We’ll Meet Again: A Scholar’s Farewell

Well, here it is, my last month as a UEA American Library Scholar. It’s hard to believe the time has flown by so quickly and incredible to contemplate some of the historic events we’ve seen together, including a global pandemic, the election of America’s forty-sixth president and the death of Queen Elizabeth II, who as a young woman served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the Second World War. But then, working together through good times and bad is what the special relationship between the United States and Britain has always been about, hasn’t it? The American Library and a PhD program in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia were an unknown flight path a decade ago, when I was immersing myself in all things noir. I watched a lot of film noir back then, so much so that I felt like I was living in black and white in my tiny studio on Manhattan’s East Side. Some of the movies I watched from that period were not about crime, but about war, and in one I heard (for the first time, I think) Vera Lynn’s unforgettable wartime anthem, We’ll Meet Again. It’s possible my dad sang it to us when were kids—he was known to belt out classics like You’re in the Army Now and Over There and was also a lover of big band music like that arranged by bandleader and US Army Air Forces Captain Glenn Miller, who died in 1944 when the plane that was transporting him to a concert for Allied troops in liberated Paris was lost over the English Channel.

My father, Flight Officer Eugene L. Solomon, a B-17 pilot with the 384th Bomb Group, himself spent some of his leave in Paris, as evidenced by his well thumbed American Red Cross map of that city. Fortunately, he never had to use the other map he carried, a silk escape map. After flying the last strategic bombing mission in Europe on April 25, 1945, the group was chosen to move to Germany as part of the United States Air Forces in Europe and initially deployed to Istres, France in June. Before that, the crew spent VE Day in London, where the crowd was ‘packed like sardines’ and my father saw King George, Queen Elizabeth, (then) Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

Flight Officer Eugene Solomon, the author’s father, top row, second from left. The crew (not shown in listed order): Pilot Lawrence E. Thurston, Co-Pilot Eugene Leonard Solomon, Navigator Theodore T. Gore, Togglier (bombardier) Robert Lee Wilkinson, Radio Operator/Gunner William O. King, Engineer/Top Turret Gunner Oliver T. Larson, Ball Turret Gunner Elias S. Huron, Waist (Flexible) Gunner James Lindsay, Tail Gunner Ralph Cauthen. Photo courtesy of Christopher Wilkinson, the son of togglier Robert Lee Wilkinson, bottom row at left.

American Red Cross Map of Paris for service members

Silk escape map

According to Walter E. Owens’ As Briefed: A Family History of the 384th Bombardment Group, the 384th transported Allied troops to Germany and American soldiers to Casablanca for return to the US, among other missions. The latter was known as Project Green, which operated from June to September 1945 and was, according to the 384th Bomb Group’s website, ‘a key part of the “Home Bound Task Force” that returned combat troops to the USA following cessation of hostilities in the ETO. Troops were ferried from various European locations to Port Lyautey, Morocco, there to await transport home.’ 

Dad’s crew helped redeploy the 101st and the 82nd Airborne and medical personnel from field hospitals that weren’t needed anymore, some of whom were intended to be sent to the Pacific. They repatriated French citizens who had fled France and were living in North Africa, including the wife, two daughters and son of General de Gaulle’s aide de camp. Dad told us in a family interview I conducted that the crew took the kids ‘up front and let them sit in the seat and “fly the plane”’. The crew also repatriated Greek citizens who had been brought to Germany to be slave laborers. On one of their missions, they flew to an air station outside of Munich to deliver supplies and witnessed the horrifying aftermath of Dachau concentration camp. 

Another operation my father participated in was photographic mapping duty, or as he put it: ‘they photographed the entirety of Europe at 20,000 feet.’ Except, that is, for the USSR, because ‘the Russians wouldn’t let us.’ The 384th BG was inactivated in France in February of 1946; however, my father was on active duty in Europe through July, when he returned to the US.^[1] In Istres, every flying officer had to get a job in a ground position, so my dad became an assistant intelligence officer, for which he had to go to intelligence school in Wiesbaden (across from the IG Farben works, a subsidiary of which produced the Zyklon B gas used in the death camps). He was also the information education officer for the Biarritz campus of the US Army University, a program that brought professors from America and elsewhere to conduct classes for servicemen and women stationed in Europe. Flight Officer Solomon returned to the US on July 17, 1946, and was relieved from active duty on September 11, 1946.

It would take many more paragraphs to list the activities I was privileged to participate in as a UEA American Scholar over the last two years. Highlights include the honor of laying the wreaths on behalf of the Second Air Division for Remembrance Week in 2021 and on Memorial Day this year at the Cambridge American Cemetery; attending the Remembrance service and Evensong at the American Chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral; staffing the long-anticipated Library launch with colleagues in May and seeing our 2nd AD veterans movingly address us from across the pond through the magic of Zoom (yes, I cried); organizing a resoundingly successful talk by my academic supervisor at UEA, crime fiction writer and scholar Henry Sutton; engaging with the public as an ambassador of American literature and culture; and furthering the Library’s memorial mission by educating visitors about the Second Air Division’s history in East Anglia.

