from Bill Fett on Orcas Island to Rosa, 22 January 1945

Umnak, 12 January 1945 -- "The races must not mingle; Entendre must be single"

My Coot Charmant…

Trying to get sleep today was similar to attempting slumber in a bowling alley. Two of the boys, Fleek and LaRue, have received their orders to proceed to Seattle for furloughs, and they were not only exuberant but packing. They packed with an enthusiasm which I can understand, but which bothered me as I fought the pad for six hours trying to get a furlough myself via the dream route. And then, just after I gave up and got dressed, they went out.  …

The only other high point of the day was a discussion of writing with Al Hesse. Al’s short story has come back again, returned with phenomenal dispatch by “The American Magazine” I simply haven’t the heart to tell him it hasn’t a chance, so I suggested that he send it to August Leneger, the critic that Bill James had work on his story. I felt that he would get a straight from the shoulder summary of the story’s faults--which include, absence of plot, absence of characterization, banality of approach and complete incomprehensibility—and that if he can keep on writing after being told that, he may develop into a writer. He is such a good-hearted egg that I can’t bring myself to give his brainchild a going over.

However today he said that he had an idea for another story. It was, simply, a GI at a USO show who is embarrassed because a girl singer sings all her songs to him. He almost wants to walk out. But when he gets back to the hut he feels good about it. That is all there is to it. “But what,” I asked, “is the plot and where’s the action?” “Well,” said Al, “I thought I’d write this like the New Yorker. They don’t have plot or action and it ought to be easy to write like they do, don’t you think?” I was honest enough to say I did not think it easy. Then Al, who is as subtle as a sack of cement, said, “I don’t know about that. Being light and gay ought to be easy.”

As for my own writing I am not very pleased with the chapter I enclose, [from Bridge to Russia] which I feel does not move. But since I have been pounding along so steadily it may be that my critical faculties are dull instead of my writing ones. Be sure to make elaborate suggestions about this one in particular so that I can pace it better when I type out the final copy. The two quotations are, of course, for the start of the first and fifth sections. I have found a good one for the Aleuts in “The People” section but not for the Russians. As for “The War” and “The Bering” I have discovered nothing yet.

 

I did about as little reading as I did sleeping today, getting through only a few chapters in “My Native Land.” One of them contains the complete text of the poem, “Kosovo,” which is an interesting an epic as I have yet encountered. [Here is a link to one translation, and historical background, of this Serbian folk classic: http://balkania.tripod.com/resources/history/battle_of_kosovo.html]

 

The only thing the radio came up with today of any interest was a rebroadcast of that Corwin “This is Radio” broadcast which, I believe, was last heard with Phyllis and Otto, although perhaps it was with the Gene Elliotts. Anyway it is the one with the song “Take a Vacation from the World Situation Blues.” It was good to hear again.

 

Nunny, I’m too groggy for lack of sleep to feel up to much of a letter today. This one will just have to serve to sort of keep up the franchise. I’ll do better tomorrow.   ….

M

[Norman Corwin wrote, among other things, an alphabetical listing of satirical verses that he broadcast on CBS Radio.  Here are his entries for “H” and “O,” referenced above.]

"H Stands for Hays Office. What is the Hays Office? The Hays Office is the office that saves you from being corrupted by any and all sin in the cinema. . . . There is a pledge of honor. . . . This oath is usually sung by the novitiate with the assistance of a massed choir. Novit:

The races must not mingle;

Entendre must be single.

Our fiber will be better

If no girl wears a sweater.

And if a kiss has too much mash,

IT SHALL—NOT—PASH! "

 

"O Stands for Ostrich Studio. What is an ostrich studio? An ostrich studio is a studio which believes social problems should never be taken up by movies, and there's nothing like good old entertainment, is there? Refrain:

"Let nothing interfere with your enjoyment.

We'll waltz our way through war and unemployment.

We're specialists in joy

And Girl Meets Boy.

We manufacture syrup

To cheer up

Your blues—

Have you got those

Need -a -vacation -from -the world-situation

Blues?

0, those blues! . . ."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,791419,00.html#ixzz113MABwBH

Umnak, 11 January 1945 -- "she may look clean..."

My Pretty Plikka,

 

Last night we had an experience which could be conceived only by the master minds of the United States Army. Here on this womanforsaken island, miles and months from anywhere, we had inflicted upon us the semi-annual showing of the sex hygiene movie with detailed instructions of how to protect our health after sexual intercourse. It’s regulations and attendance was mandatory.

After the compulsory part of the movie was over, I ducked out and raced back to the hut, for tonight was symphony night and our Arturo was doing his best by Beethoven. I missed the first movement of the Fifth, but  because our station has the curious habit of filling up any spare time in the symphony hour by replaying the start of the program again, I managed to hear fate getting in his four knocks. Everyone else from the hut was at the movie, so I had the music all to myself.

