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.]

Jonathan Raban, 1 December 1997 -- "a chance to say something about your work"

 

 Jonathan Raban and Murray admired each other's Northwest writing in part because of their divergent perspectives as a newcomer and a native son along with their sense of a region as part of a much bigger set of forces.

 

I hear today that Bad Land is to be given the prize awarded in your name by the Tacoma Public Library. I am honored; not least because it will give me a chance to say something about your work, and how it bravely explodes the rather condescending notion of "local history". One of the things I have steadily admired about your writing, since I began to read you in 1989, is how you give American history a specific locale, in the Northwest, without ever allowing Northwestern experience to seem parochial, provincial, regional, merely "local"; but rather seeing your own home turf as a stage on which the large forces of nineteenth and twentieth century history are continually in play. 

So many people, including the bulk of "local historians", feel excluded from history-proper, which is imagined to happen in some great elsewhere, whose center is London, or Paris, or Moscow, or Washington, D.C.--with the inevitable consequence that the tone of most local history veers between the apologetic, the boastful, the special-pleading boosterish. (Cf. Nard Jones...); just history, firmly placed in latitude and longitude, full of local details, as particular, and as rich in general implication, as a novel. the Seattle I live in now is still to a very large extent the imagined city that I found in the pages of your book. 

This is a verbose way of saying that the Murray Morgan Prize means a great deal to me--and, rare among literary prizes, it has real meaning. It says something important about writing and locality, and how writing which is rooted in the local need--and should--not be "local writing".

Wilmott Ragsdale to Murray, from Madison, Wisconsin, 2 May 1964 -- "hooked on Tacoma"

In sping 1964, we were getting ready to take a freighter to Europe and then re-create Rosa and Murray's honeymoon kayak trip down the Danube. Murray fainted after getting the required vaccinations and  was diagnosed with cancer. After surgery removing most of his stomach, he was advised to wrap up his affairs. Taking Rags's advice, he booked another freighter berth and we made a shortened Danube trip, from Ulm in Germany to Bratislava in (then) Czechoslovakia, later that summer. Murray lived another 36 years.

Dear Murray, 

I just got your stoical and very funny letter from Tacoma General Hospital near Wright's Park, Tacoma. It is not that I expect trifles like possible cancer operations to stop you, but it is absolutely miserable to get held up by such a thing at any time and particularly just at this time. There are inevitably other times and better times to come, but. On the other hand can you get the next ship? There's nothing like a sea voyage for a convalescence.

The sea voyage for me is that thing that I always intend to make but never manage. It is the same right now. I have a sort of offer from UNESCO to be a "consultant" to some sort of new seminar system for Asian journalists in Manila. But this depends upon a loyalty check in the U.S. and the approval of the Philippine government. I got the forms for the loyalty check about two weeks ago and after searching out forgotten street numbers going back half my life finally got the forms off in one week. ... I gave your name as a reference--for loyalty--so you may get a call from the FBI. Please do not slug that agent. Please do tell him that you have often tried to nominate J. Edgar Hoover for president. But in any case there is never going to be time for the sea voyage since the job evidently begins late in June. It is supposed to be for six months and I don't know then whether we'll come straight back to Madison or can get something for the second semester.

...

Your mention of Terry Pettus makes me think a long way back when he was drama "critic" of the Tacoma Tribune and had a moustache and wore a camelhair coat. I've never seen him since. Bill Ames at the university journalism school has just done something like a book on the Seattle PI strike. He told me he talked with Terry and referred to him in terms something like, "a fine old gentleman," which took me aback. [Rags was younger than Pettus, but not by enough not to worry about being "a fine old gentleman" by association.] I do remember Terry's father on our Academic Freedom committee. I listed this committee among the non-religious and non-political of my organizations, and called it a "social action" group. That is, I listed it on the loyalty forms. It will stick out, of course, because it is the only organization in which I had to list myself as an officer.

