Was "Lost Island," an obscure literary gem from WWII, an anti-war diatribe masquerading as enthusiastic collection of patriotic platitudes? To one columnist reading the sixty-six year old novel, it sure looks like it.
James Norman Hall fought in World War I and afterwards he moved to the South Pacific where he worked as a writer. This columnist’s interest in Hall was sparked when he sampled works by Joseph Conrad and James Michener and discovered that in the twenties and thirties, the South Pacific was like a hardcopy preview of the blogisphere. Quinn’s bar in Papeete must have, on certain days, had more customers who were successful writers than did the legendary round table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.
After ascertaining that acquiring some examples of Hall’s work was to be our next bibliophile’s quest, we quickly stumbled upon several volumes available at the San Francisco Public Library’s recurring "yard sale."
When we read the opening chapter of Little Brown and Company’s 1944 hardback edition of "Lost Island," we were delighted to see that the framework for telling the story was a wartime reunion of buddies which was held in Berkeley Ca.
Hall describes it thus: "Chance, in a benevolent mood, had consented that the pathways of three old friends and former comrades in World War I should cross for the first time in twenty years. Te boon deserved to be enjoyed at leisure, and they had gone from San Francisco, the place of the unexpected meeting, across the bay to Berkeley, where Philip Marsh, Professor of History in the University of California, had his home, high up in the Berkeley hills."
George Dodd, the story’s fictional narrator, was working for the war effort and tells his buddies about his last assignment which was to go to an unnamed atoll in the Pacific and build an airfield.
The book relays in poetic passages Dodd’s arrival on a remote island that would be the living embodiment of the past’s image of a perfect island paradise that now mesmerizes the folks in the Tiki subculture of America.
The never named island is inhabited mostly by Polynesians and a few gringos. There is a priest and his church and a Jewish father and daughter who have come to the island in an effort to seek the antithesis of the hell of Hitler’s Europe from which they fled.
Dodd rhapsodizes the beguiling allure of the island paradise (via Hall’s poetic prose) that he encounters when he arrives. Dodd is welcomed by the natives and the priest and refugee family. He slowly reveals the Americans’ plans for their island. He is preparing for a ship load of workers and equipment. Their assignment is to build a runway for use in the war against Japan.
Dodd can’t bring himself to tell the padre what’s going to happen. The priest departs on a mission of mercy and when he returns his church has been disassembled and put in a hastily prepared storage facility. The Jewish refugees are told that, regretfully, they must go elsewhere yet again.
Some of the workers seem reluctant to complete their assigned task.
On page 187, Hall describes the attitude of the gung ho workers: "To men of this kind, a swamp, green with wind-rippled rushes, refuge for all kinds of aquatic life, makes little appeal. It is something to be drained, filled in, and divided into factory sites or suburban real-estate projects. A fine asphalt-covered parking lot gives them more pleasure than the same acreage of meadowland, and they think of forests in terms of lumber or wood pulp. They have no more sentiment for organic life than they machines they drive."
The landing strip is built. The native culture is destroyed. The war goes on.
In the book, Dodd finishes his task and goes on to the next assignment.
Hall speaking via the Dodd character summarizes the next task on page 188 – 189. "As you know, the broad swath for the Alcan Highway, sixteen hundred and seventy-one miles of it, was cut through the Canadian and Alaskan wilderness in a single summer, sometimes at the rate of eight miles per day, and this against as formidable obsticales as men and machines have to meet.
Perhaps if the tree huggers, who lament the BP oil spill and the ravaging of Afghanistan in a new war, could read this obscure literary gem, they would see that like the village in Vietnam that had to be burned to the ground to save it; the challenges facing the Obama administration in the continuing war on terrorism might lead to a new and better VJ Day and that will make it all worth while.
At this point in time, it may seem that the price to pay for the war on terror is too steep, but when the day comes when roustabouts from new oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are able to buy stuff in a shopping center located in what formerly was the bayou country and when American tourists can get a New York style pizza in Kabul, then it will be obvious that it was worth the effort, lives, and cost necessary to arrive in that better world that lies in the future.
Herman Melville wrote:
"What troops
Of generous boys in happiness thus bred –
Saturnians through life’s Tempe led
Went from North and came from the South
With golden mottos in the mouth,
To lie down midway on a bloody bed."
(Does "Mega-dittos, Rush!" qualify as a golden motto?)
Now the disk jockey will play "Just before the battle, mother," "Over there," and the Pogues’s "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda." We have to go read Hall’s collection of short stories titled "The Forgotten One." Have a "dance on the volcano’s rim" type week.