Appetite for Life

by Noel Riley Fitch

  He was able eventually to tell Julia about the woman he had loved for seventeen years, who died painfully of cancer just months before he joined the OSS. He would tell her about their house on Shepard Street in Cambridge and the earlier apartment in the rue d’Assas in Paris. Edith was an intellectual, a friend of May Sarton and Helene Deutsch, and the mother of three boys before she became involved with Paul, nearly twenty years her junior.

  What Julia did not know yet was that Paul and Charlie had had their stars “read” by an astrologer named Jane Bartleman and that Charlie sent periodic updates. Paul, since April 1945, had waited for his foretold “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful” woman to come, bringing “some complication inherent” in their relationship. He referred to this reading as his “cave-of-emeralds future.” In the margin of a May 13 letter to Charlie, which recalled the prediction and in which Paul confessed his loneliness (“More than all else—more than security, more than art, more than music—I need love), Paul wrote years later: “Julie, you Idiot! Wake up!”

  At the time, Paul did not yet see Julia as a serious love interest, though she took it more seriously. Fifty years later she would remember that their romance began in Ceylon and continued in Kunming: “It was a gradual getting together; by the time we went to China we were in love. There were a lot of attractive women around. He loved women.” As the years went by, they would invest their love in China with a commitment beyond any evidence suggested by his letters. Indeed, he spoke of other women, one with whom he wished to “rise with the sea-tides, put the pungent flavor of wild sage on her tongue, and comb her hair with the wind.” He did write of Julia: “Tommy and Julie and I together last night at his quarters. I read them all your letters since 25th of April—Julia knows you by now” (June 2). “I am really starved for a certain kind of companionship” (June 10). “I am aching from the rudeness and savagery of life … I have lost the sense of savor, the feeling and creativity, the expansion that comes through love given and returned.” On June 19, he wrote: “I cannot seem to rid myself of the touchstone of Edith, against which I try the others. Nobody begins to measure up to that standard.” He threw himself into his work: “I shall bend my energies in large measure to this incredibly shocking, stupid and futile war.” On Edith’s birthday, June 27: “I miss her terribly.” He thanks Charlie for photos: “Julia and I have decided they look like some Fairy’s version of the real thing. Jeanne says they look as though you’ve ‘gone Hollywood.’” Paul wanted to be “released from the prison of this time and place,” but “where would I go?”

  LIQUOR IS QUICKER

  The end of the European war brought more visits from friends, who carried in the liquor for what Julia called “the five o’clock refreshment period.” “A glass of pure water is as remote as Châteauneuf du Pape,” declared Paul, but finding spirits was somewhat easier. According to Betty MacDonald, it was difficult but necessary to get liquor: “We had parties at the big house. Because it was hard to get liquor in China, the pilots would come in with Carew’s gin. Then the Navy began to take alcohol out of the steering wheel box that lubricated the steering wheel. Anything for a drink. There was [also] some alcohol available through the French, who came out of Indochina.”

  The music at the parties was the same as it had been in Ceylon, but without the British note, such as “There’s a Troopship Just Leaving Bombay” or “Waltzing Matilda” (the latter from Australia). The songs on the few phonographs in the camp included “You Are My Sunshine,” a favorite of 1942, “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” and “Blues in the Night.” If the McWilliams backbone said do your job well, the Weston imp drove her to dance. For one party, planned by Paul, a jazz band of black soldiers played until 5:30 A.M. for the boogie-woogie dancers.

  Among the friends who were in and out of Kunming and Chungking were John Ford, the film director and now naval officer, who with his crew of cameramen seemed to be shooting another movie. Jane Foster, the party girl and leftist expert on Java, Bali, and Malaya, came briefly from Kandy, according to Paul’s letters. Ned Putzell, as he had in Ceylon, accompanied General Donovan on a Kunming visit. According to Mary Livingston Eddy, Donovan remembered most of the names of his OSS personnel. When Byron Martin was touring with another general, Julia ran to greet him: “She … grabbed me under the arms and lifted me to my toe tips (I was rather slight of build at the time) and planted a kiss. I felt as honored as I ever have been,” he wrote. Paul greeted Joe Alsop, who (he informed Charlie) was thinner, balder, and sporting an even “strong[er] atmosphere of Cafe Society, with quite a sound fake British accent.” They preferred his two brothers, Stewart and John, who were in the OSS in Europe.

