Naked to Love: Letters from a Young American in Panama, 1952-54 [Hardcover]

Christopher W. Colie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999 | ISBN-10: 1571780823 | ISBN-13: 978-1571780829 | Edition: First Edition

When twenty-two-year-old Christopher Colie was packed off to Panama by the US Army, he'd already spent several adventurous years riding the rails and shipping out on freighters headed to the Caribbean, sleeping in flophouses and hobo camps, and, when he bothered to turn up, baffling his Reed college classmates with his exploits, and worse, his indifferent attitude towards academia. One of his fellow students at Reed was a sheltered young redhead named Carole Calkins; Chris proposed to her within hours of their first meeting.

Drafted in September of 1952, only four months after marrying Carole, Chris chafed at the loss of freedom that came with army life, and twice went AWOL before being sent not to Korea, but to the Canal Zone. Naked to Love (from Kenneth Patchen-"Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,/Naked to love, or to be a man with.") brings together the remarkable letters Chris wrote to his new wife during their separation. Writing in the latrine after lights out, leaning over the hood of a truck, or brooding beside noisy pool tables, Chris faithfully pursued his twin obsessions: getting his love for Carole down on paper, and capturing his visions of Panama and the wild rabble of conscripts he lived among.

Bundled for nearly fifty years in an attic suitcase, these real love letters are a unique contribution to intimate history, with their nostalgic view of the Canal Zone in the early fifties. They transport us to a long-ago, exotic place with breathtaking immediacy, as though we had stepped inside a fading black & white snapshot of the Miraflores Lock. Intensely personal, their sheer urgency makes them the stuff of universal human drama, and lets us relive the tumult of youthful passion-the author's, and our own. As much about the longing to write well against all odds as a record of separated lovers, Naked to Love will strike a deep chord with anyone who ever endured an army hitch with impatience, or awaited a husband's return. Out of these compelling letters-and Carole Colie's elegant, wistful backward glances-emerges an engaging and heartbreakingly honest portrait of a young man.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

For incurable romantics only, a trove of love letters half a century old, written by an American soldier to his bride. A kind of proto-beatnik, young Colie spent the early 1950s bumming around the Americas, hopping boxcars and tramp freighters to see where adventure might take him. Along the way, when both were 20 years old, he met and married Carole Calkins, who thought him unusual and even a little mysterious. Soon thereafter Colie was drafted into the army and sent off to the Panama Canal Zone, where he spent his time alternately going AWOL and composing the letters that are gathered here, which profess his zealous love. (That love didnt keep young Colie from succumbing to the fleshy temptations of Panama City, and some of the more painful correspondence centers on his confession of infidelity, evidently forgiven.) When not professing his undying devotion, Colie describes the rigors of military life, for which he was not well suited, and, in stream-of-consciousness prose, his exotic surroundings: The nights of the long, dark, crooked streets and the shacks and houses spread out toward the edges of the city night and bunched together along dark streets with dark jungle night behind them, the nights with yellow light coming out of windows and open doorways, the nights walking through strange neighborhoods, the nights with the people out in the streets and standing in the doorways . . . These descriptions rarely reach out beyond the Panamanian red-light districts, but they are better written than the average travelogue. Observing his youthful behavior in a postscript, Colie admits that the letters favor a preoccupation with my own feelings at the expense of what I should have been writing. Thats true. His writings wont put Abelard and Heloise, or for that matter, Griffin and Sabine out of business, but readers of a certain bent may still enjoy Colies stroll down memory lane. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

"At one point in his lovely book, Christopher Colie says, 'I want to write these things ... so that they won't be writing but will be living.' He does. His details of the quotidian reality of army life are clean and true; the characters-Andy, Abruzzi, Ramos the cat, and Colby, the `nice, tough, innocent, indignant kid' are vivid and sharply etched. Most constant and poignant is the ache of love for his wife. I'm so glad she kept his letters, but then, if you receive letters like these, you keep them." -- Peter Coyote, actor and author of Sleeping Where I Fall

