Navy

Seaman Francis O’Hara’s take on World War II was always slightly askew.

Watching a propaganda film screened during the first month of Basic Training, he seemed less impressed by the movie’s message than by its score. His letters home, over two hundred in the next two years, were decidedly artistic rather than patriotic. “Daddy will be amused to hear that in one of the ‘Why We Fight’ movies we’ve had, they added pathos to a scene showing the misery of the Poles who had been tortured by the Germans using Beethoven as background. As a matter of fact we have a record of the music they used—the 2nd movement from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. It was the best part of the film—I always loved that particular part.”

His reports on the daily grind, or the weather, were usually keyed up with a boyishly naive excitement: “Today has really been swell. The air is cool and clear, the sky bright blue with clouds that remind you of ‘Supersuds.’”

Sitting in classrooms for lectures on antiaircraft guns or ship recognition, O’Hara only half-listened to the drone of technical information, which he called “the usual stuff.” “It’s restricted but I can’t remember the figures anyhow so that removes any danger of me spilling the beans,” he wrote home rather fuzzily about a lecture one afternoon on the Allied armament. “In destroyers or something like that (it might be battleships or cruisers, I’m not sure) we have 11 times as many as Japan.”

Somehow O’Hara managed to move through an obstacle course of barracks, destroyer sonar rooms, and Philippine islands exploding in fireworks of artillery, as well as pass from boyhood to manhood, without losing his own uncorrected point of view. O’Hara seemed oblivious to the horror of the war into which he had been thrust along with about 16 million other young Americans, and it was his own private enthusiasms and interests that helped sustain him. He kept an attic room in his mind filled with books, musical compositions, and paintings. Such self-reliance made life a bit lonely at first for this young sailor who was more interested in listening to Sunday symphony broadcasts than marauding in local towns with his bunkmates. But it gave him time to dwell on the flourishing of what he would later call “my rococo self.”

O’Hara left Grafton full of sadness and anticipation. “My father crying as I left, sure of my failure,” as he wrote later in his unpublished novel. While there is no record of Kay’s reaction, one can imagine what it must have been, given her tendency to worry. It was June 23, 1944, and for weeks the newspapers had been full of articles on Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy launched on June 6 that resulted in a shocking daily tally of casualties. O’Hara, though, having enlisted in the Navy in the face of a certain draft, was partially excited about entering the service. As he later wrote in “Lament and Chastisement,” a short story for which he earned a B+ in Albert Guerard’s creative writing class at Harvard, “And after all I was a fairly rational person who had voluntarily enlisted in the navy and that must mean that I had subconsciously wanted to go to sea. Think of how much I liked Cape Cod in the summer. For one reason: the sea. Well, then, it would all be great fun.”

During a long wait that afternoon in Springfield, Massachusetts, O’Hara slipped happily into a movie theatre to catch Danny Kaye’s movie debut as a hypochondriac who joins the Army in Up In Arms. He then boarded a sleeper train, arriving the following day at Sampson Naval Training Center in upstate New York on the shores of Lake Seneca. The base, opened in 1942 expressly to handle the influx of new recruits, was a busy complex of four hundred buildings served by 9 miles of railroad tracks and 53 miles of roadways on a few thousand acres of low-grade Finger Lakes farmland. Equipped with its own fresh water, telephone exchanges, sewerage and power systems, and an efficient network of streets named after war heroes born in the state of New York, Sampson was fit to handle up to forty thousand men and women.

O’Hara’s first duty was to walk “the naked mile,” a rite of passage in which recruits were stripped of their civilian clothes and examined by a Navy doctor before donning their Navy uniforms. O’Hara’s statistics: height, 5 feet 71/2 inches; weight, 130; eyes, blue; complexion, ruddy; hair, dark brown; blood type, A. In The 4th of July, O’Hara transposes his experiences that day into those of the novel’s Navy veteran, Lewis: “Coming away from home, shedding my garments in the station in the midst of thousands of gleaming buttocks and ugly faces. The light came through the windows, pale and ashamed then. I stood there and to order.” O’Hara was well aware of “the subtle looks, ashamed and furtive peeks of naked eyes,” while “my pants fell like a punishment, and that day, as a rite, my father died, could never again touch me in disapproval or, even, reward.” His hair cut, fingerprinted, administered a military oath, and assigned a serial number, rank, training unit, and barracks, O’Hara felt strongly the sense of having been inducted into a tightly supervised group where conformity was encouraged and enforced. It was a sensation he was well attuned to after years in parochial school. In The 4th of July, Lewis reacts by turning inward: “And I alone, hidden, walked like a disguised emperor among them, knowing alone what was lasting and eternal, what would happen and what would work. Yes, knowing what beauty was, or at least knowing that there was such a thing.” At the time, though, O’Hara was not quite so sure. Those feelings were still inklings, not convictions. And his first impulse was to draw back. “No one had said anything to me for months and I had said nothing in return,” he exaggerated in “Lament and Chastisement.”

O’Hara was assigned for his twelve weeks of Basic Training to bottom bunk 76, near a window, its desirability proved by his upper bunkmate who tumbled onto the floor during their first night on the “topside” (second floor) of C-unit barracks. His unit was confined for the duration to these barracks surrounding an oval athletic field nicknamed “The Grinder” where they ran laps in shorts every morning at five. O’Hara’s life in boot camp quickly became a regulated routine of four-hour watches, mess duty, and educational movies on everything from aircraft recognition to venereal disease. Recreation in the camp, which he described as looking “more or less like a prison camp,” consisted of boxing matches, rowing contests on Lake Seneca, and “smokers,” which the young connoisseur of Camels, Chesterfields, and Philip Morrises dismissed because “you can’t even smoke at them.”

O’Hara was still very much living at home, at least in his mind. His link to 16 North Street was music, and his strongest cases of homesickness were brought on by listening to familiar pieces from the base library’s record collection, a collection of which he mostly approved: “The records here are pretty good. You don’t hear much Hindemith though. None at all in fact. Dad’d like it.” Although one Sunday he couldn’t attend the radio broadcast of the Sunday symphony at the library because his company’s white uniforms weren’t back yet from the tailors, he assured his parents, “You may be sure at three I’ll be mentally drying dishes and listening with you.” On the way to eat one evening he found himself humming Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in G Minor, the only Mendelssohn piece in the O’Haras’ record collection, and so felt moved to call home.

The young recruit tried to continue to run his family from a distance. He was mostly adamant that his younger brother and sister help their mother—“Don’t let her do all the work, either of you—remember, I’m not home and she has nobody to help her at all now.” He instructed his parents on how to listen to their recording of Brahms’s Violin Concerto: “Be sure & notice in the Finale how the theme (main) begins (start of the 8th record I think) and then recurs about twice as fast, or perhaps just with a different emphasis (about 1/2 way thru the 9th record I think).” He suggested that his mother try to go to bed before eleven, strongly recommended Mr. Farmer as a piano teacher for Phil, encouraged Maureen to practice her swimming, and his father to read War and Peace.

Eventually O’Hara did make friends with a few of his barracks mates. There was Everett Pillsbury, a tall blond from Maine who used to enjoy reading O’Hara’s letters from his mother because he deemed them “the height of gentility.” Lucky Frementel, a 5-foot 3-inch bunkmate of O’Hara’s from East Boston was “the nearest thing to Jimmy Durante you ever saw.” Particularly irksome was a fellow musician with “periwinkle eyes” from Vermont whom O’Hara could never forgive for claiming that he “hated Stravinsky for being so brutal one should write like Schubert.” “This boy is a violinist and so takes his music sentimentally,” O’Hara explained sharply in a letter to his parents. “I’m more interested in structure, etc., than he is.”

But O’Hara gave many the impression of being shy and standoffish. “He was soft-spoken and he kept to himself a lot,” remembers Jim O’Connor, a barracks mate from Maine. “He didn’t volunteer a lot of information, or say a great deal about his family background. You had to ask him questions. He was quiet as opposed to being a loudmouth. He didn’t care anything about athletics, but he had a good command of the English language and always expressed himself well when he did speak. When we were kids, we would have said that he was a sissy type. Some of the men were always telling about their conquests. But I never heard him mention dating or going to a prom or anything like that.”

