A Personal and Literary Odyssey

The small stucco house on Harter Avenue in Culver City sits with an aura of muted self-containment. No architectural embellishment declares its presence to the street. Louise Steinman, pointing to a hedge cut square as a stone wall, speaks with the hesitance of a woman waking to her past. “That hedge was here when I grew up,” she says. Of some oblong topiary bushes: “Those weren’t.”

She recalls attending religious school at nearby Temple Akiba, how her older brother, Larry, played in Little League. She speaks of the “ebullient,” culture-loving mother who was easy to talk to and the “pragmatic, overburdened” father who wasn’t. Norman Steinman earned respect as a caring neighborhood pharmacist behind the counter of his Rexall drugstore on Sepulveda Boulevard. He won deep affection as a devoted father to his four children. Yet he always seemed bound by a deadened inwardness, behind a wall that hid a range of feelings and a power to express them that his children never knew he had.

The power was language. How fully he’d dammed its flow his daughter only learned on the day in 1991, when she found more than 400 letters he’d written to her mother, Anne, while fighting in the Pacific during World War II. Both parents had recently died when Steinman found the old ammo box filled with letters. In them, her father was a different man, like a black-and-white image suddenly animated by color. On the ship taking him to war, he described his homesick longing: “I keep looking out at the blue ocean and dreaming that you’re beside me, and, when the moon is out, especially then, I just keep talking to you all the time.” On a jungle battlefield in the Philippines, he grasped a sense of doom with a single image of an old horse at night. “It has a bad foot, and all its ribs are showing, but it’s very tame,” he writes, adding (in combat slang that calls soldiers “dogfaces”) that it’s “a wonder some sleepy doggie doesn’t open up with a machine gun.”

Steinman also found a silk battle flag from a Japanese soldier who had perished on a battlefield he’d shared with her father. For 10 years, despite the skepticism of siblings, personal doubts and literary struggles, she dug into her late father’s life and reached for its meaning in history. She deciphered codes between her parents and tracked down the family of the Japanese soldier to return his flag. The resulting memoir, “The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War” (Algonquin), rings with the Homeric themes of a man’s difficult return from war and his child’s painful search for him.

“It was really like meeting a new person,” Steinman says. “When we were growing up, he really wasn’t given to lyrical expression. There was this openness in the letters, this emotionalism. I was overwhelmed by them.”

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We’ve moved to a table set with tea at the Culver Hotel in downtown Culver City, just steps from the former MGM studios. She has chosen this spot, with studio photos from “Gone With the Wind” on the walls, to convey the sense she writes about in her book, of growing up in a town “where illusion was the home-grown product.”

Steinman, in charge of cultural programming at the Los Angeles Central Library (author readings, performing arts series) and an occasional writer for The Times, lives now in Silver Lake. As she speaks about the book, a weariness dilutes her voice, for all its articulate sureness. She is just starting to digest the end of a journey that began with her search for the right form in which to tell the story, as she moved from poetry to journalism to book-length memoir. Then came years of rewriting and no fewer than 32 submissions before “The Souvenir” finally found a publisher. By all accounts, her tenacity stands out even in a book world where such marathon sufferings are common.

Along with frustrations, she found true believers. Too often, the desire for what writers and editors call “literary community” strains beyond the fact, especially when applied to the scattered, sequestered lives of the verbal whirling dervishes at work amid the valleys, hills and coastal fringes of Los Angeles. When writers here gather, they often talk about how hard a place this is to make a literary life work. Steinman’s experience shows how one writer’s effort became a magnet to a community of editors at very different publications--a poetry journal, an alternative weekly, a major newspaper’s Sunday magazine--which nurtured her material’s potential, as she tried one approach, then another.

