Umnak Island, 9 December 1944 -- "early in the game I offended him"

Hello Rumpus the Rabbit…

 

Today’s long-awaited mail delivery brought a nice letter from Myrtle [James] and a P-I clipping from my busy sweet. Myrtle, with myriad ejaculations reminiscent of Father Divine, told about the trip to the San Juans, and I expect a full report from you, sooner or later. 

 

And do tell me more about your newspaper and picture work, little lover, for you must remember that you are the one now fully in the professional swim, and I want to know how we are getting along, stroke by stroke, as in the Aberdeen narrative that made me so envious. Yesterday I wrangled from one of our soon to depart comrades a copy of Shakespeare he had intended to read in enforced isolation. The first sonnet I tried expressed how I feel about my careerwoman’s frantic pleasures:

As a decrepit father takes delight

To see his active child do deeds of youth,

So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,

Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth;

For whatever beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,

Or any of these all, or all, or more,

Entitled in thy parts do crowned set,

I make my love engrafted to this store:

So then I am not lame, poor, nor despis’d,

Whilst that this shadow dost such substance give,

That I in thy abundance am suffic’d

And by a part of all thy glory live.

Look, what is best, that best I wish in thee;

This wish I have; then ten times happy me!

Going from the sublime to the Day of the Dead, I must report that the book is only one page longer today than yesterday. That page was done five times last night before giving up. In a few minutes I will tackle it again. But in the meantime, a report on a bull session.

After knocking off writing last night, I had a long talk with Tookie the Texan. I have told you before that he is a strange, moody youngster, intelligent, introspective and uneducated. His is always locked in dubious battle with melancholia, and consequently as unpredictable in his moods as the Aleutian weather. Last night, for the first time, I learned a lot of his story.

He is the youngest  of seven children, all but two of them boys. His family life was out of the ordinary. His father was a trapper in Louisiana, a skilled mechanic in the Texas oil fields. Tookie knows nothing about his paternal grandparents. His mother, from a conventionally poor, conventionally genteel family, was a school teacher. She was thirty when she met her man, and after a quick courtship married him. In the next ten years she had seven children and other disillusionments. For as Tookie puts it, “Daddy could earn money, but he was just damn no good, just a damn no-good.”

Daddy, it seems had a penchant for traipsing off with trollops. Whenever he met a particularly pleasing whore he went off to live with her awhile. He made good money. At one time, trapping muskrat, he was averaging a sturdy hundred dollars a day. But the family got little of it. In fact at the very period that the furs were flying thickest for Daddy, Mother had sold all the goods her family had given her, spent all the money in the bank, mortgaged what was left of the property and had to deposit four of Tookie’s brothers in an orphanage.

One of Tookie’s early memories is of his father threatening his mother with a knife. She had refused to give him a divorce so that he could legitimize a relationship that was strictly commercial. This incident ended with Daddy being beaten up by his two oldest sons and thrown on the lawn, along with his belongings. But he came back a few months later, temporarily reformed but unrepentant, and a few months after that proudly told his wife of the birth of a bastard.

Tookie says, “There is only one thing I respect my Daddy for. He never was ashamed. When he was living with a whore, he told everyone, and if they didn’t like it, it wasn’t all he told them. And he was very polite. He came in the house one day with blood all over him. It wasn’t his blood. He said to Mother, ‘Really I am very sorry to bring blood into our house. I will try to see that it does not happen again.’”

You can, of course, hear the Oedipus overtones in all of this. But they are not as loud as might be imagined. For out of this strange family relationship came a kid with as nasty an attitude toward conventions as anything spawned outside of Sydney [reference is to Howard Daniel, from Sydney, Australia]. The only thing lacking to make Tookie a really interesting person is some sort of an education. I have been trying to interest him in reading, but early in the game I offended him regarding books and he stubbornly steers clear of any and all suggestions.

But his independence is wonderful and he has a definite personal integrity. Consequently he has the weirdest assortment of friends of any man here. I envy him his collection, although, I must admit, I detest most of them. There is Johannsen, the anti-Semitic Norwegian; Tookie is the only man who even speaks to him. Then there is Hoopes, our only stripe-conscious non-com, whom most shun but Tooke defends. I must include myself, for certainly my circle of popularity is limited. And now that everyone in the place is disgusted with the frenetic Pole, Tookie defends him, too.

