Perry Wolff

Writing a Novel and Starting Radio

Jan 192017

The Friend, A Novel by Perry Wolff

I had done a script or two for WHA, the University of Wisconsin’s radio station. Live radio production was exciting. Tape had not been invented, and everything was done to precise time. The programs had to be exactly twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds long. I liked the anxiety, the deadlines, and writing scripts for children. When I returned from Paris I looked for a job in radio. I freelanced some speculative scripts, but found nothing permanent.

Chicago wasn’t Paris, although its population was about the same. It never was a major center for writers, artists or composers. The University of Chicago is on the south side of the city, but intellectually it was a zone unto itself. It read, it criticized, it categorized; but very little wildly creative has ever come from it.

One center for serious fiction writers was Stuart Brent’s Seven Stairs Bookshop on Rush Street. The circle included Willard Motley, who had published Knock on any Door, Nelson Algren who was working on The Man with a Golden Arm, and me, rewriting The Friend. Motley and Algren didn’t get along because Willard was black and gay, but there was intellectual empathy. Their mutual subject matter was the underside and corruption of the city.

I was the odd man out, engrossed in my novel about World War II. The Friend (later re-titled Attack) is about the compromises I made to get John Robas out of combat. What I wanted it to be about were the reasons men stayed together while in combat. Discipline, to some degree, the fear of being seen as a coward if they obeyed the instinct of self-preservation and ran away, and the psychological bonding of men who saw death together.

The Friend was published in the late 40’s. The New York Times ran it as the first review in the book section. The critic said that my musings on friendship were superficial, but my descriptions of combat were excellent. On re-reading the review fifty years later, the critic was absolutely right.

The late ‘40’s were a time for Norman Mailer and James Jones who wrote many, many, many bloody words. Neither sounds well when read aloud. Terseness, either for the eye or ear, was unfashionable.

Some of the poetry I wrote during the war was published in The American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa magazine. The editor of the journal was Hiram Hayden, who was also the top editor at Crown publishers. I received a $250 advance for The Friend. Hayden, himself a well published novelist, liked my concise style. But he reported to Mat Wartels, the publisher, who was undergoing psychoanalysis. He wanted more rambling Freud than terseness. His notes were so exasperating I told Hiram to send back the manuscript and I would send back the advance. It took courage, but Crown retreated.

Crown had to budget promotional funds either for my work or Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness. Their money went to Styron’s fine novel, and I found myself remaindered in major bookstores. I saw huge piles of my book being sold for a dollar. A kind cashier walked me to the books surrounding mine, and also being sold for a dollar: The Friend lay among Aristotle’s Poetics, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Like many a graveyard, used book stores contain notables.

“It’s just business,” she said.

Nelson Algren and I played chess at Brent’s shop. We exchanged views between moves. When I told him I was learning to fly he thought it fascist. I told him he dressed like a Marxist who wanted to be a man of the people. I thought he regretted the Depression was over. I told him he ought to stop wearing jeans and a blue shirt with metal studs. Proletarian writing was finished and so was mock-proletarian costuming. Later, we became closer, particularly when he was researching The Man with a Golden Arm and I was researching my series on narcotics addiction.

Nelson had a French girl friend whose name I didn’t catch at the time. Simone de Beauvoir. He asked me if my wife spoke French because Simone wanted to shop at Marshall Field’s and needed a translator for the prices. In my post-war year in Paris I had heard of de Beauvoir and her lover Jean-Paul Sartre, but they were not celebrities on the north side of Chicago. I didn’t know then that she and Nelson had an affair that lasted over many years. Nelson was discrete. She wasn’t and wrote an account of their affair, which embarrassed him.

“For all her French elegance, it was indecent to write about me as a lover!” he told me a few years later. Communists are often sexual prudes.

Algren was deep in the criminal world. He met with whores, junkies, and went to the local prison to gossip with his contacts. He had been convicted of a crime and had served time in Texas.

Nelson lived next to a steel mill in Gary. He would drive into the city and meet me in at the University of Chicago to listen to Professor Joe Lohman, criminologist. Lohman had some unusual lecturers: criminals who had done time and who could speak about the practices of their professions. A former rum runner gave a lesson on how much it cost to buy protection from the Capone mob and Al Capone’s police before that gang was closed down.

The sessions had a mixed audience — student and spectators who often were ranking members of the Chicago’s Police Force in street clothes. Algren said there still was no difference between the criminals and the badges. The policemen were equally corrupt.

Nelson told me, “I go to the police stations and the jails. Cops and hoods trade gossip. It’s like listening to baseball players talking about who’s playing with who, and who’s been traded where.”

I thought Nelson had gone too far. But I should have listened more closely. The Chicago Police Force got me fired.

I found work at WBBM, the local CBS outlet. I was given the title of producer. I sat in a bullpen with twelve other producers. Most of our duties were to insert local commercials into network shows passing through to the Coast. The announcer arrived, I gave him the copy and he went into the studio. On my cue he read exactly twenty-seven or fifty seven seconds of inserts. One of the announcers for a second hand furrier was Mike Wallace.

Choosing a Wife

Family No Responses »

Jan 162017

Picture of Tuulikki Wolff on Perry’s desk

The Army and I divorced at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I checked into a Herald Square hotel and immediately went to a man’s store to get clothing any color but khaki. Anything but the faintest resemblance to Government Issue, GI.

Ten million other discharged soldiers had abandoned the obligatory military colors. White, blue, grey, patterned or striped had all sold out. I settled for a canary yellow. The parade had faded.

So had the music. “Hot” had become “cool” or “bop”. The jazz musicians no longer improvised on the melody, but on the underlying harmonic structure. I could follow the wind instruments, but the piano players all sounded as if they were playing Czerny finger exercises in a two octave range.

Love had also faded.

