Lockdown notes from 1944 -- "My bonnie ambivalent bivalve"

Staying at home during COVID-19 times gave me more time to spend with the family correspondence. In many ways, these letters seem from a different world, but some challenges of being cooped up sounded familiar. 

Murray spent a year and change posted to the Aleutian Islands in World War II, as a cryptographer and correspondence censor. He got there in the spring of 1944, and though the Aleutian chain is famously wet and windy, he spent much of his time off hiking and bird watching. He preferred working graveyard, which gave him more daylight hours outside. 

When not fogged in, the views were great.

Come winter, of course, all that changed. Wind squalls became blizzards. Just suiting up to get from the communal Pacific huts (basically a Quonset built of wood rather than steel) to the mess hall took a good twenty minutes with the Army-issue cold-weather gear of that era. Then you crawled through a snow tunnel to the surface and skittered across the snow crust to your destination, occasionally on all fours. Most huts kept a stash of food for times when they would burn more calories getting to a meal than they could take in once they got there. One of the many hazards of walking around on winter nights, was tripping over the chimneys of the buried huts. And there is a lot of winter night above the 50th parallel.

Chimneys were tripping hazards.

The huts had 16 x 36 feet of floor space and housed up to nine men apiece. Since hut assignments were not made by shift schedules, someone was pretty much always trying to sleep during someone else's time off. You could listen to the radio, at low volume; you could talk, likewise quietly; you could play cards. You could drink, if there was a beer issue or you could afford gray market hard liquor, but then you had to consider the certainty of navigating back up the slippery tunnel to the latrines or at least to the snow.


Murray spent most of his hut confinement reading, and writing letters or articles. He wrote almost daily to Rosa, and one way to chart the procession of dark months is to look at his salutations. Back in boot camp and his first island posting, on Adak in the spring, most of the letters started with variations on Dearest Nunny, My darling, Nunny darling, and the occasional Little Lover. By the time he reached Attu, at the western extreme of the Aleutians and the last months of his tour, he had branched out. Here's a selection:

My willowy one,

My quiet curassow,

O most delectable,

My Hemingway hating honey,

My pleasant capybara,

My incredibly loved infant,

My delectable darling

My wonderful wapiti

My passionate ptarmigan,

My adorable apple pie,

My favorite photographer,

My luscious little one,
My weird little watermelon,

Hello bodacious and beloved,
Allo my quaint little cabbage,

My cool charmant,

My bonnie ambivalent bivalve,

My pretty piltzer,    
My consummately constructed consort,

      

and in the last few weeks  before he was sent back to Seward on the mainland where she could join him (posing as his sister)

            My soon to be rejoined Rosita.

When she wrote to him she called him Butch.

Attu, 12 February 1945 -- "such a feeling of waste about this year"

1 a.m.  

Darling, darling darling...

I feel six times lower than a sturmtroopen oberfuhrer, my pretty piltzer, for it must be almost a week since I wrote last. It is partly your fault for I have been expecting a letter from you for three weeks now and, not getting any, getting more and more frustrated as each mail call has brought heaps for everyone else and nothing from you for me, I have had a difficult time in not moaning and groaning. On three successive days I tore up letters I started because of their deep blue quality and then I developed a superstition that if I didn't write it might bring a letter. 

Last night I even sent a wire to you about mail, for each time I have wired it has brought mail the next day. But even that totem failed. Today there was no mail for anyone. I came very near crying about it today -- once before when Gene got three letters and I got none I had to get out of the room fast -- but Dave came to my rescue with a bottle of brandy from somewhere and now I am warmly convinced that tomorrow will bring manna from the mail plane...

If it were not for Gene and Dave I would be very unhappy here. We are as crowded as at Station One and other of the same complications which went into the "Change of Station" story are present. But I have finally got back to my writing, Gene is everpresent in off hours to brew tea and bullsession, and Dave is around from time to time to join in the chess, the music, or the bullsessions. 

As I told you, Dave is our first sergeant. He gets some very strange orders to carry out. Today, for example, he was told to find the depth of the snow in all parts of the ACS area. This would entail considerable digging, which of course Dave eschewed. How he came by his estimates I don't know, but late in the afternoon I saw him standing on one foot in a snowdrift, his right leg raised and his knee serving as a shaky desk, while he wrote down figures on the snow. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls: love minus politics

Earlier he and Gene and I went to see "For Whom the Bell Tolls." ... The movie was, naturally, completely devoid of political content. In fact, it was so much so that it may have defeated the very purpose for which it was emasculated. At one scene in the middle of the picture, where a troop of enemy cavalry is seen approaching in the distance, the boys behind us began a subdued argument about whether they were "American" or "German."

I'm still reading War and Peace, which is something of a life's work. Last night I got past the halfway point. I hate to agree with the critics on anything they are unanimous about, but it seems, at the half way mark, to be the best novel ever written. And the funniest thing is that nearly every sequence is essentially corny and could fit into a soap opera. At the end of each could be the question "Will Natasha marry Prince Andrew," "Will Pierre kill or be killed in the duel?" "Will Boris be promoted?" But it is wonderful. Oh darling darling how I wish we could be reading it together. 