I just heard a train whistle here and it made me think of hearing train whistles and mistaking them for boat whistles on the 11th Street Bridge. [Like Murray, Rags had worked as a tender on the 11th Street Bridge--now the Murray Morgan Bridge--in Tacoma.] From the bridge a train whistle always sounded a little strange to me, suggesting travel and other places. Hearing the same sound in Madison suggests nothing but a train in Madison. I have tried several times to figure out why Madison has so little excitement for me and Tacoma so much. Today was not untypical of Madison. I had lunch on the terrace by the lake and watched three shells of eights race. Beyond the shells, several dozen sailboats were moving, and the Rescue motorboat was streaking out to pick up a couple over-enthusiastic sailors. A little later, I saw the serious left-wing students parading around the capitol at the square, carrying signs "Go Home from South Vietnam Yankees." On the way home I stopped and fished for 15 minutes, etc. I keep saying: it is a wonderful place, really wonderful. Anybody would be delighted to be in the wonderful place. And of course, I am, I am. 

I don't know whether four years is such a long time for me to stay anyplace and that I have reached my limit, or that I was just hooked on Tacoma years ago and still am. But

why was I? I hear quite often that going back to the home town is dreadful--you can't go back, etc. But I have always liked to go back. I think I have figured out part of my feeling about Tacoma and the region. It is that I have a sense not only of the physical place, but also of what happened there in the past. All of my childhood I was aware that where I played--in Puget Sound gulch, or at Dash Point, the Indians had been there before me. And this was mixed up with fragments about Job Carr's cabin, and the sailing ships that docked at Old Town, and the mills with their sparks at night. In Wisconsin I have no sense at all of anybody having lived here or anything happening here. If I find that the effort I intend to shortly make to get to the University of Washington is not successful, I will begin to read Wisconsin history.

Maybe that will help, but I know it will not be the same. It was not only the vague historical impressions I wove into my awareness of Tacoma (I remember now that many of the impressions must have come from the Historical "Museum"--especially old paintings (one of Indians with a fire on the beach). It was also a kind of faking of Tacoma as a setting for what I read. I always imagined Wrights Park as Hyde Park. If I needed a doorway of the mansion in Kensington, I used the doorway of some big house maybe on Yakima Avenue, or of course for a mansion, the old Rust house. So part of my attachment to Tacoma was my sense of what had happened there on those beaches among those trees. But part of my feeling was for what never did happen there, but only in other faraway places or perhaps only in books. And the second feeling, the faked up one, was if anything stronger than the first. If knowing-sensing the history makes a place more real and meaningful, then does bringing in what isn't there at all, make it less real? The Tacoma that is real for me may not be real for anybody else. So I have always felt justified in acknowledging that my feeling rests on a neurosis that I indulge and never want to get rid of.

Rags to Murray, from Madison, Wisconsin, May 2, 1964 -- "hooked on Tacoma"

In 1964, we were getting ready to take a freighter to Europe and re-create Rosa and Murray's honeymoon kayak trip down the Danube, when Murray was diagnosed with cancer. He had surgery removing most of his stomach, and was advised to wrap up his affairs. Taking Rags's advice, he booked another freighter berth and we made a shortened Danube trip, from Ulm in Germany to Bratislava in (then) Czechoslovakia, later that summer.

Dear Murray,

I just got your stoical and very funny letter from Tacoma General Hospital near Wright's Park, Tacoma. It is not that I expect trifles like possible cancer operations to stop you, but it is absolutely miserable to get held up by such a thing at any time and particularly just at this time. There are inevitably other times and better times to come, but. On the other hand can you get the next ship? There's nothing like a sea voyage for a convalescence.

