A warm love bytes welcome to author Philip Gambone joining us today to talk about his release “As Far As I Can Tell”.
When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer?
In college. I started off my writing career as a poet and won some accolades and prizes in college. I am still constantly reading poetry—classic and contemporary. I still occasionally turn out a haiku for my own amusement, but consider myself a prose writer. I began my professional writing career with pieces—reportage and feature articles—for Boston’s gay press. But I also wanted to tell my own stories and turned to writing fiction, which I started to publish in the mind 1980s. My first book of short stories came out in 1991.
I’ve always loved good writing. My admiration for the great prose stylists has always inspired me to reach for that level of excellence. My admiration for the early great gay writers inspired me to write honestly about gay life.
How many books have you written?
I’ve written five books: a collection of short stories, a novel (Beijing), a book of interviews with gay fiction writers, a book of profiles of LGBTQ Americans, and my most recent book, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II.
How did you come up with the idea for your book?
Out of sheer curiosity to learn more about my father. As Far As I Can Tell is a quest biography about the several-thousand-mile journey I made—both in the field and through extensive research—to track down my father’s wartime experience and to understand my relationship to him and to war in general.
My father, who was a gunner in an American tank division, never spoke about his war experience. He wrapped that story in a tight cocoon of silence. In truth, my father and I rarely spoke about anything. From early on in my life as gay man, I learned to wrap myself in a cocoon of my own, choosing to lock my father out of my emerging life. While he and I were not estranged, we conducted a polite, hesitant do-si-do around each other’s silence. Did he know I was gay? Perhaps. Did I fathom the depth of the trauma he had suffered in the War? Not at all.
After he died, I discovered among his effects a scrapbook of photos he had taken during the war, a handful of letters he had written home, and a few other documents related to his wartime experience. This memorabilia—so flimsy and incomplete—stood out to me both as an indictment that I had paid so little attention to my father and what he’d done, and as an invitation to uncover just what sort of man he had been, during the war and after.
In uncovering his story, I aimed to avoid both sentimentality and the congenial, if inconsequential, smallness of “family history.” My quest was about more than that. I wanted to assess the war’s emotional resonance: on him, on his fellow soldiers, and on me. I found myself, like the Russian historian Svetlana Alexievich, becoming “a historian of the soul”—my father’s soul, his generation’s, and mine.
The book interweaves several stories. Based on my research (including dozens of interviews with surviving members of the 5AD), As Far As I Can Tell reconstructs what my father and the men of the Fifth Armored Division endured; it also chronicles my own emotional odyssey as I followed his route from Liverpool to the Elbe River, a journey that challenged my thinking about war, about European history, and about “civilization.” What I discovered—about this man I hardly knew, and about myself, a man who was deemed “unfit” for military service in Vietnam—is the substance of the book.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Generally, I write at my desk in my study at home. I write on a laptop. But, before COVID put a damper on sitting inside at cafés, I also used to take my laptop to a coffee shop and write there. I find that there are actually fewer distractions than at home.
When you develop characters do you already know who they are before you begin writing or do you let them develop as you go?
When I write fiction, I generally start off with a character, someone who has a problem of some kind. That “problem” can be anything: a difficult situation, an emotional discomfort, a vague unease. I throw my character into a social situation and watch to see what develops. As I write, I learn more about my character. I never have a clear understanding of how things will work out until I get to the end of the drafting process. That’s what makes writing fiction fun and interesting—discovering how the story will proceed as I go along.
Do you aim for a set number of words/pages per day?
I am for time rather than words: At the earliest stage, usually 1-2 hours at a sitting. During later drafts, I can write for 5-6 hours a day.
What is the hardest thing about writing?
For me, the hardest thing is to keep believing in myself and my vision. There are so many voices—internal and external—that are full of discouragement, that tell you to give up. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I’m constantly having to pep talk myself into accepting what I am achieving in my writing.
What is the easiest thing about writing?
Ha! Nothing.
Are your characters based on people you know?
In my fiction, I have often borrowed on elements and aspects of people I know, but I’ve never completely reproduced someone I know in a story. I always change crucial elements. That keeps the story original and interesting to work on. The true elements just “prime the pump,” as it were. The creativity is in all the invention.
Do you ever get writer’s block?
I’ve never really experience full-blown writer’s block, never had a long period where I was paralyzed. But I’ve also learned to have patience when the writing isn’t flowing easily. “This, too, will pass,” is my motto.
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
What has been one of your most rewarding experiences as an author?