The US Army Air Forces monument at Cambridge American Cemetery

A B-17 flyover at Cambridge American Cemetery

The author, right, with Professor Henry Sutton at his April talk

The American Library and the Second Air Division Memorial Trust have been an invaluable resource, both in my family research as well as in supporting work on my PhD thesis with the UEA American Library Scholarship. My boundless gratitude goes out to Trust Chairman Richard Middleton, Professor Jaqueline Fear-Segal and the other Trust Governors, their American counterparts in the Heritage League, the veterans of the 2nd AD and their families, Trust Librarian Orla Kennelly, fellow Scholars and library colleagues, the Millennium Library and Norfolk County Council Library system, the Norfolk Record Office and the East Anglian community.

And here’s to you, our Scholars’ Blog readers, who commented on and shared my musings on a range of American topics.

Thank you all—but let’s not say goodbye, rather: We’ll Meet Again. 

—post by Suzanne Solomon

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^[1] His service record indicates that when he was discharged, he was attached to the 368th Bombardment Squad, 306th Bomb Group, 1st AD, which ‘engaged in special photographic mapping duty in western Europe and North Africa.’ However, there may still be more to discover about his Occupation service.

Celebrating Black History Month

Members of the 99th Fighter Squadron of the Army Air Forces pose for a picture at the Anzio beachhead, 1944. Image courtesy of National Archives

February is Black History Month, ‘a celebration and a powerful reminder that Black history is American history, Black culture is American culture, and Black stories are essential to the ongoing story of America — our faults, our struggles, our progress, and our aspirations’, as President Joe Biden’s proclamation for 2022 affirms. The Biden/Harris administration became part of that history in 2021, with Kamala Harris serving as the first Black female Vice President. 

The American Library also recognizes the contributions of Black Americans in WWII, with over 2.5 million Black men registering for the draft, many going on to serve in the Army, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard, despite continuing racial discrimination and segregation. Black women also served as nurses and in the Women’s Army Corps, as well as contributing to the war effort in large numbers as volunteers.

Below are some selections from our collection as well as links to online resources to learn more about Black American history and culture. Visit the American Library to check out these books, get more recommendations and browse additional titles! You can also check out ebooks from our online collection of titles by African American authors.

The Warmth of Other Suns : the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
An award-winning account of the mass exodus, from 1915-1970, of Black Americans from the Southern United States, seen through the eyes of three individuals who made the journey in search of opportunity and a better life.

Beneath a Ruthless Sun : a True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found by Gilbert King
A gripping true story of unequal justice in small town Florida by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Devil in the Grove.

When They Call You a Terrorist : a Black Lives Matter memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, foreword by Angela Davis
A memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement that reignited the American civil rights struggle in the 21st century.

A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry
‘A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country.’

Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II by Farah Jasmine Griffin
The stories of Black women artists in the WWII era, spotlighting choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams and novelist Ann Petry.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
An ‘African American feminist classic’ from one of the celebrated authors of the Harlem Renaissance.

Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance by Mia Bay
A history of segregated travel that ‘helps explain why the long, unfinished journey to racial equality so often takes place on the road.’

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou
Essays on American life and letters from the celebrated poet and writer.

Passing by Nella Larsen
Two Black women, childhood friends, one of whom has chosen to pass as white, are reunited, upending both their lives, in this groundbreaking 1929 novel, now a critically acclaimed film adaptation.

The National Archives has extensive material documenting the Black experience: https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans  

This database has resources on the Black freedom struggle in the United States: https://blackfreedom.proquest.com/

— post by Suzanne Solomon

Nightmare Alley

Image courtesy of Criterion Collection

‘Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.’ – Nightmare Alley

Noir afficionados, including this one, are greeting the release of director Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel Nightmare Alley with rapture. Crime fiction writer and noir scholar Megan Abbott tweeted: ‘As a lover of both the original novel and movie, @RealGDT’s sumptuous remake is irresistible…’. TCM’s Noir Alley host Eddie Muller called it ‘extremely faithful’ to the novel’s ‘world view’ and ‘truly a color film noir.’ Bonus for purists (at least those resident in Los Angeles): a black and white version of the film will have a limited theatrical release in January, according to the Deadline site. 

While I haven’t yet seen the 2021 picture, I’m a big fan of the novel and of the 1947 screen adaptation directed by Edmund Goulding, starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. That version, however, traded the book’s dark ending for a ray of hope, at the insistence of studio boss Darryl Zanuck.^[1] In this writer’s opinion, such a change (while not uncommon in adaptations), violates one of the cardinal rules of noir: there are no happy endings. Another is that the characters, while believing themselves to be in control of their destinies, operate in a world subject to the capricious laws of fate.