People repeat the words “obsessive,” “driven” and “relentless” for this petite woman of 50, whose expression can turn from severe to tender with peculiar speed. But this is really the story of two driven Steinmans. One wrote up to three letters a day, spinning a fragile lifeline of words to get him through combat, then stowed them away in the depths of the Cold War calm of the 1950s. Then there’s the daughter, who drew her father’s skepticism--he wanted her, of course, to be a lawyer--by committing herself to the Vietnam-era ethos of self-expression. Performance art, which she studied with Meredith Monk and others, became her medium in the 1970s and ‘80s.

After finding the letters, she first wrote out her reactions in “little riffs, little stories.” Most of what she’d known of war, growing up in the ‘60s, came from marches against the one in Vietnam. Now, she absorbed the lingering depth of grief and guilt that had gripped her father since World War II. “I’m an obsessive letter writer,” she said. “It is something I didn’t know I had in common with my dad until I found his letters, and I kept writing about his letters to friends.”

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Howard Junker is the editor of a literary journal in San Francisco named Zyzzyva, which specializes in publishing West Coast writers. Junker has given many L.A. writers their first publication. From his slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts, in mid-1993, he pulled a poem that Steinman had written about the letters and the flag.

Junker liked the poem but felt Steinman needed an education about her father’s war. He prescribed a list of books and movies to enlighten a daughter’s historical innocence. She rewrote the poem for him until, in the summer of 1994, not long after the 50th anniversary of Norman Steinman’s departure for a war that would take him to 165 straight days of combat with the 25th Infantry Division in northern Luzon, Junker published “The Flag of Yoshio Shimizu” across 15 pages of Zyzzyva.

Steinman had written poems before, one of which she’d published, but “never anything at all” like this blank verse saga. Imagining her father in the jungle, she resurrected him in plain, cut-stone language. She invented a scene in which war and writing merged, as he bemoaned his distance from his wife after the birth of Louise’s older sister.

My father would not write a letter to his infant daughter;

It might affect his mind in battle

She was his firstborn, named Ruth, for his sister.

He had yet to lay eyes on her,

Was desperate for a photo.

“I passed out cigars and the guys teased me,

Said I wasn’t man enough to father a son.

Little did they know how much

We wanted a little girl.”

*

Steinman felt the pull of a larger odyssey. She saw herself going to Japan to find the family of the soldier who owned the flag, Yoshio Shimizu, to return the flag: a kind of double Homeric vision of finding one’s father and his enemy.

She applied for grants to pay for a trip to Japan to trace the letters and the flag to their sources. After several rejections, a grants panel for the California Community Foundation gave Steinman what is called a Brody Literary Fellowship for $3,500. One judge was an editor with the Los Angeles Times Magazine who encouraged Steinman in her impulse to expand the poem. Soon, she had an assignment to find the Shimizu family and return the flag.

Meanwhile, she sought out people with personal connections to both sides of the war. American veterans living in Los Angeles, who would ultimately enter the book as a kind of Greek Chorus, initiated her in the complexities of the Pacific war and military life. She built upon the advice of Japanese friends, like one who had translated the writing on the flag, giving her the name of Yoshio Shomizu.

Their meeting in a park in Hollywood started her on a meditation about the broadest implications of the flag and the war. “I didn’t know how my father had come to have the flag,” she would write. “ I refused to assume the obvious: that he’d taken it off a dead soldier. Yet I felt a rush of shame. The flag didn’t really belong to me. I wanted to ask my father about it, about Yoshio Shimizu, but I couldn’t.”

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Norman Steinman repeatedly wrote that he wanted to find “a souvenir for Hal Rubin,” but the letters don’t disclose who Hal Rubin was or what kind of gift he meant. Louise Steinman concludes that Hal Rubin was a code word for mortal combat or death. “I’m wondering a lot these days if I ought to get that little gift for Hal Rubin,” he writes from combat. Then: “That gift for Hal Rubin may come up pretty soon ... “

In a letter dated Feb. 13, 1945, he announces “I have a Japanese flag now” but never tells how he got it. Did Norman Steinman kill Yoshio Shimizu? Did he merely find the flag on him? Whatever happened, his daughter makes it clear that he lost a vital part of himself to gain this writing-covered piece of white cloth imprinted with the imperial icon of the rising sun.