The shower room was the scene of some of O’Hara’s loosening up. He described it as a boyish playground in a letter to his sister, Maureen: “I was waiting for a boy to get off watch so we could take a shower. About four of us take them together each night and have lots of fun. Our chief amusement is throwing each other into an all-cold, icy shower. Last night someone had left part of a dungaree rag in there so we threw that at each other.” But the showers weren’t all simply horseplay. O’Hara was particularly struck by the fate of one of his shower mates, a “very nervous” Greek boy whom he recalled years later in run-on sentences in “Lament and Chastisement”: “And from up North there was a Greek boy who looked ten years old and could move his hip in and out of joint when he felt like showing off in the showers and began to have nervous seizures and sweat and tremble and go to the hospital but the people who knew all about queers said he was queer and just trying to get out of it all because he had no guts they never do.” This shower room shows up briefly in The 4th of July, “from the one who masturbated in the showers every night to the one who blew me under the covers with secret and night-delirious pleasures.” Such desires could usually be coped with successfully if kept under wraps. Although O’Hara had acted on some of his impulses as a teenager, his sexuality was still largely as undefined as that of many of the young men drawn democratically from all over the country, some of whom were becoming aware of homosexual impulses for the first time in their lives. Whatever activities O’Hara may have engaged in while at Sampson were surely as surreptitious and fleeting as the confessed blow job under his sheets.

Off-color activities, though, were occasionally dangerous. O’Hara was personally involved in the case of the Greek boy who was eventually transferred to L-16 for psychiatric observation and then discharged. The Sunday before his confinement, the two had eaten supper together. O’Hara concluded, “Without exaggerating at all the discharge will ruin him—from what conversation I’ve had with him, and it was intimate on his part because he wanted a listener, it will cause a permanent inferiority complex and possibly a nervous breakdown.” A few weeks earlier he had written home quite openly about a “lieutenant in one of the nearby units” who was “kicked out recently for having homosexual relations with an A.S.” O’Hara was partly relaying this story as a way of coyly tipping his hand to his family about some of his own sexual leanings, and partly because of the discomfort its proximity caused him, a discomfort that was contributing to his increasingly fiery sense of outrage at any injustice.

O’Hara was introduced at Sampson Naval Station to other prejudices, especially racial, which were far more serious than the subtler tensions between Catholics and Protestants, or Irish and Italians, in Grafton. As blacks were segregated during World War II into their own units, racial slurs against them could be easily voiced. But O’Hara never swayed in his condemnation of such remarks. His model in this open-mindedness was his father. As Philip O’Hara remembers, “My father was very open about other people’s ethnic basis. His brother, Leonard, was very prejudiced in my view. He would say that Frenchmen were cheats and sneaks, and so on. I never could understand why, but Russell certainly wasn’t like that. He didn’t talk like that. He didn’t behave like that. He had good friends who were Jewish.” In the barracks, O’Hara found racist comments particularly common among a few Southerners, “who are so darn anti-Negro,” a tendency that surprised him as his summer friends from Virginia, Birchard and Randy DeWitt, were not at all prone to “condemn the whole race as not worthy of education, etc., as these boys do.” Anti-Semitism was also apparent, especially in the case of one agriculture teacher, a graduate of Cornell, who balked when a Jewish boy was assigned to their unit, a boy whom O’Hara later described as “the lonely Jewish boy who thought I was kind.” When the ex-teacher growled, loud enough for everyone to hear, that he “wouldn’t march beside him and he knew it!” O’Hara was irate. “I don’t know why,” he fumed. “The guy just came in so he couldn’t have done much to offend him—evidently Cornell didn’t do him much good.”

From Sampson, the recruits were shipped to other naval centers for more specialized training. O’Hara was considering trying out for the post of musician, even learning a second instrument such as the trumpet, until he discovered that he would have to attend the National Music School and enlist for six years. “The 6 yrs. stopped me deader than a door nail,” he confessed. When he filled out his request form, O’Hara listed “pharmacist’s mate” or “hospital assistant” as his first choice, “radioman,” his second. The position of radioman had been suggested by his selection officer who felt that “with my years of musical training I would have good pitch and be able to operate a machine which sends out sound waves and can determine what objects are around it by the pitch of the returning sound.” O’Hara seemed convinced by the officer’s rationale. “The training should improve my pitch and teach me about the physics of sound and therefore music,” he wrote, a bit wistfully, to his parents on the day he learned that he would soon be transferred to the fleet sonar school at Key West, Florida.

O’Hara was emotionally ambivalent about his departure from Sampson. Although he had been anxious for his parents to understand that his homesickness was not excessive (“Don’t think I’m a sissy as all the kids here are worse”), O’Hara was enmeshed enough within his family that every separation was difficult. When his parents paid a Sunday visit to Sampson, his response, after he waved good-bye to their car even though he thought they could no longer see him, was, “It feels so much better here since you’ve been here & seen it. . . . I guess I’m pretty sentimental or something.” Like a good Catholic boy, he continued to attend Mass, evidenced by the Mass cards the chaplain would mail home, as “it’s the only thing we do here that you people do at home.” Yet O’Hara couldn’t help but feel a buzz at the prospect of going South, south to Florida where his mother had so much wanted to set up house after he was born. To the young O’Hara, now Seaman second class, Key West was an exotic, distant spot on the map—“not too far from Miami and is near Cuba!”—from which he could send his siblings “a shawl or a pair of maracas.”

“Phil, you certainly must agree that I’m going places now!” he spiritedly wrote.

During the last week in September, O’Hara boarded a bus to Geneva where he was transferred to a plusher pink-and-white Lehigh Valley coach pulled by a streamlined engine, the “Black Diamond,” to make the trip to the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia. After being served a meal of lobster cutlet in the railway station’s main dining room, he and the other sailors caught a Pullman that transported them nonstop to Miami. O’Hara was quite alert during the trip, avidly registering the faces and voices of all his fellow passengers—the several Marines, the elderly lady who disembarked at West Palm Beach and spoke with an accent that made roast beef “roz biff,” and the lively Puerto Rican girl straight from convent school in Cleveland with a “Dolores Del Rio mouth” who enticed the boys with invitations to a dance with lots of beautiful girls.

When he arrived in Key West on September 28, all of its streets lined with “palm trees that look like hat pins tipped with monkey fur,” O’Hara was assigned to a wooden barracks with a corrugated metal roof where he laid eyes on “the largest cockroach in the world . . . sixteen inches long and you couldn’t help but respect it for it.” At this time about thirteen thousand servicemen were stationed on the island, its skies having burned red for many nights in 1942 when a fleet of nine Nazi submarines had steadily torpedoed oil and gasoline tankers in the Straits of Florida. The naval base now consisted of a naval hospital, naval air station with two landing fields, naval submarine base equipped with extensive repair facilities, and, O’Hara’s assignment, one of the nation’s two fleet sonar schools.

But O’Hara was oblivious to the military logistics. He was more fascinated with the October hurricane that blew through Hurricane Alley, the only region vulnerable to those storms born in the Atlantic, Gulf, or West Caribbean, disrupting military activities while the enlisted men helped clean up the base and town. “It was nice to think that something could be destructive and not mean it,” he later wrote in “Lament and Chastisement.” He was positively entranced by the swimming pool, the movie theatre, and the baseball diamond where films were projected at night. “I’ve gone to the movies almost every night this week,” he wrote home at the end of his first week. “I suppose that means I’m returning to normal or something.” His favorite movie during his stay in Key West was the Technicolor epic Kismet, starring Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich (“was she exotic”).

Key West had a reputation as a wild town. As one Navy report put it: “The City of Key West continually posed numerous problems. Its main street, Duval Street, was a wide-open honky-tonk area, studded with bars and so-called night clubs of fairly tawdry character. Side streets had their proportionate share of such establishments. . . . A policy of firmness in dealing with proprietors of local resorts whose places had to be put out-of-bounds for a night soon began to show results.” Occasionally the naval commander felt the need to declare the entire city out-of-bounds, a sternness reflected in O’Hara’s observation that “There are also a lot of lovely night sounds but the military police are mean.”

If O’Hara fit at all into the stereotypical profile of the sailor at war it was in his drinking. “I can understand why men drink away from at home,” he had warned his family near the end of his stay at Sampson. By the time he was finding his way around the bars on Duval Street, the habit, which was to become legendary in later life, was definitely established. “At Key West there is Duval Street,” he later wrote. “Except for a small side street where there’s a small book store with nothing but best sellers and Modern Library editions, I’ve never been on any street but Duval. There are bars all up and down and you drink rum or vodka, sometimes brandy-and-vodka, but the scotch is watered. . . . It was in Key West that I realized I couldn’t tell Haig and Haig pinch from Cutty Sark, and believe me, even though both had been watered down in Miami, it was a blow. I also realized in Key West that if you went without lunch and dinner and drank fifteen bottles of beer the world seemed a great deal worse than it had. There is nothing like a good crying jag to make you want to hear the Brahms Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, opus 77. Or is it 72.”

