Letters From Home

ROSEMARY HARRIS: This has been quite a year for me re: old pix, documents and even recipes which I have either stumbled upon at tag sales or have discovered in the course of going through the home of a recently deceased relative.

Two days ago I received an envelope containing a batch of letters - all written in 1945 by a dear aunt. Sixty-six years ago she must have been in her early twenties and she was writing to her brothers who were in the service. They are surprisingly well-written for a young girl of modest means who was home looking after parents,nieces and nephews and the occasional girlfriend (my mother in particular.)They are wonderful letters filled with popular culture (she loved the movie A Bell for Adano), philosophy, spirituality and war news.

But my favorite is dated Friday, September 14, 1945 and it's about Dashiell Hammett, who had apparently just returned from the Aleutian islands where my father was still serving. (Who knew..I guess you really can see Russia from Alaska. Not only was my father there, but so was Earlene Fowler's.)

Like my father, Hammett was posted to the island of Adak. Hammett was assigned to write for the local newspaper, The Adakian.

















I don't know whether Hammett wrote the piece she refers to for the 50,000 troops on the island or for the folks at home, but Aunt Mary didn't think much of it! Here's a snippet of what she had to say...

"Fred, dear,
This is what is known as looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Dashiell Hammett just returned from a two year stay in the Aleutians..He writes melodramas for the movies; stories that have a sophisticated touch, so that may have an effect on his romanticism for he paints the Aleutians as a place of beauty. The footing, he tells us is rather precarious, hence the average G.I. spends most of his time looking downward whereas he tells us he looked up and never saw more beautiful mountains and lakes...Mr. Hammett is too romantic...the bleakness of the islands, the hurricane speed of the wind are quite unromantic things and they should be painted with stark realism."

You tell him, Aunt Mary! From this vantage point I'm guessing they were probably both right - from the pictures I've seen online Adak was wildly beautiful but barren and difficult. What a treat for me to find that my feisty, cigarette-smoking, scotch-loving 90 year old aunt was as much of a pistol in her youth as she was in her senior years!

On bibliophiles

The one thing everyone knows about Hallie is that she loves books.

Her latest, “The Bibliophile’s Devotional,” out in book stores now, offers the reader an inspiration from literature for every day of the year.

Each day we get an engaging plot summary, great opening lines, and more important the real DIRT – the facts and gossip -- behind the books we’ve always loved.

JAN: Hallie tell us about the book.

HALLIE: I love your description – plot summary, opening lines, and some interesting behind-the-book tidbits. I was limited to just one page per book, so for some books it was particularly challenging. Try summarizing War and Peace in three paragraphs!

JAN: And the process for collecting the many choices and making the selections. Is there any correlation between the book chosen and time of year? Holiday??

HALLIE: Sometimes. Just for example…

January 1, WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith (It opens on New Year’s Day, 1975 with hapless Archibald Jones trying to gas himself; it New Years Eve, 1992, when Archie “accidentally” releases a mutant mouse programmed to do away with the randomness of creation.)

July 4, INDEPENDENCE DAY by Richard Ford (On July 4 Frank Bascombe takes his troubled son on a trip to a sports hall of fame; at a baseball field he’s struck by a lightning bolt.)

September 2, GONE WITH THE WIND by Margaret Mitchell (On September 2, 1864, the Union troops occupied Atlanta. In the ovel that’s where Scarlett, one of literature’s most greedy and self-centered creatures, finds redemption.)

JAN: How long did it take you to research these books and how did you find the gossip and fact behind the stories.

HALLIE: It took the better part of a year. It was a little easier than it might have been because I was just coming off writing 1001 BOOKS FOR EVERY MOOD so I had a tiny head start in the research department.

I found the gossip and facts in newspaper archives, in biographies and memoirs, in the introductions and prefaces of modern editions of old books.

JAN: What’s are some of your favorites?

HALLIE: I had the most fun with this part. Here’s a few –

- Some of Margaret Mitchell 1,000-plus page manuscript of GONE WITH THE WIND was typewritten, some handwritten, some of it scribbled on the backs of laundry lists when she showed it to H. L. Latham, editor at the MacMillan copmany.

- After the publication of Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE with its expose of the meatpacking industry, foreign sales of American meat plummeted. To allay the public’s fears, the meatpacking industry itself lobbied for passage of the landmark federal food safety law which took effect in 1907.

- When Eli Wiesel completed NIGHT--his account of four years in Buchenwald concentration camp, his family’s only survivor--the only holocaust literature published to date was “The Diary of Anne Frank.” More than 15 publishers turned “Night” down before it found a small press willing to take the gamble. It went on to spend 80 weeks on the NY Times bestseller list and started a new genre of holocaust survivor literature.

- Dashiell Hammett loosely based THE MALTESE FALCON on the Sonoma Gold Specie case to which he was assigned as a Pinkerton detective before he became a writer. Within a decade the book had been made into three films.

Today we're talking about books, tomorrow come back to talk about food. It's already cold and dark in New England and Jan will be talking about her favorite winter recipes.