Later I found another symphony program but just as the first movement of the Jupiter was well underway the boys came back from the show. Al Hesse left the program on but LaRue with loud wails turned it off and got a mystery drama with an odor of Roquefort. I couldn’t object because the hut agreement is that anyone has the privilege of tuning out mainland stations in favor of the programs over our local Army station. And though the program was bad it was followed by the poetry program which LaRue, in turn, could not dial away, though he wanted to. Which was lucky, for Ingrid Bergman was reading a group of love poems and a couple of humorous ones were marvelous.

And just a little while ago one of our shortwave foreign language (in the main Filipino Tagalog dialect, I believe) programs put on a program of American folksongs: Robeson, Marion Anderson, Tibbett, and Richard Dyer-Bennet, who did that wonderful one about the haunted house in the English field.

So you can see it has been a rather successful day. It may also have brought us winter, although I’ve been fooled often enough before so that I’m ready to hedge. One swallow does not a summer make, nor one snowfall…..

The January 8 edition of Time came today and it has one exceptionally good item, a reprint from the London Observer, which sheds more light on the Greek situation than do most commentators in fifteen minutes. The item, written by Stephen King-Hall, simply supposes that Britain had been invaded in 1940 and that the Americans had now liberated it and restored the Chamberlain government intact. The implication is that the British would welcome the Americans bearing gifts of former appeasers as their rulers in the same way that the Greeks welcomed the British when they brought back the old “manipulators of evil and referees of futility.”

I picked up that last phrase in “My Native Land.” Adamic quotes it from the conversation of a sixteen year old girl about the prewar European politicians. Until I’ve finished the book I’m not going to go into detail about it. Instead I’m going to talk about a book I read in New York and whose title I’ve forgotten. John-Boy told me to read it; insisted, in fact.  The author is G. Ferraro, a living Italian, and the subject was the reconstruction of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and why the peace was kept for almost a century afterwards.

Ferraro is a royalist. He does not believe in the divine right of kings or any such nonsense, but what he does believe in is the legitimacy of kings. He feels that the post-Napoleon peace was kept mainly because the governments of Europe were legitimate and stable. In essence his theory is as simple as this: An agreement with either a military dictator or a pure democracy is not guaranteed. A dictatorship, being at most a temporary thing, can afford expediency, can afford to break the agreement. A democracy is bound only by the will of the people, and they can and do change their minds. But an agreement with a monarchy binds the monarchy and as long as the monarch or his legitimate successors are on the throne the country must feel itself bound.

This, it seems to me, is the crux of the British position in liberated Europe. The Foreign Office is composed of disciples of Ferraro who want to deal with governments they feel will abide by their agreements. It explains how the British with a figurehead king whom few can respect can wish to impose either monarchs or regencies on Italy and the Balkans, and it explains, I believe, the failure of our Allied propaganda to attack the emperor of Japan.

Personally, I find the Ferraro position a little silly. It is easy to point to monarchs who tacked with the wind—Alexander, Carol, Boris—and I cannot see the benefits of legitimacy, say, in the case of the House of Savoy which though definitely entitled to the throne has so smirched the reputation of the monarchy that the people have no respect for it. But it does seem the only legitimate grounds on which intelligent men could support the theory of kingship in the twentieth century. And although they may have social astigmatism, the British foreign officials are intelligent.

On the same track, I think that you will find Ed Murrow’s interview, enclosed, another impressive proof that he is the best man in radio today. (And speaking of the radio there is now playing a Javanese song which makes me think of our long-mustached, long-missing Geoff.)

I’m sending along two more sections of the Aleutian work, the first of which I like a lot. [This was published in 1946 as Bridge to Russia: Those Amazing Aleutians, Murray’s second book, and republished in 1981 as Islands of the Smokey Sea.] The Baranof bit is going to be the longest in the book, I believe, and I’m not quite sure of how much detail I want to use. I must work it out as I go along. When I finish with him I have a nice piece in mind about Rezanov, who planted a colony of Aleuts in California, and then a bit about a couple of the Russian priests. That will wrap up the Russian history and American story of Aleutian occupation, up to the war, shouldn’t take a lot of telling. This is the most fun of anything I’ve written, Nunny, and I hope you like it. I’ve sent you seventy-four pages so far, which should be pretty close to half the total. Be sure to let Dad see these.

   ….

M

Umnak, 8 January 1945 -- "we both know he's a god-damned idiot"

Rosita Conchita…

The boys were playing football in the area today, several of them felt a vernal urge and blossomed out in crew haircuts, and I went for a pair of long walks. The first walk was not really long. On my way to bed, I realized that with no assurance out current improbable weather will last it was a near crime not to take advantage of it. So I climbed the ridge.

