As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father In World War II a Memoir by Philip Gambone ➱ Book Tour

BLOG TOUR

Book Title: As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father In World War II

Author: Philip Gambone

Publisher: Rattling Good Yarns Press

Release Date: October 30, 2020

Genre: Memoir

Trope/s: Father/Son Relationships

Themes: Connecting to the past, Understanding our fathers,

Father/Son silence and the inherent lack of communications,

Coming to terms with history

Heat Rating: 2 flames

Length: 155 000 words/474 pages

It is a standalone book.

Goodreads

Buy Links

Publisher

(Note – The Rattling Good Yarns online store only ships within the US)

Amazon US | Amazon UK

2021 Lambda Literary Award Nominated

Blurb

Philip Gambone, a gay man, never told his father the reason why he was rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. In turn, his father never talked about his participation in World War II. Father and son were enigmas to each other. Gambone, an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer, spent seven years uncovering who the man his quiet, taciturn father had been, by retracing his father's journey through WWII. As Far As I Can Tell not only reconstructs what Gambone’s father endured, it also chronicles his own emotional odyssey as he followed his father’s route from Liverpool to the Elbe River. A journey that challenged the author’s thinking about war, about European history, and about “civilization."

"Philip Gambone weaves a moving memoir of his family, a vivid portrayal of his travels through the locales of WWII, and a powerful description of what that war was like to the men who fought it on the ground into a seamless and eloquent narrative." — Hon. Barney Frank, former Congressman, Massachusetts

“A single question pulses through As Far As I Can Tell: why didn’t my father talk about his time in the war? With meticulous research, Philip Gambone puts sound to silence, offering us a book-length love letter, not just to his father, but to anyone whose life has been hemmed in by obligation, obedience, and the brutality of the system. It’s also a coming to terms with the unknown in others, which is its own hard grace. A vital, dynamic read.” — Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

“As Far As I Can Tell is a fascinating mix of autobiography, travelogue, and historical research that not only takes us on a great adventure in search of what World War Two was like for those who fought in the European theater but probes that most difficult of all subjects, the relationship between a father and a son -- in this case, a gay son. Extensively researched, highly literate and profoundly thoughtful, the story Gambone tells uses not only soldiers’ memoirs but writers as disparate as Samuel Johnson and James Lord to make this a reader's delight.”— Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance

Excerpt

On February 12, 1942, Dad reported for induction. The chief business was the physical examination, which was conducted assembly-line fashion. The inductees were naked, wearing only a number around their necks. It was the most comprehensive physical most of them had ever had. For some it was intimidating, for others embarrassing.

Most inductees were eager to pass the physical exam, so eager in fact that in many cases, they indulged in “negative malingering,” trying to conceal conditions that might get them disqualified. Once the physical was out of the way, the only screening that remained was a brief interview with an army psychiatrist, who had been instructed to look for “neuropsychosis,” a diagnosis that covered all sort of emotional ills from phobias to excessive sweating and evidence of mental deficiency.

Paul Marshall, who ended up in the same division as Dad, remembered being asked at his physical if he liked girls. “I didn’t quite understand what he meant about it. I told him, ‘Why sure, I like girls.’” Later Marshall figured out what he was really being asked. “The ultimate question mark of manliness,” James Lord, himself a homosexual, recalled. “Do you like girls? Or prefer confinement in a federal penitentiary for the remainder of your unnatural life.” The terror of being considered a sexual leper or worse, “unfit to honor the flag of your forebears,” was real. Lord answered, Yes, he liked girls, and was promptly accepted into the army.

Not every homosexual inductee lied. Some, like Donald Vining, came clean with his interviewer, who turned out to be “marvelously tolerant, taking the whole thing easily and calmly, without shock and without condescension.” The interviewer marked Vining’s papers “sui generis ‘H’ overt,” and he was out.

My father passed his induction physical. Hale, hearty, and decidedly heterosexual, he needed none of the remedial medical work—dental, optometric—that millions of other inductees did. With the physical and the psychological screenings done, Dad signed his induction papers, was fingerprinted, and issued a serial number. The final piece of business was the administration of the oath of allegiance, done, according to army regulations, “with proper ceremony.” Once sworn in, Dad was sent home to put things in order before he went off to Camp Perry to be processed for basic training.

