Leafing through A Book of Ages, you begin to realize how many lives were changed by the events of that one day. Courses changed, careers delayed or created, stories rewritten.
Churchill gained an ally and Hitler an enemy. The war in Europe had transformed Churchill from a back number into the indispensable leader, and December 7th made it likelier he would prevail, because FDR suddenly had the ability to act. FDR became a war president. Douglas MacArthur, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower had a reason to put their boots on. (MacArthur's most recent engagement had been against World War I veterans camped on the Capitol Mall.)
Men at arms were relevant, and thousands of people who never thought of themselves as military men (or women) were put into uniform. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut would write war novels out of the experience. J. D. Salinger's story about a prep school boy named Holden Caulfield was slated to appear in the New Yorker that December. After Pearl Harbor was attacked the editors set it aside for the duration; it suddenly seemed frivolous. Salinger would see action on D-Day and meet Hemingway in Paris, and fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The war would send echoes down through his subsequent work, in characters' disrupted lives and sudden suicides in postwar living rooms.
Hemingway had seen World War I as a teenager; now he was too old to fight, but he outfitted his fishing boat to hunt submarines. In 1944 he single-handedly liberated the Ritz Bar in Paris. Edward R. Murrow became "Edward R. Murrow" reporting on a war that America was half interested in. That too changed. Walter Cronkite cut his journalistic teeth as a war correspondent, and Martha Gellhorn outran most of her male counterparts to get the big story. Her professional rivalry with Hemingway ended their marriage.
Richard Nixon's war was spent playing cards in the Pacific; he won enough from poker to win a seat in Congress. James Michener would write stories about his own experiences in the Pacific, and Rodgers and Hammerstein would make a musical from them. James Stewart enlisted and rose through the ranks to become a bomber pilot over Germany. John Wayne, a near contemporary, made the decision to stay home and play war heroes in movies. Bandleader Glenn Miller lost his life over the English Channel. On FDR's death Harry Truman was transformed from an obscure figure to the most powerful man in the world, burdened with the decision to deploy the atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who marshaled the hundreds of scientists to create that weapon, was dismayed by what he had created. Charles Schulz discovered first-hand how inhuman humanity could be; he would express this cynicism in a comic strip.
The most galvanizing event in American life in the 20th century was triggered by the events of this day 68 years ago on an obscure island in the Pacific. Nobody's life would be the same again.
Showing posts with label James Stewart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Stewart. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Memorial Day
I associate Memorial Day with the small town parade of my childhood. Old men in carefully preserved uniforms. Small flags at the cemetery. It wasn't until I'd grown older that I realized what was on the minds of those old men in uniform. They'd grown old while comrades of theirs had not. What would those other lives have been like if events had turned out differently? Roles reversed. It's the kind of speculation the other bystanders are incapable of. They say crisis pulls all of history into a single moment. I wrote my book as a collection of moments, funny, sad, tragic, heroic and commonplace. Many of them take place in wartime, with lives suddenly put in the balance.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
It's hard to visualize J. D. Salinger wading ashore on D-Day or caught up in the Battle of the Bulge, but he was there; the most searing episodes of his fiction were shaped there. Unlike Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, James Michener or Kurt Vonnegut, Salinger didn't write war stories; the war unfolds for his characters when they have arrived back home. Heller invented a term for the everyday insanity of military protocol: He called it Catch 22. He flew 60 missions as a bomberdier. War takes on a strange abstraction from thousands of feet in the air.
Like Salinger, Vonnegut was on the ground at the Battle of the Bulge. He was captured and shipped to Dresden where he experienced the firebombing of that city, an experience that reappears in his novel Slaughterhouse Five. Norman Mailer and James Michener experienced the war in the Pacific. The soldiers who came home alive read those novels in the backyards of their suburban homes.
One of the greatest war novels every written describes a Civil War that ended six years before the author was born. Stephen Crane wrote the Red Badge of Courage in 1895 when he was 24. 24 year-old J. R. R. Tolkien spent four months of 1916 in the trenches at the Battle of the Somme. Hospitalized, recovering from wounds, he passed the time writing stories about goblins and elves. Ernest Hemingway was an 18 year-old ambulance driver on the Italian Front in 1918, when he received 200 bits of shrapnel rescuing a soldier under fire. A Farewell to Arms would be written a decade later. The intervening period was written in the voice of Nick Adams who says very little about his war experiences. How do you describe such scenes without diminishing them?
War is heroism and foolishness, vast organization characterized by mass inefficiency, enormous effort in an important cause and an enormous waste of time and money, it is the seizing and avoidance of responsibility. When we visualize World War II we often imagine a soldier who looks like John Wayne because he spent so much time in uniform in movies; but he never served. James Stewart was a contemporary of Wayne's when he was flying bomber missions over Europe, age 35, but afterward avoided roles playing soldiers. He'd done that, lived it.
Harry Truman was 34 years-old when he commanded Battery D in the 129th Field Artillery. We have a picture of a man in steel-rimmed glasses and a panama hat; it's hard to imagine him in uniform. At age 60 he had the lives of millions of American soldiers and sailors on his mind when he decided to drop the A-bombs on Japan. There are no easy decisions in wartime. On the evening of June 5, 1944 Dwight Eisenhower went to bed knowing the failure or success of the next day's invasion of France, and the future of the free world, would probably be decided by the weather over the English Channel. Even so, he had a letter in his pocket taking full responsibility for whatever might unfold.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Atlantic Crossings
On May 20, 1927, at 7:53 in the morning, Charles Lindbergh took off from an airfield on Long Island, New York, headed east. He was alone, except for 450 gallons of gasoline, a Wright Whirlwind J-5C radial engine, coffee and sandwiches. The fabric-covered Spirit of St. Louis had no radio, no navigation equipment and no forward window for him to see where he was going. Lindbergh was 25. The flight to Paris took him 33 1/2 hours. When he arrived at Le Bourget Field he was greeted by a crowd estimated at 150,000 people. He was very tired, but he was suddenly the most famous man in the world and would remain so for many years. Lindbergh appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
May 20th is also the birthday of the actor James Stewart, who played Charles Lindbergh in the film The Spirit of St. Louis. He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart also appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
Christopher Columbus died, largely forgotten, on May 20th, 1506. He was 54. He'd crossed the Atlantic in 1492, landing in the Bahamas, but he died still believing he had reached the coast of Asia, unaware or not believing that he had discovered (or actually rediscovered) a new continent. A few months after his death a mapmaker in France named the New World after somebody else. Columbus appears twice in A Book of Ages.
May 20th is also the birthday of the actor James Stewart, who played Charles Lindbergh in the film The Spirit of St. Louis. He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father owned a hardware store. Stewart also appears seven times in A Book of Ages.
Christopher Columbus died, largely forgotten, on May 20th, 1506. He was 54. He'd crossed the Atlantic in 1492, landing in the Bahamas, but he died still believing he had reached the coast of Asia, unaware or not believing that he had discovered (or actually rediscovered) a new continent. A few months after his death a mapmaker in France named the New World after somebody else. Columbus appears twice in A Book of Ages.
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