Different Ghosts
Or Why I Didn't Write an Historical Novel about the Battle of the
Bulge
The trick of writing an historical novel, I'm told, is to keep your research from taking over. This is precisely why I've never finished one. The only time I tried, my research took me over, ruined my novel, and changed my life.
In 1996 I was at work on my first novel. I tried to set it in the familiar ground of Charles Mix County, South Dakota, the my father's home, a place of marginal farms, thin people, and bad weather. I discovered in the novel what I already knew in life: not much happens out there. (I wasn't enough of a novelist to write about what does happen there, or enough of a person to understand it. I was still, at heart, a citygirl making a reluctant visit.) In an act of foolishness, I moved my snow-struck farm into the Ardennes forest of Belgium, and into the Battle of the Bulge.
I don't know why I picked the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge is a ghost at the back of some family stories--uncle so-and-so who froze his feet there and was never the same. Then there was an American Experience documentary I saw by chance. I was struck by the look of it: the huge dark trees, hammocked with heavy snow. The soldiers looked small against them. It was the coldest European winter on record, and the deadliest battle in American history: a six-week slog, field by field, town by town, through fifty miles of heavy woods, hedgerows, and open fields.
Well, I thought, right, there must be a story in that.
Pure foolishness, but charming in its innocence. Soon my bedroom-office was ankle-deep in books and articles, about farming, about Belgium, and forests, about the 1940's, and, of course, about the war. The plot and its people began to take shape: the farm women--a mother and three daughters--sleeping in the cellar for the shelling, the father conscripted, the potatoes running out, the cattle hidden in the quarry. And the American soldier they reluctantly take in, an almost-accidental deserter named Vernon.
Vernon gave me trouble. My books--which had now claimed most of the bed as well as the floor--told me where he was, and why he had been sent there, how many K rations he had with him, what rifle he was carrying. But there was too much I didn't know, and it was all of the same sort: What was in his pockets. How he slept in a foxhole. How he kept his socks dry. The unending business of the care of the body isn't in the history books, but it is most of our lives.
A rare brainwave: I called the local veteran's association. They introduced me to someone who had been there, a nursing home resident I'll call Captain H, which is pretty close to what I called him in life. He had been a combat infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge and the West German campaign, and had lost a leg there. I got on my girl-reporter dress and went to meet him.
Captain H had never talked about his time in the war, and he made it clear he wasn't about to start. I was there to learn the details of day-to-day life of a combat infantryman--that stuff so common it hadn't made the history books. About his own story, he'd keep his silence.
But neither of us had realized how intimate the commonplace could be. Captain H told me about keeping snow out of a rifle barrel with a condom, about sleeping standing up, about eating Wrigley's spearmint gum so cold it snapped to pieces on the teeth. He told me about nights of cold fog, full of sound:
There was no way to stop there. From the details common to everyone on the front line, there slowly surfaced the fragments of Captain H's particular story.
For a war story, it was strange. There were no battles in it. Shots were rarely fired. The other soldiers didn't get killed, but vanished, as if they had become ghosts without ever dying. It was a story of waiting, and of aftermath. It was dreamlike, and broken.
The stories and the man drew me back over and over, for almost nine months. We observed the formalities of nursing home visits. We had tea. We put together puzzles. We played cards: five-card draw, and he was deadly. He showed me pictures of his family. Most of the time we were silent. Between those silences came bursts of the war, strange stuff, extraordinary stories.
Slowly his health, not good when we met, sank. I watched his family draw in around him, and I saw him less and less. Eventually, I moved away to Canada, to be with my soon-to-be husband. On Remembrance Day that year, I sent Captain H a tin of Hershey's chocolates and Wrigley's spearmint gum. I heard later he'd been too sick to eat them. He sent me a note, his handwriting spidered. It said, in full: "Thanks for the airdrop and the interest." That was the last I heard from him.
I was so caught up in the war that I had almost expected to hear of his death by telegram, but the news came by phone. His daughter called. And while the loss wasn't a surprise, what she said stunned me. Captain H had left me his combat infantry badge. I cried. I knew then what I should have known long before. He'd left me his story.
I knew it was a gift. I knew it was a responsibility. But what I was supposed to do next, I had no idea.