Sonar school was less like the New England Conservatory than he had hoped. “Sonar” is an acronym that stands for SOund Navigation And Range. The five-week training course consisted mostly of learning to detect underwater objects, especially submarines, using high-frequency waves sent out from an oscillator stuck on the bottom of a destroyer or destroyer escort. By the time O’Hara was mimicking his sonar instructor’s voice in “Lament and Chastisement,” the irony of confusing ear training with honing in on torpedo targets was fixed in his mind: “When you see the button you press it. You must determine the target by sighting along this line and squeezing like on an orange. There are several million Germans in the world and more Japanese who are utter horrors: we shall plant them not like dragon’s teeth but like Parma violets. You get right about center by listening for the mean tone, that’s right sweep back and forth across the target and determine its center by your hearing, you’ve had musical training haven’t you? I just love the Symphonie Espagnole. Milstein, of course. That’s right fire.”

The training also entailed riding out to sea in yachts consigned by the Navy to search for an antique French submarine that had escaped after the Nazi invasion and was now used as a decoy. O’Hara, again, seemed drawn more to the surface of these practice raids, imbuing the sea with a thirties movie glamour: “the sea was very rough and looked like silver lamé.” He liked to spend as much time as possible on deck, leaning over the rails, staring out to sea, communing with the schools of dolphins, which, to the annoyance of many of his fellow sailors, were mischievously bouncing back the oscillator’s high-frequency waves. “They seem to feel the same delight in swimming that I do,” he wrote to his parents. “They glide as if they enjoyed the feeling of the water, the constant movement, and the immensity and cleanness, as much as I do. If I were a Hindu I would believe that my soul was in the body of a porpoise in my last life. As it is they make me think I’m in the water with them.”

O’Hara’s social life in Key West was mostly confined to the few musicians he happened across. He met two violinists who played at his request the Brahms Violin Concerto, which his drinking bouts had so made him want to hear, and who bolstered his opinion that Szigeti was the world’s finest violinist. One of the instructors on base, a violinist named Johnson, inspired O’Hara’s affection because he had been present at Heifetz’s recording of the Walton Violin Concerto—the last album O’Hara had listened to before leaving home. O’Hara later recorded their talk impressionistically in “Lament and Chastisement”: “Why yes, I rather liked the Walton. Yes, Heifetz did it. Why yes, I suppose we are the only two people in the world who remember what it sounds like. No, I don’t think Schoenberg is being perverse.”

He also struck up a friendship with Tom Benedek, a graduate of the University of Chicago, who could share his enthusiasm for piano music. “For an eighteen-year-old Fran was rather refined,” recalls Benedek. “He was always talking about classical music and classical pianists. As I remember, our conversations were pretty much focused, at least by him, on the piano rather than on symphony orchestras in general. At that time he was fantasizing about becoming a concert pianist. He was obviously more intelligent than most of the people I encountered. He was friendly and talkative. I wouldn’t have selected him out as far as peculiarity of behavior from anybody else. Any homosexuality certainly wasn’t evident to me, but maybe I was just too naive. Or maybe he wasn’t that sure about it at that time either.” When Benedek later visited O’Hara in Grafton for an afternoon after the war, the two of them, along with Burton Robie and a woman friend, sat in the O’Haras’ home reading aloud from Ibsen’s Ghosts, an activity that Benedek found “a slightly bizarre thing to do under the circumstances.”

As at St. John’s and Sampson, O’Hara remained a bit of a loner. In a Navy barracks, as Benedek explains, “There wasn’t an opportunity to meet very many bright people.” As O’Hara’s friendships from an early age had always been based on some sort of intellectual stimulation, this lack was particularly difficult. Although he would later develop a style of artistic gregariousness that was quite distinctive, in this early period he fit more fully the mold of the introverted and sensitive young artist. “Wherever I’m sent don’t worry about me,” he wrote to his parents as the date approached for an assignment, which would almost certainly be overseas. “One of my main deficiencies was always my moreorless detachment but at last it is an asset. Except for swimming, most of my real pleasures are in my mind. So are always at my fingertips.”

The absence of a close circle of friends made Key West more unpleasant to O’Hara than it might otherwise have been. He found it “depressing” and, referring to Maureen and Phil, to whom he had recently mailed a machete, claimed that “I think I’d die rather than have either of our kids live in this town. Excuse me for being maudlin.” This maudlin mood was later magnified in “Lament and Chastisement”: “I’ve been in the navy three thousand years without ever seeing my mother. I haven’t cried so hard since 1929.” His schoolwork did little to lift his mood. After cursorily completing two more weeks of advanced sonar training on the U.S.S. Sylph, docked in Fort Lauderdale, O’Hara graduated eighth in his class of twenty-four and was promoted to the unexceptional rank of Sonarman third class.

“Except for the sky being so near, the dewy stars and the sea, I loathed Key West,” he later exploded. “Its only excuse for being there is that Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about it.”

At the end of November, O’Hara was transferred to a training center for those about to be shipped to sea, in Norfolk, Virginia. He waited there a month for an assignment to a destroyer, passing through one of his “periodic spells of dejection,” wandering around in a heavy peacoat, eating devil dogs, in a city that proved to be even less hospitable than Key West. “For Norfolk is a cold cold city, the ass-hole of the universe, even if I did hear Grace Moore there,” he complained in “Lament and Chastisement.” “I’m sure she was the only good thing that had happened in Norfolk in years. . . . My life is a journey; whatever may happen I know that I shall never go to Norfolk again.” The singer Grace Moore’s USO concert at Norfolk Auditorium thrilled O’Hara enough to enclose the program in a letter home, as well as his own drawing of her gown, replete with penciled shading, which he labeled “pink beading.”

O’Hara’s Norfolk stay was largely taken up with worrying. It was now clear to him and his family that he would soon be sent into one of the world’s battle areas. At that very moment, his friend Burton Robie was lost somewhere behind the lines in Belgium where fierce fighting was taking place. O’Hara became particularly solicitous during these uncertain weeks about his mother’s health, which was so often a barometer of her fragile emotional disposition, and was insistent that she visit the family doctor for a checkup. He thought of her whenever he tuned in to “Ma Perkins,” one of the most popular daytime radio programs of 1944. She was equally solicitous about her son’s rather solitary social life during the Christmas season. “I’m glad to be a lone wolf,” he wrote home. But his conviction that he would rather walk the foggy streets of Norfolk than be dragged along with some buddies in activities he didn’t enjoy was unconvincing to her. So O’Hara resolved at first not to mention that he had spent his Christmas Day alone except for dinner with a “perfect stranger” at a Navy social club in Norfolk.

Concerned that their son not spend his New Year’s Day alone, his parents made a long car-and-ferry trip to Norfolk to be with him. “I waited at the ferry for hours and ate four apples which were sold at a candy stand by an emaciated woman,” O’Hara recalled lightly in “Lament and Chastisement.” “The ferry came in and people streamed around the station. My mother and father were on it; I barely recognized them and they thought I was suffering from malnutrition; all through the weekend they were not sure it was me and I was not sure it was me, but I was sure it was them after a few minutes, and that made it a very nice weekend. . . . we did not talk about the war but about what had happened in the family and how immense my brother and sister now were, they did not come out to see the base and I did not offer to have them; it was very nice and the first thing I knew they had gone. . . . I now had a picture of my grand-aunt Elizabeth, who had died shortly after I left for the navy.”

O’Hara’s reaction at the time, though, was not quite as breezy as his Harvard short story implies. His parents’ visit, and their imminent departure, brought up uneasy feelings reminiscent of those he had endured on evenings in Grafton when they had left him to go off to a cocktail party. “I hated to have either of you leave the room I was in,” he admitted of their stay in Norfolk. He was reassured, though, to see his mother “looking well, dressed so nicely, so humorous and pleasant, as keen and interested as ever before and more fun to be with, if that’s possible.” His discussions with his father never became “heated” because he seemed eager this time to soak up his advice: “My mind has been almost seven months without flushing and was filled, I’m afraid, with you-know-what.”