He gives the local Babbitry a bad time, from Leedom down, for he barefacedly defends things he detests and relishes in their agreement. The worse the show, the more he praises it and the more he enjoys agreement. Our amiable Alvin [Al Hesse] he gives a particularly bad time, drawing him from agreement to agreement until Al finally realizes his leg has been pulled and disagrees on principle, only to find that he really is disagreeing with something he believes. I might mention that Martin was Tookie’s first friend here. Also, Tookie hates Texas.

…

Less than four and a half months now, Nunny,

M

Umnak Island, 8 December 1944 -- "my wonderful widget"

Hello My Wonderful Widget…

You are extremely loved, my pretty Piltzer. I am especially aware of what you mean to me because of the mail situation. A lot of the fellows have been getting wires and letters reporting that they have not been heard from in weeks. And today a rumor was rampant that there has been a long delay enroute in the letters written during the last couple of weeks. Since your letters mean everything to me up here, I work under the assumption that mine help you along down there and I am sad that you should have the worries that a long delay in deliveries brings. I hope you remembered that I promised to wire any time that circumstances should prevent my writing to you for three days. I am going to wire anyway tonight, to prevent you from worrying too much. 

Ted got a letter from his wife today which advanced a hundred terrible theories about why she was not hearing from him. They ranged from absence of affection to the complete disappearance of this entire island in a volcanic eruption. And I remember the strange explanations I used to devise to account for missing mail at 980. Other than the mail business there is nothing to report which is at all new. I am really sweating over the last chapter of the masterpiece [Day of the Dead]. It comes tough. As it stands now the novel seems to have the faults and virtues of my short stories—rather good background, continued action and plenty of verbs, but sketchy characterization and uncertain motivation. No matter what Ann [Ann Elmo, Murray’s agent] thinks of it when she sees it, it will have been worthwhile for I have learned a lot. And it is distinctly better than “Thunder” [“Thunder Down Under,” a justifiably unpublished murder mystery Murray wrote with his Australian friend Howard Daniel]. But, Mona, how I look forward to some factual writing after flailing around with the fiction.

 

Because of the pounding away on the book, I haven’t been doing as much reading the last week as I have averaged. I’m now going through some of Thomas Mann’s short stories—which, dammit, I still don’t see as great—and Stevens’ Paul Bunyan stories [James Stevens], which are also disappointing. The main trouble with the Bunyan tales is that they are told with a rather conscious literary pretension and consequently lose virtually all the logging camp flavor that a more simple approach would have brought.

There is also a touch of literature in a new radio program we get over the local station these days. It comes on at 11:15 p.m. and is called “Words and Music” (which was the title of Corwin’s first show). The format is organ music intermixed with mood poems read by Hollywood stars. The music is really bad—an organ played to sound dreamy and consequently a piece that sounds nothing like the composer intended. But the poetry is quite good and the reading of it even better. Strangely, Merle Oberon was the best so far. She read Housman and Wordsworth with the quiet restraint of Chamberlain announcing the start of the war. Ingrid Bergman’s readings indicated how much her acting ability is visual, for they had little impact. Except her final selection. She read a translation of the Norwegian national anthem, a magnificent, ringing performance.

"Sunshine!": Cartoon by Oliver Pedigo

Our weather remains much milder than I had imagined an Aleutian winter, but the veterans say that things do not get really rough until January. The pattern now is a fair period followed by a cold snap, then snow which lasts a day or two, then a Chinook and several days of muck, then cold and much skidding over the icy ground and then fair weather again. But when I speak of a pattern it is like trying to talk of the meaning of a Surrealist picture—everyone has his own idea, if any. Tooke the Texan, for example, insists that we have only had a good day in the last two months, while I claim we have only had a couple of really bad ones. Above all else, the weather remains unpredictable. As I write the wind is blowing hard and the room is getting cold. But when I walk around the building to drop this in the mail box a few minutes from now, the day may be beautiful.

….

