DR. SEUSS GOES TO WAR

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

My day began standing butt-naked before the medicine cabinet mirror pitching my own face as I shaved. A friend of a friend of a friend had wrangled me an interview at PM Newspaper in Manhattan at 10:00 this morning. The friend of a friend of a friend scribbled the name of the guy I was to see on a piece of paper that was folded up in the pocket of my suit pants. I was going in cold. I didn’t know the guy and not enough about the newspaper. All I knew was that it’s a left-leaning, daily publication that some say is a communist rag sheet. I don’t care about that. All I care about is that it’s chock full of photos and drawings about the war. That’s what I‘m gonna do. I mean, I want to draw war cartoons. I even have an idea for a comic strip about a sailor who escaped the Jap’s bombs at Pearl Harbor two months ago.

My bad stomach got me mustered out of Navy boot camp after four weeks of training, and I need a job bad. Ma and Pop are patient as Job with me, but I know they can’t afford to keep me much longer. Three weeks and I still haven’t landed a job. Maybe mine is a pipe dream, but I gotta give it one more try. If PM doesn’t put me on today, I promised Ma I’ll take whatever I can get. I’ll even take that job washing dishes at Cholly’s Diner if I have to. It wouldn’t be too bad. Cholly’s is just up the street from our apartment building in Flushing. I can walk it, and Cholly already told me he’d give me hours so I’d have good daylight to do my drawings on the side.

Yesterday, PM featured a clever cartoon by Dr. Seuss that I cut out and taped to the top of the medicine cabinet mirror. Everyone knows him as the children’s story author, and I admit it was a little shocking to see a war cartoon under his signature. ‘Waiting for the Signal From Home…’ it’s captioned above an endless procession of Japanese Americans on the west coast of the United States who are portrayed as loyalists to Imperial Japan. The cartoon leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of Dr. Seuss’ stance that Japanese Americans are a threat, ready and willing to commit sabotage against the United States in the name of their mother country. I don’t know how I feel about the Japanese American situation, but I guess the cartoon is in line with official government policy on World War II, as well as the thinking of lots of Americans, maybe most of them. Just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7^th of last year, the scuttlebutt is that the FBI started rounding up Japanese Americans and shipping them to ‘relocation’ facilities in Montana, New Mexico, and North Dakota. Pop says those places are called ‘Internment Camps’. And it ain’t just the Japs. Germans and Italians are running for cover, too—and like rats are ducking into any hole they can find here in the five boroughs of New York City. And I guess it’s the same scene no matter where you go in America’s forty-eight.

Americans fear for their lives and have the jitters bad. We hear that the paranoia on the west coast runs especially high where attacks by the Japs are expected.  The perimeters of buildings are stacked deep with sandbags, and blackouts and drills are common. We ain’t got it any better here. German U-boats crawl along the shore of the east coast like sneaky sharks and take out a ship now and then.

A pretty secretary pointed me to a chair in the hallway outside the office of the guy I came to PM Newspaper to pitch. Propped up on the floor against my jiggling foot is my portfolio jammed full of my drawings. I got a lot to say about this war. I just hope that guy gives me the break I need. The door opens suddenly and a noxious plume of cigar smoke snakes into my nostrils. The secretary thrusts her hand over her nose, and I watch in amazement as green nausea pulsates up her throat and into her face. Poor girl! I think to myself. I turn my head back to the door of the office and a tall, patrician-looking guy, the guy named Ingersoll, I suppose, that I came here to see, reaches out his hand to a stooped, Jewish-looking guy. Ingersoll says, “Ted, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this new batch of war cartoons. I’ll look through them after lunch and give you a call.” My heart takes off like a fighter plane and thunders in my chest. Jeez! The Jewish-looking guy is Dr. Seuss—Theodore Seuss Geisel himself, in person, not six steps away from me. It’s gotta be a sign! This job is mine! I know it as well as I know my own name.©

The above is a work of fiction by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene. It is inspired by a true facet of the life of Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss).