I had intended to use Captain H's stories to fill the holes in Vernon's story. I tried this, but holes were too small. They were in the wrong places. I tried to open the novel up, to write from the fragments Captain H had given me - not to use them, but to be used by them. Even that didn't work. It took me a long time to see that what I had wasn't holes but a whole. Not fragments but something large and strong and strange, far too big for the space my novel could give it.
But what was it? I tried transcribing the scribbles in my notebook into essays, into memoir, into a different novel.
I tried poetry, of course: poetry is my strength. In retrospect, it's obvious this needed to be a book of poems. It is, after all, a story of fragments and silences, a story about what can't be said. The poems, with their white space, hold the fragments in place. I think of a partial fossil laid out on a table, the shape of the man suggested by the angle of the femur, the carriage by the striation where muscles once attached. But I didn't have a voice for the poems. They were stiff and forced.
I floundered for three years. Finally, I put the project aside.
Then, a year later, my husband James and I were driving across the prairies in late December. We headed out from Omaha before dawn, hoping to make Michigan. There was deep, fresh snow. In the headlights, the fencerows were lined with corniced drifts. As the sun came up, we saw the hoarfrost. The hills were blue and the sky was pink, then white. The hoarfrost was thick and delicate on the barbed wire and the telephone lines. The oaks that cluster around the streams in Western Iowa were ghostly with it. I took out my notebook, and I wrote "Morning."
It took no more time to write than the poem than it would to copy it out. I stopped. I read what I'd just written aloud. James said: "What the heck is that?" Good question, I thought. That first poem came almost in a dream. I remember Captain H describing the hoarfrost that was common in the Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge. I can close my eyes and hear him saying, "You wouldn't believe how beautiful it was." But it's not quite his voice that came to me. It's a voice that's my own and not my own, his and not his. Close enough to his to tell his story. Enough mine to let me tell it.
I'm grateful for that long drive. A voice like this is a gift, and a fragile one. I listened to it for ten hours solid. I wrote clear across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, while James drove and listened to me mutter. By the time we hit Michigan, I had a dozen or so workable poems, including two or three keepers. And I had become comfortable with the voice I would later name Carl Hruska.
Perhaps comfortable isn't the right word. Now that the voice had me, it wasn't going to let go. I wrote little else for six months. That was frustrating: I was trying to finish a different book at the time. At last, at the Sage Hill Writers' workshop, I meet the extraordinary Canadian poet Besty Warland. I said, "Betsy, I can't write about anything but World War Two. It's distracting me from my work." She said, "maybe it is your work."
Oh.
At Sage Hill, the group of poems became first a sequence, then a suite of thirty poems. Once home, I submitted "Poems for Carl Hruska" to the CBC Literary Competition, and to my astonishment, they won.
There was a fair amount of publicity, and everyone wanted to know who Carl was. The name is a pseudonym, I say, but the person is real. The truth is more complicated. Carl Hruska is Captain H, and he isn't. Like his voice, he's real enough to give me the story, fiction enough to let me tell it. I needed that last piece of permission, a new name, to put this story on paper.
In this, and in all the poems, I have tried to honour him. I have tried to live up to his astonishing gift of trust. I doubt that I have done it fully, but I have done the best I could. Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska is now a full-length book, and is dedicated to the real Carl, with all my love. If all goes well, it should see print in 2003.
As for the novel, it's still where I left it. I may come back to it someday, but if I do, it will be haunted by different ghosts.
The trick of writing an historical novel, I'm told, is to keep your research from taking over. This is precisely why I've never finished one. The only time I tried, my research took me over, ruined my novel, and changed my life.
In 1996 I was at work on my first novel. I tried to set it in the familiar ground of Charles Mix County, South Dakota, the my father's home, a place of marginal farms, thin people, and bad weather. I discovered in the novel what I already knew in life: not much happens out there. (I wasn't enough of a novelist to write about what does happen there, or enough of a person to understand it. I was still, at heart, a citygirl making a reluctant visit.) In an act of foolishness, I moved my snow-struck farm into the Ardennes forest of Belgium, and into the Battle of the Bulge.
I don't know why I picked the Ardennes. The Battle of the Bulge is a ghost at the back of some family stories--uncle so-and-so who froze his feet there and was never the same. Then there was an American Experience documentary I saw by chance. I was struck by the look of it: the huge dark trees, hammocked with heavy snow. The soldiers looked small against them. It was the coldest European winter on record, and the deadliest battle in American history: a six-week slog, field by field, town by town, through fifty miles of heavy woods, hedgerows, and open fields.