There once was a girl who had cried when I left Wisconsin for the Army. It was understood she would forever wait for me to return. Just before I left her mother had come from New York to visit her daughter, but I had only a few moments with my sweetheart forever’s Mom. Mrs. Estrow must have found me lacking in one virtue or another.

After I was in uniform Margie’s letters were slow in coming. Then she criticized my griping about being a coolie, and cited a friend who had “an interesting time” as a soldier. She hoped I would become an officer soon.

Three months after basic training I had a three day pass and came to New York. I called her and went to her apartment in the Bronx to say hello. She was still beautiful, and I hoped she would revert to that tearful girl who said goodbye. But she hadn’t. Margie Anne chided me because I knew nothing about squints and I was still an enlisted man.

She was dating an ophthalmologist who was a captain in the Medical Corps. Squints were his business. Her mother passed through the room without a word.

There was one more exchange of letters, and two years later, the second day as a canary- shirted civilian in New York, I called her. We met at the Russian Tearoom on 57^th street, and she was even more attractive. But squints had given way to inlays and bridges. Her new husband John was a high ranking dentist in that part of New Jersey. She wanted me to know that she, her husband, and her mother thanked me for my service in the military. Her husband had been deferred for unmentioned reasons.

—————————

I took a plane to Chicago and a cab to my home.

It was difficult coming back to the bedroom Leon and I had shared. Eight years had gone by. My mother and father had not used the room nor touched the closet. My old clothes no longer fit.

Abe and Bess did not know how to treat me. Our meals had always been eaten next to the stove on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Dishtowels had served as napkins. But after I came home from the Army, Bess insisted on serving me on the dining room table, previously used only for company. The napkins were paper, but they were true napkins. In my boyhood existence at 705 Cornelia, Chicago Illinois, Abe brought his bottle to the table and poured himself a shot of schnapps. It was correctly assumed I would not have a drink. Now he urged it. “You must be having a tough time being home.”

For Abe to talk about any emotional state was unusual.

What was not unusual was for him to buy me clothing. The garment district in Chicago was much smaller than New York, but my father knew the textile merchants on Jackson Boulevard. Before the suit was made, the ritual was to fold out several lengths of excellent wool from a bolt of cloth, and then bring it to the face and wipe it, as if it were a large towel or fur. Sensuality ruled. The tailoring was secondary. Hand-made button holes, of course.

“Nobody uses the lower button on a double breasted suit. That’s five years back,” said Leon, who had written How a Gentleman Dresses Properly for a clothing company.

My parents were happy to lend me the car whenever I dated. The first date was June Provus. It ended explosively in the back seat of the car, just after the first dinner. After her detonation she told me she had to go home because the baby sitter left at nine o’clock. She said nothing about a husband. It was complicated, even scary. I never saw her again.

At college my thesis was to have been a novel, Lake Shore Drive. The central theme was the difference in culture between those who lived on that famous street, and those of us who did not have a view of Lake Michigan. For those of us who lived even west of Broadway (let alone west of Pine Grove) Lake Shore was our goal and our turf. I had estimated one needed as much as $7,500 a year to live in such luxury.

The war separated friends. My closest buddy, Hy Krauss, had not served. He was now a partner in a law firm headed by his father-in-law. His wife, Fran, was a brilliant, beautiful woman who vowed to find her husband’s best friend a woman even better than she.

She did. Janie Rosenquist was prettier than Fran, and lived in a penthouse duplex at 3800 Lake Shore Drive. We double-dated a few times with Hy and Fran. There was some hand holding at the movies, and one long wet goodnight kiss. She liked me and invited the three of us to dinner, served by a maid.

Her father was the top client at the law firm where Hy worked. Mr. Rosenquist wore a yarmulke. Janie held strong political views and was voluble about Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Missouri, and angry with the Jewish dissidents who bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. I had noted her bosom was small, but hard, and she had long, lean legs.

At first I didn’t note what Mr. and Mrs. Rosenquist thought about me, but they were very orthodox Jews. There were prayers before dinner in Hebrew, and Judaica surrounded us. They were too rich and too Jewish. I came from west of Broadway. And I didn’t want to be proselytized.

That’s one of the things I admire about Judaism. Proselytizing is prohibited. There are no Jewish missionaries. I was a non-observant Jew but after refusing to be taken prisoner because of the “H” on my dog tag, and after the concentration camp at Ahlem, I knew I was a Jew. If other people thought I was a Jew, I was one. Or to misquote Descartes, “Vous pensez, donc je suis.”

When I called Mr. Rosenquist “mister”, he said, “Call me Bernard.” Mrs. Rosenquist wanted to be “Esther”. The glass curtain was invisible.

In the military there was an obvious brass curtain. Insignia of rank drew a line between enlisted men and officers. You saw it, you respected it, you saluted; not the person, but the rank. The brass curtain was clear.

In America, everybody is informal – but there are glass curtains. But you can get knocked just as flat on your ass by glass as by a brass or iron. I wasn’t going to gain entry into that orthodoxy at 3800 Lake Shore Drive, unless I became a different person and I didn’t want to become what would be suitable for their daughter.

False familiarity is a perpetual American tragedy.

I married a woman who shocked Hy, Fran and Janie.

She was a Finnish immigrant from a Finnish ghetto-community in a Massachusetts factory town. Shy, because English was not her first language. Shy because one had to be a Finn to pronounce correctly Irja Tuulikki Souminen. Mocked by the American children she played with. Quiet, reticent, withdrawn—except when there was a spotlight.

The muses are named for the creators, not the critics. She studied dancing with Balanchine’s School of the American Ballet where Mr. Ballanchine looked at her very carefully, as had Martha Graham at Bennington College, where she had a scholarship. After we married, her acting astonished Tennessee Williams and Lee Strasberg.

When our son arrived she became a painter. Her works were exhibited, well reviewed, and sold in Paris and New York.