"The poet John Donne once wrote that 'Letters mingle souls,' referring to an ancient practice that many fear is fast disappearing in our coolly efficient world of cybermail. Yet in Naked to Love, Christopher Colie's collection of army love letters to his wife, we are reminded of the timeless need for soulfully composed diaries and letters. Reading them is like listening to a jukebox spinning the popular songs of the fifties, with their sweet echoes of the loneliness of young love and the passionate cries of poetic rebellion. In these intimate lines we understand anew what Dr. Johnson meant when he said that his 'soul lies naked in letters,' and are compelled to ask ourselves, 'When was the last time I wrote a real love letter?'" -- Phil Cousineau, author of The Art of Pilgrimage and The Hero's Journey

"Vibrant, tender, and immediate, these letters capture the strangeness of separation and the urgency of love across miles before e-mail and cheap phone rates. Many readers will dive for their own barracks letters; I know I did." -- Susan Shaughnessy, author of Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers

Of all the powerful emotions evoked by these letters, one of the most resonant is the frustration that lingers long after youve finished the afterword, in which Chris Colie himself reflects on the circumstances of the letters. I had a chance to get more of these things down as they happened.

Why didnt I do it? he wonders, and suggests that there was a preoccupation with my own feelings at the expense of what I should have been writing. The letters certainly create an appetite for an expanded knowledge of the people and places that slipped due to this preoccupation and have fallen away forever from our grasp. But if the price of their demise is the bare emotion exposed in these letters, it was a sound exchange. -- Rianna Riegelman, Bloomsbury Review, September/October 1999

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: Council Oak Books; First Edition edition (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571780823
• ISBN-13: 978-1571780829
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,794,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Left a bad taste in my mouth . . ., October 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Naked to Love: Letters from a Young American in Panama, 1952-54 (Hardcover)

I am sorry to say I didn't like this book. I couldn't wait to get it because my boyfriend also was in the service in the 50s and we wrote to each other every day. I enjoyed the first part of the book and all of the "interpretations" given by Carole (his wife), but Chris himself was (even for a young man/boy in the 1950s) egocentric to the point of being boorish. I don't remember exactly when Atlas Shrugged was written, but Chris (the author of these letters) sure had Ayn Rand's philosophy of selfishness. Imagine a man telling his wife he slept with prostitutes because his "sexual urge was just like my urge to eat or to scratch an itch" and he HAD to satisfy it . . . expecting her to believe that, YET telling her if she slept with anyone else he would kill himself. Ugh. I just didn't like Chris. Also, he wrote in his letters how he was DRIVEN to write . . . but we never find out if he ever WROTE anything of significance again. Very disappointing.

2.0 out of 5 stars Relatively uninteresting compilation of man's letters, November 20, 1999

By 

Christine Benes (New York, New York USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Naked to Love: Letters from a Young American in Panama, 1952-54 (Hardcover)

A man in the Army writes home to his wife, constantly telling her to write to him. He is very self-involved and constantly begs her to tell him how much she loves him with no real feeling for the fact that she is home pregnant with his child. He pays little attention to where he is and spends his free time with prostitutes and complaining about others making too much noise. Gives very little information about much except himself.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I am in love with the author and his passion is contagious., November 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Naked to Love: Letters from a Young American in Panama, 1952-54 (Hardcover)

The authors letters are honest. I had to stop and remind myself these letters were written by a very young man. It's not often we are allowed to look into the heart and head of someone so completely honest in his feelings and thoughts. I want to secret the book from others who ask me what it's about, as if the letters were written to me.

I laughed outloud on a bus while reading Chris's conversation with Andy regarding god and hell.

I was not offended because he told his wife everything including his trips to the 3 dollar whore-house. Frankly I would have been more surprised if he hadn't. I believe him when he said it had nothing to do with his feeling or love for his wife Carole. The fact that they are still married and his wife saved his letters tells me all I need to know about the character of Chris Colie.