I have such a feeling of waste about this year, so strong a feeling of what I am losing by being away from you. That is why it is so bad when there are no letters. They are my only compensation, this new medium of communication with my beloved, and when they don't come I feel trapped and frustrated and I pound the wall with my fist until it hurts too much and now my hair is long enough so that I can again get hold of it to pull. 

USS Essex in 1943, a blimp's eye view: National Archives

Dad forwarded a letter from Vic in which he mentions that his ship, the Essex, is "the fightingest ship in the Navy." It has wrought more destruction on the enemy than any other vessel and holds practically all records. From the articles, Vic says, "you will learn that I have been present at the invasion of the Palau Islands, the raids on and invasion of the Philippines, the raids on the Ryuku Islands and Formosa. We were very much in evidence at the second Battle of the Philippine Sea when so much of the enemy fleet was destroyed." 

 

The Essex was hit by a kamikaze pilot in November 1944. 

 

Little lover, it's only ten weeks now, and while "only" seems a strange adjective to apply to ten weeks away from you, it does seem possible that we will make it. For a while I did not think the year could ever end. Look both ways crossing the streets -- I worry about you so much, and get some sleep and eat three meals a day and be very very healthy for me. ..

My nunny, you are adored. Please keep loving me,

M

Attu, 25 February 1945 -- "nothing more delightful than to be cut off from society"

O Rare Rosita…

The weather is inclement today, which, in our Aleut dialect, means that it is damn near deadly. The debates on whether or not to go to chow, which involves fifteen minutes of struggling into special clothes and half an hour of battling the blizzard, are really intense. Whether you get more energy eating than you lose making the trip is a matter for serious, unscientific argument. With our hotplate we are in a better position than most huts, and my own solution is one trip a day to the mess hall. 

The Pacific hut and its entrance

The weather has an effect on everyone’s nerves. I believe that if effects Gene [Elliott] more than most. He is always depressed when it is storming. I hate to go out in the stuff, but once having made the trip I feel good, like after running white water (except Box Canyon) or making a good climb. But Gene, who seems to be able to venture out without a preliminary mental struggle, comes in irritated and depressed.

Last night, however, he slid down into the hut just as the tea was being poured and decided that hereafter before leaving anywhere he would phone and tell the people at the place where he was going to put on the pot to boil. He is amusingly irritated with his own irritation and last night was wearing a mental hair shirt because, when one of the other censors kidded him at chow, he stood up and was all set to brain him a crockery coffee cup. Fortunately the intended victim found the whole thing funny. 

There is a lot of the irrational in our life up here. My reaction to no mail is that way, darling. Your letter, explaining the difficulties in getting time to write, came in a couple of days ago and it makes me feel the bastard complet to have made you unhappy. And the worst of it is that even when I wrote I knew there was good reason for the lack of mail. I am truly sad, my sweet, for the thing I want most is for you to be happy. Just the thought of you fills me with a tenderness and longing which always threatens to overflow into tears. It makes me understand the Pathetique, even. And tonight when the radio had the second half of Fidelio with Mr. T doing right by Mr. B, I lay on the cot and looked at your picture and watched your expression change with the mood of the music. 

In talking to Gene last night I mentioned that I longed so much to be home that, for the first time in my life, I worry about the plane trip. He said he felt the same way, and also that other he had talked to had worried. It is a completely baseless worry, but the safety record of the air service out here is incredible; it is simply a manifestation of the dread that something might delay or prevent homecoming. In the same way I fear a freeze of furloughs, which there is no reason to expect. One of the fellows in our hut, Smitty, has been due out of here for more than a week now and so far his orders have not showed up. He takes the delay very well, but the rest of us—Gill, who is due to leave in 17 days; Hart, in 43, and I in 63—are sweating out his departure in earnest, nightmaring about similar snafus in our own cases.

…

I saw in a recent copy of the Saturday Review of Literature that Edmund Wilson is being given a polite sacking by the New Yorker as a literary critic. He is to go to Europe as some sort of special correspondent. This is too bad, for he had replaced John-Boy as my favorite critic. For instance in the February 3^rd edition he has a marvelous mauling of Lin Yutang. He echoes our complaints about the unheathen Chinee, which, of course, makes him deeply perceptive in my opinion. He says:

                Lin Yutang is a professional Chinese. I don’t suppose that he began by being one. I did not read “My Country and My People,” which many people seemed to find interesting, so that I cannot trace the stages of his progress. But it is certain that at the present time he is hardly any longer what he may once have been: a comparative critic of civilizations. He is a Chinese for women’s club discussions, for book-of-the-month choices, for big publishers’ advertisements. One of the most depressing features of American culture is its capacity for attracting the most banal elements of the cultures of other nations and rendering them more banal by applauding and paying them on a scale they could hardly have hoped for at home. The English sent us Hugh Walpole and, later on, Somerset Maugham; the French sent us Andre Maurois and Bernard Fey. Now China has given us Lin Yutang…the first chapters of “The Vigil of a Nation” are made up of a loose tissue of platitudes which is at moments almost unbelievable…

I have just finished reading “Kabloona” by a French vicomte who spent 18 months living with the most primitive Eskimoes in Northern Canada. It has a lot of crap in it, but most of it is good and there are parts which are both excellent and charming. One passage I liked particularly told of his visit to a missionary serving in an incredibly remote village, where he lived in a cave which had an average winter temperature of 58 below. The missionary had taught a few of the Eskimos to write, and he wrote a note to one asking him to guide his visitor back to the post. The reply, which de Poncins includes as an illustration of the bashfulness of the Eskimos, was:

Since the white man has no companion for this journey, I shall go with him. I greet the white man. I go now to hunt seal for the journey. What shall I do? I will be so shy with the white man. Write to me. Encourage me. Ittimangnerk greets the priest.