Gresham embraced—and, indeed, helped to shape—that aspect of literary noir, structuring his novel on the trump cards in the tarot deck, which he uses to introduce each chapter. He begins Nightmare Alley with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land: ‘Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see.’ To drive the point home, Gresham warns the reader by entitling the first chapter ‘The Fool’: ‘who walks in motley, with his eyes closed, over a precipice at the end of the world.’ But, like hapless noir protagonists, readers are by nature driven by hope (or else why read to the end?), rooting for the hero—or anti-hero—to triumph, for the villain to be punished, for a moving, entertaining or instructive tale. Nightmare Alley promises all of these but delivers its own funhouse version, along with a gritty tour of the noir universe of venality and lust, high hopes and low impulses, compulsion and despair, which, as readers (or voyeurs), we can safely experience from the front row.

Set in the topsy-turvy world of the carnival, Nightmare Alley is a story about a con artist who preys on people’s hopes and cashes in on their weaknesses. But carny folk aren’t all cold-hearted operators, or at least not when off duty. Some of Gresham’s cast of fortune tellers, strongmen, acrobats, geeks and freaks are sympathetic, welcoming the book’s protagonist, Stan Carlisle, when he has nowhere else to go, and showing him the proverbial ropes. At the Ten-in-One show, Stan finds a family of sorts, one that, in true grifter form, he will betray. He takes up with the show’s astrologist, Madame Zeena, who schools him in mind reading, a clairvoyant act helped along by coded questions and a shrewd knowledge of human nature, and in the arcana of the tarot. He soon outgrows her tutelage and joins forces with ingénue Molly Cahill, formerly ‘Mamzelle Electra’, and the duo take their show on the road as headliners, drawing a well-heeled society audience with a spiritualist act.

But Stan’s inner demons, including a thirst for liquor, are soon unleashed by his amorality and greed. He dumps Molly for Dr. Lilith Ritter, a psychiatrist and a suitable siren for Gresham’s modernist novel. Stan thinks he’s using her to exploit her patients’ darkest secrets, but in true femme fatale fashion, she’s a hustler too, playing Stan as relentlessly as T.S. Eliot’s ‘Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,’ must have played her marks. As deftly as a carnival barker on the midway, Gresham has conjured us into his world, palming our price of admission for a ticket to guess what happens in the end. Astute observers of human nature may believe they already know. Reader, could that be you?

‘This book formerly sold for a dollar, but for today I’m going to let you have it for two bits—a quarter of a dollar. Let’s hurry it up, folks, because I know you all want to see and hear Madam Zeena, the seeress, and her act does not go on until everyone who wants one of these great books gets one. Thank you, sir. And you. Any more?’

—post by Suzanne Solomon

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^[1] Carl Macek et al., Film Noir : An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd ed. (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1992).

Native American Heritage Month

As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of the month, fittingly, November is Native American Heritage Month, with the theme ‘Gifts of Our Ancestors: Celebrating Indigenous Knowledge and Cultures.’ Indigenous people are believed to have inhabited the North American continent since at least 15,000 years ago, and were stewards of the vast natural resources, from sea to shining sea, that European explorers found when they landed in 1492.

As President Joseph Biden said in his Proclamation of National Native American Heritage Month:

Despite a painful history marked by unjust Federal policies of assimilation and termination, American Indian and Alaska Native peoples have persevered.  During National Native American Heritage Month, we celebrate the countless contributions of Native peoples past and present, honor the influence they have had on the advancement of our Nation, and recommit ourselves to upholding trust and treaty responsibilities, strengthening Tribal sovereignty, and advancing Tribal self-determination. 

One notable fact stood out for me:  Native Americans, resident in America before anyone else, were not granted citizenship until 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act, motivated in part by their high rates of enlistment in WWI. However, it took until 1962 for all 50 states to guarantee Native Americans the right to vote.

On a lighter note, hockey fans may be interested to know that Native Americans are credited with inventing the sport, which they called ‘shinny ball’.

Nacoista drawing of man and woman playing shinny ball game, ca. 1881-1891
National Museum of Natural History https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-naa-ms166931

The Library of Congress kicked off the month with an event featuring Joy Harjo, the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, and Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary. Libraries around the United States have been celebrating by holding readings and making book recommendations.

Here at the  American Library, former Scholar and staff member Linda Sheppard did a deep dive into our collection to highlight titles exploring Native American history, culture, art, literature, culinary traditions, wartime contributions and more.

Here are a few:

We’d love to see you at the American Library where you can browse the full display and take books home to learn more about the rich and diverse heritage of Native Americans and their many individual tribes.

–post by Suzanne Solomon