The Finns have a word: sisu. It translates to strong will, guts, She was both diffident and determined. Wives must cook well. She couldn’t cook. Two days after we were married she went back to Massachusetts to take lessons from her mother.

I don’t remember the romantic side of our courtship. I do remember the first kiss, and the only thing I will write about it is that it was it was tender and her fine blonde hair tickled my ear. You have read and seen so many tales of love, lust, passion and companionship that I need only tell you we experienced them all. She will always be my wife, my love, and my best friend.

I don’t care that I lost Hy, Fran, and Jamie.

Gertrude Stein

Postwar 1 Response »

Jan 132017

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

I paid little attention to my cinema studies. The course had been put together, logically, for the French. The use of a French built camera we would never use again, French editing equipment we would never handle, and laboratories with indecipherable developing fluids.

The course including screenings of the great films the French had made during the Occupation—but they hadn’t gotten around to sub-titles. We misunderstood Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, and didn’t get a coherent sentence of Jean Gabin’s performance in Quai des Brumes — “I think that means Pier of Shadows,” someone said. Our translators would shout lines of explanation above the dialog, but their English was often so heavily accented that it added to the confusion.

I had been designated the writer of a film which would have neither dialog nor sound. It was to be called The Sergeant Sees the City, translated as Le Sergent Voit Une Ville. Someone had persuaded Gertrude Stein to sit for our cameras and be seen.

In 1943 when I left Madison, Wisconsin for the Army, I left some wonderful professors. Helen C. White was my undergraduate composition teacher. She was one of the first women to head a large English department in a major university.

I knew nothing about her background, but a course she gave in contemporary poetry became useful to me in combat. What Professor White taught me was that speed-reading might be a way through a history course, but it was no way to read good verse. She suggested I memorize parts of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I did. She asked me to read A.E. Houseman aloud to understand the rhythms of Greek poetry. (The rhythms of rap are derived from Sophocles and Aeschylus.) So I memorized most of A Shropshire Lad. Unfashionable, but unforgettable.

She later wrote that among her students she admired the poems I wrote, and those of my classmate, Harold Moss who later became the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Between the two wars the greatest influence on me was probably Ernest Hemingway. His excessive masculinity seemingly affronted Professor White, but she convinced me his short stories were far better than his novels. She made a comment, curious at the time, “He writes tersely, but he is difficult to read aloud.”

One of the sights of Paris was Gertrude Stein’s rue Christine apartment.

We set up lights, ran cables to a noisy generator, and loaded two cameras. She sat below the famous portrait Picasso had done for her.

Side note: I later did a film for PBS on the artist and I learned he had painted her stone face from archaic Iberian sculpture. Her hands were squarely on her knees, copied from Ingres’ portrait of a successful and fully dressed banker – seated on his toilet. Picasso caught her aggressiveness in 1907. As a college girl she was a boxer who hired a male welterweight with whom she sparred.)

At the time she said, “I don’t look like that.”

Picasso answered, “You will.”

(She did.)

In 1945, a year before she died, the small woman seated below the big portrait was pleased by the attention, but bewildered by the crew and the equipment.

She asked, “Who is the writer?”

I was pushed forward. She scared me.

“What have you written?”

“Sonnets.”

“Why, with all the terrible things you did and saw, would you use so constricting a form?” I think that’s what she said.

During combat there hadn’t been anything to write on except the toilet paper I carried inside my helmet liner. I had found I could memorize one hundred and forty syllables in my head, so I composed sonnets until I could write them down. That’s what I told her.

“Recite one.”

I did.

“Very good”. That’s what Gertrude Stein said to me. I remember her words very clearly. “Very good.”

When the crew had finished, she asked me to come back the next day and talk about writing. She wanted to talk about her writing, not mine. I knew she and Ernest Hemingway had been friends, and then enemies, so I did not want to talk about my prose style.

But she brought him up. “Hemingway may be succinct, but you can’t read him aloud.”

For her there were two kinds of writing: words for the eye, words for the ear. “A rose is a rose is a rose” when read for the eye is not much. But read aloud with any emphatic feeling–sadness, or joy–a rose is a rose is a rose– can be a very simple declaration of an emotion. Incantation is the beginning of poetry.

I think—(it has been so many years)—she was then defending her essay “Narration”. Read for the eye, it is a jumble. Read aloud for the ear it makes good sense. She read to me for some ten minutes, I think.

But what I recollect clearly:

“I like your poem very much,” Miss Stein said to me

She even recited the first two lines from memory:

Cannoneer, rifleman, mortarman dead

What are the thoughts you retain in your head?

“Very good” she said again.

Then her companion, Alice Toklas entered with coffee. As others have reported, Alice didn’t like men around the house. It was awkward, and I left. We were two generations, far apart. I was anxious to get back to bed with Tina, but I went back to the brothel-cum-barracks and read everything aloud. I made changes.

I wrote a sonnet about being bored in Paris:

Ennui

In the morning, in the morning,

When the whores are off the streets.

From the window I am watching

Drudges changing last night’s sheets.

We have talked of brave tomorrows,

Crosby leading to the Host,

Ellington for true love’s sorrows,

While we’ve smeared the buttered toast

Before our breakfast—make the choice—

Society demands our voice.

Let us spin the five franc coin

To see which dogma we shall join:

Heads is Marx and tails is Freud,

The milled edge is the Hebrew’s void.

I wrote no more poetry. The sonnets I had tucked away in my helmet liner were typed when I had the boring job of being in charge of quarters of a hotel that had mirrors on the ceilings over the beds.

Sometime in the middle of my Paris stay I woke up in the hospital, Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. I was told I had not been myself for a week, and had been put on sedatives. It was a case of what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, then called battle fatigue. I was asked if I felt any pain. My right side ached. Someone I never saw diagnosed me with pleurisy and dismissed me. Maybe the clerk was kind. Psychological disorders were a sign of weakness and it might look bad on my service record.