It was quite beautiful. The sky overhead was clear except for a high burst of cirrus clouds. But over our neighboring island cumulus were massing and the sun, which was still low at ten am, slanted through holes in the cloud to make glittering patches on the brooding Bering. From the water to the snowline everything was brown: brown grass, brown rock, brown road, brown fox, khaki clad men. There are no flowers in bloom now, but there are occasional bursts of a hundred or more sparrows.

On the ridge I saw three caribou. There were a long way off, apparently working their way down from the hills with the snow. I did not try to get near them. The caribou, I believe, prefer tundra to grass and stay high as long as they are able to kick down through the snow to the creeping evergreen.

When I came back I started back to the hut to go to bed, but I ran into Godfrey, who was sunning himself and feeling good that his wife remembered his birthday with a telegram. We got to talking and pretty soon along came Brady Tookie Choate, whom I talked into going for another walk. Tookie had never seen the spring, so we walked there. ….

One the way back we cut across the field and came to several small pools which had frozen into thin sheets of ice which stood suspended across the dip of the pond. As the ice contracted it had shivered into broken patterns. Each pond looked like some magnified snowflake, or a blown-up section of window frost. I have never seen anything quite like it.

A while back I told you I have been trying to lead Tookie into the literary pastures by the back gate. I have been successful to a degree, at least. He has just finished Cain’s [James Cain] Career In C Major; The Embezzler; Double Endemnity -- three big ones -- and likes them, partially for the pornography of course as who doesn’t? Then I got him interested in Thurber by starting him on “Hell Only Breaks Loose Once” in The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. It is a superb satire on the Cain style (“So I clipped her with a left hook. She went down like a two year old. It was like dying and going to heaven.” Or “I crossed with my right, but it hit her high and she didn’t go down.”) Now he has out of the library “Tortilla Flat” (He didn’t like the movie) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” They will be the real test.

As I told you the thing I like best about Tookie is his complete and antisocial candor. We were talking about one of the fellows today, and I maintained that he was “the most completely average individual I ever met—believing in all the Sunday School platitudes, honoring all the clay-footed idols of our society, and placidly believing wealth makes for unhappiness and that everyone’s social duty is to work hard and get rich.” Tookie said “exceedingly average.” And then a hundred yards farther across the field he started to laugh. “We both say ‘average’” he said, “and we both know he’s a goddam idiot.”
…
Oh my darling, how I wish it had been you on the walk with me this afternoon. I felt very close to you as I roamed along the ridge in the morning. It was our sort of a day--cool and clear, with the grass snapping underfoot and just enough wind to carry the cool evergreen scent of the tundra.

…

M

Umnak, 7 January 1945 -- "If they’re so good what did they let themselves get licked by the Germans for?"

My bonnie ambivalent bivalve…

 

I have finished reading Balkan Journey, the book you sent me quite a while ago after Howard [Daniel] had mentioned a new SE European opus he liked. This, I am sure, is not the one Howard had in mind, for the author’s prime objection to Mataxas [Greek Prime Minister Gen. Ioannis Metaxas]is not his being a dictator but his attempt to gain popular support by currying favor with labor. ...

But whatever its merits or demerits, the book has made me long for another look at the Balkans—and for a first look at Ragusa on the Dalmation coast. I hope Howard makes it over there. He may be able to help us some way or another.

I was at the library yesterday to pick up some more dope about Alaska and in looking around found Graham Greene’s book of mystery in Mexico, “The Labyrinthine Ways,” which seems to have as its hero a lay priest. Since Greene’s “Ministry of Fear” was shown at the Rec Hall the other day I was talking to Ted about him tonight over a cup of tea. Mostly I remembered Gracene, but I also recalled Greene’s semi-priestly status, which has long confused us. I said I didn’t understand how he could be a priest half the year and a layman the other half. Ted said, “We’ll have to ask Leedom.” I bit and said, “Is he a Catholic?” “No. He just knows everything.”

Leedom is the character I told you about who informed me how CBS writes its news broadcasts. He has developed a great reputation for blowing hard and long. One of his roomies gave a remarkable description of how he came in and found everyone talking about architecture. That was about nine o’clock. Leedom started telling them all—including one architect—about the ways houses are built in Seattle. At ten thirty the first fellows started going to bed. Leedom was still talking. At eleven everyone else was in the sack and the lights were out. Leedom was still talking. And, Ted swears, at one a.m. he awoke after a nice nap and the exposition on architecture went on uninterrupted.

