Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307040267
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by JOAN V. SCHROEDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In 1987, shortly after her husband Jack's death, longtime Blacksburg resident Jane Poulton came across a chestful of letters. Several hundred of them, which she and Jack had exchanged between August, 1942, and September, 1945: the heart of World War II.
Those letters, totalling more than 1,000 pages, were Jack's "last and best gift" to his wife; editing and ordering them became her "project" and, eventually, a book.
"A Better Legend" chronicles the lives and times of a young couple separated by war: he serving as a Seebee stationed in the South Pacific; she working in Richmond as secretary to the Dean of Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). Cumulatively, the letters present a blend of historic events, daily and family life, and strikingly individual voices. It's where these lives intersect _ where Jack and Jane Poulton's lives, filled as all lives are with workaday concerns and small troubles, coincide with history being made _ that the book shines. Take, for example, this letter written by Jane on September 8, 1943:
"Your birthday and the day Italy got knocked out of the war. A nice present for you from General Eisenhower . . . I was thinking about Italy and your birthday and wondering what you had done to celebrate it . . . Your birthday is something special and this has certainly been no ordinary day with Extra Papers on the streets and people talking on street corners and everybody feeling like we are over the hump in this damn war."
The converse is also true. Occasionally, the letters' content borders on the insignificant: lunch dates and students' names and dinner menus. Of course, that's what comprises life for most of us, and dailiness works its way into most letters. But this is a hefty collection and wouldn't have been harmed by tighter editing.
"A Better Legend" is a generous book, one that shares two young lives elegantly and openly, and places those lives clearly in a time and place. For Jane Poulton and many other women, that time and place included vast numbers of working women, with all the attendant social changes, and her letters reveal her own increasing awareness and strength.
It's also a quiet, intelligent love story which like a mirror must certainly reflect many wartime separations. Anyone who lived through World War II will read it eagerly; the rest of us can be grateful to Jane Poulton for believing "that lovers make better legends than heroes."
Joan Schroeder is a Roanoke writer.
by CNB