Twenty-eight years after Dad’s, my own induction notice arrived, during my senior year in college. I was instructed to report to my hometown on May 6, where the Army would put me on a bus and drive me to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in South Boston. I remember standing, before dawn, on a curb outside the town offices waiting for the bus. Other fellows from my high school were there, and I nervously tried to make small talk with them. We’d had nothing in common in high school, and the situation hadn’t changed in the intervening years.

My recollection of that day is shrouded in numbness. I remember standing in a line, stripped to my underwear, making my way from one examining station to the next. I kept assuring myself I could not possibly go to Vietnam, that the good fortune I’d enjoyed so far would see me to a different destiny than the one where I would end up dead in a jungle in Southeast Asia.

I was clutching a letter from my dentist attesting to the fact that I needed braces, in those days a cause for rejection. But aside from that, I had not taken any steps to ensure that I wouldn’t be taken. I’d heard stories of guys planning to go to their induction physicals drunk, or stoned, or wearing dresses and makeup. Others said they would flee to Canada or apply for conscientious objector status. I had made no such plans. Throughout senior year, I had been sitting on my damn butt, still banking on magic or luck to get me the hell out.

I passed every exam. I was not overweight. I did not have flat feet or a heart murmur. My blood pressure was excellent. At one station, I handed over the dentist’s letter. The examiner gave it a perfunctory glance and tucked it into my file.

At last, I came to the psychological screening area. All I remember is the examiner asking me if I’d ever had any homosexual experiences. And when I said yes, he followed up with a few more questions. Had I sought counseling? Did I intend to stop? That was it. He thanked me and I moved on. Less than two weeks later, I received a notice from the AFEES: “Found Not Acceptable

for Induction Under Current Standards.” I’d been declared 4-F. In the parlance of the day, I had “fagged out.” My parents thought the dentist’s letter about braces had done the trick.

Author Interview

Tell us a little about yourself and your writing goals.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. My first book, a collection of short stories, The Language We Use Up Here, was published by Dutton in 1991. The book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. My novel, Beijing (2003) was nominated for two awards, including a PEN/Bingham Award for Best First Novel.

I have extensive publishing credits in nonfiction as well. I’ve contributed numerous essays, reviews, features pieces, and scholarly articles. I’ve written for local and national journals including Christopher Street, The Harvard Crimson, The New York Times Book Review, and The Boston Globe. Inspired by the semester I taught in Beijing, I have also written extensively about China for several publications, including chapters for two textbooks about ancient and modern China.

My personal essays have appeared in a number of highly praised anthologies, including Hometowns (Dutton), Sister and Brother (Harper San Francisco), Wrestling with the Angel (Riverside), Inside Out (Purdue), The Man I Might Become (Marlowe), Boys Like Us (Avon), Wonderlands (Wisconsin), and Big Trips (Wisconsin).

My book of interviews, Something Inside: Conversation with Gay Fiction Writers (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), was named one of the “Best Books of 1999” by Pride magazine. My book of profiles, Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), was nominated for an American Library Association award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Stonewall Book Award.

For forty-four years, I taught high school English, mostly in the Boston area. I also taught writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and in the freshman expository writing program at Harvard. At the Harvard Extension School, where I taught for almost three decades, I guided generations of students in the craft of fiction writing. I was twice awarded two Distinguished Teaching Citations by Harvard.

My writing goals are to push myself to write the best I can. I think of myself as a painstaking craftsman.

Congratulations on your new release. Please tell us a little bit about it. What’s your favorite aspect or part of the book?

As Far As I Can Tell is a quest biography about the several-thousand-mile journey I made—both in the field and through extensive research—to track down my father’s wartime experience and to understand my relationship to him and to war in general.

My father, a tank gunner with the Fifth Armored Division, was a citizen-soldier during World War II. Born and raised in Canton, Ohio, he was drafted in 1942 and spent two years in U.S. training camps before shipping overseas. The Fifth Armored Division (the “Victory Division”) fought its way across Normandy, liberated the Duchy of Luxembourg, and then engaged the Germans at the Siegfried Line and in the horrific Battle of the Bulge. They were the first American division to enter Germany and the one closest to Berlin at the end of the War. Many of my father’s buddies did not survive; he did, and he lived the rest of his life with that sad, haunting knowledge.

My father never spoke about his war experience. He wrapped that story in a tight cocoon of silence. In truth, my father and I rarely spoke about anything. From early on in my life as gay man, I learned to wrap myself in a cocoon of my own, choosing to lock my father out of my emerging life. While he and I were not estranged, we conducted a polite, hesitant do-si-do around each other’s silence. Did he know I was gay? Perhaps. Did I fathom the depth of the trauma he had suffered in the War? Not at all.