My only incident to toss into the pot took place a week or so ago when I was at the library looking up some dope on sealing. Leedom volunteered that I could get better information from an old priest at Sitka and when I inferred that I doubted the CO would give me a pass to drop down to Sitka for a few weeks he thought perhaps I ought to write about a doctor in Anchorage instead of sealing. Fortunately we are not on the same shifts. One of the day-shift idealists had a very rough time the other day trying the convince the omniscient sergeant that countries like Holland and Yugoslavia deserved their independence after the war. “If they’re so good what did they let themselves get licked by the Germans for?”

The reminds me. Al [Hesse] has a new reason for pessimism about the post-war peace. “Everything seems to come in threes so I suppose we have to have another war.”

...

And now, my cherished coatimundi, I will get back to work on the Aleutian stuff. I can’t believe it, but I have nearly a third of the material finished—first draft—and see nothing that will slow me up very much on the rest of the stuff. It would be nice to complete a second book up here. I’m very very anxious to hear what you have to say about the parts you have seen so far—and for a fuller reaction to Day of the Dead. So far you’ve said you liked it, but not what parts you like and, really, what parts you didn’t.

 

There’s a soldier here in love with a girl in a Seattle houseboat, the unblushing varmint…

M

Attu, 29 January 1945 -- weather report

 

My delectable dinosaur...

Gene has what seems to me to be the best description of the local weather. "When you open the door and the wind is not blowing," he says, "you fall flat on your face." It is only a slight overstatement. The gales here make the old Riverside Drive blows seem like zephyrs, gentle and enjoyable. The other day on the walk up to the mess hall the wind knocked me down and threw things at me: a quick gust caught me on an icy slope, spun me around, threw my feet out from under me, and as I lay on the crusted drift, digging in with my elbows and heels, egg-sized chunks of ice came skipping by. 

 

The same afternoon I was racing between the latrine and the operations building. Just as I started down the far side of a drift a gust caught me. At the same moment my foot broke through the crust. I turned a complete somersault and lit on my knees, unhurt but quite surprised. 

For the first time I am making use of my winter issue. My regulation dress now includes knee-high, heavy, wool stockings, greased boots, kersey-lined pants (I still avoid the longhandle drawers), t-shirt, sweat-shirt, suntan shirt and wool sweater, light field jacket and parka cover, wool mittens and wool cap. It takes about twenty minutes just to put all the stuff on in the morning and for a short trip outside -- in army terminology, piss-call -- it takes at least five minutes to get bundled up. 

 

Getting dressed is not the only problem. It is sometimes difficult to get out of the hut at all. This morning is one such time. The drifting snow piled so high against the door of our storm porch that it forced it off one hinge. And through the crack it kept blowing in until, when I opened the door this morning the storm shelter was hip deep. Since I am changing shifts and moving over to swing from days I have a bit of extra time. So I spent it shoveling out the vestibule and making some rudimentary steps in the huge drift outside the door. Then I came back in and read the final chapter of "My Antonia," the first Willa Cather book I have tried. A little later one of the fellows started out, to attend to some personal business, and when he opened the inner door found the snow chest high! He had to crawl out on hands and knees. And now Gene, bundled up so that there is no skin showing on him at all, is trying his hand with the shovel. I'll relieve him a little later. 

I don't know how much of our trouble is caused by new snow. There is a crust on the old fall and particles of ice broken from it by the wind and new snow run along seeking openings -- like the entrances to huts and the sides of huts. That is another shoveling assignment, by the way -- keeping the roofs clear. The Pacific people, you'll recall from the Hut-Sut article, test the huts with tons of sand. But if you get a few tons of snow on a hut and then light a fire inside, the place leaks. I spent part of my second day here in clearing the roof of the operations building. Living up here is rather a full time occupation. 

 

The biggest problem is getting to and from mess, which is about a quarter of a mile from where we work. Actually once I get started, I enjoy the work. But when the wind is howling and the flying ice drumming against the sides of the building, it is hard to get up the will power to go to chow. Fortunately we have a rather good stock of canned goods in the hut and it is possible to get by comfortably on one real chow a day at the hall.

...

An hour later. We have been digging steadily and the wind has been blowing steadily. When we started we could not close the outer door and now we still can't close it. Except for some healthful exercise I do not believe that we accomplished much but Gene, who is hut chief and extremely conscientious, seems to feel that the effort itself was worthwhile. ...

Attu excerpt -- "sixty six more days"

 

Darling darling darling. The little pink sheet I have tacked on the side of the cabinet next to my bed -- fastened beside the picture of you in the Moldavian middle -- has only sixty six numbers left to cross off. Each morning when I awake my first duty is to take a pencil and block out another letter, then announce the score: Sixty-six more days, six six, I say again, sixty-six more days, six six. This is the technique we use in ship-shore radio broadcasts and until I've intoned it I am not officially awake. The other day I forgot and three guys asked me. They all check daily, too, to see I'm not cheating on the calendar.