Editor’s Note – The letter published hereafter belong to the same archive from which I selected the 143 letters included in Writing Home. Selected WWII Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler. Fiedler wrote itto his first wife Margaret and their two sons Kurt and Eric on May 7 1945 (the couple would have four more children). That is to say, he wrote it during his second year of service as a cryptologist and translator of Japanese for the Navy. Perhaps more important, he wrote it after he returned from the war in the Pacific Theatre at the end of April, which for him culminated in the Battle of Iwo Jima, where he interrogated Japanese POWs, and the collapse of the German army in Europe and North Africa. He wrote it from Pearl Harbor, one of the three main places where he was stationed during those two years of service: along with Guam, and, after the official end of the war, the city of Tientsin, in Northeast China. Thematically, it covers mainly one of the main topics of the rest of the archive, international politics, which Fiedler dissected in a matter-of-fact fashion, conscious that at that point the war was about the realignment of colonial powers, with the U.S. replacing the UK, France and Japan as the hegemonic capitalist nation, and the consolidation of Stalinism inside the then USSR. Like all the other letters, this too reflects the strong intellect of Fiedler’s wife Margaret, which allowed him to exercise his own intellectual power. Like all the other letters, this too was handwritten and, until the end of August 1945, subject to the Navy’s censorship. Except for some typos and the omission of a few lines that do not alter its content and meaning, this is a literal transcription critically edited. On the eve of the 84th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, it seems to me especially beneficial to remember how, in different capacities and roles, our fellow Americans of all backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions, united and led other countries and peoples to defeat authoritarianism, tyranny, and fascism. They believed that despite (or because of ?) their country’s faults and the contradictions of our modern condition, democracy and freedom were worth fighting for. They still are.
Samuele F.S. Pardini is Professor of Italian in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, as well as the editor of “The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler” and “In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen.”
May 7, 1945
Dear Margaret,
Today brought along with the actual anniversary of our parting (I have decided after all that it was the 7th), the early broken news of V-E Day. How messy the whole thing remains until its very end; it will not be concluded with neatness and dispatch. There is more involved than the scoop of a newsman, the quick ear and the preference of dispatch over diplomacy; more is revealed ever than the arbitrary nature of such a day. You were quite right in your surmise that a joint, willful declaration of some point would be made and that around it fighting would still go on, slackened to a guerilla struggle before and after. But there must be the designation of a focal point, a crisis – for we are still old fashioned and even as we demand the declaration of war after the fight has commenced (quite correctly, for it is such respect for etiquette that makes war in the end not the barbarous business it is described by sentimental meliorists, but a product of high culture), so we choose to have a pronouncement of conclusion in the disordered interim between the collapse of the enemy’s center and the cessation of the last peripheral fighting. Your intuition that May 1 would have been chosen was right, too – but the moment eluded the chosen festival, comes on a mark-less day (distinguished only by our secret anniversary which our world’s leaders, foolish fellows, do not even suspect) – with all the distinct smack of opportunism that has characterized the whole scene.
What is revealed substantially (and even to my orthodox-shy vagaries it comes as a surprise) is the revelation that there have been two ways going on in Europe all the while, a war between Russia and Germany and one between the Anglo-Saxon Allies and Germany – the one still largely an old-fashioned struggle for world hegemony, the other a naked conflict of ideologies. To us, the German sense, formal submission is possible, to the Russians meaningless. Our slogans have confused us. It is the chariness of the Russians, tonight’s news reveals in its bubbling way, that kept the official declaration from breaking today. After all, the Germans are still fighting their troops – and obviated the embarrassment of a blatant separate peace.
But the fact is that for most of our boys fighting has already ceased, that my brother tonight is for the first time in months in no danger of his life, that he shall soon get a chance to see his daughter. Remembering all this I am capable of some rejoicing. Outwardly there is no change in the texture of my life.