Well, I thought, right, there must be a story in that.
Pure foolishness, but charming in its innocence. Soon my bedroom-office was ankle-deep in books and articles, about farming, about Belgium, and forests, about the 1940's, and, of course, about the war. The plot and its people began to take shape: the farm women--a mother and three daughters--sleeping in the cellar for the shelling, the father conscripted, the potatoes running out, the cattle hidden in the quarry. And the American soldier they reluctantly take in, an almost-accidental deserter named Vernon.
Vernon gave me trouble. My books--which had now claimed most of the bed as well as the floor--told me where he was, and why he had been sent there, how many K rations he had with him, what rifle he was carrying. But there was too much I didn't know, and it was all of the same sort: What was in his pockets. How he slept in a foxhole. How he kept his socks dry. The unending business of the care of the body isn't in the history books, but it is most of our lives.
A rare brainwave: I called the local veteran's association. They introduced me to someone who had been there, a nursing home resident I'll call Captain H, which is pretty close to what I called him in life. He had been a combat infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge and the West German campaign, and had lost a leg there. I got on my girl-reporter dress and went to meet him.
She comes to meet him
Omaha, Nebraska - April, 1996
Most of a leg left on a hospital ship--
the rock, the reek of ether.
He learned to walk, after,
but now he's going back
to bone, listing
into old damage.
We meet in the parlour.
He sits and sets his cane to picket
beside him, takes
my untouched hand.
The young researcher, he says--
a charity. It might be
the young lady, in a yellow dress,
a perfume called Forest Lily,
as if it were a different April
and I had come to see him
carried from the train.
Outside,
on Farnam Street, the tulips blown,
the rain.
Captain H had never talked about his time in the war, and he made it clear he wasn't about to start. I was there to learn the details of day-to-day life of a combat infantryman--that stuff so common it hadn't made the history books. About his own story, he'd keep his silence.
But neither of us had realized how intimate the commonplace could be. Captain H told me about keeping snow out of a rifle barrel with a condom, about sleeping standing up, about eating Wrigley's spearmint gum so cold it snapped to pieces on the teeth. He told me about nights of cold fog, full of sound:
Night
Ardennes - January 1945
The hardest thing
was night, all white
and the snow whipped up
in devils. Or worse,
still. That cold--
you could hear everything.
Trees would creak and crack
like rifles. Voices,
sometimes, words
you couldn't make out,
or cattle, bawling to be milked.
There was no way to stop there. From the details common to everyone on the front line, there slowly surfaced the fragments of Captain H's particular story.
For a war story, it was strange. There were no battles in it. Shots were rarely fired. The other soldiers didn't get killed, but vanished, as if they had become ghosts without ever dying. It was a story of waiting, and of aftermath. It was dreamlike, and broken.
Spared
Seeing him shaking,
a wordless medic gave him once
a wool cap,
hand-knit,
helmet-matted,
another man's heat
still in it.
He fingers an ear
as if he still feels it,
says
luck
close thing
says
spared
and stops
as if it scares him.
The stories and the man drew me back over and over, for almost nine months. We observed the formalities of nursing home visits. We had tea. We put together puzzles. We played cards: five-card draw, and he was deadly. He showed me pictures of his family. Most of the time we were silent. Between those silences came bursts of the war, strange stuff, extraordinary stories.
Winter White
Ardennes - January 1945
Midafternoon in some nameless town
a door bangs, a woman comes running,
arms full of folded white. One sheet
flies out behind her like a banner, and
they understand. She's giving them linens,
winter camouflage. With no language,
he thanks her, and she presses to him,
weeping. When she runs he lifts
his hands and finds
a table cloth. Not lace,
but that stiff stuff,
cutwork. He cuts it
with his bayonet.
Pulls it over his head. Inside,
he smells the starch,
the ghost of iron.
Slowly his health, not good when we met, sank. I watched his family draw in around him, and I saw him less and less. Eventually, I moved away to Canada, to be with my soon-to-be husband. On Remembrance Day that year, I sent Captain H a tin of Hershey's chocolates and Wrigley's spearmint gum. I heard later he'd been too sick to eat them. He sent me a note, his handwriting spidered. It said, in full: "Thanks for the airdrop and the interest." That was the last I heard from him.
