Authors: Mark Dunn
IBID (9 page)
7.
Lucile Moritz entered Jonathan’s life through the peeled-back tarpaulin flap of a Chautauqua lecture tent.
The lecture which brought Jonathan and Lucile together was delivered by a Professor Wilbert Wollensagen on the topic “Agronomy and Animal Husbandry in the Age of Industrial Encroachment” and included “a magic lantern slide show for illustration, and musical interludes provided by Judith Crevecoeur and her dwarf-harp.” So instantly enamored of each other were Lucile and Jonathan that neither recalled much of the event beyond projected images of fruit flies and botflies and a gagging farm child who had apparently put one of the insects into his mouth. Jonathan’s Diary, 4 June 1914.
Traveling tent Chautauquas were popular vehicles in the early 20th century for exposing non-urban communities to culture, intellectual thought, and the more refined performing arts. They also provided—as Jonathan and his new girlfriend Lucile were probably well aware—the opportunity for young men and women in such communities to meet and mingle outside the auspices of church and the
socially regimented workplace. Indeed, for many of Jonathan’s generation the word Chautauqua served as acronym for “
Clever, handsome and unambiguously tantalizing adults under-canvas quietly uniting anatomies
.” John B. Paperwhite, “Courting and Cavorting in Rural America,”
Rustic Review
17 (1975): 12-17, 72-79
8.
“We spend long hours together working jigsaw puzzles…and doing other things.”
Jonathan took an instant liking to the recently invented jigsaw puzzle and shared this interest with the new love of his life. Jigsaws would remain a favorite form of entertainment for him. He even carried a box in his “ol’ kit bag” when he began his tour of duty for Uncle Sam in 1917. On those occasions during which things got quiet on the Western Front, Jonathan would pull out the box and try to scout a flat, clean surface upon which to reinstate the disassembled picture of a smiling Dutch school girl holding a bouquet of colorful tulips. He was rarely rewarded for his efforts; the pieces quickly became soiled and blood-blotted, a trench rat chewed a large hole in the box, and fellow doughboys made fun of him, calling him “Jigsaw Jugglehead.” “It was a stupid idea,” Jonathan later wrote to Lucile from the front, “but I did somehow finish those tulips.” Ibid., 17 June 1914.
9.
“I will not rest until I am sent to the front.”
This letter is typical of the more than forty earnest yet politely couched appeals Jonathan sent to various public officials and army personnel in an attempt to overturn his disqualification from active duty in the First World War. The following, however, is a letter of a different sort, an unusual exception to the rule, submitted to demonstrate the degree of frustration Jonathan felt over not being able to pass muster for the muster. He later apologized for the harangue by sending its recipient a basket of fresh figs, following in the family tradition. JBP (carbon copy).
July 7, 1917
To Captain Reuben Milone
Draft Board
I beg you to reverse your decision regarding my suitability for service in the expeditionary force being assembled to fight in Europe. I was afforded not so much as an interview, receiving, as you must recall, the most cursory of visual inspections and a dismissal so preemptive that I was left brain-dazed from its celerity. In all my twenty-nine years I have never met a man so quick to prejudge another and so contemptuous of those who don’t fit neatly into one’s narrow concept of soldiering competency.
That very same day on which I was removed from any further consideration of my potential as infantryman, I learned that you had enthusiastically approved for active duty an obscenely obese baker with a maddening eye tic, three men wearing rouge and sequined pantlings, and a German-American youth who had just moments before his interview loudly professed his love for the Kaiser and his desire to sabotage whenever possible the efforts of the Allied armies to achieve victory and make the world safe for democracy. This was followed by a ditty that made my patriotic blood boil: “In my marrow I’m a Hun. Gonna have myself some fun. Shoot me a Yank, with a big ol’ tank. Turn a doughboy into a hot crossed bun!”
You had no difficulty approving any of the aforementioned candidates for service. Why you would not afford me the same consideration I do not know, although I am tempted to attribute the fact to simple stupidity, your mother being a simian creature far down
the evolutionary ladder, perhaps a rung very near the bottom just above the introduction of opposable thumbs.
With all sincerity,
Jonathan Blashette
10.
“Will somebody please enlist that courageous three-legged man before Colliers picks up the story and Pershing shits a brick?”
Newton Baker to Tasker Bliss, 17 July, 1917U.S. Defense Department Archives.
11.
“Now what do you want to go to that silly ol’ war for?”
Lucile Moritz to Jonathan Blashette, 4 September1917, JBP.
12.
“If you must go, I will be resigned, but I will miss you so.”
Lucile Moritz to Jonathan Blashette, 15 September1917, JBP.
