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February 12, 2009

"THEY HAVE LITTLE CURIOSITY"

FR Last weekend, Mrs. TEV and I spent a lovely Saturday wandering around the Norton Simon Museum, my favorite of L.A.'s museums.  I was there to do a little research for my new novel - I wanted to get a close look at one of the paintings in the collection.

Afterwards, we found ourselves in the Museum Bookstore - always a dangerously expensive proposition.  This time was no exception, and my bag filled up with things like Apollinaire on Art, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Mountain Life.  But the impulse buy of the trip was a slender little volume put out by the University of Chicago Press called Instructions for American Servicemen in France During World War II, a facsimile of a "pocket guide" prepared by the United States Army in 1944.  The books were shipped out to soliders along with ammunition and chewing gum (for seasickness, as Rick Atkinson's introduction tells us) as part of Operation Overlord.

The guide consisted of six parts:"Why You're Gong to France" ... "The United States Solider in France" ... "A Few Pages of French History" ... "Observation Post" ... "In Parting" ... and "Annex: Various Aids".  There's also a brief but handy glossary with a surprisingly good pronounciation guide.  (bawn-SWAR). The book is a fascinating time capsule, at once naive, amusing, touching and practical.  Here's a brief sample from Meet The People, which is the first section of "The United States Solider in France":

You have certainly heard of gay Paree.  Yet the French have far less the regular habit of pleasure than we Americans.  Even before the Nazi occupation when the French were still free to have a good time, they had it as a special event and managed it thriftily.  A whole French family would spend less on pleasure in a month than you would over a week-end.  The French reputation for gayety (sic) was principally built on the civilized French way of doing things; by the French people's good taste; by their interest in quality, not quantity; and by the lively energy of their minds.  The French are intelligent, have mostly had a sensible education, without frills, are industrious, shrewd and frugal.

The French are not given to confidences, or to telling how much money they make - or used to make - or to bragging.  And they think little of such talk from others.  The French have a remarkable capacity for minding their own business.  Even in the days when they used to travel, before the Nazis shut down on it, the French never used to sit down in a railway train and tell their private affairs to a total stranger.  They are observant; don't think they won't notice what you do.  But they have little curiosity.

There's much practical advice as well - don't consort with prostitutes, and if you do, and you pick up a "nasty souvenir" report it at once.  Don't eat beyond your rations, as you'll be taking food supplies from the locals.  And in closing, soldiers are admonished not to brag or belittle, to be generous and to remember: "We are friends of the French and they are friends of ours."

Posted at 12:14 AM in Worthy Titles |

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Comments

Evie

They also did these for Australia, Britain and Iraq. There also some guides for British Soldiers in certain countries. I have a copy of Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia 1942, and if that's anything to go by, they're quite entertaining little books.

"Unlike cricket, which is a polite game, Australian Rules Football creates a desire on the part of the crowd to tear someone apart, usually the referee."

"The Australian has few equals in the world at swearing. . . . The commonest swear words are ‘bastard’ (pronounced ‘barstud’), ‘bugger,’ and ‘bloody,’ and the Australians have a genius for using the latter nearly every other word."

"Of course, the best thing any Australian can say about you is that you're a "bloody fine barstud".

"Australians eat and drink too."

"You'll find that the Digger [Australian soldier] is a rapid, sharp and unsparing kidder, able to hold his own with Americans or anyone else. He doesn't miss a chance to spar back and forth and he enjoys it all the more if the competition is tough."

"Another thing, the Digger is instantaneously sociable. Riding on the same train with American troops, a mob of Aussies are likely to descend on the Yanks, investigate their equipment, ask every kind of personal question, find out if there's any liquor to be had, and within five minutes be showing pictures of their girls and families."

"There's no use beefing about it - it's their country."

Posted by: Evie | February 12, 2009 at 05:35 AM

Pete

Mark, I suggest that you title your next book "The Nasty Souvenir."

Posted by: Pete | February 12, 2009 at 10:45 AM

Anne

I have the advice to American servicemen in Britain. It is a treasure. These are amazing books. I wonder if there are such .pdf s now on Korea or Iraq...?

The other one I like is *Keeping Well in Wartime,* a blitz-time UK publication that's really mainly about trying not to mind that you don't have very much food. It's an amazing document for translating Churchill's pep talks into very practical advice about mental health, etc.

I want this French one, it's delicious, isn't it?

Posted by: Anne | February 17, 2009 at 10:27 AM

genevieve

Terrific post - enjoyed both pamphlets, yours and Evie's! We do eat and drink down here, heh. Just think, if they were writing it now they'd have to say what great coffee we have too.

Posted by: genevieve | February 18, 2009 at 01:00 AM

Kim

I love it! Especially that the French are very observant, close mouthed and have little curiosity. I think "nasty souvenir" maybe become my new euphemism for all kinds of things.

Posted by: Kim | February 18, 2009 at 10:55 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

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    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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