In uncovering his story, I aimed to avoid both sentimentality and the congenial, if inconsequential, smallness of “family history.” My quest was about more than that. I wanted to assess the war’s emotional resonance: on him, on his fellow soldiers, and on me. I found myself, like the Russian historian Svetlana Alexievich, becoming “a historian of the soul”—my father’s soul, his generation’s, and mine.

The book interweaves several stories. Based on my research (including dozens of interviews with surviving members of the 5AD), As Far As I Can Tell reconstructs what my father and the men of the Fifth Armored Division endured; it also chronicles my own emotional odyssey as I followed his route from Liverpool to the Elbe River, a journey that challenged my thinking about war, about European history, and about “civilization.” What I discovered—about this man I hardly knew, and about myself, a man who was deemed “unfit” for military service in Vietnam—is the substance of the book.

Do you schedule a certain amount of time for writing each day/week, or do you just work it in when you can? Would you like to change this, or does your current method work well for you?

I try to write every day, though with all the editing for the new book that has just come out, it’s been difficult to carve out time for new writing. Now that the book has been published, I’m getting back to daily fiction writing.

When I’m working on something new, I can write for an hour, two hours, six hours, depending on how it’s going. But I always try to stop at a point where I know what the next sentence will be. That helps to alleviate the anxiety that attends picking up the “pen” the next day.

I mostly work at my desk at home, and compose almost exclusively on a laptop. Before the pandemic, I would also take my laptop to a library or coffee shop, because I found that taking myself out of my apartment, into a new environment, helped me to concentrate.

I write slowly, and I revise constantly—both as I’m going along and after a complete draft has been finished. My most recent book went through about 10 drafts.

What was the most difficult part of writing this book? Why?

The book is about reconstructing a story that had basically been repressed and lost. As I mentioned earlier, my father rarely spoke about the War. After he died, I discovered among his effects a scrapbook of photos he had taken during the war, a handful of letters he had written home, and a few other documents related to his wartime experience. This memorabilia—so flimsy and incomplete—stood out to me both as an indictment that I had paid so little attention to my father and what he’d done, and as an invitation to uncover just what sort of man he had been, during the war and after.

When I started doing my research, most of the soldiers who had fought in WW2 were in their upper 80s and 90s. They were dying off quickly. I was lucky to have found about a dozen guys who were in my father’s division, the Fifth Armored, whom I interviewed. Those interviews, the scanty documentation my father left, tons of library research, and my three trips to Europe—from Liverpool to the Elbe—helped me reconstruct the story.

Another difficult aspect was confronting my own emotional reactions—both to my dad’s ordeal, and to the feelings that arose as I traveled through the U.S. and Europe to uncover that story. I have never thought of myself as “patriotic” or someone who admired soldiers, but working on the book challenged those prejudices.

In fiction writing, are you a planner or a pantser? How much do you know about your story before you start writing? How often does your plan change? Why does this work best for you?

When I write fiction, I generally start off with a character, someone who has a problem of some kind. That “problem” can be anything: a difficult situation, an emotional discomfort, a vague unease. I throw my character into a social situation and watch to see what develops. As I write, I learn more about my character. I never have a clear understanding of how things will work out until I get to the end of the drafting process. That’s what makes writing fiction fun and interesting—discovering how the story will proceed as I go along.

Do deadlines motivate you or block you? How do you deal with them?

I work well with deadlines. And I’m happy to report that I’ve never missed a deadline. I’m very disciplined in that respect.

How do you develop a story idea? Do you always use the same method? Specifically, which do you develop first in your story building, the characters or the plot?

What are your favorite genres when it comes to your own pleasure reading? Do you prefer to read ebooks or print?

I read all the time. I usually have 4-5 books going simultaneously, one each in a different genre: poetry, fiction, biography, history, Chinese studies. (When I lived in China, I came to love Chinese poetry and philosophy.) I am not a fan of e-books. I love the tactile pleasures of holding and reading an actual physical book.

Does writing energize or exhaust you?

Both. First drafts are exhausting, sheer hell. But I love the rewriting process. That energizes me.

If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?

Search This Blog

As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father In World War II a Memoir by Philip Gambone ➱ Book Tour

Labels

Comments

Post a Comment