The S.S. Marine Fox, a nearly 500-foot-long cargo and transport ship, “arrived in San Francisco Bay from Guam and Saipan via Honolulu September 11, 1946.” A photograph of the arrival shows literally thousands of soldiers and sailors on deck, some smiling for the camera, others more reserved, no doubt still feeling the effects of the years at war. 1 It is not hard to imagine poet W.D. Snodgrass, who served in the Navy, among those on deck, as his poem “Returned to Frisco, 1946” recounts such a ship’s entrance into the Bay. However, far from depicting a joyful return, the poem is much less sanguine; in fact, he feels that “we were dulled and shaken/With fear. What still could catch us by surprise?” Is the war really over? Could we still be a target, with our “first life” in sight? The “first life,” the pre-war life, though, cannot be regained.
Margot Norris writes that the poem “oscillates between lightness and darkness in mood” (Norris, 2012, 99) but the few phrases that could be seen as “light”—“lingering over steak and white, soft bread . . . Free, if we chose, to blow in our back pay/On smart girls or trinkets” – are ameliorated by the undertone of doubt about the possibility of recapturing the pre-war past: “We would have liberty . . . Free to choose just what they’d said we should, . . . Ties that had lasted and which must be good” [italics added]. Any hope of regaining the “old affections” is foreclosed. There is even a sense of trepidation about what the post-war world offers: “We had stood years and, then, scrambled like rabbits/Up hostile beaches; why should we fear this land/Swaddled in luxuries and its old habits?” What is that fear? That the veteran will be ignored, forgotten? Rejected? Become invisible, as suggested by Howard Nemerov’s “Grand Central with Soldiers, In Early Morning”? 2 Will the civilian care more about “luxuries” that had to be foregone during the war years? Or does he anticipate what might be in store for him if his war memories emerge? All these could be barriers which lead to alienation from the self, the family and the larger community. Snodgrass continues:
Off the port side, through haze, we could discern
The Rock, all lavender with flowers. Barred,
The Golden Gate, fading away astern,
Stood like the closed gate of your own back yard.
Norris writes about this final stanza, “the barred Golden Gate . . . conjures a sense of deterrence, of a psychic if not physical barrier to home. The same threat of psychological damage . . . is here intimated for Snodgrass’s returning veterans” (Ibid, 100).
She does not specify the types of “psychological damage,” but other poems suggest what the veteran may experience: memories that cannot be erased, and which persist years or even decades after the war. These intrusive memories, which cannot be controlled through the will, lead to sensory hypersensitivity, where the past overtakes the present.
The persistence of memories has a psycho-social as well as physical effect, as in Lucien Stryk’s “The Pit” and “Watching War Movies” and Thomas McGrath’s “Remembering That Island” and “Homecoming.” In each case the memories activate physical responses. In “The Pit” the speaker and a small crew are ordered to bury a number of rotting dead. Stryk writes that: “Twenty years. I still remember/The sun-blown stench, and the pit . . . ” In “Watching War Movies” the speaker has flashbacks of the war while watching movies on TV: “my skin crawls–/heat, dust—the scorpion/bites again. . . . The war goes on and on.”
In McGrath’s poems, the memories blur the line between past and present, and the sights and sounds of the war reappear. He hears the “rattle of [a boat’s] blocks,” sees the faces of his dead comrades, “And mine is among them.” The poem concludes:
I see the vast stinking Pacific suddenly awash
Once more with bodies, landings on all beaches,
The bodies of dead and living gone back to appointed places,
A ten year old resurrection,
And myself once more in the scourging wind, waiting, waiting.
“The Homecoming” begins on a positive note with the speaker’s return to America, which “opened up like a child’s picture/book . . . And the slight smell of death was lost/in the untroubled darkness; . . .” However, the mood quickly changes as he recognizes that the familial, domestic past is overtaken by the war experiences. His return home is troubling because he realizes he will never be able to readjust. “Home” represents alienation, psychological estrangement, and a new type of fear, where:
We must clothe ourselves in the lives of
Strangers
Whose names we carry but can no longer know—
Is a new fear born between the doorstep and the doorFar from the night patrol, the terror, the long sweat.
The most extreme form of psychological disturbance is depicted in Howard Nemerov’s “Redeployment.” Any connection to “reality” is tenuous at best: “They say the war is over. But water still/Comes bloody from the taps, . . . ” After mentioning a man who keeps “A soldier’s dead blue eyeballs” in his pocket, the poem concludes (with a nod to Poe in the last line):
The end of the war. I took it quietly
Enough. I tried to wash the dirt out of
My hair and from under my fingernails.
I dressed in clean white clothes and went to bed.
I heard the dust falling between the walls. 3
It is salutary to consider the ways that trauma from the experience of war is reified, and can offer a perspective on the poems. Chris Brewin, referring to the work of Pierre Janet, writes: “one of the first traumatologists, [Janet] wrote extensively about how memories of traumatic experiences are dissociated or split off from normal consciousness, resulting in powerful and uncontrollable re-enactments of the events.” Brewin goes on to note that “characteristics of this traumatic re-experiencing in PTSD are its involuntary and uncontrollable nature, the strong sensory impressions, and the sense of ‘nowness’ or of the event occurring in the present.”
