Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is a work of World War I historical fiction by author Kathleen Rooney. The novel’s primary purpose, according to Rooney, was to depict the visceral horrors of war through the telling of Cher Ami, a pigeon, and the soldier Major Whittlesey’s story. In this interview, we asked Rooney some questions about her experience writing the book and becoming a published author.
What inspired you to write Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey? What, if any, specific events led to you writing the book? How did you come across the historical figures that the book is based off of?
I teach at DePaul University here in Chicago and I am always telling my students to look up references to things they don’t know. In one of his poems for class, a student of mine encouraged me to look Cher Ami up, so that became my first fascination; Cher Ami — this heroic World War I messenger pigeon I had never heard of — was my way into the story. But almost simultaneously I fell down the rabbit hole of Whit as well. I was drawn to both of them right away because even by Googling to the shallowest extent, you see they both have this really interesting gender and sexuality situation where there were questions about Cher Ami’s gender even after death, and Whit, based on most researched accounts, lived a clandestine life as a gay man.
The book features incredibly heavy, graphic and emotional scenes of wartime. How did you approach the task of writing from the perspective of a soldier? How did you seek to make it authentic?
I was super-aware of the tradition of war literature and war cinema where even stuff that is intended as antiwar comes off as pro-war. Take Apocalypse Now, where there’s this famous scene of a helicopter raid while Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” plays. You get the impression that Coppola is being critical of war, but it’s impossible to watch that scene and not think, “That was super-cool.” I was always reminding myself not to pull a Coppola. One way I managed to do this was to shift my focus from the larger events to the smaller details. I don’t want to be crude, but war is crude, war is obscene, war is bodily. When the battalion is stuck in the Argonne Forest for days, the latrines are overfilled and they are literally living in their own shit. It’s really hard to read scenes like that and come away thinking, “I wish I fought in World War I.”
What was the process of writing this book like? How was it different from books you’ve written in the past?
I always do a ton of research when I write historical fiction, but I had never had to do so much research on pigeons before — how they are raised and how they learn how to home, and why they were such crucial messengers in times of war all the way through World War II. My favorite element of research, though, was extremely personal in that as I was drafting the novel, a pigeon couple moved in under the eaves of our condo and raised two adorable babies and I got to see all of my pigeon research — about how they nest, how they parent, how they learn to fly and on and on — play out right in front of my eyes.
Why is this story important? How is it unique among all the books written about World War I? What is one thing readers should take away from this book?
It’s morbid to say World War I is my favorite war, but I suppose it is the war that most fascinates me because its wastefulness and futility are writ larger than almost any other. My father was in the military and taught classes on military tactics and history, and when he told me that in World War I the men would live in muddy, water-filled, rat-infested pits dug into the earth that stretched on for miles and then periodically go “over the top” at the generals’ orders to run straight into bombed-out fields full of barbed wire and tanks and landmines and enemy mortar and machine gun fire to be mowed down in almost unfathomable numbers only to gain maybe a few inches of ground, I couldn’t believe it. Like I couldn’t believe that people in charge said that this was what had to be done and that millions of people obeyed them. It defied comprehension. It still does. But it happened.
And the reason it happened has a lot to do with a certain kind of top-down, patriarchal callousness on the part of elected leaders and military ones and also a certain kind of cultural attitude among some of the people that they led who bought into various ideas about how it was noble to die for one’s country, or how war was a big adventure, or about how “real men” should welcome the chance to do something so brave. One of the things I found in my research was that because of the urbanization of Europe and the United States in the early part of the 20th century, various elected leaders and pundits began wringing their hands about how European and American manhood was “going soft” (with all that phrase’s phallic connotations). Now that all these men were moving to the cities and working white-collar office jobs rather than doing red-blooded, blue-collar labor, they needed to be hardened back up, and how better to do that than by sending them to the front? I hope my book makes people everywhere say NO to war.
What did you learn through the process of writing this book?
I learned that some people absolutely love reading animal perspectives and some think animal perspectives are silly; I prefer the former.
The book alternates between the voices of the major and Cher Ami in concurrent chapters that begin with the same sentence. Why did you choose to make that decision?
I think that all humans everywhere would be in a much better position in terms of sustainability, the environment and respect for all life if they took animals and other non-human beings more seriously. It seems like a failure of imagination to say animal characters are only for kids, as many of the aforementioned people do. So I knew from that first moment sitting on Wikipedia reading about this episode that if I was going to tell the story well, it would have to have both perspectives treated with equal intensity and love.
Cher Ami narrates the whole story as a taxidermed pigeon in the Smithsonian, whereas Major Whittlesey is aboard the ship he will later jump off of to his death. What influenced you in making those choices for the characters?
Those are the fates that befell them, in one of those the-truth-is-stranger-than-fiction twists. Cher Ami really did get taxidermied and stuck in the Smithsonian after dying. You can go visit and she really is there alongside Sergeant Stubby. And Whit really did kill himself by leaping off an ocean liner bound for Cuba. As a writer, I’m a big fan of having a clear “occasion of the telling”—why a character is telling a particular story in a particular way at a particular time. Those two occasions seemed to good to pass up or change.
How did you tackle the subject of Major Whittlesey’s queerness? How did you choose how to depict his interactions with men he was attracted to like Bill Cavanaugh?
I’ve gotten some backlash from readers condemning the novel as “woke trash” for saying Whit was gay and telling me I’m tarnishing his name as a hero. But he wrote in one of his suicide notes “I am a misfit by nature and by training, and there’s an end to it.” And that’s pretty clearly him stating that he is not straight. I am fascinated by this idea of who and what we expect a “war hero” to be culturally and in terms of gender. I was excited to have the chance to show an unlikely hero — unlikely not just because he was gay but also because he was a quiet, kind, shy Wall Street lawyer who was the very last person anybody expected to succeed in war. And yet Whit did — and it cost him everything. I was interested in trying to show — through Bill and his other encounters and attractions — how someone of Whit’s sexuality at that time would have had to negotiate those relationships and how unforgiving the public opinion would have been if they had known.
What led you to pick writing as a career? What was your journey to becoming a published writer?
Writing picked me! I always knew I wanted to write poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays — all of it. My first published essay came out in The Nation about 20 years ago and I have not stopped since.
What piece of advice would you give to young aspiring writers?
Capitalism creates competition and inequality in everything it touches, and that includes the publishing industry. That’s why it’s extra important to believe in yourself and not give up — there are so many other people competing to be writers that it can get demoralizing to hear no no no all the time when you submit and try to get published. But remember that it only takes one person to say yes and change your life. And a lot of times you get rejected not because your work is bad, but because the numbers are bad and the game is rigged in favor of a few books getting the majority of the attention. Believe in yourself and keep at it, and also, whenever you can, fight that inequality by supporting and creating opportunities for your fellow authors!
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