The following week O’Hara boarded a train bound for San Francisco, the port from which he would eventually sail to the Pacific. Before departing, he mailed home three books for safekeeping: Harmony, Sixteenth-Century Polyphony, and his favorite, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, of which he wrote, “In some places Joyce’s character is uncannily like me—remarkably so in the passage where he goes down to the beach and ‘finds himself.’ His (the character’s) way of thinking of his childhood school was also similar to my own.”

A new theme, too, began to be sounded in his letters during this transitional time. “Lately I’ve been getting better adjusted, I think,” he tentatively wrote to his parents. “One can’t stay at home all his life, I guess.”

It was a theme that was to recur more forcefully over the course of the unusual year to come.

For the boy whose yearbook wish had been “to live in a big city,” wartime San Francisco was a tumultuous relief from the tedium and loneliness of the East Coast boot camps. A revolving door of a city, militarily speaking, San Francisco in January 1945 was teeming with sailors either waiting to be shipped to the Pacific theater or just returned to land, raring for a drink, a free ticket to a show, a hamburger and “cup of Joe” (coffee). Thanks partly to USO backing, the city’s symphony, opera, and ballet were packed nightly with audiences colorfully divided between civilians and uniformed men and women. Not since the Gold Rush a century before had this port city been so energized.

“There was the symphony and there was the ballet,” O’Hara recalled in “Lament and Chastisement,” “and there was the fresh old city, gauche and precious, wide avenues, tiny streets, hills and troughs for cable cars, there was wind blowing, the scent of lavender, and snow in the air.”

O’Hara’s train trip along the “southern route” from Norfolk to San Francisco had been pleasant. He had started reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a Christmas gift from his parents. When his upper bunkmate shared a pint of rye with him on their first night out, O’Hara insisted on returning the favor by presenting him with a copy of André Gide’s homosexual novel The Counterfeiters, which he had bought in Norfolk and read through “practically without stopping for breath.” It was an exchange he recorded in “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” his autobiographical poem, which significantly picks up his Navy experiences on the train to San Francisco and, more fully, in the Pacific. These were experiences that were obviously more seeded with poetry for O’Hara than his six months in the training barracks:

kept moving in berths

where I trade someone The Counterfeiters (I thought it was about personal

freedom then!) for a pint of whiskey,

He jotted down notes along the way for a piano piece, a variation on a Beethoven sonata, to be titled “Conversation on a Beethoven Theme.” Two or three times, passing through Texas and Arizona, he mentioned sending a card to “my kids” or “the kids,” referring to Phil and Maureen, much to the amusement of his companions. “I don’t want to be overpaternal,” he apologized to them by letter.

O’Hara’s first stop was Treasure Island, a man-made island built in the center of San Francisco Bay as the site of the 1939–1940 Golden Gate International Exposition, which was now being used to process up to twelve thousand men a day for Pacific area assignments. Within days he was transferred to a centrally located Market Street barracks—“I think Market Street is the best street in the world of the streets in the world which I have seen”—where he served as a Shore Patrolman for the next month. His job, for which he was outfitted with boots, belt, an armband, and club, was to guard the entrances to hotels and bars designated out-of-bounds for military personnel, or to act as a sort of extra policeman on wagons sent to pick up drunks and accident cases, an uncharacteristic task that he recalled in “Ode to Michael Goldberg”:

and I stared with my strained SP stare

wearing a gun

During 1943 and 1944 the Navy’s Shore Patrol had been particularly active in a crackdown on many of the city’s gay nightclubs—including Finocchio’s, the Black Cat Cafe, and the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. One newspaper claimed the toughened regulations were a reaction to a return of the “devil-may-care spirit of Barbary Coast days,” which was again turning San Francisco into a “hell-raising town” with “Uncle Sam’s fighting men” weaving drunkenly through its streets. By 1945, though, many of these bans had been lifted, as evidenced by O’Hara’s several meals at the Silver Rail, a tavern attracting a gay clientele that had earlier been declared off-limits.

O’Hara was a benign Shore Patrolman who felt his duty was to keep sailors out of trouble, at times even to intercede with his superiors on their behalf. He was simply not disciplinary, and enjoyed the post only because it gave him the opportunity to see more of the city as he stood guard at the Lido Club, the Continental Hotel and Bar, and a dormitory run by the Harbor Club. Of his street patrols he wrote home, “The more I am on SP the more it is born in on me that drunks and I are just naturally attracted.”

To allay his parents’ concern, he later filled in: “Now don’t worry. I don’t like cheap liquor and anything else is out of my wage bracket, so I am in the same position as the repulsive spinster who prided herself on her virginity. Lately I’ve been too busy anyway.”

To the extent that O’Hara was casual, even self-deprecatory, about his assumed authority—“Pretty soon I’ll be one of those fat Irish cops!”—he was horrified at other Shore Patrolmen who became overly zealous. Particularly repulsive was the Baptist ex-minister who headed the main lockup room of the Shore Patrol headquarters, “a gloomy efficient place with innumerable cages and rooms and ramps.” O’Hara once observed this “pear-shaped fish-faced southerner” who spent hours reading a book titled The Power of Prayer inappropriately relishing a punishment. “He was doing a beautiful job of beating up a young Negro steward’s mate who not only had done nothing (I was watching) but also was slighter, thinner, and shorter than I am, and couldn’t have been over 17 yrs. or 130 lbs.,” O’Hara wrote home. “As I said before, this ‘man of God’ has an original way of expressing his convictions. The jackass! I’d like to see him get his head knocked off.”

Luckily O’Hara’s stints were brief. Shore Patrol consisted only of eight-hour shifts on alternate nights, so that he was free every forty-eight hours to walk the streets of the city, eagerly noticing stray details, such as the prevalence of dungarees among boys aged ten to seventeen, or taking in concerts and museums. On his first night of liberty he was thrilled to attend a performance of the symphony at the War Memorial Opera House with its gold and cream hangings and red plush chairs. His ticket, purchased from an ensign, allowed him to sit close enough to the stage to see the guest conductor, Efrem Kurtz, “squint his eyes at the violins and count under his breath” during a Corelli suite, and to watch “the drops of perspiration on Jan Smeterlin’s forehead in the heated passages” of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. O’Hara’s favorite piece was “Metamorphosis on Themes by C. M. Weber” by his contemporary favorite, Hindemith. “Pardon me for saying so,” he gloated to his parents, always playing up his ability to scout talent, “but I guess I can tell a genius when I come across one!!!”

Two weeks later he went to the Civic Auditorium to hear Yehudi Menuhin play a Bach violin concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. After the performance O’Hara, along with another sailor he had met in the ticket line, filed backstage where he asked Menuhin to autograph a program to send to his sister. Menuhin was about thirty years old at the time, and O’Hara was particularly struck by his blond hair, which was as light, he thought, “as Sally Warren’s used to be when she had braids.”

In San Francisco O’Hara first established the hectic urban pace that was to become his trademark later in New York, attending a breathtaking number of exhibits, concerts, movies, and shows in a crowded six weeks, crossing lines effortlessly from one art form to another. The future aficionado of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet saw his first ballet in San Francisco, a production of Princess Aurora with Tamara Toumanova that inspired him to write home decisively, “From now on your son is a member of that part of the public known as ballet enthusiasts or, as the N.Y.er calls them, balletomanes.” He visited the San Francisco Art Museum, where he thought enough of the Calder mobiles to draw them for Maureen in a letter, as well as to offer short critiques of paintings he had seen by Braque (“I never liked his so much before”), Matisse (“loads of rhythm”), Chagall (“touching, sentimental, humorous”) and Klee (“a simplified face, done in an embarrassed pink”). He took in as well a show of “sculptured orotund animals” at the Civic Center, deciding “I don’t like sculpture.” He enjoyed Duke Ellington at the Golden State Theatre more than the San Carlo Opera Company’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor. And he still managed to keep up with many current movies, including Dark Waters and A Song to Remember, both with Merle Oberon—of whom he gushingly wrote, “Wish I’d meet someone like her!”—and To Have or Have Not with Lauren Bacall—whom he summed up less attractively: “She moves like a horse and has a voice like a bass drum.”