Image: Dr. Seuss’ cartoon: Waiting for the Signal From Home…

Paperbacks and eBooks by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase through Amazon. An overview of her latest novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON is below:

Amid the seductions of Las Vegas, Nevada and an idyllic coffee plantation on Hawai’i’s Big Island, a sextet of opposites converge within a shared fate: a glamorous movie-star courting distractions from her troubled past; her shell-shocked bodyguards clutching handholds out of their hardscrabble lives; a dropout Hawaiian nuclear physicist gambling his way back home; a Navajo rancher seeking cleansing for harming Mother Earth; and from its lofty perch, the Hawaiian’s guardian spirit conjured as his pet raven, conducting this symphony of soul odysseys.

Was it chance or destiny’s hand behind the movie-star and gambler’s curious encounter at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? The cards fold, their hearts open, and a match strikes, flames that sizzle their hearts and souls. Can they have the moon and the stars, too? Or is she too dangerous? Is he? Can their love withstand betrayal? Can it endure murder?

While the cards at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas fail to distract them from their troubled pasts, on the side, the actress and the gambler play a game of ‘will they won’t they’ romance. Meanwhile, an otherworldly hand also has a big stake in the game. Unexpected secrets unfold brimming with dangerous consequences, and finally, a strange brand of salvation.

Amazon Buy Links:

https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder-ebook/dp/B07Z44YN9X/  - EBOOK



https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder/dp/169984402X/ - PAPERBACK

              

Review of Pamela Allegretto's 'Bridge of Sighs and Dreams'

Downsizing from a large four-bedroom home and moving to a small two-bedroom condominium in recent months has made it impossible for me to read at my usual speedy pace. But when my tortured back and squealing feet refused me during my “downsizing” project, I was able to spend much of my time-outs reading a few books, among them a marvelous World War II epic titled Bridge of Sighs and Dreams by author and artist Pamela Allegretto. The book was a perfect diversion, and has earned an honored place in my library of “World War II Books.”

Like Kristen Hannah’s acclaimed World War II novel The Nightingale, Allegretto’s novel explores the seldom-seen topic of the effects of war on women, the former on two sisters in German-occupied France, the latter on two sisters-in-law in war-torn Italy. If you haven’t read both of these fabulous books, you are missing out on big-time reading pleasures.

An artist whose fine art is collected worldwide, Allegretto’s every stroke of the keyboard that gave life to Bridge of Sighs and Dreams is rendered as masterfully as the brushstrokes that shape her popular canvasses.

https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Sighs-Dreams-Pamela-Allegretto-ebook/dp/B015JRFQE8

Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

Readers and Writers Have Much to Learn from Author William Styron in His Sophie’s Choice

Finding the right title for a book is often the bane of an author’s existence. One highly successful present-day author is so book-title challenged that she runs contests among beta readers to come up with the best titles for her tomes. Author William Styron (1925 - 2006) didn’t have that problem, and of all of the great titles among his published works, the absolute spot-on one is Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979. Apart from the fact that it has found a home in the lexicon as an idiom translated as “faced with a forced decision in which all options have equally negative outcomes,” amazingly, those two little words hold within themselves the entire description of this 626-page novel. This is because contained in every major theme of this masterwork, Sophie is confronted with unbearable choices—she just can’t win, a consequence infecting everyone else around her—and of course, that is the seminal factor of the story. She is doomed, as is her paramour Nathan. An adjunct to the story is Stingo’s unlucky fate, as well—Stingo, the narrator of this story about three people in three separate rooms in a boarding house in post Second World War Brooklyn and the third leg of the ménage a trios around which the novel is constructed—Stingo, the young and naive writer whose life can only be construed as a portrayal of Willian Styron himself; Nathan, the drug-riddled, brilliant and charismatic lover; and Sophie, the beautiful and embattled Polish survivor of the Nazi terror, around whom the plot centers in regard to a tragic decision she was forced to make upon imprisonment at Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the war.