13.
Each soldier was also provided a book of helpful French phrases.
In Jonathan’s copy a few additional phrases have been scrawled on the blank last page. It is doubtful that he ever had the chance to use any of them. JBP, Ephemera Collection.
Monsieur le boucher, avez-vous un poulet qui n’est pas mort de la gale?
Mr. Butcher, have you a chicken that didn’t die of poultry mange?
Excusez- moi, mon ami le fermier français, mais y a t’il des Boches morts dans votre grenier?
Excuse me, my French farmer friend, but there are dead Boche in your hayloft.
Je n’ai pas demandé si votre fille étaìt une prostitutée; j’ai demandé si cette prostituée était votre fille.
I didn’t ask if your daughter was a prostitute; I asked if this prostitute
was your daughter.
Pouvez-vous nous diriger vers le front? Nous sommes perdus et tres saouls et plutôt gênés.
Can you direct us to the front? We are lost and very drunk and somewhat abashed.
Votre char est sur mon pied.
Your tank is on my foot.
Quelque chose a pondu des oeufs dans vos cheveux.
Something has laid eggs in your hair.
Est-ce la puenteur de la guerre que je sens ou êtes vous tous français?
Is that the stench of war or are you all French?
JBP, Ephemera Collection
14.
“I’m going to kill my sister.
” Lucile had absolutely no control over her younger sister; Beryl would continue to write to Jonathan pretending to be Lucile until the end of the war. Jonathan got fairly good at distinguishing the counterfeit correspondence penned by Beryl from the legitimate letters written by Lucile, and even came to look forward to them as humorous diversion. What follows is one of Beryl’s more obvious efforts at deception. JBP.
April 17, 1918
My dearest Jonathan,
I miss you so deeply that the pain of your absence has manifest itself in a palpable ache in the abdomen that results in frequent bouts of crumpled cramping. You would not wish to see me right now.
Toddy asked me again last night to accompany him to the new Arline Pretty/Douglas Fairbanks picture. I confess that this time I succumbed and accepted his offer. I know that you would object strenuously to the
liberties he took with me in the darkened theatre, yet I hunger so much these days for the touch of a man—any man, for that matter—including, but not limited to Mr. Pamida the unkempt ragman and his daft assistant Squib, and the offensive line of Devanter College’s varsity football team.
I left the theatre on Toddy’s arm, not because of any abiding affection for the gentleman but because I was undone. He had explored my body with his hands and mouth without intermission, finally leaving my bodice and undergarments in shameful dishabille. He then proceeded to take me to his lodgings on the outskirts of town where I was further disrobed and disgraced and where I do most grievously confess I came close to having my virtue fully compromised.
I must say, dearest Jonathan, that I am a woman whom you would do best to scorn and dismiss, having degraded myself not only with Toddy but with all manner of men, including, but not limited to, Teaseman the manure vendor and his grime-caked, toothless apprentice Happy, and the Wilkinson County Volunteer Fire Brigade.
I do not deserve you.
I suggest that you call on my beautiful and chaste sister Beryl when you return from war service. Beryl has never so much as been touched by a man save one accidental brushing of the hand by Mr. Withers who is forgiven on account of his blindness.
Yes, Beryl is the girl for you, my love. I will the bear the pain of the loss even as I continue to shamefully proclaim my hungry female body open to all comers.
With all sincerity,
Lucile
When Beryl realized that she was losing the battle to steal Jonathan from her sister, her tactics became even more inventive. She stopped pretending to be Lucile and wrote to Jonathan under her own name. In the letter that follows, she makes one last desperate sortie to win the heart of her sister’s boyfriend through pity alone.
October 14, 1918
Dear, dear Jonathan,
The doctor tells me I have only a few weeks to live. I have now gotten the dreaded Spanish flu not once or even twice but three wretched times. I am taxed to exhaustion and have lost weight, for I can keep nothing down but rice pudding and then only if the rice is removed. As I waste away to near invisibility I can only think of how much your presence at my bedside would rally me. If only I could look into your beautiful hazel eyes and be told that you cherish me with a love that far exceeds any love you have ever had for my libertine sister Lucile who as I write this is off with one among a host of young slacker suitors (for she so admires the ingenuity of those who dodge service to their country through feigned illness or pacifistic mollycoddledry).
Perhaps I will see you one last time before the veil is pulled permanently across my young life. Or I shall pray for a miracle—that your mere presence will snatch me from the abyss and my strength be restored in the warmth of your blazing smile. Soon, I pray, I will be gamboling about like a frisky fawn—gamboling with you, my love, with health returned and eternal
happiness assured. A miracle it would surely be. And so I live on hope even as life slips out of me like sand from a splintered hourglass.
