Bill Denton writes:
<< If/when the first complete Willeford biography is
done, this would have to
be detailed and then we'd all stop wondering. Many
veterans never talked
about the war, which is understandable, but it's also
understandable that
younger people are curious. >>
I could only do so much when I was doing my little bit of
Willeford research for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
A few things to note. In the early 1970s, there was a
devastating fire at a military archive in St. Louis that
destroyed a good deal of WWII personnel records. Willeford's
likely went up in flames, though some material is, I believe,
duplicated and at the Bienes Center for the Literary Arts in
Ft. Lauderdale. Military operations, including individual
participants, can be tracked through unit records, which
survive. These records are in Maryland somewhere, I think. In
the Foreward to "Cockfighter Journal," James Lee Burke writes
"[H]e never wrote about taking his tank into an encircled
village and carrying twenty-three GIs back to the Allied
Lines without losing one of them." Somewhere, I thought I
read--in Herron's book maybe--that he went back twice. What
Willeford did write about the war is entirely uncelebratory:
humorous, grisly vignettes, which he calls "schematics," that
appear interspersed between poems in
"Proletarian Laughter." Following his hemorrhoidectomy (as
described in "A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided"), Willeford
writes "I...proceeded to put in the longest night of my life,
a night at least twice as long as the night I spent in a tank
turret in Bergdorf, Lusembourg, during the Battle of the
Bulge." He also writes in this book: "My experience as a
combat soldier had taught me that sustained, well-controlled
anger in periods of great stress is a survival factor that
works when other methods have failed." A friend of Willeford
told me about a story of Willeford leading men into an
artillery barrage--I gathered that it was on foot. As I
understand, you have to move forward to get under the
artillery--retreat takes you back into the shells. Apparently
some men did not sustain the advance, and it was all very
ugly. Doug
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Jan 2001 EST