            Stingo’s Sophie’s Choice, to make use of the idiom here, was whether or not to woo Sophie, for whom he suffered an agonizing passion, or to honor his friendship with Nathan. A choice between his unbearable life or release through self-inflicted death was Nathan’s Sophie’s Choice. And Sophie’s options, or lack thereof, were fixed a handful of years before, specifically on the day she came face to face with the fascists' hideous ignominy toward life—her chances ruined by the blight it continued to cast on her life, as on countless others, for incalculable years following the war to defeat Hitler's evil regime.

Despite his unrequited desire to bed Sophie, and his failed attempts at love with every surrogate female who crossed his path, Stingo/Styron did walk away with a good story that found voice in the bestselling Sophie’s Choice, a winner of the US National Book Award for Fiction and the book widely considered his greatest literary achievement. Five years in the writing, the book was, says Styron, “suggested by a mere germ of experience. I had been living in a boardinghouse in Brooklyn one summer just after the war and such a girl lived on the floor above me; she was beautiful, but ravaged. I never got to know her very well, but I was moved by her plight. Then, about five years ago, I awoke one morning with a remembrance of this girl; a vivid dream haunted my mind. I suddenly sensed that I had been given a mandate to abandon the novel I had been at work on and write her story.”

Although deemed a modern masterpiece and a profound meditation on the foremost evil of the Twentieth Century, it is not without controversy, especially among those who consider some topics so heinous as to be unspeakable. A number of his detractors found Styron opportunistic and exploitive in this choice of topic, this one especially judged the third rail of letters. Styron answered his critics thusly: “No event could be so hideous that it would defy a novelist to trespass upon it. It was an episode in history that cried out to be explored, the ultimately challenging subject for a novelist.”

Bringing history to life in fiction can be tricky business. The central dilemmas of the authors of historical fiction are how to avoid coming across as pedantic, as well as how to bypass stiff and dry parroting of statistical information gleaned through research. The best advice I can offer in that regard is to study Styron’s techniques in this book. He couched his deep exploration of the history of the Nazi’s horrendous pursuit of a "Final Solution" in his characters—the actions of his characters revealed the history. He made an untouchable and unutterable story, real and describable by having his characters sweep the floors and vomit all over themselves and pee their pants.      

An additional literary device Styron used successfully, and an effective one often employed by writers, is the suggestion of background music to set a mood or design an ambience, and in this case, to announce Sophie’s presence or absence in her room. Nathan’s phonograph and enviable collection of long-playing classical records, housed in Sophie’s room, were crucial to the story. I last saw this method used in an outstanding book I read in recent months which I will review here in the coming weeks—a novel titled Those Who Save Us, authored by Jenna Blum, another book centered on Second World War Europe. 
         

I would venture a guess that far more people are familiar with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name than with the book. Although an outstanding film, one of the best, do yourself a favor and read Sophie’s Choice. Savor Styron’s intricate weaving of Stingo’s story, which the film downplayed, but which is the driving force of the book, lending it a full compliment of emotions and diversity of experiences that divert to lighter places, here and there, the heavy stream this novel follows. In addition, Styron’s elaborate prose is not to be missed…but keep your dictionary handy. Styron loved his polysyllabic words. Ha Ha!

www.booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com

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December 7, 1941, A Day That Will Live in Infamy

 

The morning of December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan, in a sneak air attack on Pearl Harbor, effectively eliminated the Pacific Fleet of the USA.   It was a battleship and a combat plane force that had been transferred there eighteen months prior by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a presumed deterrent in the east to Japan’s seemingly endless offensive that had raged on almost unrestricted throughout the Pacific rim since its 1937 invasion of China.  Not only was the bombing of Pearl Harbor a defining moment in history, but it was also the event that triggered the involvement of the USA in World War II. 