M

Umnak, Sunday, 5 November 1944 -- Snow

Cartoon by Don L. Miller, from the pamphlet Windblown and Dripping, assembled on Adak by Dashiell Hammett, and later reprinted by Jeanne Culbertson. Born in Jamaica, Miller studied at Cooper Union before the war and became a well-known commercial artist. He created the main mural at the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

Happy Birthday, little nunny…

 

At least I hope this gets to you on your birthday. The present I had intended to send (and the one I would most like to get down your way except, of course, me) is Day of the Dead. I had hoped to finish it in time to mail in on your birthday, but try as I have in the past few weeks I cannot step up page production high enough to make it, I fear. Not unless I find a bottle of tequila somewhere and sail through the final three chapters in one day, as I did with Thunder Down Under. And remembering the Ziff-Davis critics' remarks about the last three chapters of that one, I suppose even that would not be worthwhile.

…

We are not having canoeing weather up here. When I came out after work this morning the day was clear with the sharpness and simplicity of a good Thanksgiving poster: black soil showing through a powdering of snow, the grass a high yellow, the sea grey and the sky a strong blue, just regaining strength from an overdose of pastels. I woke at two in the afternoon to find the sky grey, our mountain hidden, a fox standing wet and miserable just outside the door, the grass bending before a rising wind, only a narrow strip of the Bering visible and it rising like a wall on the close horizon. I decided against going for a walk and went to clipping some recent Times and PMs. (I could not work on the novel as some of the fellows were sleeping.) About four I noticed a strange murmuring which seemed to run through the drum-like hut in a rising rhythm. At first I thought I was imagining it, but when it continued I stepped outside to see if something was scraping against the roof. Snow. And already the area looks fantastically beautiful, and the men when they come in stamp their feet and beat their arms, and the first snowball missed me a foot.

I hope the snow does not keep me from going to the movie tomorrow afternoon. There is a show at the Downtown theatre and while “They Made Me a Criminal” with Ann Sheridan and John Garfield does not sound particularly attractive, there is a short feature called “Birth of a Volcano” and what could that be but our personal Paracutín?

…

About this afternoon’s clipping. I am sending them along, but I can’t resist the temptation to quote from the Ickes speech about Dewey’s friends. The insults are superlative. Ickes suggested that Dewey named Col. McCormick of the Trib to his cabinet and Secretary of War. He brought up that old letter McCormick wrote to a friend saying that he had introduced into the Army the ROTC, machine guns, mechanization, automatic rifles, serial artillery-fire control and the acquisition of Atlantic bases, but had not been able to get the navy out of the far Pacific. Then Ickes said, “The letter does not say in so many words, but it is fair to assume that one the seventh day the colonel rested."

There also was a letter to the sports editor of the Times which will bring back memories of happy days and night in the left field bleachers. The subject under discussion is not Big Mike but Babe Herman. However he was once a Seattle first baseman, so the similarity is complete:

“When a high fly was hit the Babe often took off in a loping, confident glide for two or three steps. Then he would stop, gaze dubiously into the sun, take a big chaw—or rather shift his chaw from one cheek to the other and you could actually see the bulge disappear from one side to reappear on the other--and stand motionless for what seemed like a full second. At this stage a community groan would go up in the stands that meant: ‘Oh well, Herman’s lost it in the sun again.’ However, like a man deciding he has time for a quick one before the train pulls out, Herman would feint again in a different wrong direction and then gallop like Ty Cobb back the way he had come in the beginning. Oddly enough he usually caught the ball--but the wear and tear on the fans was severe.”

…

The other night I heard one of the fellows telling a story that I thought might be possible to revise into an Esquire short. Here it is, in more or less the original form. 

 

I heard it in the kitchen, about four a.m. Half a dozen of the fellows were sitting around on the tabletops, drinking greenish GI coffee or strong black tea. When I came down the steps, Howard Holt, a tall, blond, rather simple son from Eastern Washington was talking.

“When I hit Seattle on my furlough,” he said, “I was sort of eager. I had an eighteen-month backlog of passion. So the first thing after clearing with the front office in the Federal Building, I went looking for a girl.

 

“I started up Marion, headed for the Rathskeller. Right in front of that building at Second and Marion that used to be a bank there was a classy looking girl. She had on a sort of fuzzy sweater which was pretty tight, the sort of thing you like to see on someone else’s wife. And she really was stacked. She just stood there, sort of looking around, as though maybe she had been stood up. She didn’t look like a pick-up but what the hell, I’d been up there eighteen months and I didn’t give a damn. So I sort of whistled and said, ‘Hello, Betty.’

