The Immigrant and a Mentoring Sea
In a letter my father wrote to my mother on arriving in America to pave the way for his three sons and wife, he said: “The boys will be better off in America.” He spoke about his sons getting an education and avoiding factory jobs. Three years later my father died of throat cancer. Thirty years earlier my mother had lost her first husband, a World War I veteran, to his battle wounds. With no support from either family, my mother put her three children from this first marriage in an orphanage. The children later told me that she rarely visited them.
My mother was devastated by my father’s death, especially so soon after arriving in the states. We were essentially penniless. Education would have to wait. All three of us got jobs delivering newspapers, working in a nursery, greenhouse or the corner store. We bought our own clothes and much of our food. My older brother quit high school and joined the Army. I squeaked through high school and joined the Navy. My younger brother would follow. Like our mother we were all immigrants in the survival mode. I wasn’t completely saddened to leave Pittsburgh because we were greeted, especially when commuting to school, by an anti-immigrant, Limey-chanting crew that I eventually would give proper treatment in my novel, “Limey Down.” One place I felt safe and at home was Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, then a predominantly Jewish high school.
As a sailor, oceans away from London and Pittsburgh, sleeping below deck on an ammunition ship, too close to 2,000 lb. bombs, and enjoying regular swim calls as we crossed the Pacific, I felt a certain freedom and distance from earlier pain. Decades later I would be able to put this journey in a fuller perspective. My study of Carl Jung after my mother’s death helped me understand the “Mother Complex,” and how the mother confines and defines the son. As a twenty-year-old, these notions were vague, buried and unconscious. Years later I would understand a son’s road to psychological health and wholeness is separation from the mother. This doesn’t mean a certain sailor didn’t write her often and send her money when he was able.
My ship, the USS Mount Baker, named after a volcano, was loaded with bombs but also loaded with books. The ship’s library had lots of novels and crew members regularly exchanged works they had purchased on liberty or shore leaves. After a year or so I got off the deck force and moved to the navigation bridge which had its own library dealing with celestial navigation and, although we had plenty of electronics, I fell in love with the sextant. I remain indebted to an early teacher, our ship’s navigator, a Japanese-American. I not only learned about the stars but also about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which my ship visited on a number of occasions, often donating blood in honor of the dead.
As I advanced in my role as an assistant navigator the captain strongly suggested I become an American citizen so I could have access to confidential and secret documents. I recall the judge in a San Francisco court inviting me to the front of the room to take my oath. It must have been my full-dress uniform. It remains a special moment.
I was in my third year of Navy service when a seaman friend from Boston hailed me on the main deck and said, “Mac, you should go to college.” He had apparently heard some nice things about me from the bridge crew, and I thanked him. He had flunked out of Officer’s Candidate School and was serving his remaining years on a lowly ammunition ship, the runt of the Seventh Fleet. But he got me thinking. I took a correspondence course in meteorology from Penn State University and realized how much time I had to make up. I recall walking into a large hall at the University California, Berkeley for my SATs and noticing all the other student had slide rules. I thought that this would not be smooth sailing.
My ship was in the Tonkin Gulf as that war was beginning to heat up. I recall a helicopter from the USS Midway, a carrier, delivering mail to our ship’s fantail. In the bag of mail was an acceptance letter from a small college in Pennsylvania.
I recall the first assignment in English class. The instructor asked us about what we did “last summer” or about some memorable experience. I wrote a paper titled “Typhoon Nancy” about surviving a storm that almost sank the Mt. Baker, sending bombs careening below deck unchecked. He asked me to read it in front of the class. The teacher suggested I might have promise as a writer but to watch that purple prose.
Recently I looked through a journal I kept while in the Navy. It contained largely impressions of time at sea, comments on the Vietnam War, and some pretty bad rhyming couplets. As a practicing Catholic at the time, I wrote my views about religion and war. More than a decade later these thoughts would become “That Kingdom Coming Business,” a long poem published in the Sewanee Review. I remember receiving the pre-publication proofs for this poem as I entered the room for my PhD orals at Lehigh University. This remains a particularly delicious memory.
Undoubtedly my time in the US Navy has informed much of my life. It provided distance, time, perspective and some understanding of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures. I cannot look at the night sky without reflecting on compass, sextant and my rendezvous with all those lines of longitude and latitude.
During the pandemic I took another, perhaps final trip back to the sea, to memory and war. This “trip” was prompted by the death of my step-sister Pat at 96. As noted earlier, her father died of wounds suffered in World War 1. She was sent to an orphanage and sent home three years later when she was wrongly diagnosed as dying from diphtheria. Pat was at my birth during the battle of Britain. War never seemed to leave her. She married an American GI who survived the Battle of the Bulge and committed suicide thirty years later. Shortly before he died, he said, “These women are killing me.” A novel was stirring in me.
“When War Becomes Us” is about the profound effect war has on the individual, the family and the psyche. The novel is about a multi-generational family’s attempt, especially through the mother, to keep a tidy war story passed down through generations as gospel. The book is about a mother’s hold on the family, the past, and collective generational tales, especially about war. It is about the history of wars examined through a psychological lens. This includes my Navy service that returned in the form of nightmares and dreams surely fed by the pandemic.
“When War Becomes Us,” is a psychological novel in that the importance of outer, historical events is balanced, modified and at times reshaped by dream, fantasies and story-telling. The novel charts the effort by five family members, not to rewrite history, but to transform that history by soul work into a living, breathing narrative.
I anticipate a Spring/Summer 2022 publication date.