  Theodore H. White was a favorite of both Julia and Paul. He had been in China since 1939, when, as a twenty-eight-year-old with a Harvard fellowship, he continued his study of Chinese and worked as a translator in Chungking. John Hersey of Time found him, and White reported on the war for Time, Life, and Fortune. Years before Julia arrived in China, White was covering the war and explaining China and the Chinese to his American readers in a more comprehensive way than any other reporter. He believed that the real power of the Orient resided in the Chinese, not the Japanese. Julia found him affable, and Paul enjoyed his visits to Kunming.

  While the Chinese transplanted the rice in the paddies and harvested the wheat, Julia joined Jeanne, Paul, Jack Moore, and another man for an overnight holiday. “We left Sunday afternoon at 4:30 packed in a jeep,” wrote Paul. There was a monsoon in progress and they all got soaked in spite of ponchos, “but nobody cared because it was lovely, lovely, Freedom!” They drove out past Paul’s favorite red bridge for another hour before turning off the main road to a lush valley surrounded by purple mountains. Here they checked into a tiny resort hotel at a hot spring. The next day in the rain they went walking along rice paddies, watching local peasantry transplanting rice, looking at the big waterwheels, swollen river, and deep mist on mountains. There were “startling patches of emerald green when the sun broke through and red brick soil where eroded,” wrote Paul. They sat on a high plateau and chewed pine needles, smoking and talking and taking pictures of each other.

  Mary, Julia’s roommate, says that when Dillon Ripley came to visit and look at birds, Julia took him to the hot springs, about an hour’s drive away. Julia adored soaking in the hot water. According to Jeanne Taylor, she declared: “Do you realize that if everyone in the damned war had a Sani Hot Springs bath every day, it would be over by now?” Jack Moore, who worked with Paul, remembered trips with Julia and Paul to visit the springs, temples, journeys over “spine-crushing dirt roads” that were a sharp contrast to the British-built country roads of India, and to commercial restaurants for “real meals…. They had obviously done a lot of exploration with Chinese food.”

  That summer Paul went to the hot springs with others, including Jeanne. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mary Livingston Eddy said, “I was not aware that Julia and Paul were romantically involved in China. I saw them together, but we all were together.”

  By August both the war and the partying quickened. “There have been quite a few visitations of the big WD/IBT [General Donovan],” Julia wrote in a communiqué to Ceylon. Clearly the focus was on concluding the war in Asia. Personal life went on as usual, with Paul’s longing for “The Big Affair,” and Julia involved in busy social life, longing for him. She acted the role of Miss Preen in a production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner with a cast of two dozen, calling themselves the Area Entertainment Guide. Lieutenant Colonel Birch E. Bayh, the Theater Special Services Officer (a future U.S. senator from Indiana), pronounced the production a “splendid success.”

  The women were renovating their house during July for even greater parties. After hiring a new number one boy, redoing the floors, repainting the walls, and recovering the furniture (much damaged by the five resident dogs), they hosted the visiting generals and OSS personnel—seventy-five in all, says Ellie’s diary. The rains began
that night and did not stop until three inches covered the new living room, while holes were drilled in the ceiling to keep it from collapsing. Somehow, by hiring help and working diligently, they cleaned the house up and hosted three hundred people (including General Donovan) for cocktails that August evening, with guests spilling out onto the large veranda circling the house. “The rain stopped, the party was a huge success, and the visiting general was very pleased!” Before the week was over, the compound was under three feet of water and Julia was frantically rescuing top-secret documents.

  Within hours of the party, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6). Two days later Russia invaded Manchuria, and the following day another bomb obliterated Nagasaki. General Douglas MacArthur told Teddy White, “There will be no more wars, White, no more wars.”