For many years afterwards I tried to remember every place I had slept in Europe. First the tents in Normandy, then the bedrolls in an abandoned kitchen in Prummern, then the foxholes in Germany, the garage in Marche Belgium … but as the years passed I could no longer remember.

I know my mind is scarred, but the bleeding has long stopped.

Image

Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/47.106, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=705156

Liberation

Postwar No Responses »

Jan 122017

Palais Garnier / Opéra de Paris Interior. Postcard from 1909

Now that I had money, I bought a four-seat loge at the Opéra. I asked Captain Pinckney and his Ani to the ballet as my guests. There were three in the box the first two visits, but at the third ballet, there was Tina Soubiran who worked with Ani. She was alone because her boyfriend was a French Colonel parachutist in Indo-China.

I found her very,very,very pretty.

Charles said “She needs some companionship. And she wants to improve her English”

”So do I. My French needs work.”

“The rest is up to you, soldier.”

In deference to the French effort in Southeast Asia, at first I made no moves towards Tina. Two dinners were followed by nods and verbal good nights at her Métro stop.

Because of my manners Tina invited me to see a stage version in French of “Raffles.” I didn’t understand the play at all but I picked up an irregular verb or two, and that the French word “con” was not as pejorative as it is in English. I invited her to see a sub-titled film at a local cinema down the block from my hotel. She told me that it was Picasso’s favorite Paris movie house.

“Howdee Pard!” she said after the movie. “That’s how Pablo greets his friends.”

I asked her why she was so amenable. Between fractured French and eccentric English, I think this was what she said:

“You are teaching me English. And my French girl friends are amused that I am with an American enlisted man. There are so many of you. It is like having a pet gorilla as an escort.”

“Gorilla?”

“Gorille.”

She had gone too far and she knew it.

She said something like this, in a longer version, but this was the exciting essence.

“Two years is a long time to wait for my Colonel. I am lonely. Perhaps you and I should know each better.”

Unlike Andrée, Tina was neither in conflict with Catholicism nor Jean Paul Sartre. We got to know each other much better that night, and the next day, and the night following.

This time it was I who went too far, too quickly. And I knew it.

As an older woman, she rebuked me tactfully, diplomatically.

“Now that we are —as you Americans put it—-seeing a lot of each other—have you noticed that I eat sugar only at night, at dessert?

“You Americans have sugar with your coffee in the morning, sweet drinks with your lunch, a Coca Cola in the afternoon, cranberries with your fowl, and dessert at night. You eat too much and you eat took quickly.

“Slowly, dessert should be eaten slowly. I prefer my treats slower.”

Since then I have taken French diplomacy more seriously.

Captain Pinckney translated their fashion for me. Both women had let their hair fall loosely. For years the French women had piled their hair on the top of their heads. It was a chic sign of resistance. But who had resisted, and who had not?

Ani told me a month later that Tina’s Colonel had returned from Cambodia. She also told me that Tina thought I was nice and wished me good luck.

There were only three of us in the loge from then on.

Image

Auditorium. Postcard from 1909: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_Garnier

Too Many Americans in Paris!

Postwar No Responses »

Jan 032017

April 13, 1946: Closing the Sphinx

The Army maintained our hotel-cum-brothel as a military post. The required Charge-of-Quarters (CQ), a non-commissioned officer, was on duty during regular hours. The former pleasure palace had a built in security system: a button and a two-way speaker from the street to the registration desk where the CQ sat. The doorbell or sonnette would ring at almost any time. A former customer would announce:

“Marie, Je arrive pour Marie.”

“Speak English!”

“Marie! Marie, S’appele Marie.”

“Marie NEPAL AH, goddammit!”

The young chickens (poulettes, or old hens, poules) that had used the hotel now had to make other arrangements. They hung out below. In time one approached me.

“Come with me, Cheri.”

“I don’t have any money.”

It was a cold night.

A pause. “Pas pour l’argent. Pour le chauffage central.” (Not for money, for central heating.)

The CQs often knew when the leave trains arrived at the central stations, and we’d pass on schedules of new arrivals. The chicks and hens clucked gratefully.

One of the great American Army tourist attractions (for officers only, but we knew the guides) was Edward VII’s Paris whorehouse, The Sphinx. The King of England spoke French well and had a large potbelly. To hide his paunch the tailors invented the double-breasted suit. Hung from the ceiling of a bedroom in The Sphinx was a leather harness with a belt to uplift the Royal Roundness in spirited times. I was told the brothel was temporarily closed to tourists to avoid embarrassing the English.

Ten months after Paris was liberated the cheering had stopped and a sullen tolerance was noticeable. Yet there were exceptions.

I dined with an elderly gentleman who spoke some English and who had a delightful sense of humor. His daughter, a translator for our group, had become engaged to a soldier.

She was to live in New York State. He had heard only the name of the city.

He asked how to spell Poughkeepsie and I wrote out the letters.

“P-O-U-G-H pronounced Poe, like your poet.”

“Yes. “

But there is also a O-U-G-H in the word ‘enough’, n’est ce pas?” Or is it pronounced “enow?”

“Well, no. It’s enough.”

“And then there’s thrO-U-G-H” Pronounced throw, like a baseball is thrown?”

“Well no.”

He smiled. “To get to Puffkeepsee take a threw train early enow. And you Americans think our language is difficult.”

He became my favorite Frenchman.

I’d never get the language. I’d be at best an observer, a long-term tourist.

French society is always difficult to penetrate, and only a privileged few enlisted Yanks were able to infiltrate the surface.

One was Sergeant Carl Hollander whose French family had invented a method of preserving furs. I walked with him to his dinner on the Avenue Foch. The building was what the French call grand standing, and it means in French money terms exactly what it means in American sports. Hollander went upstairs to meet them and left me on the curb. I decided to enter France without the language passport. I didn’t need verbs and nouns to go to the ballet, the concerts, and the art museums. I had the francs.