Steinman retraced nearly every inch of the battles her father fought. Coaxing the horrors from his quiet past became her opportunity as a writer. In August 1995, the Los Angeles Times magazine published “War, Remembrance and a Flag.”

The usual way of securing a contract for a nonfiction book is to write a few sample chapters and an outline, then find an agent, who seeks a publisher. Having published a related magazine article can help. “I thought that I had the article, and now I just had to find the agent, and I’d get a contract,” Steinman recalls.

It didn’t happen that way. She found an agent, but the agent couldn’t sell the project. Editors who liked the article didn’t see how it could become a book. The timing was bad. The market was jammed with books linked to 50th anniversaries of World War II events. To top it all off, Steinman’s agent suddenly announced she was quitting the business and moving to Alaska.

Next, Steinman connected with Los Angeles agent Betsy Amster, a dogged prospector of the city’s literary talent. She also had trouble. Steinman’s original agent had sent the magazine article to five publishers without success. Amster sent a fuller book proposal to 27 publishers, in three separate series of submissions, in 1996, 1997 and 2000. Amster said few of her writers have had to stomach “no” so many times before hearing a “yes.”

Steinman rewrote and rewrote. She sustained a measure of hope by publishing essays based on her work in the L.A. Weekly. Still, the book deal eluded her. “I kept thinking we were dead in the water. I thought I can’t do this any more. But my interest in the subject would revive. And Lloyd always encouraged me to keep at it.” Says Lloyd Hamrol, husband to the long-distance memoirist and a sculptor who works a lot in the patience-building realm of public art: “You have to have the support to go through something like this, and not everybody does.”

In 1998, Amster told Steinman she should take the somewhat unusual step of writing the whole book before trying to sell it again. It was a liberating idea. “I realized it wasn’t in the hands of some higher authority to give me permission to complete this,” Steinman says. “This was something I needed to finish for myself, and that’s what I decided to do.”

She focused the book more on the dialogue between her search and her father’s actual words, to the point where she now calls the book “a collaboration” between the two of them.

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Finally, early last year, Steinman found a passionate champion in an editor named Antonia Fusco, who bought the manuscript for Algonquin Books. Fusco’s response was personal: Her uncle had returned from the Pacific after World War II, shell-shocked and silent, something she found out from her mother only after telling her she was considering Steinman’s book. Fusco says her connection to the project became “unusually deep,” even at Algonquin, which prides itself on close editorial involvement. She asked to read all of Norman Steinman’s letters and helped Steinman make the final selection of which ones to quote.

“I couldn’t help myself,” Fusco says. “I just felt compelled to read them.”

On Oct. 26, “The Souvenir” was published to enthusiastic early reviews. “This quiet, heartfelt book,” wrote Publisher’s Weekly, “is the perfect contrast to all the Pearl Harbor 50th anniversary bombast.”

Steinman says she was so happy she almost yelled for joy the first time she saw the book’s cover, with its sea-green montage of her father’s letters, on display at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. It was “startling to see the book outside of myself,” she says. Her delight, however, has been mixed with sadness. After 10 years of diving deep into the brutality of one war, she has surfaced to an America immersed in another. Steinman says she’s horrified by the war that started with the attacks of Sept. 11. Her long meditation about war in the past, she says, did not prepare her to comprehend any more conclusively than other people the news unfolding these days.

Still, as we sit into the afternoon, it seems necessary to ask her: What is the value of a book like hers, so intent upon the healing power of memory, expression and reconciliation, when history has revealed itself anew as a long row of savage conflicts?

“Often it falls to the next generation to form bridges over these gulfs that war can make,” Steinman says, with speculative gentleness. “Maybe family members of soldiers on different sides of the war in Afghanistan willmeet 40 or 50 years from now. The book I’ve written is something born of perspective. That is something we just don’t have right now. The point is to fill in the blanks, to understand the impact of terrible conflicts on the combatants and the painful legacy they always seem to leave for generations.”