I work in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan which is a collection of primary materials and documents all focused on American History. It is an amazing place to be, and I have access to people's personal lives over 500 years (take that, Facebook!). One collection I just spent some time with was a collection of letters between an Army doctor serving in England in World War II and his fiancee at home in Syracuse. They wrote more than 600 letters in the two years that they were apart, sometimes writing 3 or 4 letters a day. However, despite the seemingly prolific communication, there was a month wait time for their letters to float across the Atlantic Ocean so they never were really able to have a dialogue. They weren't able to respond to each other in time, so their correspondence takes the form as parallel individual narratives. They are quite lovely, and made me think a lot about how much dialogue has changed. My own significant other lived in England for a year and our communication took quite different forms. I wonder if historians will have access to our correspondence?
Some of these lines are taken directly from the original letters, though much of it is inferred. Read it as you like. I attempted to construct separate narratives, as their letters were, but also give it an overall structure that could be read in multiple ways.
War Correspondence
| (I had a hard time with formatting, so I just took a picture of the text) |
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