last war. The problem will be what will start the next one. 

By all this I do not mean that I believe in “Compromise Peace.” Any peace which left the Jap navy afloat and in its own bases, or the German army intact behind its defenses, would very likely be brief. But if we can get the Germans to surrender in any form which allows us to get behind their lines it does not matter what the terms. For once behind the Siegfried Line, once in occupation of the German factories and laboratories, we can do whatever we decide with the country. And if it does not jibe with the terms of surrender, there are precedents to be found in our own history—our treaties with the Indians, with the South after the Civil War, with Spain, with Cuba, with Nicaragua. For, as Niccolo the Magnificent said, “Deceit in the conduct of a war is meritorious.”

Incidentally, Machiavelli has supplied me with the most logical answer for a question I have been asking ever since the stories of the Lublin extermination factory came out. [Lublin-Majdenek was a German death camp in Poland. Hundreds of thousands of, primarily, Polish Jews, Russian prisoners of war, and Polish resisters were killed there. Russian soldiers liberated Majdanek on 24 July 1944.]  It seemed incredible to me that the Germans would not destroy such a place if it had, in fact, been used for the purposes we claim. But Machiavelli says:

Niccolo Machiavelli

“Two of the Roman colonies, Circes and Velitrae had revolted, hoping to be sustained by the Latins; but the defeat of these deprived them of that hope, and therefore a number of their citizens advised the sending of deputies to Rome to sue for peace and offer their submission to the Senate. The authors of the rebellion objected to this, fearing that all the punishment would fall upon their heads: and to put an end to all further discussions about peace they stirred up the multitude to take arms and make incursions into the Roman territory.

And certainly, if anyone desires a people or a prince to abandon all idea of a peaceful settlement with another, then there is no more certain and effectual way than to make them commit some outrageous act against those with whom you wish to prevent them from making peace. For the fear of punishment which they are conscious of having deserved by that outrage will ever keep them from coming to terms…(Chapter 32, The Discourses).

The above business … is an attempt to express both a mood and an attitude. … Since starting this letter I have had a short bullsession with one of the fellows in the hut about the same question. He maintains that to win Unconditional Surrender is important because it will give us a moral right—the moral right of conquest—to impose whatever peace we feel just. Although we went round and round we could not agree. I could not see that the honorableness of a conqueror’s moral right to oppress was worth, say, the lives taken in a spring campaign: whereas he would not agree that if the Germans surrendered with conditions it would be just as much an acknowledgment of the loss of hope in eventual victory as if they had fought on to the last pitchfork and barehanded end through sheer despair. God but I’m glad that for me the problem is academic and the final decisions rest elsewhere.

 

…

Umnak Island, 28 October 1944 -- "It's like being away from music"

My lovely one…

Gorki Valenzuela

Yesterday brought a nice letter from Manuel [Manuel Valenzuela, the model for the character Angel in Day of the Dead], which I enclose. There was also a picture of Gorki, who is if not the most attractive baby I have ever seen at least the most photogenic. …

The mail also brought me two packages. One was from Dad and had a fruit cake in it, the other from you with my robe and the special vitamins both much appreciated, my thoughtful one. As far as I know all the packages are here now, unless the fur hat is en route. …

Among the newspapers and magazines that came along with the packages was the new Harper’s, the October issue. I believe I told you that there was a story in the September number about Paracutin, didn’t I? Well, in this one these is a story in which the heroine is called Bluey. There is a quite good article on Colonel McCormick [Col. Robert Rutherford McCormick was the longtime editor and publisher of the The Chicago Tribune].  In addition to being a job of reporting rather than the usual invective about that individual, there are a couple of quite nice newspaper stories. One concerns the way in which the Tribune always backs up its reporters. One night near deadline a Tribune reporter, Big Jim Doherty, denied admittance to a room where police were questioning a suspect, grabbed a chair and started battering down the door; when the state’s attorney telephoned the paper to demand that Doherty be fired, the managing editor replied gently, “Mr. Courtney, if you knew Mr. Doherty as well as I know him you would know that it is very difficult to deny him. Good-bye, Mr. Courtney.”