“And she turned on a real nice smile and said real warm-like, ‘Jim, you’re back.’ And I said ‘Yeah, I’m back. Surprised?’ And she said, ‘No. I knew you’d come.’ And she put her hand in mine and said, ‘Isn’t there someplace we can go?’

 

“I said, ‘I was just going to the Rathskeller, let’s have few.’ She looked at me sort of funny but said ‘Well, all right.’ We had a few beers and I told her about the Interior and about the fighting on Attu – well, all right, what if I wasn’t there – and we got on pretty good. I was beginning to wonder about shacking up with this little number and how to go about it when she said, ‘Now let’s go out to the house and see Daddy.’

 

“Well, now. That sounded a bit funny, but I had begun to wonder if maybe this wasn’t the classiest looking pro I had ever run into. I was sort of dough heavy and hell, I didn’t care what it would cost. So I said sure, Let’s go.

 

“We took a taxi and went someplace out in West Seattle, looking down on the Sound. There was a nice little house set back on a big lawn and couple of big fir trees sticking up behind it. Altogether, I thought, the classiest cathouse I ever saw. I paid the taxi and she said, ‘It will be fun seeing Daddy, won’t it?’ I said, ‘It sure will.’

 

“Well, now. She did have a Daddy. We went inside and she called, ‘Daddy.’ And a voice answered, ‘Yes, Betty?’ And she says, ‘Jim’s back.’ And he says, ‘No, really?’

“There is a pounding on the steps and a big old guy with white hair and a face full of lather and a razor in one hand comes down the steps. He said, ‘Hello Jim.’ And I said, ‘Hello sir.’ But boy I was scared, and I couldn’t figure out what the hell.

 

“He sort of circled around me and then he patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You changed some, Jim, but it’s been a long time and I’d know you anywhere.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just sort of shut up. And Betty says, ‘I want to wash up’ and runs out of the room.

“Well, the old man looks at me awhile and I look at everything else in the place. And finally he says, ‘Soldier, what do you look so scared about?’ And I gulped and said, ‘Sir, I think there’s a mistake somewhere.’ And he said, ‘Good, boy. I wondered what you’d say. My daughter has you puzzled. Is that it?’ And I said it was.

“The old boy looks at me kind of sideways and says, ‘Now don’t scared, but she is not quite normal. Not dangerous or anything like that but she has hallucinations. She was married two years ago and her husband went right off to war. He was a Marine, and he was killed the first day on Guadalcanal. The shock was too much for her. She just can’t accept it that he is dead, and she keeps thinking he has come back. Now you aren’t the first soldier she has brought here. The first time it happened I told her she had made a mistake and so did the soldier. And she was sick for weeks. The doctor said we had done wrong, that it would have been best to let her pretend. Sooner or later, he says, this will wear off and she will forget all her imaginings. But now to have time taken away from her might result in some other kind of a breakdown. So will you sort of stay for diner and then take her dancing or something like that. Sometime during the evening her hallucination will wear off and then you can duck out and everything will be all right.’

 

“Well now. That was a fine mess. Stuck with a weird widow on my first night. But there wasn’t anything I could do, so I said sure. Betty cooked dinner, and it was good. And right after dinner her old man says, ‘I have to go over to Joe’s to see about some drawings he is making for the new machine. I’ll walk. You two can have the car.’ We had decided to go to The Ranch and I said fine.

“The old man went out and Betty said, ‘Just a minute, while I change.’ She went into her room and in a minute she said, ‘Come in a minute, Jim.’ Well I went in, and there she was in a grey lace thing you could see right through, and boy, she really had ‘em. I said, ‘You can’t go dancing in that.’ And she said, ‘It’s been a long time, Jim.’ And I felt sort of prickly and hot all over, and some of the time I thought about what I could see and some of the time I thought about her husband being dead and her being nuts. She came over and put her arms around me and sort of pressed up against me, and I kept trying to think what I ought to do and then trying to tell myself I shouldn’t do it. And then I thought, Well if I don’t it will sure make her suspicious and her old man said the doctor said nothing should disturb her.

“So I saw there was nothing else to do, and I decided to do it. There was a big bow on the front of that negligee and I started to fumble with it. And just then….” Holt looked up and everyone in the place sort of leaned toward him. “Yeah?”

“I woke up.”