Elliotts to Morgans, Port Ludlow, 1946 -- "The rediscovered sweetness of his life"

Murray was released from the Army, and therefore from Washington, D.C.,  in early 1946. They made their way home to Puget Sound, with a few journalistic stops along with way, where other recently demobilized friends were waiting.

from Jean and Gene Elliott, 1946

Dear Rosa and Murray -- you'll feel dazed for a long time. We still do. And Harry said that for a month after he was out he was afraid to cross streets or enter any situation which might threaten the rediscovered sweetness of his life. We are all very happy for you, have composed a ditty on the theme of "Murray is out, Murray is out" to the tune of "Carmen's in love, Carmen's in love" (Carmen Jones, not Fett). St. T a K. will be in May when you come to Port Ludlow.

Pt. Ludlow mill in 1918. Wikipedia

And please come soon. You can have chess, writing, oysters, a burned-down, debris-covered mill to photograph, hills to climb, fish to catch, bays to kayak in, music to listen to, sun to lie in (I think), our dog to play with (I've tried to teach him to enjoy having his ears bitten a la Haj but he keeps losing his temper -- he's only four months old), our cat to play with and anything else we can think of between now and May. Beer and conversation are understood ("Have a little wine of the country, Rosa" -- oh, Rosa, I've learned to make fudge -- chocolate and peanut butter -- although I haven't learned it very well because it never gets completely hard).

...We'd love to have the split bamboo blinds. We're making a trellis-work and grass and tree (one) sidewalk café effect outside our back door and the blinds would be useful. I also want (please) the top to the Mexican bean pot which you gave us for Christmas 1943 sans top because Murray thought all packages with ribbons were for him. But don't worry if you can't find it because I have another one that fits. Bring your (Judy's) cats if you like -- we're making an animal-and-children compound. The only items which are at all important, really, are your sleeping bags. We have many beds, little bedding. (Dorsey maintains that we can sleep nine guests comfortably at once but I think seven is our top limit unless a lot of them are in love with one another. ...)

 

Dear M and R, this will be just a note because we want to get in the mail tonight. This is David talking now, and not sleeping D or Sick D or even Mildred, but the real David. I'm just back from a week-end in the city and it’s the first wk end in the city I've spent that hasn't been Angst-voll. All the major creature needs were taken care of and I feel like a clean vessel once more. Ludlow has no floating female or male population to minister to the body's needs, which is probably a good thing. All the same one

does need what he needs. Miss Stein once said this more or less repetitively in a poem called "Needs be needs be needs be near." Today I attended the lecture given by Joseph Warren Beach or whatever his name is, the Walker Ames man who is teaching contemporary poetry. His lectures are enlivened by phrases like "As Robert (Frost) said to me ..." He is very urbane and exceedingly charming and somehow made me feel like becoming a poet. The novel is really a bore and I keep thinking of more attractive things to write about. Rosa I'm glad you liked the ending. Murray, a friend of mine tells me that he saw in a recent Harpers a story called I think, "A Little Oversight" about two GIs n Wash D.C. in the hottest part of summer wearing full Class A woollens and being arrested for taking off their blouses or blice. I immediately thought of you. About being a poet, the best poem I've written is very simple:

GHOST

In the night

All in white

He don't care

If he is a fright.

Why I'm burbling like this I don't know. Perhaps Bill James was right about celibacy. You know he was celibate for a week once and got enormous quantities of writing done. Here is an anecdote a friend of mine who is taking Giovanni's Philosophy of History course told me. Miss Pierson did Marx for her paper and in reading it got all involved with a middle-aged Russian in the class who asked several pointed questions. Their conversation got rather heated and was abruptly terminated by the Russian's jumping to his feet and grabbing his coif and shrieking, "I, who have been through four revolutions, am forced to listen to this stuff!" It fair panicked the seminar.

...

 

from David -- Port Ludlow  -- 1946

Dear Murray,

Charles Olson and Howard Lewis, shucking oysters

loves, ruins an incipiently good baritone by refusing the heed the advice of competent teachers, continually violates his own integrity by taking jobs which he is gradually cutting himself down to fit, and ends by staying in the navy as a commissioned officer--a success by what has become his own measure. You will agree that it is a degrading and ignominious end, but there is a lot of sex to compensate.

If you could write me a letter asking me about the state of the work and telling me the idea has possibilities, etc. etc. I should be most grateful. You probably know more about it than I anyway. Please include news about your own productions. I am curious, and besides it would look impressive. It would be nice too if you would begin one paragraph with a phrase like "A person of your ability".... Do not be too Pollyanna, but I do not trust the govt.