When McCormick heard that the Rhode Island state legislature had voted to remove all Republicans from the Rhode Island Supreme Court, he ordered that every flag on the Tribune building be taken down and the Rhode Island star removed. This was done, but some of his lawyers warned him that it is an offense to mutilate the U.S. flag, so he had to have the stars sewn back on.

….

The novel is going slow again. I’m still having trouble needling in some action with the dialogue, but I still hope for an early finish.

Time goes so slow, my sweet. Only a week of the second six months is out of the way. Have you noticed the title of Huxley’s new book: “Time must have a stop”? For is it seems to have been in the past tense. There is a joke rather popular here now. A newcomer to the island was being told the local history and customs by one of the ancients. “Gee,” said the just arrived, “have you lived here all your life?” And the veteran said quietly, “Not yet.”

The mail just came in. More packages. There were three—no less—packages from the Leaming sisters, a book from Dad (Darwin’s Cruise of the Beagle), and a box from R.V. Mack [Aberdeen, WA city councilman], of all people. There was also a package from Frederick and Nelson. I thought it was from you when I opened it but it is a box of candy from Phyllis and Otto. …

Daily, darling, you are loved more. In fact it seems to multiply by cubes. It’s like being away from music, as we were for awhile, at Patzcuaro. It not only makes you realize how much it meant to you, it makes you love music more. …

M

Umnak Island, 21 October 1944--"from here on we coast"

My pretty piltzer…

And so ends the first half of the long, long year. From here on, although the weather is just starting to get rough and the novelty of the near north has worn to a nub, there will always be the knowledge that there is less to do than has already been put behind.

It is strange what a mental hazard that has been to me: the feeling that even when the day of the week or the month was over there would still be more days of loneliness to live through than had been accomplished. But from here on we coast. 

While on the subject of things that are strange, here are a pair: A letter came from Howard Lewis yesterday and it seems he received a letter from me which I did not write. That’s right—a letter I didn’t write. I don’t glimmer with it, but those are his very words. I suppose that the explanation is that I wrote him a letter, filed in it in the Aleutian memory box and wrote him another with most of the same stuff in it. But that is just a guess. I’ll enclose Howard’s opus and let you wrestle it around.

the bareness of the background

The other strange thing is the twinge I felt when you mentioned the bareness of the background in the picture I sent you. For as Aleutian islands go, this one is quite beautiful. Of course, the area is nothing but dark dirt and green Pacific and bleached clapboard buildings. And of course the ridge is as bleak as November in New York. But there is beauty here too and if you were here and the army wasn’t, I’d not mind a year here.

Rather odd, also, is the fact that the time has been going faster since the departure of my one close friend, Jack, of course. The reason is that I have been working so steadily on the novel. At long, long, long last—a last as interminable as that string of adjectives and almost as inexcusable—I have chapter nine under control and feel right about the way the book is going. The one difficulty is that the pages do not add up as fast as I expect them to, and I am afraid the overall length of the book will be under the minimum even for this type of story. But then complications keep suggesting themselves so I may be able to stretch it to the 45,000 mark. I have done more rewriting on this book than on almost all the other stuff I’ve done in the last couple of years.

Last night we had a bit of excitement. The graveyard shift has the assignment of burning the accumulated wastepaper for the day. The paper is kept in big wooden bins, three of them. Usually we match to see who will carry all three out, but last night in a mood of unusual cooperativeness Cobb and the Rebel and I each grabbed a bin. Behind the operating room are three big galvanized iron cans for burning rubbish. It was still dark and we had trouble unloading the bins in the cans, especially because the wind was rising and our hands were cold. Finally we had the cans full and the Reb lit his. I lit the other two and pieces of burning paper and whoosh! the paper flared. Then the wind whipped thought the draft hose in the bottom of the cans and long streamers of teletype paper, burning brilliantly, were soaring thirty feet up into the air. We ran around under this incendiary confetti, making sure it didn’t come down where it shouldn’t. And while we were running around playing fireball the door blew open and a ball of burning paper rolled in. I tore in after it and fished it from under the captain’s desk. By the time I got back outside the wind had died down completely and we had to stir the cans to make sure the last of the paper burned.