One of the happiest moments was when my first short story was accepted for publication. The editor of the journal initially rejected it, then wrote back to say that the story was haunting him and could he have another look. A few weeks later, it was accepted. That was over 30 years ago. It gave me the confidence to keep going.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
Read—a lot! I also love listening to classical music (both recorded and, pre-pandemic, at live concerts), go to museums, and travel. I’ve visited most countries in Europe, been to East Asia seven times, and have start5ed exploring Latin America. At the moment, I’m relearning Spanish. I also used to play a bunch of musical instruments. I’m trying to re-teach myself the piano, but all the work on the book hasn’t left me much time for that.
Do you like music or silence when your write?
Silence! Always silence. I love music too much to let it become background noise.
Do you outline or do you just write?
For my fiction writing, I generally just write. For my most recent book, I had a vague outline. I knew the route my father had taken across Europe, so that became my narrative guide. But there were plenty of detours and diversions that I added. Those were not planned.
Do you prefer pen and paper or computer?
I used to write on yellow legal pads: lots of crossings-out, arrows, bits pasted together. A nightmare! The computer allowed me to write to my heart’s content, inserting and erasing with ease. Now, except for my journal, all my writing is done on the computer
Do you write as routine or do you write when you feel like it?
I try to write something every day.
What do you love best about your current book?
I love that I finished it! It was an enormous project that took three years of research and another four to write and revise and revise and revise. It’s the most complex book I’ve written and, in many ways, my best, I think. I think I took my writing to a new level with this one.
What is your next project?
I’m back to writing fiction. I’m hard at work on a collection of short stories about older gay men. I think older gay men are under-represented in fiction. I’m out to change that lacuna.
Things I learned while writing this book/series.
Well, to begin, I learned a lot more about World War II—just how horrific it was. But I really set out to learn more about my father, who was such a taciturn man. I learned to admire his quiet dignity, his sense of duty (to the Army and to his family), and his resilience in the face of all sorts of disappointments, pain, and losses. I also learned a lot about European history in general. The places where my father fought—France, the Low Countries, Germany—have been the scenes of so many wars. I had to confront how little human beings learn from one conflict to the next. And, finally, I learned a lot about myself, as a son who had not paid much attention to his father, as a young man who was rejected from the Army, as someone who loves European civilization despite its often brutal underpinnings, and as a gay man.
Elaborate on the things that you edited out of this book, or that was originally planned but changed once you started writing.
The first draft was 1200 pages long! My research was very extensive and I threw everything I discovered into that first draft. Over the next 2-3 years, as I whittled down the book, I took out a lot of redundant information. The final draft, which I submitted to the publisher, was about 450 double-spaced pages in length. As the publisher and I were working on the final proof copy, I added bits that I had taken out, bits that I thought were just too good to let go. All in all, I think the book ended up exactly as I wanted it. It’s lean, has got forward drive, but still a lot of great detail. A good balance, I hope.
What is your advice for new writers?
Read as much good literature as you can, keep a writing log (to keep yourself honest about your commitment to daily writing), get into a writers’ group, and don’t pay attention to negative voices.
Thank you.
Book Title: As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father In World War II
Author: Philip Gambone
Publisher: Rattling Good Yarns Press
Release Date: October 30, 2020
Genre: Memoir
Trope/s: Father/Son Relationships
Themes: Connecting to the past, Understanding our fathers,
Father/Son silence and the inherent lack of communications,
Coming to terms with history
Length: 155 000 words/474 pages
It is a standalone book.
Buy Links
(Note – The Rattling Good Yarns online store only ships within the US)
2021 Lambda Literary Award Nominated
Blurb
Philip Gambone, a gay man, never told his father the reason why he was rejected from the draft during the Vietnam War. In turn, his father never talked about his participation in World War II. Father and son were enigmas to each other. Gambone, an award-winning novelist and non-fiction writer, spent seven years uncovering who the man his quiet, taciturn father had been, by retracing his father’s journey through WWII. As Far As I Can Tell not only reconstructs what Gambone’s father endured, it also chronicles his own emotional odyssey as he followed his father’s route from Liverpool to the Elbe River. A journey that challenged the author’s thinking about war, about European history, and about “civilization.”
On February 12, 1942, Dad reported for induction. The chief business was the physical examination, which was conducted assembly-line fashion. The inductees were naked, wearing only a number around their necks. It was the most comprehensive physical most of them had ever had. For some it was intimidating, for others embarrassing.
Most inductees were eager to pass the physical exam, so eager in fact that in many cases, they indulged in “negative malingering,” trying to conceal conditions that might get them disqualified. Once the physical was out of the way, the only screening that remained was a brief interview with an army psychiatrist, who had been instructed to look for “neuropsychosis,” a diagnosis that covered all sort of emotional ills from phobias to excessive sweating and evidence of mental deficiency.
