January 2011

It was with a great deal of pleasure, somewhat akin to meeting an old friend, that I read Donald R. Morris’s article “Thomason, U.S.M.C.,” in the November issue. As a young airman pulling isolated duty on a “rock” called Bluie West-One in Greenland in the early 1950s, I first encountered John W. Thomason’s writings in his classic War Between the States novel. In my opinion, Thomason had the best ear for a soldier’s idiom and syntax of any author I’ve ever read. Or perhaps it was his translating from voice to print my native East Texas language, or maybe his easy-paced, leisurely style of another era—more akin to Twain than Hemingway.

Whatever it was, no one in the latter half of the twentieth century has come near him as a writer. Under different circumstances it might have been Thomason, rather than Jones or Mailer, who produced the definitive novel of World War II. Too bad that we never had a chance to know.

Caria Davidson’s story of Stonington, Connecticut ("History Happened Here,” October) is an engaging description of that delightful, formerly war-torn, village. The article’s one shortcoming is the failure to mention the fine recent book that is so central to her subject, James Tertius de Kay’s The Battle of Stonington: Torpedoes, Submarines, and the Rockets in the War of 1812 (Naval Institute Press, 1990).

While Ms. Davidson describes the British attack, which originated from motives as Delphian as any ever employed to justify such a travesty (a British flotilla bombarded the helpless citizenry of Stonington with fifty tons of projectiles over a four-day period), de Kay brilliantly employs Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy’s assault on the village, which had absolutely no military significance, as a microcosm illustrative of Yankee tenaciousness in the face of British aggression.

I much enjoyed Wilfrid Sheed’s entertaining story about Broadway songwriters among the Philistines of Hollywood during the early 1930s (October). Reading it, I suddenly realized the full, score-settling import of a lyric that Lorenz Hart wrote in 1940, long after he had fled back to his beloved New York.

Near the end of Pal Joey , the title character’s two girlfriends, each having just found out about the other, tell each other why they are dumping the bum. One explains:

Phil Patton’s account of the career of Aunt Jemima left out one of her most interesting avatars. Tess Gardella (c. 1898-1950), daughter of an Italian miner, had been making a living singing in New York political rallies and Chinatown nightclubs when she was discovered by Lew Leslie, a producer famous for promoting African-American talent. He persuaded her to don blackface and launched her in vaudeville as “Aunt Jemima.” Her jolly Mammy character became such a hit that she was cast as the black cook Queenie in the original production of Showboat (1927) opposite Joe, played by Jules Bledsoe, a real African-American. Only in America could an Italian performer gain fame as an icon of negritude.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest waterborne invasion in history, we remember the stakes and the costs. Maurice Kidder went ashore at Omaha Beach, and his grandson, Nathan Ward, tries to retrieve the actuality of that experience; Charles Cawthon, who also landed on Omaha, looks at what he and his comrades accomplished; the letters of a young married couple offer an intimate glimpse into the courage and longing of those days; and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., assesses how clearly the Commander-in-Chief saw the world that the Allies were struggling to bring about.

The evolution of wetlands in the public imagination from fetid swamp to natural paradise … the lonely passion of Typhoid Mary … baseball comes to Vassar … and, with the vernal force that through the green fuse drives the flower, more.

New York was suffering a newspaper strike when the great black former boxer Harry Wills died in December of 1958, and, therefore, not everyone in the city of his residence knew he was gone. Elsewhere, the obituaries uniformly highlighted the designation that followed him for more than 30 years: He was the man Jack Dempsey ran away from.

Dempsey never claimed otherwise. “He was gypped out of his crack at the title,” Dempsey wrote in his autobiography. There was a reason. “I never fought Wills … because he was a Negro.” In this regard, Dempsey was following the lead of the first recognized heavyweight champion of the world, the Great John L. Sullivan: “I will not fight a Negro,” he declared in 1892. “I never have and I never shall.” His immediate successors followed his example.

by Barbara Capitman, Michael Kinerk, and Dennis Wilhelm, photographs by Randy juster, Viking Studio Books, 224 pages

Swfte International, Ltd. Requires Windows

Two of us sat down at a computer expecting to play an explosive video game exploiting the three momentous days at Gettysburg. What we got instead was a highly involved, even scholarly, computer re-enactment.

The battle can be played out multiple ways: Both sides as they actually fought, with progress reports on casualties, retreats, how many stationed on high ground or in woods; or, you can assume Meade’s command while Lee’s strategy remains faithful or vice versa. Two players cannot battle each other, since the purpose of the game is historical. Lee’s second-guessers should take charge of this Army of Northern Virginia in order to appreciate his skimpy options. We tried dividing Lee’s force on the first day of fighting, instead of advancing, but to disastrous results. Less dramatic fine tuning is also possible. You can change the marching orders of Baxter’s brigade at 12:45 P.M. , for example, and otherwise leave the original strategy intact.

by Irving Lewis Alien, Oxford University Press, 307 pages

Before half the country moved to the suburbs, the great engine of slang creation was the American city, especially New York. So argues the sociologist Irving Lewis Alien in his history of our street talk. Slang dictionaries over the years have presented popular speech alphabetically; this book is organized around themes that cover the urbanizing years from 1850 to 1950. Speakeasy , for instance, appears in an overall chapter on “The Sporting Life,” along with derivations for taxi dancers and piker joints . There are sections full of terms for restaurants, tall buildings ( cloud-supporter rightly lost out to skyscraper ), mean streets, and social types, and lists of epithets the rich and the working class have had for each other, including dinner pailer and Fifth Avenoodles .

Thank you for the delightful article “Mammy: Her Life and Times,” by Phil Patton, in the September issue. It has always seemed to me that in Hollywood depictions of Mammy in movies, such as Imitation of Life , the character is less a racial stereotype than a personification of one-half of the qualities that our social unconscious mythologized the ideal woman of the house as possessing.

In movies of the thirties, forties, and fifties, you see Mammy as supermom, all smiles, with a heart and bosom big enough to embrace half a dozen children at once. She is not articulate, but love gushes freely from her every emphatic word. She spends her days toiling selflessly in a kitchen that is not her own, making luscious things like pancakes and fry pies. Or else she irons and darns with a religious zeal. She is not well educated, but she is life-smart and full of pithy aphorisms. She knows how to get things done. She is a caretaker and confidante to whoever crosses the threshold. Overall, she’s a lot like grandma.