The little French music I knew came from 78rpm records, but here symphony concerts were heard live. No flop-flop between discs. American Jews admired Gershwin, but Ravel had taught him orchestration. So I searched out Ravel, and found him and Debussy and Gounod and Chabrier and Saint Saëns — French music that would stay with me the rest of my life.

The French Ballet taught me to look at more than the ballerina’s crotch and breasts. The athleticism of the males was apparent, but what grew slowly on me was the technique of the ballerinas. Much later, when I married a dancer, I learned the syntax of the formal ballet, and that has made me a balletomaniac, as my son calls us.

Image

The Sphinx, 13 avril 1946 : fermeture définitive des maisons closes

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The First Time I saw Paris

Postwar No Responses »

Dec 122016

Paris Opera in Paris, France

Three months after combat ended I was transferred to Paris to study cinema at Les Hautes Etudes Cinematographique. I spoke little French and had no interest in making motion pictures. I had read the literature prevalent between two wars: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, dos Passos; the whole Grand Tour of disillusionment. Paris was the center of my heroes’ wounded world, and I was to live there for a few months.

In 1945 I would see what my gods had seen in 1925.

I arrived in Paris by rail from Karlsruhe, a ruined German town.

Karlsruhe stank.

The city had been destroyed by Allied area bombardment. Because it was just over the French border it had no anti-aircraft defenses. Those of our bombers who could not reach their assigned targets would unload on Karlsruhe before returning to England. It reeked because so many humans had decomposed under the wreckage.

Karlsruhe-Paris was an overnight train ride. We arrived at the Gare du Nord (North Station) in a cloud of steam and confusion and were loaded into small Army trucks.

The first time I saw Paris it was a city like none I had seen in a year. Intact. The roofs were on the buildings. No wreckage in the streets. Windows, shops — and best of all, out of an avenue, a girl on a bicycle suddenly swung behind our truck. Her skirt billowed to her shoulders, her undergarments were visible, and her good bare legs cycled away. As quickly as she arrived, she turned into a side street.

We arrived at our hotel. The non-com in charge of quarters said “You‘re three days early. Here are the keys to your rooms. Check in every now and then.”

I walked the streets of Paris. These were the cafes and avenues I had read about. The clichéd landmarks were fresh for a man in his early twenties. The stereotypes came from two dimensional photographs. Paris was three dimensions plus smells, shadows, sound, and living people. I went into the Cathedral of Notre Dame and was awed. I stood under the Eiffel Tower and was bewildered. I crossed the Seine at three different bridges, right bank to left bank and back twice more.

Sometimes trite is right.

Paris is the most beautiful city in the world for strolling on foot.

On the Boulevard Haussman I saw a girl who looked lovelier at each approaching step. I stared. The sight of her injected me with an overdose of testosterone, a heave of macho, a surge of Type A manliness. My lust must have had a vocal grunt element, or more probably my ogling and body language menaced her. She disappeared into a large door at the back of a large building.

It was the Opéra. I went to the front and bought a ticket. I saw my first ballet in July of 1945. My seat was way up, in Paradise. Since I knew so little French I became a three-a-week balletomane. Coincidentally, the captain in charge of our billet had been a dancer, although it took him time to admit it. In that era all male dancers were presumed homosexual. Captain Charles Pinckney was not.

He was an elegant Bostonian with a graceful redheaded French mistress, an older lady probably in her thirties. Ani worked for Guerlain, and one day the captain took our cinema class to learn about the superiority of French fragrances. It was a promotion of course, but there was Pinckney’s girl demonstrating the perfume Chypre. She taught us how ladies put it behind their ears, and then demonstrated that drops should be put on the upper thigh, so that when a seated woman’s legs were crossed the perfume would be warmed and the scent would arise from her skirt when she rose. The skirts weren’t short in 1945.

We saw the riches of Paris. The trouble was, we couldn’t afford the city. Soldiers were paid in Army coupons, rather than French francs. The coupons were worth two francs each. On the black market the dollar was worth many times more. So we ate in the mess halls instead of the restaurants and bought next to nothing.

One day near the end of a month, the American military decided to pay us in dollars. We were asked to turn in the coupons, and we’d receive our pay translated into French francs. We were all broke and had little scrip, so somehow, a swindle took place. The finance clerk paid us at two francs to the dollar as if we had deposited our full pay. He pocketed the rest. On the same day the clerk got orders to go back to the States. He was stuck with two bags filled with ten thousand franc notes in numerical order. Home was more important than Frog francs. He had to get rid of the pay sacks.

He gave one to me. He asked me not to buy anything that could be traced to him. I was to take the large bills and spend them out of numerical order. I was not to buy property, nor use them for large black market purposes, and I was never to mention his name.

I was probably the richest corporal in Paris. I bought a whole box for myself at the ballet. I could have bought a building and stayed in France for years.

One of the translators in the class was Andrée Zaigue. Her English was excellent. She lived near the top of the hill of Montmarte. I asked her to dinner several times at a restaurant near her home. The last meeting went very late. The lights of the City of Light were about to go out.

Electricity was rationed during the winter of 1945. The subway closed down at midnight. It was a long way from the restaurant to my hotel, and I finally had the courage to ask her if I could stay at her home. I knew she liked me. Courtship must be culminated.

She agreed. I was a wonderful man. But I had to understand that while she was a disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre and an existentialist, she was also a fervent Catholic. It was the contradiction in herself that she was trying to work out, with much joy and some pain. She was sorry, cher Perry. Perhaps after she had applied logic to her emotions? Not tonight, mon ami.

I left hurriedly. The blackout was to begin and the metro was about to stop.

I started down the hill. I was lost. I met an older woman and asked her in French where I could find the subway station.

“Madame, je suis perdu. S’il vous plait, dans quel rue est le metro?”

