A Pilgrim’s Digression

I have a soft spot for forgotten writers and forgotten works of literature. It always seems unbearably sad that someone, even a hack, can manage to write a complete novel–maybe even a complete set of novels–yet nonetheless slowly find their redoubt eroded by time, like Shelley’s “colossal wreck,” Ozymandias.

Today, while reading the unpublished memoirs of a World War II Navy veteran, Everette Johnson, the author mentioned that he served under Lieutenant Commander Marcus Aurelius Goodrich aboard the U.S.S. Pitt. The veteran further commented that Goodrich was a best-selling novelist, author of Delilah, a novel published just prior to the war about life aboard a U.S. Navy ship. The novel received good reviews, and following the war Goodrich went to work as a script writer in Hollywood. He married Olivia De Havilland in 1946 and divorced her in 1952. Despite high expectations of literary success, he was never able to finish another novel.

More on Goodrich, including excerpts from his novel, can be found here at this interesting blog: The Neglected Books Page. Goodrich died in 1991 while living in a nursing home in Richmond, Virginia, shortly after his only son by De Havilland died of Hodgkinsons Disease.

One has to wonder if the nurses who attended him in his last days knew that the man they cared for was a veteran Navy officer from World War I and World War II, as well as a one-time best-selling novelist, a Hollywood screenwriter, and former husband of one of the most beautiful actresses of the 1930’s and ’40’s.

Sad to say, but none of that probably mattered much, either to him or to the people caring for him. What could anyone have done about it? Neither his one novel, nor any of his achievements, helped preserve him from a fate all too common to the elderly. He died alone, in the care of strangers.

What I find most fascinating is that the sailor who wrote about Lt. Commander Goodrich in his memoir remembers only the fussiness of his CO. Goodrich once called the young man, a Chief Quartermaster, and two other sailors into his cabin and lectured them for 15 minutes on properly syncing his (Goodrich’s) clock with the ship’s chronometer. In the words of the veteran, Goodrich was “universally disliked,” and “a confirmed nitpicker.” Rather in the tradition of Captain Queeg, of Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, Goodrich was eccentric to the point of mental instability. In one example Johnson provides, Goodrich strolled around the decks of his ship clad only in his officer’s cap, tennis shoes, and a jock strap.

It’s odd the things that people will remember about us when we’re gone. If people remember us at all, it will probably be incidents such as that which stick in the mind. Innocuous pranks, random comments or grandiose speeches made without thought, the throwaway detritus of an ordinary life that last but a moment in our short term memory…these are the stuff of other people’s unpublished memoirs, the stories engraved, in some way or another, upon our monument.