Charles Haldeman

A Memoir; Mid-Century Journeys of a Vagabond Author

Richard Haldeman

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781647010553
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Biographien

Charles Haldeman (1931–83) was a man with unusual literary and artistic abilities who sought to identify his and his generation's mission in the world of the midtwentieth century. Charles was born in the Depression; lived six months as a child in Hitler's Germany during the 1930s; grew up in a US Army town during World War II; and traveled, studied, and worked throughout the US, the Pacific, Europe, and Canada during the midtwentieth century. He lived his final 25 years in Greece, where he befriended and hosted the literary elite of this time and published three novels based on his experiences and knowledge of his generation and time. Charles Haldeman's letters reveal his search for his own identity. He was born to a mother from the segregated South and a father who migrated to the United States from Germany less than a decade before Hitler came into power. From an early age he sought to understand and separate himself from the racism in his family's American and German heritage, to reconcile the principles of the American dream with the reality of American life, and to help bring about a world in which human beings no longer used "war as a school for life" to build "monuments to stupidity." Seeking a country where the artist had the freedom to thrive, he made Greece his home, only find ultimate disappointment in his "love affair with Greece." Despite this disappointment and his early death, Charles Haldeman left a legacy of three novels that described a time in American and world history, giving voice to his "silent" generation. This memoir attempts to honor that legacy.

I

A World Long Passed; Vision of a Higher Good

Charles would have appreciated Alexandra Hionides’s remark, showing recognition by many Greek people, if not the Greek government, that Greece was his home. In truth, however, Charles Haldeman never “belonged” to a country or a place. A college professor of Richard Haldeman’s daughter Nancy, after reading The Sun’s Attendant, told her, “Your uncle’s plane landed everywhere.” Charles had indeed lived throughout the United States and in Germany, Greece, and Canada; traveled throughout Europe and in the Middle East; and while in the Navy, visited the Far East.

Charles did, however, belong to a “time.” A child of the Depression and World War II who grew to adulthood in the 1950s, Charles Haldeman chronicled the world of his time in three novels and found early success as a writer of fiction and documentaries, only to find interest in midcentury America and Europe and print media fade in a time of the Cold War, racial unrest, assassinations, Eastern and Middle Eastern wars, and the dawning of the information age. His last published novel failed to find an audience, and his final two novels and several film scripts were unsuccessful in securing a publisher or producer.

As Séamas Carraher pointed out to Charles’s brother Richard, Charles’s generation lived in “a world long passed…not just the century, but its taste and feel and everything that gave it body… We live in a very different world today.” But Richard and others of that now-shrinking generation realize that today’s “very different world” was molded by events in that “world long passed,” with its hot and cold wars; ideological, religious, and racial revolutions; collapse of colonialism and Soviet communism; and development of weapons of mass destruction.

Those events were the genesis of troubles today in North Korea, Iran, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Central and South America and of the rejuvenation of nationalism and fascism throughout the world. Charles Haldeman was a member of the “forgotten,” often too-silent generation born in the 1930s, in the notch between the wartime “Great” generation and its children, the baby boomers. He grew up during the Great Depression, Second World War, the Korean Conflict, and the Cold War. As a writer, he was able to describe this time and his generation as a witness, providing the “taste and body” of his era. His was the final generation (before television and the computer) in which the written word, newspapers, magazines, books, and even letters, had prime importance.

Charles also gained the love and respect of his generation’s writers and artists—British, American, German, Irish, and Greek. Deprived by fate of the means and education of most accomplished writers, he educated himself and became their peer. Better still, he was their host and their friend, offering them artistic stimulation and encouragement rather than competition. As his friend Peter Levi wrote in his introduction to Charles’s posthumously published book of poems without graves, no resurrections: “If Charles had not existed, one might have invented him, plucked him from the air and darkness…”

Yet his letters, his novels, and all his other manuscripts fail to capture the essence of who Charles Haldeman was. It was something perhaps he himself never understood, though he tried to explain himself in his letters to his mother. There was duplicity even in his name. Charles’s drawings and writings, including an article in The International History Magazine and an unpublished novel, are sometimes ascribed to “Charles Heuss,” his birth name and that of his birth father. Ironically, Charles had the concentration camp philosopher in The Sun’s Attendant describe maintaining one’s identity as the core of one’s existence.

As a man and as a writer, Charles lacked a “sense of place.” Was he an American…a German…a Greek? If an American, was he a Southerner, a New Yorker, or a Californian? How could he claim to love America but find it impossible to live there? After rejecting America for its materialism, lack of values, and failure to carry out its ideals and Germany for its emptiness of purpose, could he recreate himself as a Greek, living among a people whose freedom he admired? And how would a settled life in Greece affect the creative talents of this wandering artist? Strangely, it was an American, Stavroulakis, who caused Charles to fail in his effort to become Greek, who was successful in recreating himself as a Greek and an Israeli.

Was Charles Haldeman a failure as a writer? That he is still being read today, through publication of his first novel in Germany more than thirty years after his death, attests to his novels still having something to say. Even if, as Tom Maschler expressed in a telephone call with Richard Haldeman in 1983, he had failed to fulfill the promise of his first two novels, Charles was embarked on resurrecting his life and career. He was convinced that, as he wrote Séamas Carraher, he would not only “endure” but also “prevail.”

Neil Haldeman perhaps best expressed Charles’s difficulty in finding an audience for his fiction. He wrote in The Difficulty of Dying in Greece, “He (Charles) chose to become a novelist and achieved some early success at it, largely due to his friendship with Tom Maschler, but his work was so abstract, so complex, that only a truly dedicated reader could absorb it. Those readers would be rewarded in the end; but Charlie probably never would have acquired much of an audience in America.”

Was Charles’s life a tragedy? In his early death and failure to fulf...

Table of contents

• Prelude
• A South Carolina Interlude and a Visit to Germany
• A New Father, a Tragic Loss, a New Home
• Becoming a Family:New York City Adventures
• The North Country: An Idyllic Summer Before the War
• Sackets Harbor: A Home for the Duration
• A South Carolina Sojourn, Move to Paradise, Paradise Lost
• California, Here I Come:San Diego, 1950–53
• A New York City Interlude; a Special Family
• Back in San Diego, Transfer Denied, 1953
• Preparations for Sea, Long Beach, Fall 1953
• “Twenty-two…a Strange Age…a Strange Year”
• Discovering the War-Ravaged Postwar World, 1954
• September 1954: Settling in New York, Job at Brentano’s
• Frances Steloff and Censorship, Tedium, Home News, Reunions
• Artistic Experiences, a Trip Home, Visiting Henry Miller
• Final Days in New York, Trip Is On, Meeting Eric Gutkind
• Meeting German Family and Viewing “Monuments to…Stupidity”
• Becoming Nonmatriculated Student; Kindness of Sohl Family
• “Everything Is Going Well” with Heidelberg Study
• Spring in Greece and Paris; Fully Matriculated Student
• Trip to Holland, Final Days in Germany
• Athens, 1957–60: Teacher, Mathematician, Artist, Lyricist
• Writing and Publishing The Sun’s Attendant, 1962–63
• A Creative Decade, 1964–74: Author, Film Writer, Magazine Editor
• The Loss of Angel One, an American Sojourn, More Losses
• Years of Personal and Artistic Frustration and a Canadian Film Project
• “A Light Goes Out”: The South Revisited, Final Days in Athens
• A World Long Passed; Vision of a Higher Good