Missing were the almost equally energetic friends who would be accompanying O’Hara in the crush of artworld events a decade later in New York. Yet in his last two weeks in San Francisco he finally began to meet some friends who were able to share at least partly in his interests, friends his mother was rather quick to brand as “bohemians.” One Sunday afternoon O’Hara went searching for an arts center in Chinatown that he had seen advertised in a brochure at an art museum. Making his way through the neighborhood of buildings “similar to pagodas” he found, on a second floor, the Servicemen’s Arts Center, comprising the home of its founder, the composer and pianist Charles Cooper, plus three studios for painting, sculpture, and piano. As Cooper and his wife were friendly with a number of contemporary composers, including William Schuman, he and O’Hara found much to discuss. After their talk, Cooper led his astonishingly learned young friend into the piano studio where, while a fire crackled in the fireplace, O’Hara played for him two pieces he had bought in Norfolk—Leonard Bernstein’s “Seven Anniversaries” and Jacques Ibert’s “Little White Donkey.” O’Hara then stayed on from two until five in the afternoon playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier without stopping while Cooper practiced next door on the baby grand in his living room.

Cooper invited O’Hara to come back at eight as he was having some friends in to play string quartets. This invitation led to a number of musical soirees. That evening there were two other sailors, one in the audience with O’Hara and one playing cello. Mrs. Brown, a musician who had done concert work in New York, played first violin, supported by a Mr. Foy. Along with Mr. Cooper, they played a movement from a Schubert quartet and two movements from the César Franck piano quintet. Afterward, Cooper invited O’Hara to play two of the “Seven Anniversaries” he had practiced that afternoon. O’Hara did, to the displeasure of “a young lady who wore her black glossy hair in a large bun at the base of her skull,” as O’Hara remembered her in “Lament and Chastisement,” “and knew but did not care for Leonard Bernstein which I thought very snotty indeed.” O’Hara stayed on until midnight listening to Cooper play some of his own romantic and very pianistic compositions.

“Mrs. Brown, the Coopers and the people I’ve met in that connection have done me a world a good,” O’Hara wrote to his parents, relieved to have finally found someplace away from home where he felt he belonged. “Proving what I’ve always held to be true, that musicians are not the weak, effeminate, or neurotic people who hide under music’s skirts for solace, emotional release, and the like. . . . they have shown me how normal my love of it is, and what a bond exists between music lovers.”

O’Hara soon became enamored of Mrs. Brown’s daughter, Carolyn, in the sort of theatrically flattering fashion that would become characteristic of his passions for certain women artists throughout his life, their appeal to him being more dramatic than sexual. Nicknamed Natasha, she was, as O’Hara described her in “Lament and Chastisement,” “a beautiful art student from Stanford . . . who wore black always and tortoise-shell combs; there was beer and Natasha loved Russian rye with anchovy paste.” He described her to his parents as “a very attractive girl with brown eyes, brown hair, medium complexion, oh lovely!” He was a bit suspicious, partly because of his susceptibility to his mother’s judgment, of an unproductive artiness in some members of the group, vowing “I shall never get to the point where a cocktail table will be more attractive than a piano or desk.” He was impressed with Natasha not only because she was “nice-looking” but because she could sketch and play piano. O’Hara met her only a week before his notice arrived with orders to ship out to the South Pacific, but they spent his last night in town together playing duets, building a fire in the fireplace, and seeing The Canterville Ghost, with Charles Laughton playing the part of a ghost who haunts an English castle where a group of American GIs are billeted. The young O’Hara, already enamored with the freedoms of San Francisco, whipped his brief acquaintance with Natasha up into a sort of movie romance. “We’re going to write,” he assured his parents.

Although O’Hara’s stay in the booming harbor city had been brief, he was decisively changed by his encounters there. His resolution in Norfolk to be more self-reliant had not greatly enhanced his life, leading him at best to a local performance of a “turgid” Brahms First. But in San Francisco, he was able to attend truly stimulating concerts and exhibits. He followed a trail of tickets and leaflets that eventually led him to the more cultivated Charles Cooper and Natasha Brown, musicians who could share some of his excitement at his recent purchases of sheet music for Hindemith’s “Konzertmusik” for piano, brass, and harps and César Franck’s “Prélude, choral et fugue.” He managed, too, to shake his spells of dejection and homesickness, claiming that he now felt “on the whole more independent, freer, more confident, happier, and more at ease—because I’ve found I can rely on myself, not only to amuse myself, but to attract new friends.” This sensitive boy who had so relied on his family for his emotional sustenance was beginning to realize, though, that as he solved his problems in finding happiness on his own, he was also rendering any true return home impossible. “The trouble is that I may have trouble readjusting myself when I do get home,” he warned gently, “but I imagine our mutual affection will take care of most of the obstacles.”

On February 9, O’Hara arrived at a fenced and guarded pre-embarkation barracks on Treasure Island where he was issued his mess kit, high work shoes, mosquito netting, and a new seabag, while awaiting orders to board ship. His transport was scheduled to make its trip across the Pacific Ocean in twenty-eight days, docking eventually at Manus, a volcanic island of New Guinea that had been occupied by the Japanese from 1942 until 1944 and was now being used as a holding base for sailors about to be deployed in General MacArthur’s campaign to conquer the Philippine Islands, and push on to Japan.

“I’ll remain in constant communication with you all via telepathy anyhow so we’ll never lose touch,” O’Hara wrote in his last letter from San Francisco.

Although O’Hara would often think back nostalgically on San Francisco, and joke while stationed in the Philippine Islands that the popular song lyric “carry me back to San Francisco” captured his sentiments exactly, he did not share in the general lamenting on February 28 as the Golden Gate Bridge disappeared off the ship’s stern in a morning mist. O’Hara was moved at the sight of Fort Mason, where Colonel Brown, Natasha’s father, was stationed. As they sailed past the district of apartments where the Browns lived he soothed himself with the thought that “It isn’t as if I were going away forever.” All of his usual anguish at separation was evoked this time by Natasha and his friends at the Arts Center rather than by thoughts of his family.

After waiting on the beach for hours until finally being shuttled aboard “like cattle,” as one of his fellow sailors described it, O’Hara boarded the U.S.S. Lurline, a converted ocean liner. Steaming to the South Pacific at a brisk twenty-eight knots, the Lurline traveled without escort, jammed with an overload of sailors and a segregated corps of five hundred WACS waiting to be dropped off in Hawaii. All of the liner’s staterooms were packed with bunks stacked four high, and queues for meals looped endlessly through the cafeteria. It was a rough crossing and the long swells of the Pacific Ocean caused a lot of seasickness, with a few sailors always draped over the rails vomiting.

The main attraction of the boat to many of the enlisted men, especially O’Hara, was the sea. Its deck was filled each day with boys escaping their crowded cabins to stare out at it. One friend’s comment as he leaned over the rails stuck in O’Hara’s memory for years: “I’m a chemist; this is just the blue I used to make things with indigo.” O’Hara particularly enjoyed walking the more solitary decks at night, careful not to light up a cigarette—a punishable offense as its flicker might alert an enemy plane. As he described one of these trysts to his parents: “The other night up on deck in the moonlight, with the stars unbelievably bright, and clouds incredibly low, and the boom of the waves and rustle of the foam, very lovely, I thought as usual of you all. It was very pleasant—I felt so very serene and calm and detached. I love the sea now more than I ever did. I hope it doesn’t get to wearing off or become boring.”

O’Hara’s stateroom, with only nine men assigned to it, was less crowded than most. While four of his companions didn’t have much to say, O’Hara claimed that he and the other four often engaged in “heated discussions” about “law, music, Negroes (inevitably?), social problems, socialism, liberalism, government, politics, current events, personal beliefs, morals, sex, industry, labor, Franco, and even Sacco & Vanzetti!” One of his bunkmates enraged O’Hara by arguing that Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps was “a work of ignorance,” but then redeemed himself by reciting almost perfectly a part of one of O’Hara’s favorite works, “The Communist Manifesto.” These were the sorts of debates O’Hara had been primed for by his living room discussions with his father. He now felt particularly justified in voicing opinions, even if they sounded reckless, because he had been reading an essay by Emerson (included in his 1944 Christmas gift from his Aunt Margaret, Selected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson), in which, wrote O’Hara, “Emerson says something to the effect that ‘I have no patience with consistency. Only a stupid man is consistent!’”

