So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (11 page)

The attack on Pearl Harbor did not seem to me as important as some other events of the time, especially four days later when Germany declared war on the United States, an action whose origin has remained a mystery to me (indeed, to this day, I still have no idea why Hitler declared war on us).

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941; Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress on Monday, December 8, to request a declaration of war against Japan; Congress immediately and overwhelmingly complied. The rest of Monday went by, Tuesday went by, and still no word from Germany. Nobody knew if the attack on Pearl Harbor had been coordinated with and approved by Nazi Germany, and nobody knew if Japan and Germany had a mutual assistance treaty or whether the Nazis would honor such a treaty even if it existed. Word spread in Berlin’s diplomatic circles that Adolf Hitler would soon send a message about the United States to the German Reichstag, which would, of course, rubber-stamp whatever he wanted.

When I look back now, war between Germany and the United States seems to have been inevitable; FDR, after all, was providing extensive material help to the British and taking the United States as close to war as he possibly could. And the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, wrote in his diaries that Pearl Harbor made him “sleep like a baby for the first time in years” because he knew that the United States would now get into the European war. But in the hours and days immediately following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, no one knew quite what would happen. A Pacific-only Japan-U.S. war seemed possible. FDR, for example, had made no mention of Germany in his “Day of Infamy” speech asking Congress to declare war against Japan. And American journalists in Berlin (still there because the United States was officially neutral) reported that top German officials seemed quite surprised by Japan’s actions. Then, on Thursday, December 11, four days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s message arrived at the Reichstag: He wanted war with the United States.

I was wrong about some things. I was isolationist but knew Britain had to win the war. The America Firsters were more pro-German than I had realized and more anti-Jewish, the kind of people who referred to Franklin D. Roosevelt as Rosenfelt because they thought he was too concerned about the treatment of Jews. (Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who was one of my heroes then, was chosen by Philip Roth to be Charles Lindbergh’s vice president in his 2004 novel,
The Plot Against America,
in which Lindbergh in 1940 defeats FDR and becomes the pro-German, anti-Semitic president of the United States.)

What stands out perhaps most, as I look back on all this, is my optimism, my certainty that Britain would not fall even if the United States never entered the war. That something like that could happen was inconceivable to me, just as I later felt certain that the United States and the Soviet Union would never engage in nuclear war. Naïve? Some kind of uniquely American optimism? Some kind of generational perspective? I don’t know. I’ve just always believed these things would work out well.

*   *   *

In September 1941, just a few months past my seventeenth birthday, I enrolled at UCLA. My recollection is that no application had been necessary, beyond the possession of a high school diploma and the tuition, which was seven dollars for a semester, or thirteen dollars if you also wanted football tickets and the
Daily Bruin
. I elected the high end; I was living at home, after all.

Among the classes I selected, along with a major in political science, was a survey of English literature. Six weeks into the course, I was summoned after class by the professor, Edward Niles Hooker, himself a distinguished scholar, and told a story and made an offer.

It seems a young (he was then twenty-five years old) instructor named Eric Bentley, new to the UCLA faculty, had persuaded the six senior professors of English literature to select one student each from their freshman classes and ask if that student would be interested in meeting—not for credit, alas—once a week with Bentley for the remainder of the school year to read—aloud and in turn—James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
freed in 1933 from an earlier judgment of obscenity and now available in a revised edition by Random House. Before the judgment was reversed, the U.S. Post Office wouldn’t let it into the country. I had read cursorily about James Joyce and had rejoiced over Judge John Woolsey’s decision, but I had never thought about actually reading the book. I accepted eagerly, feeling the selection a bit of an honor (and possibly the precursor of a good grade from Professor Hooker) and even curious about who my special classmates would be.

So we started. We got no credit, but it didn’t matter. We, six of us, met every Sunday night at Bentley’s apartment from six o’clock until at least midnight. This continued from October to June.

My ignorance of the book was matched by that of the others, and a splendid lot they were. Manfred Halpern was one, a serious refugee from Hitler’s Germany who later became a celebrated scholar. Another was Leon Cooper, who became a leading Los Angeles lawyer and a good friend. Others in our group included the son of the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the son of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (the Nazis and other Fascists had driven a splendid group of artists to America and, eventually, to Hollywood).

We read
Ulysses
aloud, after a session or two in which Bentley, a thoughtful and, in my eyes at least, brilliant lecturer, gave us all the background we needed on Joyce: his earlier work, the history of Irish independence, and the story of the authorship, publication, and eventual banning and unbanning of the book. We admired the courage of Judge Woolsey and of the executives at Random House. I bought—and read—copies of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and
Dubliners
and vowed to read
Finnegans Wake
as soon as we had finished with Leopold and Molly Bloom, a resolution I kept.

And so began my loving acquaintance, to last a lifetime, with Buck Mulligan, Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and all the other Dubliners.

Bentley asked us, as we read aloud, to turn to him and to Stuart Gilbert’s “key” whenever we encountered a word or a passage or a plot development we didn’t understand, and readers of Joyce’s masterpiece will surely recognize that on first reading it is hard to go more than a few sentences without asking for help. Thus the celebrated opening of the book—“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—promptly led to the observation by Bentley that Mulligan was based by Joyce on a colleague and fellow Irish journalist and author, Oliver St. John Gogarty. That, in turn, would lead to a semi-lecture on contemporary Irish authors and their predecessors, their influence, if any, on Joyce, on Yeats, and, and … it’s easy to see how it took nine months to read the whole book.

