I knew Mina Curtiss’s name as the collector and editor of the letters of Marcel Proust. Curtiss wrote of her experiences in tracking down Proust’s letters in her 1978 memoir, Other People’s Letters (which is, unfortunately, out of print again). But I was surprised to learn that during World War Two, she collected letters written by America G.I.s stationed all over the world and from all walks of life in the 1944 book, Letters Home.
I found the following review, by journalist and historian Gerald W. Johnson, in a small stack of brown and brittle old copies of the New York Herald Tribune weekly book review section that I bought from a dingy antique store in San Antonio back when we lived there. The review not only makes the book sound well worth rediscovering but itself captures some of things lost from that time (“It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race”–a sentence no one could write today, for good and bad reasons).
The War — by the Boys Who Are Fighting It
by Gerald W. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, June 11, 1944, p.1.An intelligent woman, an associate professor of English in Smith College, has selected out of some thousands about a hundred letters from forty-odd men in the fighting services, including the merchant marine, and presents them in a book as a picture of war from the enlisted man’s standpoint.
Incidentally, she presents a problem that floors the reviewer. It is a good book, yes. But what kind of a book? The answer is, every kind—and how are you to describe every kind of book in a single review? In some cases, several letters from one man are reproduced; but no man is given more than twenty-five pages. The result is that style, content, point of view, everything changes with each new section.” There are intensely religious sections and bawdy sections, sentimental sections and cynical sections, tender and tough; polished and semi-literate, comic and tragic. One vast field of literature, however, is missing altogether. There isn’t a phony section in the book. These men were writing, not for publication, but for the information of the people at home, and not many men write pretentiously to the crowd at home.
Not that the book is altogether a truthful record. Take, for example, the letters written to a certain Mrs. Roark, of Grover, N. C., by her six sons in the services. Every man of them swore up and down that he was in fine health and spirits with not a care in the world and Mom must stop worrying (the one who was in the Philippines died in a Japanese prison camp). It is my firm conviction that the boys were lying, but they lied like gentlemen, adding honor to the race.
It is evident, too, that the writers are more discreet than exact when they touch upon two subjects—the horrors of the battlefield and the recreations of the man-at-arms in his infrequent hours of ease. But who would have it otherwise? The people at home do not, and cannot, know at the same time either the comradeship or the fierce stimulation of an active campaign. Yet without these the perspective on both recreations and horrors must be all wrong.
The letters are all from the ranks. Letters from officers were excluded as reflecting too much the sophisticated point of view; the exceptions are a few airmen, a parachute trooper, an ensign or two and a lieutenant of ordnance, and each of these was chosen for a highly individual point of view.
I said there is not a phony letter in the collection, yet there is one composed entirely of the most stilted, threadbare clichés from all the Fourth of July orations ever made. Furthermore, it came from this country and was written by a woman to her husband. He was an oiler in the merchant marine and he had been on one of the early runs to Murmansk, before protection was well organized. That convoy lost nine out of eighteen ships. New he was off again, and his wife wrote him as if she were addressing a large and unintelligent audience. But before you finish that discharge of bombast you discover the truth–the woman was sick with fear, but she had been told she must write cheerful letters and she was going to be cheerful if it killed her. When you see that, it transmutes all the tinsel into gold.
How it feels to drive a tank for the first time; what one does standing watch on the bridge of a destroyer; how the “grease monkeys” (ground crew) sweat it out when their pilot comes back an hour late; how the Australian women stride; how it felt to be torpedoed off Algiers; how sorry the men in Italy are for those on Guadalcanal; what the soldiers think of strikers—all these are here and they are of the substance of war as it is.
The book is full of stunning remarks: “I have been in Jerusalem and was at the place where Christ was born. . .. I sure do wish I was in North Carolina where I was born.” “Heaven help them [the Japs] when all our forces are concentrated in the Pacific. They are going to need all His help and a hell of a lot more, too!” “I’m a Roosevelt man but sometimes I wonder why.” “Freedom? Maybe it’s more than freedom. I think it is for the fulfillment of all the dreams and sacrifices that we, the people make.”
If you are interested in a picture of the war as a whole, done with literary skill, by all means stick to the books of war correspondents, who are professional writers, much better at the trade than these men. But if your wish is to see the thing as it is, to comprehend the attitudes of the men who are fighting it, this will do more for you than the most brilliant productions of the professionals.
In Other People’s Letters, Curtiss recalled how Letters Home came to be:
The letters of Iowa soldiers [published in a daily column in the Des Moines Register and Tribune] stimulated me to make an anthology of enlisted men’s letters from all over the United States. (Officer’s letters predominated in similar anthologies.) I wrote a letter to two hundred and fifty newspapers asking them to publish a request to families of servicemen to send me their letters. Most of the city papers, as well as many small-town and village weeklies, cooperated. Within weeks I was swamped with contributions. In cartons, in outsized envelopes, in show boxes, or just in paper parcels came more hundreds of letters than even I with my obsessive curiosity could digest. But after I sampled one or two out of every batch it became clear that a collection of single letters would not reproduce or re-create the impact of my Iowa experience. I therefore chose thirty-six series of letters written from a man’s first day in the service to his latest and sometimes his last. Sixteen states and almost every branch of the armed services were represented.
Letters Home was published on D-Day and had a very good notice on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book section. But the book failed to attract many readers, although excrepts from it continue to be published in textbooks and anthologies. Obviously my great interest in letters intended for someone is not widely shared. Even I, when the selection was finally made, felt smothered by other people’s letters and thought that never again would I want to read any that weren’t written to me.
Only three years later, Curtiss was in Paris hunting down Proust’s unpublished letters.