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.

Glimpses of Eugene Elliott, Attu, 1945

Murray's final Aleutians post, on Attu, was shared with his good friend from Seattle, Eugene Elliott, later an English professor at the University of Washington. Both were writing novels during the abundant indoor downtime provided by winter weather in the Aleutians.

29 January 1945

[During a bull session about religion] Gene said there was mention of life in the Aleutians in the Bible. He quoted the passage, the number of which I forget, but the words are: “Jesus Christ: the same yesterday today and forever.”

22 February 1945

The weather today was really rough. When I went to go out of the hut once I knocked myself out, quite literally, by running into a board. I hadn’t realized that snow had sifted through onto the floor of our tunnel and raised it so much that I no longer had clearance for my head. Then, later, after I had been out of the hut for about an hour, I could not find the entrance. The trap door was drifted over. I had to dig to find it, dig some more before I could burrow my way in. I had a bad claustrophobic moment when I was stuck in the elbow of the tunnel but finally made it. .. It is a queer feeling to walk in a high wind when there is much loose snow about. The snow blows up from the ground and you can’t see your feet. A flashlight is no help. You just walk slowly, trying to test the drift with each step before trusting your weight. Other men move past, dim, shapeless, truncated in the drifts. They look like shadows without their accompanying objects.

 

Tonight I read some more of Gene’s symphonic book. God, but he writes well. From a purely commercial standpoint, I am not sure whether there is enough movement and continuity in the book. But from the point of satisfaction to the author, of saying what he has to say in the form he wants to say it, I envy him very much. ..

3 April 1945

Gene is in the room with me, working on his novel. He really suffers. In fact he is about the closest thing to Larry Abbott I have seen when it comes to the agony of composition. While he doesn’t have Larry’s habit of banging his head on the desk in an effort to start the flow of inspiration, he does groan, swear with expected softness, and hold his forehead as though his temples were likely to shake loose. Like me, Gene will take any chance to keep from writing when the work is not going well – he will read anything (even the Readers Digest), cut his nails, go for a beer, sweep the floor, put tape on the crack in his eyeshade or trim his already too neat mustache. Currently he is cleaning the keys of his typewriter with a jackknife. A few moments ago he was trying to work out a chess problem in the London Sunday Times.

Attu, 3 March 1945 -- "fresh, unurined snow"

Murray liked describing landscapes and weather.

 

My Nunny,

This is a beautiful morning. Walking up from the hut to Operations, I waded through fresh, unurined snow, so clean it was a Bunyan blue even under the pale, pearl, predawn sky. And a few minutes ago when I went out I watched the washed gold sun rise over the bluewhite mountains. Its light was emerald on the sea, pink on the clouds above the mountains, and, on the light-falling snow in the area, a misty white. Very nice. You're nice too.

...

I am now filled with great envy. Smitty just left to catch the plane out and down. but we have only 58 more days now, my delectable...five eight. I can hardly wait.

You are immer loved,

M

Attu, 4 March 1945 -- "the privilege of the salute"

my weary wapiti... 

"Negro USO" East Madison YMCA, Seattle, 1944. Rosa Morgan photo

...great is my delight in the pictures in the Y brochure. already three fellows have asked me to ask you to get the name and phone number of the little lass perched on the edge of the swimming pool. My favorite, like yours, is the shot of the east madison christmas party. there is a wonderful collection of faces in it; the girl to the right of the pianist looks like margo carlin, the one to the left belongs with hilda simms and lena horne, but the boy at the extreme right looks like an illustration for native son. 

I rather look forward to meeting pearly and lem, sometime around second week of our furlough. but would you start spreading the word that the morgans will not be "at home" during the early days of may. eight weeks from tomorrow and the ordeal is over ...

... Little lover, since writing yesterday I haven’t done a thing but sleep. I went down to the hut and decided to take a nap before supper and woke up, late to work this morning. And so there just isn't a thing to tell you about life in the Aleutians that I haven't told you so often before.

Oh, there was one thing. I told you that we were due to get classes in military courtesy because a couple of our boys have forgotten to salute the commanding [censored] Vern H, when a jeep breezed by without stopping, thumbed his nose at it in the mistaken impression it was the ACS mailman; it was an officer. So, yesterday, the first class in courtesy. I attended reluctantly but under compulsion. It was worth the time. Dave M, whose irony can be delicate, read from the field manual on the privilege of the salute, a privilege denied to civilians but done snappily by soldiers because of their pride in their profession. 