As we went on, something else developed in me, which perhaps had lain unnoticed or at least not encouraged for years but which, in any event, emerged under the influence of James Joyce—a fascination with language, its construction, its origins, its usage, and its variations. Joyce, of course, invented words as he went along.

We encountered difficulties with Joyce’s anfractuous language and structure, his frequent use of ancient Gaelic or other foreign languages, his puns or made-up words, and his occasional bursts into his own or others’ verse or song. The book was, Bentley assured us, a masterpiece and a monument of modern English literature, and our experience in reading
Ulysses
would last, he predicted, through our lifetimes. In my case, he was dead right. Every Sunday night, nobody had a date; no one went to a movie. Wouldn’t
dream
of it.

We were reading it aloud because Bentley said that was the best way to do it. Lincoln used to read Shakespeare out loud to War Department telegraph clerks as they waited for news from the battlefront. They did it in cigar factories in Cuba, too. There was always a reader who would sit and read out loud, and his voice would carry through the barn or wherever women were rolling tobacco leaves.

That reading of
Ulysses
aloud remains the central intellectual experience in my life.

*   *   *

My
Ulysses
is a hardback edition, Random House’s Modern Library from the 1930s. Printed in it is “Whilst in many places the effect … on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac”—that’s from the opinion of the federal judge John Woolsey, who in 1933 ruled that
Ulysses
was not pornographic and could be sold in the United States. He had been nominated to the federal bench by Herbert Hoover, a conservative Republican.

Here is Joyce on the funeral of one Patrick “Paddy” Dignam:

This morning (Hynes put it in of course) the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise after a brief illness came as a great shock to citizens of all classes by whom he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the deceased were present, were carried out (certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge from Corny) by Messrs H. J. O’Neill and Son, 164 North Strand Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan (brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John Power, eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora (must be where he called Monks the dayfather about Keyes’s ad) Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus B.,4., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph M’C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M’Coy,—M’lntosh and several others.

You have to listen, pick up the cadence and rhythm. Some of this has changed in meaning since I first read the book. Some change is going on now. Language is alive and democratic. It evolves. These were the basic messages of Bentley.

Bloom’s mind wanders about in the newspaper office: he imagines falling into the press and having the news printed all over himself and he wonders what they do with all the paper after it’s no longer news.

“Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof,” Joyce adds, borrowing from the Sermon on the Mount’s “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”—to which he might now add, “sufficient unto the day is the news cycle thereof.”

As I think about my World War II stories, I am reminded that after the Civil War, the poet Walt Whitman, who had spent years at the bedside of wounded and dying soldiers, wrote, “The real war will never get in the books.” Another sober warning comes from the Vietnam War combat veteran and novelist Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” in
The Things They Carried
(1990): War is so inherently brutal and stupid and wasteful that any war story with a moral is a lie. O’Brien was talking about combat, but the same can be said, one suspects, about stories focused on the attitudes and actions of “ordinary” people and top decision makers preceding, during, and after a war.

My World War II stories confirm this thesis: None offers “the real war” or anything resembling a “moral.” Like most combat vets, furthermore, I rarely say anything focused on actual combat. For example, firing mortar shells, one of my duties, unleashed thousands of shards of metal designed to rip apart the bodies of anyone within a wide radius. My favorite story about firing mortars, however, relates to something silly a training officer said.

Indeed, I tell many war stories because I find them funny; others I tell with a sense of wonderment, and still others with a feeling—firm, even if said with a smile and a laugh—that certain things are inevitable and immutable and to second-guess them would be, at best, foolish and useless. Here, in something approaching chronological order, are some of those stories.

*   *   *

A month or so after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mo Yonemura, our commanding cadet colonel in ROTC and head cheerleader for all UCLA sports, disappeared. So, too, did every other Japanese-American student on campus. One day, they were all just gone. To “training centers” or “detention camps,” some people on campus said. My friends and I thought this at most a little odd; we did not think of it or talk about it much, if at all.

*   *   *

Colin Kelly was an American pilot shot down and killed less than two weeks after Pearl Harbor. He had dropped his bombs on a Japanese battleship and then stayed with his plane, helping his crew bail out after it was hit. A popular country-blues hit song had lyrics we could all recite:

There’s a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere,

In a distant land so many miles away;

Only Uncle Sam’s great heroes get to go there,

Where I wish that I could also live some day.

I’d see Lincoln, Custer, Washington and Perry,

And Nathan Hale and Colin Kelly too.

A few months after I turned eighteen, I went down to the draft board and “volunteered for induction.” This was an army term, designed to keep some grip on assignment of manpower. In the first months after Pearl Harbor, enlistments were heavily in the navy (occasionally, marines), partly because, I thought, ships seemed a safer place to be than in ground combat. The uniforms were nicer, chances for advancement seemed brighter, and opportunity for actual combat seemed lower. But eventually, this would create a huge navy and a slimmed-down army, and the real fighting, of course, would ultimately have to be on the ground—to recover Europe from the Nazis and, it was rapidly seen, most of the Pacific islands from the Japanese.

So the War Department ended enlistments in 1942 and, in their place, offered the opportunity to volunteer for induction—thus giving the government the decision over which branch of service one would be assigned to, with the actual call-up being done by one’s draft board. I was not surprised, a few weeks later, to be ordered to report for army duty at the induction center at Fort MacArthur in Los Angeles and then swiftly assigned to infantry basic training at Camp Roberts in California, roughly midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.