  If the war was ending, romance was heating up. Betty MacDonald remembers Paul coming over to spend time with Julia: “He would read to her a lot. One of the books was about sex. Dick [Heppner, said MacDonald] made fun of them and asked, ‘What’s Paul doing with this book about sex?’ Perhaps he was catching her up.” Betty was not the only one to notice that Paul was “blossoming around Julia.” For Julia’s thirty-third birthday he wrote her a poem about her “melt[ing]” his “frozen earth.”

  AN UNCERTAIN ROMANCE

  AT WAR’S END

  The poem is dated August 15, 1945, the same day the news arrived of the final surrender of the Japanese. In Kandy, Jane Foster won a case of scotch for correctly guessing the date of the surrender. She was sitting at a desk opposite Gregory Bateson when the loudspeaker announced the news that “an atomic device” exploded over Hiroshima. In Kunming, Ellie wrote to her parents: “It seemed unbelievable that it is over, and there was very little hilarity or celebration here—everyone was too busy I guess.”

  The next day Paul wrote to Charlie that he was fond of Julia and hoped that Charlie and his wife would meet her someday, for “even in a USA context she will show up very well”:

  Over the 18 months or more that I have known Julia I have become extremely fond of her. She is really a good friend, and though limited in relation to my concept of la femme intégrale, she still is understanding, warm, funny, and darling…. [S]he is a woman with whom I take much comfort, and she has helped me over many a rough spot by just simple love and niceness.

  Everyone stayed up late at night talking about the coming peace accord and what it meant to their futures. The big excitement in the OSS was organizing commando groups to be sent to Japanese prison camps around Asia. It was the OSS’s last important operation, and historians agree on the valor of the OSS in rescuing POWs, among whom was General Jonathan Wainwright, captured by the Japanese on Corregidor early in the war.

  Uncertainty about the future of China gripped everyone. America’s policy for a postwar China was a “model of ambiguity,” notes one historian. Indeed, there was no policy. With the Japanese defeated, Chiang now resumed his civil war against the Chinese communists, and OSS agents were left inside communist territory. Theodore White said that with their victory over Japan the United States had lanced a boil in China, and the killing would continue until it became the “greatest revolution in the history of mankind.” Both sides lied and killed, but Mao had the people on his side (White makes it clear that the United States chose the wrong side to support).

  Continued flooding killed refugees, whose bloated bodies floated by in the river. Rats started to eat shoes, belts, soap, and pistol holsters. Local restaurants were now off-limits, but Julia would remember the effect years later when she told Parade magazine that she learned to love food in China: “We always talked a great deal about food, particularly … because there was a plague going on, and we couldn’t eat the Chinese food.” During this time women were required to have two men escort them, according to Mary Livingston Eddy. “Julia was upset because she wanted to stay in China; I wanted to go home, but was ambivalent because I had put my family through enough worry.”

  For Julia, the awareness of her unsecured future ripened with the news of the war’s end and Paul’s birthday poem to her. She loved Paul, but there seemed so many obstacles. He was unsure, though his poem spoke of the “scattered seed” of their “Sweet friendship” growing “to final ripened grain.” He was ten years older, introvert to her extrovert, experienced to her inexperience. She had a strong father; he had none. She had the privilege of an Ivy League education; he had none. Though he attended Boston Latin and took some extension courses at Columbia University, he was self-taught and had supported himself since youth. Everyone from this period of his life remembers him as highly intelligent and, in Jack Moore’s words, “interesting, complex and very articulate (an untutored American might have thought he was a Brit).” His grasp of poetry, music, painting, languages, and the sciences put her education to shame. She had no intellectual rigor, was highly emotional, and given to spontaneous merriment.

  She certainly did not match his ideal of women, especially in contrast to his Edith, who was petite, dark, chic, sophisticated. Nor did he conform to her image of Western manliness: Paul was a cosmopolitan man who loved the company of women, for, as he told his brother, “the friendly association of beautiful women is a panacea for almost anything.” Yet his hard body revealed the years of physical labor aboard oil tankers and at a munitions factory in Lowell. When he looked at one of his hands, he wrote in 1943, he saw his experience:

  Thousands of hours of engraving which now make a burin fit with such comfort, the manila ropes that have raised blisters there hoisting sail on the Nova Scotia schooners, the judo jackets that have broken its fingers, the sheets of stained glass that almost severed its thumb, the ax handles that have glazed it, the breasts it has caressed, the paint brush handles that have numbed its fingers, the wine glasses it has lifted in delight, the photographic solutions it has stirred, the violin bows it has guided through the intricacies of Bach, the dogs it has scratched behind the ears, or its knowledge of Venice water, egg-beaters, ski-wax and hand clasps.