The trip to the South Pacific seemed long, and many of O’Hara’s shipmates grew restless. But he managed to keep himself quite busy and absorbed. He read a number of best-selling novels, including W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, the story of a love affair between a white man and black woman, which had been banned in Boston. He composed two pieces: “Little Dances for Piano” (made up of a waltz, march, sarabande, and polka) and “Rere Regardant,” a string quartet based on four passages from Joyce’s Ulysses in which he was absorbed at the time. He even tried his hand at poetry, although he later told the poet Bill Berkson that his efforts were such failures that he tossed them overboard.

Confined on the U.S.S. Lurline in the middle of an immense “great gray tarpaulin” of ocean, cut off from his family, O’Hara arrived at a stronger sense of his own identity and of the importance of the pieces of music and poetry, his own and others, that he had studied and composed. This realization during his sea crossing was powerful enough that he would later describe it with unusual drama as “a second birth.” “At this time I reread Ulysses, needing to throw up my sensibility and Joyce’s art into the face of my surroundings,” he wrote in “Lament and Chastisement.” “I found that Joyce was more than a match, I was reassured that what was important to me would always be important to me; deprived of music I wrote pieces which turned out to sound something like early Bartok, and I wrote awful poetry compounded of Donne, Whitman and Cummings, which I later destroyed. I found that I myself was my life: it had not occurred to me before; now I knew that the counters with which I dealt with my life were as valid in unsympathetic surroundings as they had been in sympathetic ones. . . . I had subconsciously felt this, and now I knew it. From that monstrous womb: a second birth.”

By the time the U.S.S. Lurline arrived at Manus, though, even O’Hara was ready to jump. The remainder of the voyage had been smooth enough, except for a few squalls. The sights had become increasingly tropical and picturesque. Blue-and-white flying fish would “taxi off just like an airplane,” sometimes leaping so high they would land on deck. Swirling winds stirred up hundred-feet-high liquid tornadoes called “water devils.” But as the weather grew hotter, the ship became smelly, the beds stank, and the men, including O’Hara, who enjoyed clomping around deck in “noisy as heck” wooden sandals he had bought in Norfolk, were forced to bathe only with salt water and special soap.

Manus was an extremely hot jungle island in the Admiralties, which because of its location a mere three degrees south of the equator had neither dusk nor dawn, but rather passed from day to night as quickly as if someone had flipped a light switch. The Lurline arrived two weeks ahead of schedule on a March night, and the sailors took notice at the first sighting of the Southern Cross constellation. They were also surprised by the busyness they could see on shore. “When we were on the West Coast everything was blacked out,” recalls a radioman who sailed over with O’Hara. “So it was funny when we arrived at Manus, which was lit up like New York City with beacons and searchlights and yardlights. It was a twenty-four-hour operation. Munitions were being transferred to ships on the beach all night long.”

O’Hara was assigned to a Quonset hut through which the rains blew during almost daily downpours. All of the sailors were issued doses of a malaria preventative, Atabrine, which O’Hara felt caused him to look “very oriental,” and his shaved head, he felt, resembled “a coconut” or “a football with fungus growing on it.” If the routine on Manus was round-the-clock, it was still tedious in its repetitiveness, with each day consisting of a predictable cycle, which O’Hara reduced to “watch; chow; shower; nap; chow.” He was involved mostly in stockpiling cases in ammunition dumps, which he described in “Lament and Chastisement” as “situated in clearings along a broad dusty highway. Working parties went there for eight hours at a time in the hot sun; everyone blistered ached burnt and was unhappy.” This task resulted in the accident recorded in “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”:

warm as we never wanted to be warm, in an ammunition

dump, my foot again crushed (this time by a case of 40 millimeters)

“the

only thing you ever gave New Guinea was your toenail and now

the Australians are taking over”

As usual, O’Hara seemed more enchanted by the colorful topography of the South Pacific “where the beaches flower with cat-eyes and ear fungus” than he was concerned with the dangers of its tactical significance in the war with Japan. He was particularly alert to tropical animals he had never encountered in New England: scorpions, monkeys, green lizards, plumed birds. The bats he described in a letter home as “wheeling in the air” appeared four years later in “Lament and Chastisement”: “bats swooped from flopping trees, knocked coconuts and bumped everything with a squeal of surprise like a mouse’s as the sky oozed into the gray bay each night quickly when the sun went out and the flag went down.”

O’Hara escaped the card-playing tedium of the hut, which his mates had nicknamed Stumble Inn, by composing music. “He was composing music every free minute he had,” recalls O’Hara’s bottom bunkmate, Gordon (“Rosey”) Rosenlund, a metalworker from Minneapolis to whom he eventually gave his only copy of Ulysses. “He was continuously busy writing symphonies up there, in that upper bunk, with these big sheets of music paper around him. I was twenty-four when I joined the Navy so I already had some sand in my boots. Francis appealed to me because he had a quieter and more mature nature than many of these other guys. There were some real characters around. They were noisy and they would get more than their share of beer and wind up tipsy. Some of the younger guys were really filthy in their language, the filthier the language the more they gloried in it. Francis had a clean mouth. He was well-mannered and reserved. He wasn’t one of those macho boisterous types.”

O’Hara and Rosenlund took in many movies at the base’s USO shell up the road from St. John’s by the Sea Chapel, “a chapel made of brown wood which smelled almost as bad as the bodies.” They saw Experiment Perilous with Hedy Lamarr, a Disney cartoon titled Three Caballeros, and a film life of Chopin, A Song to Remember, which O’Hara was seeing for the third time. These Hollywood features were mixed in with captured Japanese movies and endless newsreels, one of which included a sequence of a GI spitting on a dead enemy’s body that only incensed O’Hara. On Sundays symphonic transcriptions were played for sailors and natives sunning on the benches in front of the shell. In “Lament and Chastisement,” O’Hara, quoting Villa-Lobos’s description of Bach as “the folk music of the universe,” recalled a broadcast of Bach’s fourth Brandenburg concerto as particularly liberating: “the fourth Brandenburg Concerto established a meaning and a synthesis akin to the Elizabethan chain of being; a finger touched a button and lit up the world there all aglare with death suffering struggle defeat in motion and in blinding coherence.”

There were savage times, too. One Sunday morning the body of a murdered black mess-cook was discovered slumped in front of his hut. As Gordon Rosenlund recalls, “One of the cooks did try to fool around with one of the Melanesian women and they didn’t like that. They dropped off his body one morning, killed, mangled, with his testicles sewn in his mouth.” O’Hara never related this incident to his parents, only hinting at such disturbing events when he wrote to his mother that “situations arise that you and dad and your friends, sophisticated as you and they undoubtedly are, cannot imagine.” He did eventually express the strange horror of the incident twelve years later in “Ode to Michael Goldberg”:

in New Guinea a Sunday morning figure

reclining outside his hut in Lamourish languor

and an atabrine-dyed hat like a sick sun

over his ebony land on your way to breakfast

he has had his balls sewed into his mouth

by the natives who bleach their hair in urine

and their will; a basketball game and a concert

later if you live to write, it’s not all advancing

towards you, he had a killing desire for their women

O’Hara was growing increasingly bold at expressing new ideas to his parents. These notions, which were stimulated by his demanding reading list as well as by his wartime experiences, were often at odds with the Catholic dogmas he had been taught at St. John’s. His reading of The Magic Mountain led him to dispute Hans Castorp’s preoccupation with death, a preoccupation of Catholicism: “Our religion rather encourages us to picture death as a relief and a refuge, it seems to me as I think of it; and I can’t help but think that that is not healthy and wholesome. . . . why prefer the shadow to the sunlight, water to land? Life with its trials has a zest that a Utopia would never have. I would prefer to believe a little less that this is just a preparation, to lose a little of the attitude Hans Castorp has in the book. . . . It is good not to fear death but I know darn well it is unhealthy to look forward to it as an interesting and enlightening (does information always bring the cat back?) experience.” He recommended to his parents an Isak Dinesen story from Seven Gothic Tales about a devout churchgoer, Miss Malin, who dies “virga intacta” but spends her last years in delightful reminiscences of her past amorous indiscretions. “And doesn’t the church say the thought is sinful?” O’Hara asks rhetorically. To his brother and sister he recommended “This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful,” a poem from the Calamus section of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which his parents had sent him as an eighteenth birthday present the previous year: “It’s most appropriate for Sunday, and more Christian than many things you’ll hear in church. But there I go again.” These percolating notions gradually resulted in new behavior. The boy who had been so assiduous about attending Mass and having the priest send home Mass cards suddenly grew lax. “I hope you don’t expect such church attendance of me when I get back,” he wrote to his parents about their recent “pious” bout of churchgoing.

