"This is the moment I've been waiting for." Those are the first words in the handwritten diary that my father kept as he began his long service in the Pacific during World War II. He wrote them as a young lieutenant on 6 November 1943, the day he shipped out from California for Australia, where he was to join the headquarters staff of General Douglas MacArthur, who had fled to Brisbane after the fall of the Philippines and the escape from Corregidor. My father, an illustrator all his life, died in 2004, and not long ago my mother made me a gift of the yellowing diary pages, composed in the familiar strokes of penmanship that I now understand I have made my own, though I do not remember consciously doing so.
I had never seen the diaries before, and read them straight through, grateful for the chance to reconnect with his presence, even if the conversation was a little one-sided. Part of the thrill was that the man here was someone I never knew: a young adult suddenly thrown into the midst of great men in a great war. Another part of the thrill was something else. The winning quality of any diary is a sense of the ordinariness of life as it is lived in the moment. No matter how momentous the events they recount - or even if there is nothing to recount - diaries display a fundamental unknowingness about how things will turn out, which is an ingredient that the best works of narrative history can almost never capture. This place of unknowingness is, of course, where all of us live. It's the universally shared geography.
In this case, though, the geography came with starting co-ordinates: Brisbane. Recently, I was invited to Australia in connection with a book of mine that was being published here. Aboriginal cultures have given the world the notion of a Walkabout; this visit was to be more of a Talkabout. But knowing that I'd be in the area - meaning, as I now appreciate more fully, on a vast continent with many time zones - I decided to start my journey where my father had started his.
And so I found myself one evening sitting on a balcony above a modern city that looks like a starter kit for a Vancouver or a Seattle, and nothing at all like my own hometown of Boston. It had been an eventful day. I had made copies of my father's diaries, and carried them with me around Brisbane like a street map. Many of the old haunts, like Lennon's Hotel, where the senior American officers had their apartments, are gone, but quite a lot is still here to be seen. I started with St Stephen's Cathedral, where my father attended mass every day (faithfully recorded) and went to confession weekly (the fact, though not the transgressions, also recorded). There's an entry in the diary that reads "Blind date (awful)," which doesn't suggest much material to work with on the confessions front.
Douglas MacArthur's headquarters, where my father spent much of his time, were right around the corner from St Stephen's. They were located in what was then known as the AMP Building, which has since been turned into a shopping mall and condominiums. But the MacArthur floor has been preserved as a museum, and you can see his office, and his desk, and the anterooms. It is a quiet museum, receiving few visitors, and staffed by docents of my father's age whose handshakes have the hard, gristly strength that always surprises me in the elderly. Life will have to let go first, the grip seems to say. The docents approached from all sides, wondering, I suspect, what such young carrion (age 55) could possibly be doing here.
My father was an aide de camp to a general named William Marquat, and he would go on to serve with Marquat, whom he admired, in New Guinea and the Philippines, and during the occupation of Japan. It's clear to me from reading the diaries - as it gradually became clear to my father - that Marquat initially wanted him on board for one reason only: to paint portraits of senior Allied officers and their families, in order to help Marquat grease the political bureaucracy of the MacArthur regime. "We've got some decorating to do around here, Murphy," Marquat says to him upon first meeting - meaning, it turns out, Grab your brushes! Cherry-picking from the diaries over the next six months, I find innumerable sentences like these: "Finished General Sutherland. Turned out swell. He wants another for his wife." "Did Gens. Aiken, Clark, Fellers. Painted all day (and all night!)." Methodically he works his way through the entire American, British and Australian high commands. When, finally, my father is promoted to captain, Marquat wants him to understand that it has nothing to do with "all that painting". "I wouldn't have it any other way, Sir," my father replies.
The biggest get of all for Marquat was, of course, the Supreme Commander himself. For my father, MacArthur and family would become the wartime version of Monet's water lilies - he painted the general and his wife, Jean, and his very young son, Arthur, again and again. There's an account in the diaries of the first meeting with Mrs MacArthur, which took place in Lennon's Hotel shortly after he delivered his first portrait of the general. Now it was Mrs MacArthur's turn to sit.
