Subject: Re: Back from the dead, or the living
From: Benjamin Samuels (madhava@sprynet.com)
Date: Tue Mar 21 2000 - 22:48:13 EST
> AND: My dad was born in 1921. ALL he TALKS and THINKS about is WWII. I
> wonder if JDS is back there, I wonder if he ever tried to write that WWII
> novel he speculated about (maybe he's working on the damn thing NOW), I
> wonder if in a sense _Catcher_ and the Glass Saga served as some sort of
> escape from all that he experienced in those four years in the forties.
> Amongst those underpublished 22 stories there is a handful were he's
really
> grappling with the horror. (I don't think "Esme" is as raw an experience
as
> some of the others.) And of course soon WWII is left forever behind. Ah,
> just thought of what Boo Boo said in her letter to Buddy in _RHTRBC_:
> "Maybe it's going to be perfectly all right, but I hate 1942. I think
I'll
> hate 1942 till I die, just on general principles."
>
> --Bruce
I'm a generation behind you, Bruce, my grandparents were in WWII and both my
grandfathers were already dead when I was born. (though not from the war)
So, I've had little contact with living memories of that time. I've been
trying to understand what it might have been like at that time- it seems all
too impossible to imagine for me and my young male compatriots to all be
drafted and sent to fight the good fight today. Anyway, what I really
wanted to share was something that happened to me last week while working
for the Census. I visited a house of an Very Angry Old Man. After a minute
or so he stopped being angry at me (due, I'm sure, more to his lonliness
than to my charm) and started telling me about some his experiences in the
war, which were what was making him mad I can only assume. He recalled
being in the pacific, a friend or relative of his had been killed at Pearl
Harbor. He was in the Navy and told me about komikaze (sp?) pilots bearing
down on his ship and he shot a bunch down. Killed seven of those %*%^%
[racial slur] &@*##s . I don't know if I'm really doing him any justice
here but he distinctly made me feel like lying down in the grass and staring
at the sky for a while. Imagine all the drama of hearing about the war,
getting drafted or signing up, gsaying goodbye, going to training, going
overseas all leading up to a couple hours or a couple days in many cases of
intense action.
Here's a great line I heard on the radio tonight: "I love reading. I'm
never blocked and every page is really good writing!"
Love,
Madhava
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