  The touch of this hand taught Julia how dough feels when it is plunged into boiling oil. She was in love. But the contrasts were so great that Paul did not foresee his love for Julia, except as one of many girls with whom to romance. Years later he would castigate himself in the margins of his diary at every casual mention of “Julie.” (“What stupidity that Julia was right there, and I never realized it was she!! It was Julia, of course! I never guessed it!”)

  To some of his correspondents, Paul sounded like a man in love. Professor George Kubler, an old friend of Paul’s who taught art history at Yale, received a lengthy letter about a long-legged California girl. As he read the letter to his wife, Betty, she realized it was her classmate at Smith, Julia McWilliams. To Charlie, he pointed out Julia’s strengths: “A constant, steady and driving worker—quite self-disciplined and a wonderful ‘good scout’ in the sense of being able to take physical discomfort, such as mud, leeches, tropic rains, or lousy food.” Though he still questioned her ability “to sustain ideas for long,” he thought she was “tough and full of character, a real friend,” he wrote Charlie. “I am very fond of her,” he adds, informing Charlie he had invited her for Thanksgiving dinner.

  In early September it was not settled between them. The Japanese signed the peace accord aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, but Julia did not want to leave China. There were farewell parties for those who were leaving. “Life is chaotic here,” Ellie wrote to her parents. Peachy was sent home early; Marjorie became a war correspondent for Fortune in Chungking; Betty was flown home after helping to write the history of OSS/China and began working on her memoir Undercover Girl (1947) while rooming in New York City with Jane Foster. “People are departing right and left and the airport has been busier than usual getting them over the hump.” And “so many close relationships that have been built up over a period of months and months” make “everyone so uncertain,” Ellie added. “We find ourselves hanging in mid-air.” Betty MacDonal
d described it as “a sudden vacuum which peace had brought.”

  When Gregory Bateson arrived to visit Kunming, Paul accompanied him to his university lecture and Julia went with him and a young Chinese sociologist to visit temples in the western region and listened to their tales of Chinese social customs. She was sorry she had seen so little of China.

  Julia was recommended in September for the Oak-Leaf Cluster award by Colonel Richard Heppner for her “meritorious service as head of the Registry sections of the Secretariat of the Office of Strategic Services, China Theater.” (In May she received an Emblem for Civilian Service.) But awards did little to dispel the weeks of waiting and boredom and frustration with her housemates.

  Julia resumed a diary, as she had during other critical moments of her life. The irritation that she felt toward her roommates (even their morning throat clearings drove her to distraction) was probably displaced sexual frustration. She concluded one page with an example of the practicality and perseverance she learned in China: the mental tack to take, she told herself, is “genuine love and understanding of individuals as part of the human fabric of life.” Still the upbeat girl from Pasadena, but a more experienced one.

  At the end of September, Julia and Paul took more trips to the lovely hot springs, this time alone. Halfway up the mountain above the springs, in the cool air under a hot sun, Paul wrote to his brother: “Julia is here beside me and we have been reading aloud to each other from a collection of Hemingway’s short stories.” On a second visit he described her sitting beside him on the hilltop above the springs, she in pale blue slacks and dark blue sweater. The rains had stopped and the deep soil erosions were the color of cinnamon. Far beneath them were the yellowing rice paddies and the collapsing world they had known for two years: Donovan returned to his law practice when Truman announced the dissolution of the OSS, scheduled for October 1; Paul’s Presentation Unit was transferred to the State Department, but he had no assignment; Julia was arranging for the transfer of all papers to the OSS Archives in Washington; most of the OSS branches were to become a part of the War Department; and everyone was turning in their guns and buying jade. Julia and Paul both feared they would soon be out of a job. They talked about meeting each other’s families when they returned.