Our house is taking a little more time than we hoped it would, but it's a nice house and is quite beautiful. We would all like you to come and see us. Good luck, and give my best to Rosa.

David

Are you going to join the AmVets Committee?

[the GI Bill allowed self-employed people the difference between their monthly earnings and $100 a month for a maximum of 52 weeks in two years after discharge. Since the difference between being a self-employed writer and being unemployed is often hard to parse, aspirant veterans asked more established ones to vouch for them.]

Howard Lewis, 9 June 1954 -- Army-McCarthy hearings -- "one of the great dramas of all time"

Howard was between jobs and getting ready to join us in Puerto Vallarta, where we lived in 1954. He wrote about his travel plans, and one of his reasons for procrastinating.

Joe McCarthy covers the mics as Roy Cohn gives advice. AP Photo

One of the treats of old correspondence is reading about events that later became representative of an era but on that day were just another bit
of news. Howard was more prescient than many, predicting that the face-off between Joseph Welch and Joseph McCarthy "could be one of the great dramas of all time." It happened later on the day he wrote this letter. A disgraced McCarthy drank himself to death three years later. Roy Cohn lived on to mentor Donald Trump.

 

"Another thing that is still keeping me here is the McCarthy-Army hearings. I must say that the grotesquerie is beginning to pall just about now, but it still ranks as one of the great morality plays of all time. I feel that we all need (at least I do) constant reminders of the foolishness of compromising with what we feel to be wrong. What better example could there be than Secretary Stevens squirming on the witness seat, screwing up his mouth with petty complaints, looking piteously at his tormentors, and then groping for the alleviating word. Well, as I say, I've learned my lesson now and it's beginning to pall. But another act is coming up. McCarthy still has to take the stand for the first time under oath and that should be interesting. What will make it completely fascinating is that the Army counsel, Joseph Welch, is a dead-ringer for Ephraim Tutt and I keep feeling that he has something up his sleeve. This could be one of the great dramas of all time and I wait for it hungrily."

Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens had summed up the purpose of the hearing earlier in the day. To read the bullying that followed, you can look up the transcript, available here -- http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6444/ -- among other sites.

Secretary STEVENS. Gentlemen of the committee, I am here today at the request of this committee. You have my assurance of the fullest cooperation. 

Robert T. Stevens

In order that we may all be quite clear as to just why this hearing has come about, it is necessary for me to refer at the outset to Pvt. G. David Schine, a former consultant of this committee. David Schine was eligible for the draft. Efforts were made by the chairman of this committee, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and the subcommittee’s chief counsel, Mr. Roy M. Cohn, to secure a commission for him. Mr. Schine was not qualified, and he was not commissioned. Selective service then drafted him. Subsequent efforts were made to seek preferential treatment for him after he was inducted.

The face-off between McCarthy, his lawyer and later Trump confidante Roy Cohn, and Joseph Welch followed. After Welch spent some time casting doubt on the sincerity of Cohn's and McCarthy's urgency in exposing Communism, this exchange led to Welch's most famous question.

Senator MCCARTHY. Jim, will you get the news story to the effect that this man belonged to this Communist-front organization? Will you get the citations showing that this was the legal arm of the Communist Party, and the length of time that he belonged, and the fact that he was recommended by Mr. Welch? I think that should be in the record. 

Mr. WELCH. You won’t need anything in the record when I have finished telling you this.
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. 

When I decided to work for this committee I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, “Pick somebody in the firm who works under you that you would like.” He chose Fred Fisher and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when he had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case was about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, “Boys, I don’t know anything about you except I have always liked you, but if there is anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case you speak up quick.” 

Fred Fisher said, “Mr. Welch, when I was in law school and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers Guild,” as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, “I am secretary of the Young Republicans League in Newton with the son of Massachusetts' Governor, and I have the respect and admiration of the 25 lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr.” 

I said, “Fred, I just don’t think I am going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out and go over national television and it will just hurt like the dickens.”
So, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston. 

Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale & Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale & Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I will do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. 

Senator MCCARTHY. Mr. Chairman. 

Senator MUNDT. Senator McCarthy? 

Senator MCCARTHY. May I say that Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless. He was just baiting; he has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours, requesting that Mr. Cohn, before sundown, get out of any department of Government anyone who is serving the Communist cause.
I just give this man’s record, and I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it has been labeled long before he became a member, as early as 1944— 

Mr. WELCH. Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild, and Mr. Cohn nods his head at me. I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn. 

Mr. COHN. No, sir. 

Mr. WELCH. I meant to do you no personal injury, and if I did, beg your pardon.
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? 

 

 

That question remains.

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.

…

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