Such comments sent Katherine O’Hara into a panic. She sensed that she was beginning to lose her oldest son. She blamed the books he was reading—particularly such racy pieces as Strange Fruit, and Seven Gothic Tales—and seemed to sense that his excitement about them was somehow related to the company he was keeping with those “bohemians” in San Francisco. Her son’s rather sarcastic response: “You seem to think that what I believe comes from outside influences, although considering my schooling and contacts I don’t see how you could.” She was also concerned with what she called his “taste in liquor” and used the well-worn parable of one apple spoiling the barrel to shift the responsibility for his drinking onto his bunkmates. “Because one comes in contact with thieves one is not going to become one is he?” O’Hara countered. “After all, people are not exactly apples. And because a person likes food he does not become a glutton does he? Or liquor a drunkard? Really, now.”

Her alarm was not entirely unfounded. The more she tried to control her son from a distance, the more O’Hara realized that he would never be able to satisfy her expectations again. He began to spell out his warnings quite clearly. “I hope you won’t be disappointed when I get home again,” he wrote, preparing them for his break from childhood. “You both always think of me as a baby, I know, but you must expect a different person from the one that left. Not essentially, but in detail; more complete or extended, perhaps, if that explains it. . . . there are a few opinions which have been strengthened or corroborated which are not new but which I didn’t express; but because of my conclusions I am now ready to express them. You may or may not agree. I don’t mean that I may not be wrong, but I hope you’ll be able to respect them and to accept the slight changes in me, without loss of affection. You cannot expect me to be a carbon copy of yourselves.”

O’Hara was increasingly comfortable with his hutmates. No longer looking forward to a return home as an antidote for his “cycle of moods,” he was freer to find some fun in “horseplay, jokes, kidding, arguments.” He pursued a government-sponsored correspondence course in English literature, “From Beowulf to Thomas Hardy,” and worked absorbedly in his upper bunk on his latest piece, which was titled “Tribute to Afro-Americans.” O’Hara didn’t seem to mind the claustrophobic quarters filled with the smoke of five-cents-a-pack cigarettes, its walls covered with pin-ups of Vargas girls in bathing suits. One hutmate’s decorative contribution, which O’Hara slyly judged as “more realistic” than the pin-up girls, was “a large photograph of a steak, with butter melting over the top as mother serves it.”

His newfound ease with a few of these sailors only caused O’Hara redoubled pain when they were eventually transferred out a few weeks before him. At that time his anguish at separating was cued in powerfully. “I know every one of my immediate circle of friends is going to be transferred and I’m not!” he wrote home. “It is so rare to meet several people of above ordinary intelligence with common interests and ideas similar to my own. Oh, hell, I don’t give a tinker’s damn anyway. Every time I leave myself open I get stung and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it again. Damn this sentimentality of mine.” By the next day, however, O’Hara, although passionately declaring that “I can no more resist people than music,” had cooled enough to realize that his friendships with these sailors weren’t actually so intimate. He tended to magnify—to himself and in his letters home—the importance of casual conversations or shared recreation time in a way that might have surprised some of his buddies had they known. He often mitigated his loneliness by exaggerating gestures of friendship from men to whom he was attracted. “I’m not so friendly with all those fellows as I inferred,” he wrote. “My talent, or fault, of dramatization (to substitute from Porgy and Bess—‘Sincerity is a sometime thing’) can be blamed for it appearing so tragic.”

Two weeks later, following news of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, which was met with a hush throughout the camps, O’Hara received his own assignment. On April 22, 1945, he boarded the U.S.S. Nicholas, a Seventh Fleet destroyer, which had been built as the first of the Navy’s smaller-class fighting ships. Unaffectionately known as “tin cans,” they were equipped with torpedo tubes, forty-millimeter guns, radar for shooting down planes at night, and carried about three hundred sailors at a time. Within five days, O’Hara’s ship was situated strategically at the Bay of Tarakan, a heart-shaped island off the Dutch, eastern coast of Borneo valued for its oilfields and Japanese airfield sites. On the morning of May 1, the Nicholas was part of a covering force for Australian land forces that fired a prelanding bombardment starting at 5:30 a.m.

As O’Hara described the day in “Lament and Chastisement”: “Borneo loomed nearby then gaped blue under the spatter of what there is a midget submarine blocking the bay if you’re thinking of leaving but the ship ahead just struck a mine and the fiss-fiss-fiss-fiss-fiss-fiss-fiss spewed feathered fans of earth trees bones skyward in the most abstract of designs you wouldn’t get me to go ashore thank god for the Australians everything that comes up goes down hoho right on some Australian’s head.”

The U.S.S. Nicholas engaged in a series of such limited bombardments and sweep-up operations. From June 17 until June 25, the destroyer served as part of a covering force in the closing phase of the Okinawa campaign, an assault that, in early May, at the time of the announcement of V-E Day, had been one of the most severe in the war. “When we again went to sea there was Okinawa flashing red,” O’Hara recalled in “Lament and Chastisement.” From July 3 until August 22, the Nicholas operated in a task group replenishing the Third Fleet off Japan, an assignment that seemed to imply eventual combat in an invasion of Japan. All such contingency plans were quickly dropped, however, when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, and another on Nagasaki on August 9, a maneuver from which O’Hara was still recoiling in “Lament and Chastisement”: “we killed the great Japanese architect the great German scientist the great Italian musician dropped death on Hiroshima killed killed killed and yes I hate us for it killedkilledkilled.”

In its circuitous course through trouble spots from Tarakan to Tokyo Bay, the U.S.S. Nicholas had spent many weeks stopping at various liberated ports to help evacuate prisoners of war. These stopovers, including Sendai Bay about five hundred miles north of Tokyo, visited after the formal surrender, were charted impressionistically by O’Hara in “Ode to Michael Goldberg”:

banana brandy in Manila, spidery

steps trailing down onto the rocks of the harbor

and up in the black fir, the

pyramidal whiteness, Genji on the Ginza,

a lavender-kimono-sized

loneliness,

and drifting into my ears off Sendai in the snow Carl

T. Fischer’s Recollections of an Indian Boy

Between ports, O’Hara preferred to sleep on deck rather than in the hot and humid “racks” below, enjoying the sensation so much that he joked to his parents that “I probably won’t be able to sleep in my bed when I get back.” He recorded the essential poetry of this experience later in “Lament and Chastisement”: “sleeping on the open deck under the teetering mast which stirred the stars like a finger in a porridge bowl under showers of soot under the warm wind as the slouching like ghosts in mist in the straits the islands like slow hippopotami passed until there was fragrant and fruitful in doe-eyed women and gazelle-legged men the yellow slush the Philippine rain had slobbered.”

While O’Hara didn’t tend to tell war stories later in life, any more than he revealed details about his childhood, he did mention the destroyer Nicholas to a few friends, usually dwelling teasingly on its shadowed homoeroticism. He confided to Larry Rivers that his nickname on board had been “Butch,” obviously a humorous misnomer as it implies a tough maleness, contrary to the impression made on his Navy acquaintances or, obversely, was used in slang to refer to women thought to behave in a masculine manner.

A letter O’Hara received in 1950 from one of his shipmates began “Dear Butch.” “Don’t suppose anyone ever calls you Butch anymore,” O’Hara’s buddy from the U.S.S. Nicholas continued. “Well it’s been a long time since I’ve written or heard from you. . . . Now comes the big question. ‘Are you married yet?’ Sure hope so for it is a wonderful life. If you haven’t you don’t know what you’re missing. Butch please write and tell me about you.”

Most of the friends who remember O’Hara discussing his warship experiences were with him at Harvard in the late forties when the war was still a fresh topic. “Frank had wonderful memories of life at sea,” recalls his friend George Montgomery. “He told us that he sat all night in the lap of the gunner.” Larry Osgood remembers O’Hara telling of a shore leave where “he and another sailor in uniform got drunk and fell down in the gutter and started kissing and hugging until a Shore Patrolman tapped them and told them to get back to the base.” This may be the same story he later told Joe LeSueur. “He said he went around whoring with his guy one night in the Navy but that they couldn’t make out,” says LeSueur. “Frank stuck with this guy and finally got to do something with him after the whole night was over.” According to his Eliot House roommate, Hal Fondren, who had served as a gunner in the Army Air Forces, “Frank talked about having been buddies with someone on his battleship. It was sort of like going steady. It never got sexual, but it was sweet and loving. He didn’t talk about it very often. He implied that if there was the slightest hint of homosexuality among the men it was really thought to be quite disgusting. Obviously the relations were basically homosexual but they could never be admitted as such. Frank and I shared stories about war romances where it was never admitted as such by either party.” These adventures of O’Hara’s tended to be adolescent and romantic and mostly imaginary, closer to the sporadic and furtive liaisons of boys at summer camp than to sexually or emotionally committed affairs.