I was so caught up in the war that I had almost expected to hear of his death by telegram, but the news came by phone. His daughter called. And while the loss wasn't a surprise, what she said stunned me. Captain H had left me his combat infantry badge. I cried. I knew then what I should have known long before. He'd left me his story.
I knew it was a gift. I knew it was a responsibility. But what I was supposed to do next, I had no idea.
I had intended to use Captain H's stories to fill the holes in Vernon's story. I tried this, but holes were too small. They were in the wrong places. I tried to open the novel up, to write from the fragments Captain H had given me - not to use them, but to be used by them. Even that didn't work. It took me a long time to see that what I had wasn't holes but a whole. Not fragments but something large and strong and strange, far too big for the space my novel could give it.
But what was it? I tried transcribing the scribbles in my notebook into essays, into memoir, into a different novel.
I tried poetry, of course: poetry is my strength. In retrospect, it's obvious this needed to be a book of poems. It is, after all, a story of fragments and silences, a story about what can't be said. The poems, with their white space, hold the fragments in place. I think of a partial fossil laid out on a table, the shape of the man suggested by the angle of the femur, the carriage by the striation where muscles once attached. But I didn't have a voice for the poems. They were stiff and forced.
I floundered for three years. Finally, I put the project aside.
Then, a year later, my husband James and I were driving across the prairies in late December. We headed out from Omaha before dawn, hoping to make Michigan. There was deep, fresh snow. In the headlights, the fencerows were lined with corniced drifts. As the sun came up, we saw the hoarfrost. The hills were blue and the sky was pink, then white. The hoarfrost was thick and delicate on the barbed wire and the telephone lines. The oaks that cluster around the streams in Western Iowa were ghostly with it. I took out my notebook, and I wrote "Morning."
Morning
Ardennes - January 1945
You wouldn't believe how beautiful
it was. In the night the fog would freeze
and in the morning everything
was soft with it--ghosts of trees.
We advanced into open fields
the colour of apple blossom,
delicate with blue shadows.
Against that snow we stood out
like deer.
And then
the shelling would start.
It took no more time to write than the poem than it would to copy it out. I stopped. I read what I'd just written aloud. James said: "What the heck is that?" Good question, I thought. That first poem came almost in a dream. I remember Captain H describing the hoarfrost that was common in the Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge. I can close my eyes and hear him saying, "You wouldn't believe how beautiful it was." But it's not quite his voice that came to me. It's a voice that's my own and not my own, his and not his. Close enough to his to tell his story. Enough mine to let me tell it.
I'm grateful for that long drive. A voice like this is a gift, and a fragile one. I listened to it for ten hours solid. I wrote clear across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, while James drove and listened to me mutter. By the time we hit Michigan, I had a dozen or so workable poems, including two or three keepers. And I had become comfortable with the voice I would later name Carl Hruska.
Perhaps comfortable isn't the right word. Now that the voice had me, it wasn't going to let go. I wrote little else for six months. That was frustrating: I was trying to finish a different book at the time. At last, at the Sage Hill Writers' workshop, I meet the extraordinary Canadian poet Besty Warland. I said, "Betsy, I can't write about anything but World War Two. It's distracting me from my work." She said, "maybe it is your work."
Oh.
At Sage Hill, the group of poems became first a sequence, then a suite of thirty poems. Once home, I submitted "Poems for Carl Hruska" to the CBC Literary Competition, and to my astonishment, they won.
There was a fair amount of publicity, and everyone wanted to know who Carl was. The name is a pseudonym, I say, but the person is real. The truth is more complicated. Carl Hruska is Captain H, and he isn't. Like his voice, he's real enough to give me the story, fiction enough to let me tell it. I needed that last piece of permission, a new name, to put this story on paper.
Purple Heart
Hospital Ship, English Channel - March, 1945
The medal-pinners came to Dover
to meet the ship. I remember, we were s'posed
to lie at attention. A man could die, and they'd only say
how fine his attention -
Never put my name
on anything, would you, Erin?
In this, and in all the poems, I have tried to honour him. I have tried to live up to his astonishing gift of trust. I doubt that I have done it fully, but I have done the best I could. Ghost Maps: Poems for Carl Hruska is now a full-length book, and is dedicated to the real Carl, with all my love. If all goes well, it should see print in 2003.
As for the novel, it's still where I left it. I may come back to it someday, but if I do, it will be haunted by different ghosts.