There was also a bit of philosophical writing which was interesting but with which, of course, I did not agree:

If  war comes tomorrow, I shall not know it. If a sidereal cataclysm destroys half the surface of the globe, I shall not hear of it. Man’s pride lies in feeling himself one with his kind, in the knowledge that he is a member of human society; we, at Gjoa Haven, have not this honor. We are the tail of the lizard, cut off from the body and continuing to wriggle.

In my present mood I can think of nothing more delightful than to be cut off from society, or all but a very small segment of it. And I have recently decided that it would be a disadvantage to learn Spanish fluently. My idea of a perfect life consists of being somewhere with you where we cannot understand enough of what is being said to be disturbed by it. Just as I like folk music as long as I don’t know the words, I like people as long as I have no idea what they think.

Attu, 30 March 1945 -- "I don't think that emotion is what the labor movement lacks"

My soon to be rejoined Rosita... 

My application for rotation is in the mail. I had ten hours of solid sleep last night, and today brought your wonderful Shelton letter. For APO 726 that is the perfect day. Gene [Elliott] and I have been reading extracts from your and Jean's letters. Jean says to tell me to tell you that besides the things you know she left in the houseboat there is also the Elliott's croquet set under Haj's bed. That is a statement which strikes me as nearly as wonderful as the one about living in trees being a prerequisite of conceptual thought.

...

I finally got around to reading the WA and frankly, I'm not impressed. I think that the general program is good in parts but that there is not the least chance of it's being effective, and there seems to be a lot of conflict between the points. For instance "Unify Labor's Ranks" and "Purify the Unions." The one calls for solidarity and the other calls from throwing out reactionaries and scissorbills, which would include, presumably, DeLacy [Hugh DeLacy was a one-term Congressman and president of the Washington Commonwealth Federation at that time.] and men of his type. That would make for a unified union but a damn small one.

[This WA (Workers Alliance) --there have been several others--was a short-lived publication of the Workers Alliance Institute in Seattle. The "work-or-jail" legislation mentioned was one of several Congressional attempts to pass a law requiring able-bodied civilians to work in war-related industries if needed.] 

 

Up here I do not know that full background of the "work-or-jail" bill. I object to it very strongly as a peacetime measure, just as I object to the idea of peacetime conscription. But if there is a labor shortage, if they can't get workers by ordinary means, I think the cry of slavery is unjustified and hysterical. It seems to me that the argument is that if the government can draft men to fight, to garrison the Aleutians, to sweat out the Southwest Pacific, it has every right to draft them for the factories.

 

 

It is, of course, impossible to expect people to appreciate what they have, but with all the goodwill in the world it is hard for me to feel that anyone is being abused when he is allowed to live at home, have some privacy and earn enough to keep eating. That only goes for wartime, of course. Also the WA mentions many times the deep dark plot of driving a wedge between labor and servicemen. At the same time it hails in three front page stories efforts to avoid the No-Strike Pledge. I'm undecided myself on what justifies a strike in war time, but I know completely and positively that 95 percent of the men in the army are not undecided. If there is one thing which angers a soldier it is the idea of a strike in a war industry. 

To buck for better relations between labor and the servicemen and at the same time to indicate approval of striking for 2-1/2 cents an hour more in the lumber camps, or a change in factory jobs in New Bedford, or because the NWLB decided against concessions to the Textile Workers Union is the best divisive propaganda that could be conceived. A strike now, for anything but the most imperative reasons, is a direct invitation for the formation of a Legion whose labor-baiting after the war will make the old Legion look like the civil liberties union.

It seems to me that WA could never be anything except a splinter group, at best a bleat like the New Republic, at worst a name-calling In Fact. This, of course, is judging purely by the paper. Knowing people might make difference. Also, there is remarkably little news in the paper: it is all given over to attitude and opinion. I don't think that emotion is what the labor movement lacks: it needs facts not adjectives, and facts seem pretty far between. Incidentally, the little item on why there is no inflation south of the border was a gem, even down to the exclamation point. 

I hope you are not disappointed in me for the above, little lover. On such things as the work-or-fight legislations I simply am in no position to judge; the papers get here very light [late?], Time of course is inadequate on such subjects, and the name-calling and hysteria of the antis seems unnecessary to me. 

Darling, darling, I love you so very much, and it is so hard to try to say the things I mean across time and space. Before long I will be with you and then the world can take itself off and go noisily to hell for all I care because my life will be very full and very complete and entirely wonderful.

You are adored,

M