Clearly, the poets considered here 4, especially the latter three, illustrate the effects of sensory overload from traumatic memories, now considered a marker of PTSD. There is no separation between an event in the past and the present, regardless of the years or even decades of distance. The veteran is caught between two worlds, a liminal state between the traumatic past and the reintegration into post-war present, an uneasy co-existence. The return to home becomes a double-edged sword, as it is at once looked forward to and at the same time it is feared. 5
NOTES
1 Marine Fox enters San Francisco:
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrErQn_UMFpdVwLsg9XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3BpdnM-?p=ww2+troops+return+to+sanfrancisco&fr2=piv-web&type=E210US0G0&fr=mcafee&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fthumbs.worthpoint.com%2Fzoom%2Fimages1%2F1%2F0522%2F31%2Fvintage-1946-ww2-troops-return_1_cfbec68d6a0398af0bb7102b664b5584.jpg
2 In that short poem Nemerov presents a scene of veterans “secretly . . . going to some place,/. . . That they may go in stealth and leave no trace,/In early morning before business starts.”
3 In contrast, Nemerov also has a more bitterly satiric take. In “Coming Home to New York When It Was Said to Be Going down the Drain” he writes of returning to New York by air. As the plane, carrying “The rejects the retreads the Four-Fs of every last/Country in Europe, our lot that grew up here,” approaches the airport he observes Manhattan, “the bankrupt town.” When he finally arrives in the city for processing, he finds himself with mixed emotions: “Right in the midst of the biggest damn dream/Everybody ever dreamed at once, Manhattan, Beautiful recipe for disaster, gone for broke . . . and here it is, dead broke, . . . .” The poem ends with a rewriting of the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, suggesting that liberty is problematic:
“Give me your garbage, send me whatever can walk,”
And made good every word, and, dying day by day,
Throwing the money away, made ruin renew.
4 One British poem that reflects the tenuous return to post-war society is Gordon Symes’s “Song,” which has echoes of Snodgrass, in that “home” as once known has become a “closed gate.” In the first three four-line stanzas the speaker addresses a sailor, a soldier, and an airman, cautioning each that even though their service is over, nothing will ever be the same. In the fourth and final stanza he writes:
And your hearths shall be baffled, wherever
You settle, north or south,
By that airy keening, stiff alien
Salt, and the gall in your mouth.
5 The visual arts of the period also depict the estranged veteran. Certainly, the film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), winner of seven Academy Awards, although with a “happy ending,” reflects the GI returning home to a difficult reintegration. Other films, like The Chase (1946), High Wall (1947), Homecoming (1948), Act of Violence (1949) and Backfire (1950), nominally film noir, similarly show the difficulty of returning to civilian society. Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover painting, Homecoming GI (1945), depicts a young veteran standing in the courtyard facing the rear of what looks like a tenement apartment building. His family and neighbors, sixteen in all, welcome him back, palpably overjoyed. The vet, in uniform and holding his duffel, seems rooted to the ground, unable to process the enthusiastic reception. The image of the Marine in Tom Lea’s 1944 painting The Two-Thousand-Yard Stare suggests the psychological condition that the vet will be burdened with in the civilian world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brewin, Chris R. “Re-experiencing Traumatic Events in PTSD: New Avenues in Research on Intrusive Memories and Flashbacks.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology, Vol. 6, issue 1, May 19 2015 [article 27180. doi: 10.3402/ejpt.v6.27180].
McGrath, Thomas. “Homecoming” and “Remembering That Island.” Poets of World War II, edited by Harvey Shapiro, American Poets Project/The Library of America, 2003, pp. 105, 106-7.
Nemerov, Howard. “Redeployment” and “Grand Central, With Soldiers in the Early Morning,” The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, The University of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 61, 63.
Nemerov, Howard. “Coming Home to New York When It Was Said to Be Going down the Drain,” https://www.poeticous.com/howard-nemerov/coming-home-to-new-york-when-it-was-said-to-be-going-down-the-drain
Norris, Margot. “American Poets of World War II.” The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, edited by Piette, Adam and Mark Rawlinson, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 94-100.
Stryk, Lucien. “The Pit.” American War Poetry, edited by Lorrie Goldensohn, Columbia University Press, 2006, pp. 236-37.
Stryk, Lucien.“Watching War Movies.” Articles of War: A Collection of American Poetry about World War II, edited by Leon Stokesbury, The University of Arkansas Press, 1990, p. 155.
Snodgrass, W. D. “Returned to Frisco, 1946.” The Hudson Review, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1957, p. 50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3847556
Symes, Gordon. “Song.” Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939-1945, edited by Brian Gardner, Magnum Books/Methuen, 1966, p. 191.