La, little lover. Only 56 days, 12 hours and 54 minutes.

You are adored,

M

Attu, 2 March 1945 -- "classes in military courtesy"

Hello bodacious and beloved...

Murray was getting over a cold

... My mistake was in getting some exercise or, to avoid all euphemism, in doing some work. I have told you about our rather strange tunnel into the hut. From time to time snow drifts into the entrance, making passage a major problem ... So on my day off I finally decided to take remedial action, i.e., grab a shovel. 

I dug for a solid six hours and when I was through I had constructed a lovely labyrinth with secret passages and, really, a trap door. It was the most fun I have had with snow since we last did Carr Street. All who beheld, wondered. The only trouble was that I sat in the snow myself and marvelled at the ice caves of APO 726. And verily, I say unto you, the cold I contracted was heavier than the bomb load of a B-29.

Gene ministered to me most touchingly, little lover. When I refused to get up for chow call he broke out a can of mushroom soup and heated it in his mess kit. He tells me it tasted good. ...

Big Ass Chess

... There are eight entries in what is known officially as the APO 726 Big Ass Chess Tournament. So far I have played Ross, 110% Johnson, and Jay-Bird Berry. We play two games each and are awarded ten points for each win, five for a draw or a stalemate and nothing for a loss. ... There is a $3.00 big ass prize (official nomenclature) and if I capture it I will buy you a doll to go with the shuffleboard ping-pong trophies. 

Big Smitty, who had the collection of phonograph records in our hut, finally got his furlough orders yesterday and will be down in Seattle in a few days, the fortunate individual. Yesterday he took his Courtesy Board test, and passed. This test is a neat little indignity inflicted on all outgoing army personnel from this post because too many of them got in trouble on their return to the states by forgetting to [censored]. Now we all have to pass an exam in military courtesy before we can leave the island. 

For that matter we are due to have classes in military courtesy right in the area. It seems that one of our local characters, a large-featured ox named Howard, who wanders around drawing pubic hairs on pin-up pictures, breezed by [censored] without saluting and, it is said, when called back by the offended dignitary, explained "ACS men don't salute their officers." Result: classes on courtesy and more memos on the bulletin boards. We are all supposed to read our field manuals on courtesy, too. 

Personally, I’d rather read Vanity Fair, into which I have gone a cold-fogged two-hundred odd pages. If I remember right, Nunny, you were not impressed by it; but I'm not sure I remember right. I find it charming. It is particularly interesting because it covers the same period, and the same social strata, in England as War and Peace did in Russia. ...

The local library has received a large shipment of books from the states, and in looking them over I was surprised to find all of the early Hemingway stuff, which is practically unobtainable: In Our Time, Torrents of Spring, and Winner Take Nothing. I am pleased at the prospect. There are also a couple of the histories of Alaska that I have been hunting for. 

I have also acquired a haircut, the first since the GI massacre of Station Two. The new one eliminated some of the more startling inequalities perpetrated by the Moldovian madman and might even meet you with approval. In the barber chair I read an article by Henry Pringle [biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and former journalism professor at Columbia University] on U.S. education. Pringle quotes, in apparent dismay, the answer of a college freshman to a test question on what was the major contribution of Teddy Roosevelt to the United States: "a large collection of animal heads." Another answer, held to be wrong, was that the traditional U.S. policy in China was "to get as much as we could for as little as possible." Which is a rather good description of the Open Door diplomacy. 

Churchill, FDR, Stalin, etc., at the Yalta Conference. Credit: Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard part but not all of the President's report on the Crimea Conference. It seemed to me to be a sweet and reasonable statement of the case for pure power politics. Since the only alternative to a world run by the three big powers is a world fought over by them, there is no choice but to support the Administration's policy. But as long as the Big Three retain individual sovereignty and independent economic interests, the possibility, or rather the probability, of a bigger and better war in another fifteen or twenty years is unpleasantly apparent. ...

My darling, my darling. When I woke this morning and looked at your pictures on each side of the bed I was able to think, "Less than two months." In fact, on the pink slip on the right of my bed I crossed out 60 and announced to the uncaring, solidly-slumbering multitude: "Fifty-nine days, five nine. I say again fifty-nine more days." In less than 1 month I put in my papers applying for a furlough. Take good care of yourself, my most adorable one. 

Your everloving, undeserving,

M