full fathom five

Precious first readers

As a new author, I was on tenterhooks about how my book would be received.  What was most important was that the book keep readers turning pages. 

One of the first readers DID turn pages, and it's a wonderful feeling.

And e-mail from another reader:   

Hi Mary Lee,

Yes....I was up till midnight (and I very seldom stay up that late!) because I HAD to finish your book!  I read it in one day. I simply couldn't put it down.

Another one called me to say that she was in the middle of the new biography of John Quincy Adams, so opened my book just to look at the design before putting it on her to-read stack.  She said she made the mistake of reading the first few lines, and got stuck reading it for the next day and a half.  She's gone back to finish the John Adams, but says she wants to read FFF again. 

And now Cowtown Patty has written a wonderful Memorial Day post citing the book and even plans to research and write to life a cousin of hers who died young as a result of having been in a Japanese prison camp in WWII.  My dad would have been so happy to know that his story inspires this kind of investigation.  There were so many unheralded victims of WWII, and the POW's were particularly invisible because after the war our government didn't want them to tell their harrowing stories for fear of offending our new allies.  So the ex-POWs were told to stay mum, and carried their scars around inside of them for decades.  Patty's cousin apparently died without anyone in the family knowing his story.  Patty will do the world a favor to dig for this man's story and bring what might be an amazing legacy to light.  We just don't know until we try.  At the very least, she'll be - in the most literal and personal sense - making history.               

The power of vengeance

I just finished an article in the New Yorker (Apr. 21) by Pulitzer prize-winning author Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel).  He contrasts tribal societies' behavior around revenge with that of countries with stronger government control.  New Guinea is his example of a society where tribal disputes are settled personally, with each killing demanding a revenge-killing by the victim's relative.  This causes an endless state of war, with people demonizing enemy tribes and constantly fearing for their lives. 

In contrast, more developed countries' meting out of justice by an impersonal government allows us the luxury of peace, and allegiance to that is ingrained in us from an early age by religion and law.  While New Guinea children are taught that to die avenging one's enemy is the most honorable death one can have, American kids are taught to rise above revenge by sayings like "Two wrongs don't make a right;" "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do unto others....," and "Sticks and stones will break your bones...".   

However, Diamond shows that we're not so different from tribal societies once we go to war.  Then we do our share of demonizing and dehumanizing the enemy to take our revenge.  And once war is over, we go back to curtailing our desire for revenge and again trying to rise above it.  Diamond says this is deeply confusing, not least because vengeance is a very powerful emotion.  Equally powerful emotions of grief, anger, and love are amply aired in our society, but we don't talk about our desire for revenge.  This is an emotion that has been made shameful by our laws and religion.   

I think Diamond has put his finger on why those who fought WWII were so quiet about it when they came back.  There was such a disparity between the savagery they'd experienced and what was expected of them when they returned: to paste on a smile and build the peace, make up for lost time, that they couldn't talk about their sorrow or anger for lost comrades, the hatred of the enemy that was necessary for them to fight, and other dark thoughts.  Our Christian ethics made these thoughts unseemly.   

And another thing that reduced our returning soldiers to silence was the euphemistic way WWII was purveyed to civilians by the media.  Newspapers thought their readers wanted heroes, so stories of men taking out Japanese singlehandedly led the headlines. The gruesome side of war was left out, so that returning soldiers felt their experience of savagery was untranslatable to folks back home.  And that made them despair of ever telling it. 

Everyone I've ever talked with whose parents went through the war said the same thing: there was almost no talk about it except in very general terms for the rest of their parents' lives.  And because WWII was probably the most cataclysmic experience of their parents' lives, this silence was doubly strange.   

Our opposite stance to vengeance in war vs. peace still causes hesitance between military personnel and civilians.  At least I experience this when I talk with today's soldiers and sailors.  We don't talk freely about provocative subjects of war, vengeance, and what it takes to maintain peace.  But we should.   

One of the best things about researching my dad's service was beginning to have this dialogue.  I realized that people who have served have thought long and hard about these subjects.  They've had to.  They've lived it, and come home to silence.