At 4:30 the telephone rang, and it was Jean MacArthur herself, and she told us to come right up, which we did. We got out of the elevator, walked to an open door, knocked, and were greeted by Mrs. M - looking very charming in a flower print dress. General Marquat introduced me to her, and she gave me her hand, then led us into the living room. There are a couple of photos of the General on tables, and a small green bust of the General on the piano.
The bust on the piano is a nicely observed detail. My father was a MacArthur partisan all his life, impatient with any criticism of the Old Man that might include phrases like "overweening vanity". He makes no comment in the diary when Jean MacArthur hands him a photograph of her husband that she'd like him to paint. She calls it "the General's favorite", and my father describes it as showing MacArthur "with an open collar reclining in a B-17". Tom Ford as warlord. When MacArthur died, in 1963, my father took me to the Seventh Regiment Armory, in New York, so that we could pay our respects, and I vividly remember seeing MacArthur lying in state. Actually, being a smallish boy at the time, what I remember vividly was just the famous aquiline nose rising above the rim of the casket. It was impressive, the kind of nose you'd follow anywhere. I won't second-guess my father on the character issue, but will note that my wife doesn't allow busts of me even in the guest bedroom.
My father's account continues:
We discussed poses, at length decided on one, and I began to draw. She discussed my painting of the General, and was quite extravagant in her praise of it - said it was "exactly like him." She told of the McClelland Barclay oil of the General, and said that she didn't care much for it because she didn't like the eyes - said that the General did like the one you did very much.
And then Jean asked us if we'd like to "see the Barclay." Of course we would, and were led down a hall to a room that proved to be Arthur's playroom. Passed a room and, looking in, saw a footlocker with GENERAL MACARTHUR neatly printed on it in white paint. Standing against the wall in Arthur's room was the Barclay portrait, and alongside it was mine. Mrs. MacArthur showed me what she meant by not liking the eyes in "the Barclay."
There's scarcely a note of censure in the diary, though my father knew well what blowhards were and couldn't stand them, and there were not a few in the Pacific command. The one exception in the diary is a general by the name of Willoughby, who elicits a certain uncharitable testiness. Willoughby would be Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's G-2, or chief of intelligence. It was he who had refused to recognise the obvious signs before the Chinese crossed the Yalu and devastated American forces in Korea. Of all the generals my father painted, Willoughby is the only man who proved difficult. He sent the first painting back because he "detested" the photograph it was taken from. When arrangements were made for a portrait from life, Willoughby broke all the appointments. After a portrait from life was finally underway, Willoughby sent along a diagram so that all the combat ribbons would be displayed correctly, indicating his service in - I'm picking up from the diary now - "Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua". Not exactly Hastings or Saratoga or Austerlitz - but might as well get the man's achievements right. The diary notes, interestingly, and again without comment, that Willoughby (who was born in Prussia and began life as Adolf Karl Weidenbach) described himself as "a Pole".
It was hard to tear myself away from the MacArthur Chambers - and I mean, physically hard. Those gristly hands. I was late for a lunch appointment, but the docents were at my elbow, and as determined as federal marshals. You haven't seen the corncob pipe! The Medal of Honor! I threw myself upon their mercy - even vowing, with good-natured elan, "I shall return," which in the end may have melted their hearts.
Weeks later, back in Boston, I spent an afternoon sifting through hundreds of my father's pencil sketches from the war years - moments captured in an instant with a few deft strokes on sheets of flimsy paper: the graphic equivalent of diary entries. I pulled one out and put it aside - a drawing of the AMP Building, with MacArthur's car parked by the entrance. I pulled out another - MacArthur and Prime Minister John Curtin, a rendering probably done in a few seconds. I slipped the sketches into an envelope and sent them off with a note to the MacArthur Chambers. I hope indeed to return, but my father will get there first.