Her response, very slowly, “Messieur, est-ce-que vous parlez francais?”

It was my American accent.

The hardest word in French for an American is rue. That “r” is in the back of the throat where English never visits. In Yiddish there is Chaim, in Spanish Xavier, In American there is no such sound, unless the throat is cleared.

But bad as the “R” is, the ue in rue is worse. From the back of the throat to forward of the lips was too long a journey for me.

Worse– perdu had that r and that French u again. It came out as in Bloomington Indiana’s University of Purdue.

All i’s in French are pronounced as eel, the fish, not ill, the sickness. And all those American flat A’s should have been Ah’s as in “Ah-hah, villain!”

No wonder she asked me if I spoke French.

She also said something I heard only phonetically.

“Et quand est-ce que les Américains vont rentrer chez eux?”

She was politely asking when we would leave. But later on the walls: “Yankee go home.”

The electricity was out, but there was a full moon. I walked all the way downhill in moonlight. Here and there, gas lamps, lanterns, and candles.

I was in a time warp. The city was no longer 1925. It was Paris before electricity. Not the Paris of the between-the-wars gods I knew — Hemingway and dos Passos — but of the immortals sixty years before them. La Belle Époque about 1880.

In art, the early impressionists, Renoir and Manet; and van Gogh who hated electric lights. In music, Ravel, Gounod, Chabrier, Saint-Saens. In literature, Zola, Proust, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert.

When I finally got to the bottom of the hill I had pledged myself to this exasperating, civilizing country.

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Endings

World War II No Responses »

Dec 062016

Soldiers of the 69th Infantry Division 273rd Infantry Regiment met soldiers from the Soviet 58th Guards Division on April 25, 1945 in the vicinity of Torgau, Germany on the Elbe River.

One May night, the Third Battalion heard military movement on the other side of the Elbe. Some foolish American officer ordered random fire over the river. He was foolish because our reconnaissance parties and the Soviets had met several times. We knew they were on their side of the river, and they knew we were on ours. They returned fire and a Russian mortar shell burst fifty feet or so to my left, but nobody was hurt.

Then silence.

Reason prevailed over procedure. It could have been an international incident.

The Russians had brought tanks to the edge of the Elbe. They had advanced to the agreed upon line of demarcation between there Army and ours. We had been trigger happy but our official report (later dictated to me and refused by me) would read that we had run into a German unit and fired on it to defend ourselves. That action is still in the official Army History. Unhappily for historians, happily for me.

The next morning we saw their soldiers on the far bank. Our officers fueled the barges and went to meet their counterparts.

The first contact had been made a few days earlier at Torgau, up river. Both sides wasted a day getting their publicity machine ready. The Torgau meeting was re-staged for reporters and cameramen and became a stock footage standard for films on World War II.

GI Joe’s (we hated the term) and Russian Ivan’s meeting, shaking hands. Cut to a Soviet accordion player. Pan to Russians dancing on their heels, cut to Allies arm in arm. Smiles, many smiles to be used as inter-cuts. A Russian officer, a two star American general who had probably come from ten miles back.

No one will ever believe it could be otherwise. Documentaries can’t lie.

At our quieter meeting, further north, each side was curious, but indifferent.

A day or two later some fifteen of us were detached and trucked back to Hanover. We were told our mission was to guard a castle, Schloss Hanover.

“Against whom are we guarding, sir?”

“The Germans. The Germans loot too. This place is full of valuables.”

We moved into the guardhouse. We couldn’t wear shoes. The beautiful hardwood floors of the castle were not to be marred. Felt slippers were obligatory for all, including visitors. They came, mostly at night—officers with flashlights whose indifferently patterned beams reorganized grandiose paintings by obscure artists.

The Hanoverian Kings of England came from here. Indeed, the British relieved us several days later. Their officers arrived in an enormous Bentley.

We were moved south to the Neckar Valley, just outside Heidelberg. We had nothing to do.

There was talk that we would be shipped to the States, and then to Japan.

We lived among the Germans in German houses. A directive from the war department confused us. The policy was “non-fraternization.” Soldiers who fraternized with the Germans would be fined $75.

There was a quick answer “Fucking is not fraternizing!”

I was asked to use my Yiddish again. “How do you ask them out?” “Like, for a walk?”

“Say, ‘Whoa len sea spot sear en gay en.’”

I never asked it myself. After Ahlem Hanover and for the next decade I wanted nothing to do with them, and I bought nothing of German manufacture.

American capitalism appeared before American government arrived. The supply section liberated some red, white, and black cloth and recruited local women to make banners. The ladies were paid in soap, coffee and C rations. The flags were sold to the rear-echelon personnel.

In a local foundry a great circular seal was struck. In the center, the American eagle, and around it the text: THIS SEAL IS TO SATISFY GERMAN DESIRE FOR OFFICIALDOM. The flag ladies were given stamped documents, signed by a forged Franklin Roosevelt signature.

An engineering friend and I built a radio station, WCIR, for W Cowhide Infantry Regiment, our unofficial designation. Unfortunately, we had chosen the same frequency the British were using and we were shut down as soon as military government arrived.

I wrote and narrated a broadcast in the style of Norman Corwin—something that sounded like poetry but wasn’t. I remember the first two lines:

“You are in a foxhole north of Geilinkirchen

Between rain and winter…”

Later it reminded me of Robert Frost’s comment on Carl Sandburg’s free verse.

“It’s like playing tennis without a net.”

The commander of our regiment, Colonel Roy, was a stranger to me. I never saw him during the two years I served under him. The Colonel had an idea: he wanted a souvenir book published on the actions of his unit. He passed his notion to Captain Richard who told me I was to assemble all my papers and write a book about our valor. Captain Frank Roles accompanied him.