When he did tell war stories, O’Hara preferred waxing on about his Valentine’s Day cards of romantic friendships rather than describing any brushes with battle or death. Not until he wrote about the events of the summer of 1945 in “Ode to Michael Goldberg” was the mixture of the military with the erotic, the constant threat of sudden death with the romantic, expressed:

a tangerinelike sullenness in the face of sunrise

or a dark sinking in the wind on the forecastle

when someone you love hits your head and says “I’d sail with you any

where, war or no war”

who was about

to die a tough blond death

like a slender blighted palm

in the hurricane’s curious hail

and the maelstrom of bulldozers

and metal sinkings,

churning the earth

even under the fathomless death

below, beneath

where the one special

went to be hidden, never to disappear

not spatial in that way

Standing on deck, observing “huge and ungainly” albatrosses trailing the ship, O’Hara had plenty of spare time to pursue his reading. He skimmed another best-selling novel banned in Boston, Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, but was disappointed: “Does it stink!” More to his taste was Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson, a novel about four days in the life of an alcoholic that had been released as a movie in 1944 and had recently won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (Billy Wilder), and Best Actor (Ray Milland). O’Hara identified with the main character and used his discussion of the novel in a letter to his parents as a means to hint again at the existence of darker possibilities in his own personality: “It really is interesting and gripping—and because some facts of the man’s character remind us of ourselves (or did me, anyway) practically terrifying. . . . but still it is a novel of a particular man with distinct characteristics—artistic leanings (dreams of being a great pianist—but never took a lesson!), mother complex, homosexual tendencies, etc. His mind deteriorates right before your eyes. And what a fine contempt he has for the ‘amateur’ who can’t stand the smell or sight of liquor the next morning!”

On August 27 the U.S.S. Nicholas entered Tokyo Bay. Its assignment was to transfer Japanese emissaries from the destroyer Hatuzakura to the U.S.S. Missouri for the formal surrender on September 2. “When we pulled up alongside the Japanese ship to pick up their officers we couldn’t see anyone aboard,” remembers Pete Bouthiette, a shipmate of O’Hara’s. “It looked completely empty. So we manned our loaded guns. We got almost alongside of it before we finally saw some heads pop up.” The Nicholas also shuttled Russian, French, British, and American officials to the ceremony, including most of General MacArthur’s staff. According to Bouthiette, “The only officer we weren’t carrying was MacArthur. He didn’t want to associate with the rest of his officers. You could overhear the officers complaining about his not coming aboard with them.” It was perhaps this tension surrounding MacArthur’s entrance, as well as O’Hara’s own mixed feelings about his war experiences, that later inspired his 1964 satiric play about the return of “The General” to the scene of his Pacific triumphs, The General Returns from One Place to Another. (As General MacArthur was gravely ill at the time of the play’s production—he died a month later—there was a comment in one newspaper about the tastelessness of satirizing the former supreme commander of the Allied powers.)

O’Hara wasn’t particularly moved by the ceremony on the “Mighty Mo,” where the same American flag that had flown over the Capitol on the day of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was hoisted over the heads of American generals in khaki uniforms with open-necked shirts, civilians in formal dress with top hats, and a frozen-faced Japanese delegation. Rather than dwelling on the historical resonances of the day, as did the radio announcer with an “emotion-filled voice” whom O’Hara slyly dismissed by remarking, “Well I suppose that life would be very dull if we didn’t dramatize it a little,” he tended to concentrate on the more theatrical details of the French officers’ “gold-braided hat boxes” or the Russian generals so grandly decked out in swords and gold epaulets that he cast them as “musical comedy veterans.” He was also aware of the comic touches, such as the Nicholas anchorman who nervously heaved a line around a general’s neck rather than onto an adjoining ship.

Far more inspiring to O’Hara, though, gazing off across the bay, were the aesthetic reverberations of “a segment of landscape that would be perfect on a vase or parchment.” “Looking at the hills and mountains, the foliage, the sloping lines and milky mists, it is easy to see where the Japanese get inspiration for their much-admired paintings,” he wrote to his parents from the destroyer Nicholas, docked until October 1 in Sagami-wan under the shadow of a cratered Mount Fuji, which he described as having an “unfinished look.”

The remainder of O’Hara’s term in the Navy was a waiting game.

Having earned the right to wear the Philippine Liberation Campaign ribbon, American Area Campaign medal, Asiatic-Pacific Area Campaign medal with one operation and engagement star, and a World War II Victory medal, O’Hara was shipped in October to Seattle Bay and then to the San Pedro shipyard twenty-five miles south of Los Angeles. There he waited, along with millions of other soldiers, as the military bureaucracy slowly processed the papers that would shrink the American forces over the year from 11 million to 1 million. During this interlude he visited the orange groves “(ripe too!)” of the San Bernardino Valley and took shore leaves in Los Angeles, where he attended a range of concerts from the opening night of Johnny Grier’s band at the Biltmore Bowl to the Pro Arte Quartet’s performance of three quartets by Schubert, Schoenberg, and Beethoven.

to the orange covered

slopes where a big hill was moving in

on LA and other stars were strolling

in shorts down palm-stacked horse-walks

O’Hara and his roommate in later years, Joe LeSueur, discovered that they had probably attended the same concert during a shore leave of O’Hara’s in 1946. “One night Frank was saying he loved every piano concerto ever written,” recalls LeSueur of a conversation in 1959 after having watched A Woman’s Face on the Late Late Show at a friend’s. “He was mimicking Joan Crawford when she announces to Conrad Veidt that she likes ‘some symphonies and all piano concertos.’ So I said, ‘I bet there’s one concerto you’ve never heard, the Pan-American Piano Concerto by Roy Harris.’ ‘I have too,’ he said. ‘I heard his wife, Joanna Harris, play it at the Wilshire-Ebell in Los Angeles in 1946.’ Well I had been there that night. I went with a girl, and I did remember looking up and seeing a sailor sitting in the balcony!”

On June 2, 1946, O’Hara received his separation papers at the Personnel Intake Station in San Pedro, California. He then boarded a train at Long Beach, California, for the cross-country trip. This train trip—or a collage of this trip with previous trips to and from Boston on a brief Christmas leave in 1945—is evoked in “Ode to Michael Goldberg”:

eight o’clock in the dining car

of the

20th Century Limited (express)

and its noisy blast passing buttes to be

Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fé, Baltimore and Ohio (Cumberland),

leaving

beds in Long Beach for beds in Boston, via C- (D,B,) 47 (6)

On the surface O’Hara’s homecoming was smooth as he settled again into his rear bedroom with its red rug. As he had written to his parents from the Admiralties, “What could be more satisfying than a red rug??” The only immediate evidence of any stress from having served on a warship was his insistence that his mother give away her yellow canary to friends on Worcester Street who had other canaries because its chirping was so close in pitch to the sounds emitted by sonar equipment. “It was a great concession for my mother,” remembers Philip O’Hara. “But that canary was gone the next day.”

O’Hara was struggling privately, however, with his attempt to adjust at home after achieving a measure of adult independence. “It’s independence I want,” he had written to his parents from Los Angeles in January. “There are things I must learn for myself and undoubtedly they will hurt—but not forever. I’d rather be hurt than stunted anyhow. And besides—perhaps the worst has already happened! It hasn’t killed me yet. Very few things will shock me, I’m afraid.”

O’Hara described the disorienting experience of returning home more trenchantly in a letter written to a classmate from Harvard in 1950. “This finality is actually better than when I left the Navy,” he wrote of his graduation, “because I am going to a place of my choice, whereas then I had to go home, and it upset me terribly because I first in the Navy managed to establish my identity with real people and situations, rather than depend on the context of a piano or a vide papier to enable me to manage it, and upon discharge I had to return home like a prodigal who has done many evil things only to find that his parents didn’t even hear about them!”

O’Hara again expressed this feeling of displacement on returning to Grafton in “Ode to Michael Goldberg”:

to “return” safe who will never feel safe