The sea voyage for me is that thing that I always intend to make but never manage. It is the same right now. I have a sort of offer from UNESCO to be a "consultant" to some sort of new seminar system for Asian journalists in Manila. But this depends upon a loyalty check in the U.S. and the approval of the Philippine government. I got the forms for the loyalty check about two weeks ago and after searching out forgotten street numbers going back half my life finally got the forms off in one week. ... I gave your name as a reference --for loyalty--so you may get a call from the FBI. Please do not slug that agent. Please do tell him that you have often tried to nominate J. Edgar Hoover for president. But in any case there is never going to be time for the sea voyage since the job evidently begins late in June. It is supposed to be for six months and I don't know then whether we'll come straight back to Madison or can get something for the second semester.

...

Your mention of Terry Pettus makes me think a long way back when he was drama "critic" of the Tacoma Tribune and had a moustache and wore a camelhair coat. I've never seen him since. Bill Ames at the university journalism school has just done something like a book on the Seattle PI strike. He told me he talked with Terry and referred to him in terms something like, "a fine old gentleman," which took me aback. [Rags was younger than Pettus, but not by enough worry about being a fine old gentleman by association.] I do remember Terry's father on our Academic Freedom committee. I listed this committee among the non-religious and non-political of my organizations, and called it a "social action" group. That is, I listed it on the loyalty forms. It will stick out, of course, because it is the only organization in which I had to list myself as an officer. 

I just heard a train whistle here and it made me think of hearing train whistles and mistaking them for boat whistles on the 11th Street Bridge. [Like Murray, Rags had worked as a tender on the 11th Street Bridge--now the Murray Morgan Bridge--in Tacoma.] From the bridge a train whistle always sounded a little strange to me, suggesting travel and other places. Hearing the same sound in Madison suggests nothing but a train in Madison. I have tried several times to figure out why Madison has so little excitement for me and Tacoma so much. Today was not untypical of Madison. I had lunch on the terrace by the lake and watched three shells of eights race. Beyond the shells, several dozen sailboats were moving, and the Rescue motorboat was streaking out to pick up a couple over-enthusiastic sailors. A little later, I saw the serious left-wing students parading around the capitol at the square, carrying signs "Go Home from South Vietnam Yankees." On the way home I stopped and fished for 15 minutes, etc. I keep saying: it is a wonderful place, really wonderful. Anybody would be delighted to be in this wonderful place. And of course, I am, I am. 

 

I don't know whether four years is such a long time for me to stay anyplace and that I have reached my limit, or that I was just hooked on Tacoma years ago and still am. But why was I? I hear quite often that going back to the home town is dreadful--you can't go back, etc. But I have always liked to go back. I think I have figured out part of my feeling about Tacoma and the region. It is that I have a sense not only of the physical place, but also of what happened there in the past. All of my childhood I was aware that where I played--in Puget Sound gulch, or at Dash Point, the Indians had been there before me. And this was mixed up with fragments about Job Carrs cabin, and the sailing ships that docked at Old Town, and the mills with their sparks at night. 

In Wisconsin I have no sense at all of anybody having lived here or anything happening here. If I find that the effort I intend to shortly make to get to the University of Washington is not successful, I will begin to read Wisconsin history. Maybe that will help, but I know it will not be the same. It was not only the vague historical impressions I wove into my awareness of Tacoma (I remember now that many of the impressions must have come from the Historical "Museum"--especially old paintings (one of Indians with a fire on the beach). It was also a kind of faking of Tacoma as a setting for what I read. I always imagined Wrights Park as Hyde Park. If I needed a doorway of the mansion in Kensington, I used the doorway of some big house maybe on Yakima Avenue, or of course for a mansion, the old Rust house. 

So part of my attachment to Tacoma was my sense of what had happened there on those beaches among those trees. But part of my feeling was for what never did happen there, but only in other faraway places or perhaps only in books. And the second feeling, the faked up one, was if anything stronger than the first. If knowing-sensing the history makes a place more real and meaningful, then does bringing in what isn't there at all, make it less real? The Tacoma that is real for me may not be real for anybody else. So I have always felt justified in acknowledging that my feeling rests on a neurosis that I indulge and never want to get rid of.