Paul Marshall, who ended up in the same division as Dad, remembered being asked at his physical if he liked girls. “I didn’t quite understand what he meant about it. I told him, ‘Why sure, I like girls.’” Later Marshall figured out what he was really being asked. “The ultimate question mark of manliness,” James Lord, himself a homosexual, recalled. “Do you like girls? Or prefer confinement in a federal penitentiary for the remainder of your unnatural life.” The terror of being considered a sexual leper or worse, “unfit to honor the flag of your forebears,” was real. Lord answered, Yes, he liked girls, and was promptly accepted into the army.
Not every homosexual inductee lied. Some, like Donald Vining, came clean with his interviewer, who turned out to be “marvelously tolerant, taking the whole thing easily and calmly, without shock and without condescension.” The interviewer marked Vining’s papers “sui generis ‘H’ overt,” and he was out.
My father passed his induction physical. Hale, hearty, and decidedly heterosexual, he needed none of the remedial medical work—dental, optometric—that millions of other inductees did. With the physical and the psychological screenings done, Dad signed his induction papers, was fingerprinted, and issued a serial number. The final piece of business was the administration of the oath of allegiance, done, according to army regulations, “with proper ceremony.” Once sworn in, Dad was sent home to put things in order before he went off to Camp Perry to be processed for basic training.
Twenty-eight years after Dad’s, my own induction notice arrived, during my senior year in college. I was instructed to report to my hometown on May 6, where the Army would put me on a bus and drive me to the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in South Boston. I remember standing, before dawn, on a curb outside the town offices waiting for the bus. Other fellows from my high school were there, and I nervously tried to make small talk with them. We’d had nothing in common in high school, and the situation hadn’t changed in the intervening years.
My recollection of that day is shrouded in numbness. I remember standing in a line, stripped to my underwear, making my way from one examining station to the next. I kept assuring myself I could not possibly go to Vietnam, that the good fortune I’d enjoyed so far would see me to a different destiny than the one where I would end up dead in a jungle in Southeast Asia.
I was clutching a letter from my dentist attesting to the fact that I needed braces, in those days a cause for rejection. But aside from that, I had not taken any steps to ensure that I wouldn’t be taken. I’d heard stories of guys planning to go to their induction physicals drunk, or stoned, or wearing dresses and makeup. Others said they would flee to Canada or apply for conscientious objector status. I had made no such plans. Throughout senior year, I had been sitting on my damn butt, still banking on magic or luck to get me the hell out.
I passed every exam. I was not overweight. I did not have flat feet or a heart murmur. My blood pressure was excellent. At one station, I handed over the dentist’s letter. The examiner gave it a perfunctory glance and tucked it into my file.
At last, I came to the psychological screening area. All I remember is the examiner asking me if I’d ever had any homosexual experiences. And when I said yes, he followed up with a few more questions. Had I sought counseling? Did I intend to stop? That was it. He thanked me and I moved on. Less than two weeks later, I received a notice from the AFEES: “Found Not Acceptable
for Induction Under Current Standards.” I’d been declared 4-F. In the parlance of the day, I had “fagged out.” My parents thought the dentist’s letter about braces had done the trick.
Philip Gambone is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His debut collection of short stories, The Language We Use Up Here, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His novel, Beijing, was nominated for two awards, including a PEN/Bingham Award for Best First Novel.
Phil has extensive publishing credits in nonfiction as well. He has contributed numerous essays, reviews, features pieces, and scholarly articles to several local and national journals including The New York Times Book Review and The Boston Globe. He is a regular contributor to The Gay & Lesbian Review.
His longer essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, including Hometowns, Sister and Brother, Wrestling with the Angel, Inside Out, Boys Like Us, Wonderlands, and Big Trips.
Phil’s book of interviews, Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, was named one of the “Best Books of 1999” by Pride magazine. His Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans was nominated for an American Library Association Award.
Phil’s scholarly writing includes biographical entries on Frank Kameny in the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford) and Gary Glickman in Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. He also wrote three chapters on Chinese history for two high school textbooks published by Cheng and Tsui.
He is a recipient of artist’s fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. He has also been listed in Best American Short Stories.
Phil taught high school English for over forty years. He also taught writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and in the freshman expository writing program at Harvard. He was twice awarded Distinguished Teaching Citations by Harvard. In 2013, he was honored by the Department of Continuing Education upon completing his twenty-fifth year of teaching for the Harvard Extension School.
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