Sometimes, this blog writing business is heavy lifting. I’ve been at it for almost five years now, and there are days when I sit down at the keyboard with a fully formed idea that’s going to carry me through the week’s posting but today was not one of those days.
I tried the free writing strategy I introduced to my students who complained they had nothing to write about. Sometimes, as if out of the fog, an idea takes shape and you run with it. That wasn’t the case this time around. What emerged from the process was pretty thin gruel. Staring back at me from the screen was the confirmation of my lingering fear that what I had produced in these hundreds of postings wasn’t real writing, was devoid of the depth that made me a hungry reader. It didn’t help my state of mind that I had barely gotten any response to my last few postings. I may pretend that I’m not concerned about audience but it’s not really true. I don’t want to be that proverbial tree falling in the unpopulated forest.
- Plan B on these days when the engine isn’t cranking is to take a short nap. Sometimes that fresh start and whatever creative processes are percolating during sleep are enough to overcome inertia, but that wasn’t happening either, so I resigned myself to an unproductive afternoon. I grabbed a book, feeling parasitic at the end of a day of consumption without production. I had forgotten that when Rosellen was following her most disciplined writing regimen, she always started the work day by reading someone else’s published work. That was enough to activate the juices, partly out of a desire to test her own ability “to do what they’re doing.”
The book that kickstarted me was I Will Tell No War Stories by my friend Howard Mansfield. I had brought it on our trip to New Mexico this past weekend, not fully conscious of the irony, as you’ll see, of reading this book on a plane. Reading it as an escape from work produced the opposite result because it motivated me to recommend it to you. Let’s see how good a salesman I am.
Howard is a prolific writer. He has published at least a dozen thought-provoking books. It’s hard to imagine that he’s had too many flat days like the one I’ve just described. In our summer stays in New Hampshire, Howard and I often kept the same late afternoon gym schedule which I imagined came at the close of a productive writing day for him. His books are hard to classify. Many of them grow out of the small-town New England ethos that has been his petri dish for many decades. He’s not afraid to take on big concepts and ideas like time and the meaning of home. I think of Howard as a public intellectual, willing to follow his interests wherever they lead him, hoping his readers will join him for the ride.
I Will Tell No War Stories is a departure. It is a deeply personal book, a road Howard has not taken before. While cleaning out his father’s house after his death, he found a small notebook that contained notes about the bombing missions his father flew as a gunner in a B-24 during World War Two. People who have been through unimaginably frightening and painful experiences – returning soldiers and Holocaust survivors, among others – often refuse to talk about them with others who didn’t share those experiences. The memories may be too painful to relive or the potential teller of those tales despairs of the ability of others to understand what they’ve been through. My own parents brushed off my inquiries about their lives in “the Old Country.” “It was bad. You don’t need to know about it. It’s better here.” End of conversation.
Howard’s father, Pincus, talked his way into the Army Air Force, as it was known then, in 1943, despite a deformed left hand. His childhood in the Bronx, so similar to mine in Brooklyn a few years later, did not prepare him for the horrors he was to witness from his perch behind an airborne machine gun. Nothing could have.
Howard succeeds in reconstructing, from limited data, the nightmare of facing death on a daily basis. His father had shared very little of this with him. Every bombing mission over Germany from his base in England exacted enormous casualties – whole crews lost when their planes were hit or individuals wounded and dying on planes returning home riddled with the results of intense flak attacks. The survivors were greeted with a shot of whiskey or donuts served by young ladies from English villages surrounding the base, then off again the next day for a repeat encounter with death. This was what daily life looked like to a 19-year-old soldier.
Although I’ve been to Steven Ambrose’s well-researched World War Two museum in New Orleans and read many books about the war, I’ve never felt the terror of war as intensely as I did reading Howard’s account, constructed from the scant information in his father’s journal, supported by a prodigious amount of research from military archives and from memoirs of others who had experienced the air war themselves and were willing to recount their experiences.
The other night we attended an event honoring another writer friend, Alex Kotlowitz, whose book There are No Children Here is included in the New York Times list of the best books of the 20th century. Alex tells the story of family members living in a Chicago public housing project saturated with violence and death. Alex calls himself a storyteller, not a writer, because he believes in the power of story, each unique, each intimate, to reach people emotionally.
By daring to chronicle his father’s experience Howardhas helped me understand a whole generation of my elders who returned from the war with experiences locked up inside them that affected the trajectory of their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren, though they were rarely able to share those experiences. It took a storyteller like Howard Mansfield to bring those stories to us.