I was waked this morning by many loud radios, the efficient, self-conscious voices familiar now as waking itself – and between sleeping and waking I heard the news. I went down-town a little later (after my first land hair-cut in the expanded Officers’ Club where the system has changed, the barber now expects tips. One can sense it in the air entering; there seems on their stupid fresh faces already a dim mist of corruption. How vile a civilian habit, intruding without disrupting its proper evils into our military [pseudo-military!] world) chiefly to watch the reactions on the faces of sailors. Nothing, the news boys held out the pink papers with their heading large and palpable as hysteria – and the men walked by on their way to the beach or bar with scarcely more notice than when the fall of some obscure Hungarian town “loomed” morning after morning. In the barber shop a boy grinned self-consciously visible as a window-display under the fingers of a lady-barber who shampooed him lasciviously nudging his shoulder from time to time with a tit. The hum of voices were the same- the hankers, the shoppers pawing the lacy clichés of greeting cards, the serious faces if Naval Officers buying books with more than 500 pages, the patterned admiration of small groups around a window behind which a pawned vulgar diamond lay drowned in its own smug luster. I ended by observing nothing; it is a cheap, arrogant notion after all – bought a beautiful edition of Dante with 32 Blake drawings as illustrations and a most vile translation in terza rima. You should, you shall see these pictures, dear Margaret; the one used as a decoration for the inside cover especially (it is one of the few of this series, the last thing he even attempted, that Blake finished engraved) is worth the five bucks I could not really afford. The whole mad scene of the wind-whirled lovers is fixed in the sort of instantaneous stasis, the clarity the rejects all extra-aesthetic notions as in D’s verse at the moment when the Poet has fainted (e caddi come corpo morto cade . . .) at the story of Francesca. Some of the others, half-finished sketches that they are, an excellent, particularly the Inferno illustrations (B. was of the Devil’s party and knew it) where there is a wonderful tension of design between the delicate pre-Raphaelite figures of Dante and Virgil (that have the texture of painting) and the MichelAngelesque figures of the damned with the texture of sculpture – fixed out of time. You will like it, but I must beg to live with it for a while myself.
Afterwards I went to the University Library to read magazines and poke about idly in its shadowy world. I was lectured in progressive education by a very earnest boy all the way back into town. The schools here are apparently progressive, that is, one teaches arithmetic when he sells war bonds, science when a plane goes overhead – if the kids are interested. I did not quite have the nerve to tell the lad I was a teacher, nodded like a dull but willing disciple at his condescending exposition. Progressive!
I had three letters from you today and one from my mother. It becomes clear that my mail, erratically and slowly, but certainly comes thru to you and you begin to get a sense of the pattern of my life – the leave (there are more now but the Blimp is my favorite; I have discovered from underground sources that she is carrying on a violent, squalid affair with a married enlisted man. It seems incredible, but I choose to believe it, since it relieves me of the necessity for feeling sorry for her), the return to my old job, my feelings at relearning the ungrateful routine.
My call seems to have come before the letters that explained my status. It is just as well. I wanted it to be a little in the nature of a surprise, to start proceedings as soon as was detached and able. I am glad that it gave you a real sense of my presence, did not rob my voice of undertones and its proper tonality. To be sure we did not manage to say anything – but in retrospect it seems a substantially satisfying experience. I did not want to disturb – you our Kurt by slighting Eric. I do love him and wanted to talk to him, was even convinced that he would be able to handle it all better than he did, but there were only spaces to be filled in on the form with people one wanted to talk to. I hoped that you would be able to smuggle E. in anyhow, not offending the presiding powers with more anonymous kid. It all seems to have been a source of such lasting excitement eddying out from you in a series of phone-calls and rehashing of the event. You make me feel a little like a personage, no rather like an event. My mother’s letter, too, was concerned with the call. She was, as you know, pleased that I remembered the anniversary – full of the post-exited deflation. I am sorry for your sake that you and she tangled over the question of Kurt’s companions. I am astounded at her suddenly stepping out her role for so impertinent a piece of criticism. What annoys me is her taking your remark defending vulgar democratic contacts as book-stuff; Lord knows (and I, too, in my way) that what you and what understanding you have in relation to kids is far from sterile academic remarks. It is all no matter, of course, and would be unnatural (a little disturbing as if there were too deep a conflict to risk exposing) if you did not have occasional small argument but I hate to see you misinterpreted.
. . . Your analysis, of course, of Stalin’s leading role in the world set-up, the shameless brutality with which he imposes his provincial notions is unquestionable. Thank God, for our own devious reasons, we decided to buck the arrogant scoundrels at S. F. I am not distressed, as you apparently are, at the inclusion of Argentine. After all, why not? Is this an organization for the world or the pure? Why no cry at Brazil – and yet at Argentina? If we are going to demand a “democratic” government as the price of admission, why not exclude Russia? I am not defending our motives in excluding Argentina (the desire for another vote on our side, shameful – and the honorable resolved (an aspect too of diplomacy) not to over-ride the consensus of the S. American Republics), but the fact seems unimpeachable. Raise a cry if you will about our almost unnoticed smuggling in of the Philippines which do not possess even a nominal independence, but give me no New Republic, unconsidered trash about Argentina. Our organization will have to include our enemies before we are thru – in short the world; the only legitimate scruple is against stooge governments, mere reduplications of votes. The crudity and colossal tactless bully-hood with which Russia entered tempts one to applaud every rebuff which chastened her, taught her respect for the forms at least (if we can have nothing else, we welcome so much) of inclusiveness.
You had a premonitory start in one of these letters about the effect on me of what you had written on Hawthorne; I did react as you know as you most feared. But your awareness of that possibility is a partial redemption. At any rate, stay good, handsome and happy, for I love you.
Leslie