The news of the Philippine invasion has caused quite a bit of comment here, but I think the disappointment over the failure of Germany to fold as fast as the newspapers headlined has taken the edge off all our enthusiasm. The start of a campaign is not what fires our imagination now. Only the end of the war. But, oh! how we hope for that.

 

And now, my pretty one, I am going to go to bed. Yesterday I worked on chapter nine for five hours of my regular sleep time and I am pretty groggy this morning. Tell Carmen her letter was much enjoyed and that I think I agree with her about Bill’s painting—although, of course, I can’t be sure without seeing it. I will write her in a day or so. I have already written the Guggenheim people for the application forms.

…

Your

M

Umnak Island, 19 October 1944 -- "Tonight is symphony night"

My Nunny...

I found this in “The Pacific Ocean” by Felix Riesenberg. It is a quote from Conrad:

“If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows up the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lusterless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before life itself.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Tonight is symphony night for the local radio station and we had a bit of Ravel, Tschkai—wow, really off the Slavic beam tonight, and the Schubert Second Symphony. I told you before, didn’t I, that the second movement of the Schubert Second is the little dance the Offenbach lifted for Bluebeard? It was extremely pleasant to listing to in a quiet hut and it made up for the sleep I didn’t get. ...

Some of the boys on the swing shift have started a rather nice custom. They come to the maintenance shop during graveyard to write their letters and they bring a portable phonograph and records. Tonight I heard the Bruch concerto and the Rachmaninoff concerto while working, which is a nice way to spend the evening. Incidentally the Rachmaninoff is that one with the cover which shows a pair of peasants and a Kremlin-like building against a Chirico background. Our Corsican troubadour doodled his initials all over the cover. He also drew some fish and a phallic symbol.

…

M

Umnak Island, 15 October 1944 -- "we leak at every joint"

My little nunny…

The wind is buffeting our hut as though it had every intention of upending us and seeing if it took three or four hops to put us in the swamp. If we were a ship I’d be worried, for we leak at every joint and an Inn-like stream flows under the door and past me toward the center of the hut. Our stove won’t work. The wind either comes down the chimney and blows it out or the water comes from somewhere and there is an explosion that fills the hut with oil smoke. And I am very, very happy for today brought two letters and two packages from you.

from Windblown and Dripping, cartoons assembled by Dashiell Hammett on Adak. This one is by Bernard Anastasia.

The packages held the teapot and the cups. They arrived unmarred. And I have already typed out some notes on the sheaf of paper and studied, to the mystification of Mac et al, the Public Service Journal and the 104 Reporter, both of which are good run of the mill house organs. Nothing to be excited about, but nothing to be ashamed of. The weakest part of either seems to be the 104 head schedule, if any. 

Jean Elliott, seeking solitude

The only flaw in today’s letters was the line “Surely there must be mail today,” which indicates there has been a considerable gap in mine to you. I can’t understand that because your letters have been getting through quite regularly and they are increasingly wonderful, my plikka pet. The sketch of the solitude seeking Jean [Elliott] was indeed epic. Also the story of the moron who does not want to be an editor—for very good reasons, I might add. …

 

The day’s reading was mainly in the Saturday Review of Literature and Whitman, and in a pile of newspapers which came along with the packages. The Saturday Review, in its 20^th anniversary number, asked a number of its contributors to nominate the leading American novelist and the leading novel of the past twenty years. I don’t know who the contributors are were but here are the results:

1.       Hemingway

2.       Willa Cather

3.       John Dos Passos

4.       Sinclair Lewis

5.       Thomas Wolfe

6.       Ellen Glasgow

7.       Theodore Dreiser

8.       Steinbeck

8.  Kenneth Roberts, William Faulkner, Marjorie Rawlings –all tied for 8^th 

 Hemingway received twice as many votes as Willa Cather for second. The best book since the war was the S. Lewis “Arrowsmith,” which seems absurd. The first five chosen were: Arrowsmith, A Farewell to Arms, U.S. A., The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The editors of Saturday Review said their first four novelists “might have been” Hemingway, Lewis, Steinbeck and Glasgow. The novels “might have been” Arrowsmith, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Grapes of Wrath, Barren Ground. All of which means I had better read Ellen Glasgow…

We have a new man in the hut. His name is Harry or Herb Warren (perhaps Henry) and he comes from Olympia. He is a pink-faced blond, heavy-set, young. After two years in the ACS he is still a private and it seems to worry him. Although he has been in the Aleutians only about a week, he has developed the best stare I have discovered yet. He has a very bright bulb in his light socket and he lies on his bed and stares at it. I think he could out unblink a terrapin. …

By the way, you have undoubtedly heard of the ACS unfortunate last year who received from his mother a five-pound can of Spam? Well Christmas presents are coming in here now and Ralph Lundquist who has the bunk across from mine got a box of cheese crackers of a type which is distributed by the case in the rec hall—and is left untaken. But, even better, Mac, the cook, got two cans of Vienna sausages, which make a runaway race of being the least favored food locally.

And getting back to the weather. I was just up at the shower hut to get water for more tea and bumped into Cobb. He says his hut is leaking steadily and that the Corsican thunderbolt was all for shooting a hole in the floor so that the water could drain out. He was argued out of it. Someone pointed out that in the Aleutians the rain falls up. So he wanted to put the hole in the ceiling.

…

You are tremendously loved, my cheerful chickpea,

M

from Howard Lewis, 15 October 1944 -- "one seeks sympathy, the lonelier one is"

 


Howard was a Columbia Journalism School classmate and lifelong friend of Murray and Rosa's. After earning a Bronze Star during the war in Europe, he became editor first of This Week magazine and then of the men's magazine Argosy. Later he directed the information office for the National Academy of Sciences and then edited the Science Writers News magazine. When I was a equine-obsessed child, he thrilled me by coming to me for information for a book he was writing about horses.

World’s End, USA

My Friend Murray,

You are due for one hell of a long letter if I can get this typewriter to hold together for that long. I owe you, not only for the letter of September 10, but also for the letter of August 11, which will remain one of the beautiful mysteries of my life. Some day, when I shall have developed the luscious style of Alexander Woollcott, I shall tell that story in limpid prose. Right now I have only two facts to go by: 1) The letter was never written by you (I have your signed letter of 10 September as evidence), and 2) the letter arrived here about two weeks after the September one. I suppose that an unwritten letter doesn’t follow the usual postal schedules; at least the Council on Psychical Research in London informs me that such letters can materialize at any time up to seven years, seven months and seven days after the date on the letterhead.

…

This book you are reading—“Thirty Years in the Golden North”—a sign of defeatism perhaps? After looking over the standards by which they plan to release men after the war, I have been scouting around for one on the Army as a Career, or a GI version of Live Alone and Like It. A fellow who works in the local PRO S/Sgt. Shea, and the light of my Muroc life, has it all planned out that the two of use will be caretakers of Muroc when everyone else goes back to their dependents. Since he outranks me, I have agreed to let him be commanding officer, so he has magnanimously appointed me as Executive Officer and Staff. They only thing that worries us about our post-War setup is the possibility of little cliques forming and boggling up the Administration of the Camp. I wonder if you could teach a jack rabbit to do KP.