Get home safe.
Yours truly,
Beryl
15. “
After a Chaplin one reeler came news from the front, followed by a two-hanky Gish blubbertale, interrupted by the spiel of one of those dreadful four minute men.
” In his letter to Jonathan, dated 16 October1918 (JBP), former college chum and fervent socialist activist Findley Sanders described the theatre’s four minute man’s pitch for war bonds as “absolute spread-eagle lunacy.” Sanders, who, incidentally, would be arrested only one week later for his antiwar activities, reported that the war booster also urged his audience to give up hamburgers for the “duration” and send all the town dachshunds (“dog-huns”) to the local abattoir. Sanders added with undisguised relish that one woman, an obvious inveterate dachshund-owner, made her opinion of this idea known by hurling a box of Cracker Jacks at the man, nearly putting his eye out. She was discourteously escorted from the theatre, and, no doubt, charged with “disloyalty and sedition.”
Such was the climate of the times.
16.
Jonathan struck up several friendships “over there.”
Some friendships endured for many years after the war. Others did not. Among the latter was his relationship with Arliss McKeon, whose incredible talent at least deserves brief mention here. Skilled at word-perfect textual recall, McKeon delighted and amazed his fellow doughboys before going on to enjoy several successful years on the Orpheum
vaudeville circuit, declaiming as “Mr. Mnemonic” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, and hundreds of other orations he had committed to memory with apparently very little effort. Although he spent most of his later years as a rouged salon palaverer and social sycophant, McKeon continued to perorate from his repertoire right up to the moment of his death in 1972 at the age of 76. Awaiting the arrival of the ambulance following an ultimately fatal coronary arrest, McKeon is purported to have mumbled his way through a good portion of the notoriously lengthy thank-you speech given by Greer Garson at the 1943 Academy Awards banquet, as well as random sections of Richard Nixon’s televised “Checkers” speech, his final breaths expelling the haunting words “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Lynette Klein,
He Remembered it All
(San Francisco: Puppage and Sons Publishers, 1982) 378-80.
17.
Jonathan saw serious fighting in the last weeks of the war.
Jonathan Blashette to Addicus and Emmaline Blashette, JBP. The full text of Jonathan’s letter home follows.
October, 1918
Dear Mother and Father,
I am writing you from the front. I’m not sure when this letter will reach you. We have had a time of it.
I miss you both. I miss dry socks. I miss clean drawers. I miss good eats. (We did finally get some chocolate bars yesterday courtesy of the Y.M.C.A. after a full week of rock-hard French bread, salmon and water). They also sent along some cigarettes. Yes, Mother, I have begun to smoke. We all smoke. It is what you do here in the trenches. My buddy Max is the exception. Max lost his
face yesterday. He offered me his fags as they were rolling him onto the stretcher. “I can’t smoke these any more,” he said, “because I have lost my mouth.” Or maybe I imagined this is what he said. I imagine things a lot. I have not slept in days. The shelling doesn’t stop. Whizz-bangs, 77’s. The Whizz-bangs come in low. You can’t get out of the way. The shrapnel can take an arm off. I can’t even describe the concussion.
I am no coward, but this war is hard stuff. I try to think of things that will keep me sane. I try to think of the two of you, of sweet Lucile and funny, funny Beryl who wants me in the worst way! And I try to think how much I want to help win this thing and come home and never have to think of it again. A good buddy of mine was killed yesterday. A Heine sniper picked him off for doing nothing but taking himself a Goddamned stretch. (Mother, pardon moi my “parlez vous.”) He wasn’t thinking. You don’t always think. Sometimes it can get you killed. Sometimes you get killed anyway. Every bullet has a name on it. Some of the bullets find their marks. I don’t know if I’ve dodged mine yet or not.
I want to come back from this war. And all in one piece if that isn’t asking for too much. (Unlike these other fellows, I could lose a leg and not be put out too much.) See, I want to start a business. You will laugh. This is the rankest- smelling place on the face of the earth. The stench of death gags you. The waft of mustard gas (even though we haven’t faced a frontal assault of the damned stuff yet) makes you want to wretch. Unwashed humanity. B.O. with a capital B. The ladies have their perfumes and their rose water and their Mum-cream. I’m going to make something for the fellows. A deodorizer for the male underarm. That would be a good start, right? I told this to my chum Luddy. He says
it’s a dandy idea. I say that sounds like a swell name. Dandy. Dandy-de-odor-o.
Sarge says we’ll be going over the top soon. There will be an end to this. One way or another.
Your loving son,
Jonathan