RESEARCH General Arts

LITERATURE
Letters between Sandburg and sailor inspired both men's writing

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; andreal@uiuc.edu

8/1/03

Photo by Bill Wiegand Gene Rinkel, the Sandburg Collection curator, says the library staff fields nearly two dozen questions a week from scholars and others.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Certainly few literary correspondences more movingly trace the friendship between a mentor and a protégé than that of Carl Sandburg and Kenneth MacKenzie Dodson. The letters glow with the details of a quick, deep relationship set against the backdrop of World War II and based on mutual awe for each other’s work – and code of ethics.

Dodson’s papers, which also include Sandburg manuscript pages and original unpublished poems, recently were acquired by the University of Illinois’ Rare Book and Special Collections Library and appear in a free public exhibit here that runs through August. The 86 new items become part of the library’s huge Carl Sandburg Collection.

Sandburg, the great poet and biographer, was so moved by four war letters that Dodson, a young naval officer, had written to his wife from the Pacific, that Sandburg immediately wrote the sailor – a total stranger at the time – asking permission to quote from them in a book he was finishing. That book, Sandburg noted, would be made into a motion picture. The poet felt that the letters, which had passed from "Kennie’s" wife to family to friends to the great writer himself, were "extraordinarily vivid … unforgettable"; moreover, they gave him "a lift to go on in the final shapings of this long book."

In one letter Dodson wrote his wife: "War leaves a stamp on you. You take a bath and don’t feel clean. You want a spiritual purge of the whole stinking business … to be baptized and have communion."
Instead of simply quoting Dodson in "Remembrance Rock," Sandburg cast the junior officer – who would go on to earn nine battle stars – as a character of great integrity named Kenneth Mackenzie MacDougal.

Impressed by the sailor’s nascent writing skills and personal code of ethics, Sandburg encouraged Dodson to take a writing course and promised to work with him "on shaping up a book." "You have been places and touched people. You are a man of a thousand stories," Sandburg wrote Dodson in 1949. "Find a framework. Then write it. Then overwrite it and cut it down. Let no day pass without writing it. When the going is good with you, your sentences march and hammer and sing low and what is called style is there in a simple perfection. You have an eye for the vivid and can render it sparely. You can make telling phrases and compress great teaching in a few sentences."

After Dodson produced a book manuscript, Sandburg put his mighty literary muscle beyond it. He wrote one editor: "It is one of the great sea stories. A master mariner wrote the book – and I count him a master of writing. I would go the limit for it." Dodson’s "Away All Boats" was published in 1954. A best seller, it was translated into six languages, and like "Remembrance Rock," became a Hollywood movie.

Christopher Jones curated the Dodson-Sandburg exhibit, which also draws on the Library’s previous Sandburg acquisition of about 500 cubic feet. The library staff fields nearly two dozen questions a week from scholars and others, said Gene Rinkel, the Sandburg Collection curator.