You should have known that anyone who would put up a stiff defense of Thomas Wolfe would also write a seventeen-page letter about it. The Hell with him, I say, and anybody else who argues. I may have said this before, but I say it again. I don’t argue with anyone anymore about anything. I listen to anybody who has a point of view about anything. I listen for a while and if I agree, I say, “Yeah,” and go back to what I was doing. If I disagree, I just say “Bullshit,” and go back to what I was doing. And, on rare occasions, when some GI comes out with something that seems to be sound and yet unknown or unrecognized by me, I say, “Hmm,” and go back to my book. The last time I opened my yap was a few weeks ago when I walked into the Special Service Office and got trapped in an argument about Dewey. The antagonist was a paunchy civilian named Titus who works a USO circuit on the Field. He had it all figured out that the Republicans are responsible for the New Deal, which is nice if he likes it that way, but then he came through with one of the most astounding statements I have ever heard from the mouth of man. He was talking about how the country was split up into 48 separate states before the first World War and how the national government lacked any sort of unity. Then it came. “Do you know what united this nation for the first time?” he asked me. “No,” I answered, ready for anything. “Well,” he said, slamming his fat hand on the table, “The one organization that brought this country together for the first time in history was the American Legion!” I backed out the door. 

Any more stories you can pick up like the one about the character with the boil, just send it along. My main trouble is that situations I run into never seem to resolve themselves into stories. They just exist for the moment and run into the ground. I’m afraid I never got the knack of the story-teller. But, nevertheless, I think I’m going to try to write some fiction for the markets that don’t seem to ask too much, of which “This Week” seems to stand out in my mind. One of the better agents who advertises in Writers Digest says that he’ll handle anyone who has sold more than $500 worth of stuff in the past year. With $250 already accounted for, I should like to see if I can sneak in under the wire. Name of August Lenniger. Ever hear of him? A ten-percenter. 

You asked me what Tom Bridges did on the Times. Apparently he’s a legman, as is Woody [Woodrow Wirsig, a Columbia School of Journalism who later edited Look Magazine; Much later, Wirsig wrote I Love You Too, a memoir of caring for his wife Jane, another CSJ classmate, during her years with Alzheimer’s], covering human interest stories, interviewing people in the street, etc. Tom got a byline about a month ago when he put on a clown suit and did a matinee with one of the three-ring circuses that hit Los Angeles. He got two pictures and a two-column spread on the split page, but I thought the story was pretty bad, pretty maudlin. He would run a couple of paragraphs on the backstage life of a clown, and then insert a four-word paragraph: “But laugh, clown, laugh.” Then more backstage atmosphere and conversation, and then four words again, like the refrain of a song. Mr. Ellard might have liked it, but I didn’t. [Two years later the Times sent Bridges, who weighed over 300 pounds, to eat a big messy lunch in front of Claude Baxter, a chef who was 83-days into a fast to raise money to feed starving people.] 

 

The LA Times has gone stark, raving mad about this election, by the way. Hopped-up editorial columns I’m used to, even though the Times has a rabidity which makes anything I’ve seen in the East (except for the "vermin press") look like lacecollar journalism. But their front pages have gone nutty too. A story of a school kid getting beaten up in a schoolyard by some other kids for favoring Dewey goes right on the front page, good for six or eight inches of copy. A broken window in a Dewey Headquarters is good for a three column picture and a two column head on the split page. They seem to have given up any idea of running a newspaper until the election is over.  Since the only other paper sold on the post is the Examiner, which is horrible, I have subscribed to the LA News by mail. And according to Woody Wirsig, the News is running the ass off the Times in both ads and circulation. When you stop to figure that LA is predominantly Democratic, with its thousands of war-workers, the Times seems to be cutting its own throat, of which I am very much in favor. 

The argument about Thomas Wolfe reminds me of the character we have in the office now, whose sole claim to fame is a novelette published in Fantastic Adventures, or some such thing, and he is bothering me a great deal. I find that I am very sensitive to a certain kind of blind egoism, and that is something he has a lot of. It isn’t that he goes around bragging, but just that he has a great deal of opinion and very little judgment. He majored in English Literature in college and thinks Gone With the Wind is the finest novel written in the contemporary era. I wonder sometimes why I spend so much time, in letters to my friends, complaining about people who annoy me. Perhaps it’s like coming back from an irritating day at the old Civil Liberties Union and complaining to Helena. I imagine you did the same thing with Rosa. One seeks sympathy, the lonelier one is. Pretty soon I shall be crying in my beer. Damn stuff is weak enough now.

…

Send my best to Rosa,

Howard