        Marlin Landon (Bob) Gaffin had been drafted into the Army under the 1940 Civil Service Act.  At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was still in training camp at Ft. Thomas, Kentucky.  Bob was to later serve throughout the war under General George S. Patton beginning with Operation Torch in Africa and culminating with the clean-up of Berlin at the end  of the war.  The letters exchanged among him and his family and friends are a vital adjunct to my latest novel, Guardians and Other Angels, letters that give the reader an unprecendented insider's view of the times.   The following excerpt of the novel includes two letters relevant to the Pearl Harbor Bombing:

                                                                                                                                                 Monday Morning, Dec. 8, 1941

Dear Son.  I will try to write you some this morning.  I was so nervous yesterday I just couldn’t write and not much better this morning.  But the children are all gone and I am here alone so maby I can write some.  Bobby we heard down at church last night that war had been declared.  It sure does worry me.  I just can’t help it.  They tell me if I don’t be careful I’ll go crazy.  But I don’t know.  They surely can’t take you though untill they get you trained.  Of course I know that I am just one Mother in thousands.  We will just have to trust in God.  Of course you know that we are praying for you, and that will help you along.  Herman preached last night.  He surely is a good man.  Well Bobby you didn’t say what they fed you.  But I suppose you have enough to eat and a good place to sleep.  If this country is in war now I expect they will call all those boys back that they let come home, won’t they?  Roma told you what Howard said.  I think that is the word he used (Detachment) Corps.  I think he said it was in the Infantry.  Berlin & Irene said that Bill told them you sure was a fine looking soldier (Ha ha).  Well Bobby I will have to close as it is almost mail time.  So write often and we will too.  There are so many people wanting to write to you when you get settled I don’t know how you will answer them all.  So Good by a(nd) good luck and R(em)ember Mother as always [is] always thinking of you and loves you.  So as always Your loving Mother & all

 

                                                                                                                                                                           Ft. Thomas Ky.

                                                                                                                                                                    December 9, 1941

Dear Mom & all:

                I will answer your letter I rec’d today and was more than glad to hear from you and Roma.  I got a X’mas card from Clarine & a letter from Dot too Mom [Dot is Bob’s girlfriend.  Clarine is her sister].  I sure like to hear from everyone.  I guess it’s our only mean’s of communication.  Well Mom I guess we are in a war again.  Japan declared war on the U. S. Sunday eve. at 1:30.  Followed by the bombing of Guam, Honolulu and other U. S. property in the Pacific.  104 American soldiers were killed & a U. S. ship sunk with 350 on board.  Germany the kingpin has taken action against America and is Declaring war.  Roosevelt is Declaring war on Japan.  Plane’s and ship’s of the U. S. were rushed to the danger point at once, and enemy plane’s were reported over the West Coast last night at 5:30 A. M.  The citizens blacked out San Francisco.  No bombs were dropped.  My guess is they [the Japanese or the Germans] were taking picture’s, drawing map’s and fixing for a future attack.  I hope I’m wrong.  We are being issued the strictest of order’s here, to be ready to leave here for camp anytime.  Maybe a week or in the next 10 minutes.  All furlough’s have been canceled, until further order’s.  All reserves discharged were ordered to report to their draft board’s at once.  I could run on & on Mom telling of things that took place in the last 48 hr’s.  I’ll maybe get to see everyone in 6 mo. Mom.  I hope before then.  But it may be yr’s [years].  But it takes the courage and unfaltering faith of the pioneer Mom to face such a crisis as this.  So have courage Mom as we of the Army have and we will pull through.  God is our shephard.  So we will have to do the best we can.  Tell Roma I was glad to hear from her, and tell everyone Hello for me.  And that I will write to everyone when I get settled.  And I appreciate your prayer’s Mom a lot.  Don’t worry to much.  I can take care of myself.  Oh yes, about Bill [Greene – my paternal uncle].  I guess he is doing pretty good now.  I was over there Sunday all day, and as soon as war was declared he wanted to come with me.  So he came over Sun. night & enlisted.  He won’t be examined until the last of the week.  Don’t tell Eva or Alderson [(Greene) – my paternal grandparents] yet.  It will worry them.  And Bobbie Mendenhall is here in the same barracks with me & Woodrow W. Hoop of Peebles.  Well I’ll close for now Mom.  Wishing all of you luck.  So answer soon.  XO Your loving Son, Bob.

 

The link to Guardians and Other Angels is http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Other-Angels-Linda-Greene/dp/1897512562/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338336762&sr=8-1