“We have chosen someone to do the maps. Captain Roles and I have gone to the biggest publishing house in Mannheim. They will do the printing. Captain Roles will go to Paris to examine the Signal Corps archives for photos. You will write the text. Clear, Wolff?”

“Sir, the pictures will be related to the text. I’d like to go to Paris with the Captain.”

“So would I, soldier. That’s all.”

Kalbfleish and Roles were both West Pointers. Our civilian officers often referred to regular army men as WPPS, the West Point Protective Society. As an infantry major, Roles had been drunk at the first American encounter with the enemy, the 1943 battle at Kasserine Pass in North Africa. By General Patton’s orders he had been stripped of his rank and given a dishonorable discharge. He re-enlisted as a private in the Army, requesting infantry duty. Whether it was his bravery, or the influence of the WPPS he got a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant, then a First Lieutenant, and then a Captain. As I was to learn, he had his eye on the gold oak leaf worn by Majors.

The manuscript was prepared from the notes I had gathered and from accounts sent in by each company in the Regiment. I was to take credit as the author, but that error on the banks of the Elbe suddenly became crucial to my future. I wrote that we had fired on the Soviets by mistake.

They wanted no mistakes.

Kalbfleish asked me to change it. He couldn’t order me to write a lie, but that is what he wanted. I said no. We had already disagreed. I had insisted on a listing of the men of the 334^th Regiment who had been killed. An honor role. They disagreed, but I slipped the record in anyway.

Suddenly the obscure writing job assigned to me became of great importance. It was always expected to be a commissioned officer’s duty, as required by Army Regulations. My part-time job as a corporal writing military reports was taken over by Captain Frank Roles, certain to be Major Frank Roles again, particularly at pension time. I was to be his aide, unless I wanted reassignment.

Reassignment meant I was to be transferred out—to Paris.

The book was published as Fortune Favored the Brave and if you ever read it, you will see that our Third Battalion fired on GERMAN, not Russian targets.*

You will also see Colonel Roy looking fearlessly in the future—and showing a trim figure. You will probably not read the names of the dead, but their families will. No money was paid to the Mannheimer Großdruckerie. Butter, K rations and fuel were bartered for the printing. I received several copies once I was in Paris. I was credited as the author. I should have taken my name off the book.

* See footnote under Waiting for the Russians

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The American-Soviet Linkup at Torgau, Germany on the Elbe River, http://www.69th-infantry-division.com/eastwest/eastwest.html

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Waiting for the Russians

World War II 1 Response »

Nov 172016

Germans rowing the Elbe River to surrender to the 335th Regiment, 84th Division

In early April 1945 we had not yet met the Russians, but they frightened us. The battalion stopped at the Elbe River, some fifty miles northwest of Berlin. We dug in and waited.

The waters of the Elbe were cold. German soldiers and civilians came from the east, stripped off their clothes and swam to our side of the river to avoid the Soviets. Our orders were not to shoot the swimmers.

At first, just a trickle, and some drownings. The bodies floated down the river, towards the Baltic.

We found some motorized barges and used them to cross the river and pick up those who wanted to surrender. The German soldiers left their weapons behind or threw them into the river. I learned that the prize loot for the Russian soldiers was a watch. When the Germans embarked they handed their watches to the Army crew as carfare.

“Heir ist mein ühr!” Here’s my watch!

Whole German divisions surrendered. When our barges ran out of diesel fuel in our sector, the German vehicles supplied us. We ferried only German army personnel. The civilians were not permitted to cross. A hospital on barges floated from Berlin by canal and passed by our part of the Elbe waterfront. We did not fire.

The German panic was contagious; something powerful and dangerous was coming from the East. I felt the fear, for no reason except that I was surrounded by hundreds of the fearful. The menace was epidemic and contagious.

American cab-over-engine trucks picked up the prisoners and brought them to a railhead where they were put on trains and sent to prisoner of war compounds.

The deal was in. We’d sit on one side of the river, the Russians on the other. The two allies would not blunder into each other. The agreement was that the Americans and British would not cross the Elbe. That way the danger of two friendly armies firing at each other would be averted.

According to official accounts we did not cross the river. But we did.

I know we violated the agreement, because I was on the east side, the wrong side of the Elbe, unloading two jeeps that had been ferried across. They went off and left me on the bank. I missed the boat and had to wait.

Suddenly a German arrived on a horse. A beautiful, shiny, black horse, and a rider in a clean black uniform. A mounted enemy is a fearsome sight, particularly when his holster is open and his hand is on his pistol. I aimed my gun at him.

Either could have shot the other.

“Hände hoch,” I said. Hands up!

“Warum?” Why? (He was so much more elegant than I.)

“Das Krieg ist Ende.” Because the war is over.

“Nicht für mich. Noch nicht.” Not for me. Not quite yet.

I could have shot him with my grease gun. I couldn’t shoot. I knew I had killed others, but the war was over for me. I might also kill that beautiful black mount.

He turned the horse’s head with the reins. He could have shot me because I had hesitated. But he galloped away like a lancer without a spear.

I went back to the ferry, trembling.

I have never understood why neither used his weapon.

Footnote

At 2100 14 April, two weeks after crossing the Rhine, the Regiment was deployed near the banks of the Elbe River. We had made our last advance in the European Theatre.

Generally, the Elbe front was quiet. The Germans attempted one counter-attack in the Third Battalion area but it was stamped down with artillery fire. We were dug in on the west side of the river. Our patrols showed that the Germans were along the levee on the east side of the river. We maintained outposts, laid trip flares and conducted all defensive measures. Behind us were few Allied troops. Our supply columns were attacked by a few German units which were later bottled in the Harz Mountains. A fully loaded mail truck was lost.

The Russian offense near Berlin, only 50 miles away, sent a backwash of refugees to the German side of the Elbe. A few civilians and soldiers came across the river to us, seared, they said, by the hot breath of the Russians. We knew it would not be long before we met the Soviet forces.

The prisoners came across in increasing numbers. A hospital on barges floated from Berlin by canal and tied at a wharf in the Third Battalion area. At first we took all who wanted to come across, but soon the far bank of the river was filled with frightened Germans. We could not permit civilians to cross, nor had we facilities for the wounded. Thousands of able-bodied German soldiers wanted to surrender. Whole German divisions marched to the river bank and obediently waited for boats to transport them. At times the Regimental PW cages held prisoners numbering three times the strength of the Regiment. When we ran short of diesel fuel for the barges, the Germans drained the vehicles with which they had driven to the bank. Hysterical men and women stripped to swim the Elbe. Nazi propaganda had invented a ridiculous rumor that the British and Americans had declared war on Russia. Many asked if they would have to continue fighting the Soviets.

Fortune Favored the Brave, A History of the 334th Infantry 84th Division, by Cpl. Perry S. Wolff, Mannheim Press, 1945:

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Germans rowing the Elbe River to surrender to the the 335th Reg, 84th Division, twitter.com/84Railsplitters.

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Der Stürmer

World War II No Responses »

Sep 132016

dersturmer In April 1945 I used the M3 twice in a single day.

We had crossed the Rhine and come to an ugly town, Bad Ems, on the Ems River. The city center was an oblong square surrounded by four story apartment buildings. In the plaza was a bulletin board, and tacked under the glass a newspaper with two large photographs on page one. The journal was Der Stürmer published (I learned later) by one Julius Streicher. The two photographs were of the same crying young man. I thought the captioned headline read: “How to know a Jew, if you see one.” His nose looked like my father’s.

His tears were to be education for the citizens of Bad Ems.

The butt of my M3 was steel. I smashed the glass and tore up the newspaper. The bulletin board was too sturdy to be knocked down. I went to the center of the plaza and shot a burst, spraying the buildings like a garden hose. No one appeared at the windows, no voice was raised. I had chipped some plaster, and I felt no better.

A few hours later it was fortunate that I had a weapon that did not require my eyes for aiming. I stepped around a corner, as did a German soldier.

One of the troubles with the M3 was that the user had to go across the grease gun with his left hand and throw open the safety hatch. Unless the hatch was open, the gun could not operate. The German soldier’s weapon was not so encumbered. I think his safety was in the trigger housing. He only had to flick his finger forward, release the safety and then pull the trigger. That’s what he did. He missed me.

I was slower, but I got off some .45 caliber rounds without aiming. A bullet hit him in the head. He fell, squirming. I watched him writhe but left before he stopped moving.

It may have been the only time I saw somebody I shot.

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Obligations

World War II No Responses »

Sep 052016

The men who died in Perry Wolff’s company.

They were late picking me up from Holland. It was a week before I joined the rearguard in Homburg, a small town on the west bank of the Rhine. Although there had not been much physical damage, we weren’t certain the enemy hadn’t left snipers somewhere. Desultory fire continued until the tanks arrived.

I never liked tanks. Armor was no protection for the foot soldier. Tanks were so large as to attract artillery fire, and so noisy that stealth was impossible. Their armor was so easily penetrated that the vehicles often caught fire and exploded. G.I.s called them Ronsons after the cigarette lighters. They did have one virtue: the back end was always hot, and the tankers carried their Jerry Cans of hot water on the rear of the vehicle. Water hot enough for powdered coffee. In the attack phase, hot food was rare.

We found the means to heat our cold canned rations in the local bank. The People’s Bank of Homburg was an ancient structure with a metal door. We invented a danger. Perhaps there was a sniper behind the door who had to be flushed out. I think it was a bazooka shell that shot the safe open, but in any case, there was no sniper. Just safety deposit boxes, blown open. Paper was strewn everywhere. The documents were pushed into a mound and a fire was lit to warm our C rations.

I don’t know what went up in that smoke. Wills and deeds, I suppose. I saw a lot of paper money. It never occurred to us Nazi currency might have residual value. There were hooked crosses on each bill and we were here to destroy the Nazis, and it was assumed, their currency.

I once told this story to the former head of Rockefeller University. He said we should have been put in prison, and I said he should have been put in the combat infantry. We have never since spoken.

At the time, I didn’t mind being in reserve. Being out of combat was safe. There has been a lot of noble nonsense written about “We few, we band of brothers.” Henry the Fifth was a good propagandist. World War II was not the Battle of Agincourt.

At first we stayed together because that is how we had been trained. To respect yourself meant you had to stay with the men you knew. To desert would be cowardly, and your soldier colleagues would know. But to stay had nothing to do with brotherhood. At this time almost six out of ten of the original cadre had been killed, wounded, or missing.

Many were replacements and many of the replacements would be replaced. We didn’t want to know their names. If we knew them, mourning might be required. It might have been a good administrative idea to replace a soldier with another soldier but it destroyed the moral bond between men who knew each other.

Before the replacements arrived, we stayed together because if we were rational and ran away from the enemy we would have shown cowardice to the men who fought and trained with us. A soldier might not like the individuals in his unit, but the unit had its own morality.

After the nameless replacements came, nobody was my brother. Desertions mounted. It was easier to run away. The official histories are quiet about the numbers who cut and ran, both enlisted men and officers, high officers.

It was later that guilt came to me in a rush. The inequality of sacrifice. Why was I safe and alive, when so many good men were dead? I thought I had been tricky in avoiding combat. I thought I was false and pretentious in accepting my awards as a combat infantryman. They were handed out as we had thrown candy to children.

I had been in and out of combat, but I was neither dead nor mad. But something ripped my brain, and I was later hospitalized in Paris for a week. It took years to come to an awkward settlement with myself.

Maybe that is why I am writing this.

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K Company, p. 229, Fortune Favored the Brave, A History of the 334th Infantry 84th Division, by Cpl. Perry S. Wolff, Mannheim Press, 1945

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