I read in the paper or heard on the radio more than once that the soldier votes with his blood. Blood and noise, confusion, and a self-erasure not only before death but in the beginning stages of a martial engagement: the way one is a number, a cipher . . . a piece of cannon fodder . . . A citizen—but only in a special sense: the mathematical citizen and the democratically minor and statistically tiny bit of cannon fodder that one is, that self keeps the homefires burning as one’s share of the clumsy vastness of the democratic war effort, the democratic effort to make war; one helps as much as one can to preserve and increase the velocity of the national motions toward apocalypse, another world—win-or-die.
And one forgets—and has moments in which one cheats-on-battle-and-lives-on-slyly. With moments of independence of all of it. One’s morale, everyone’s morale, war nerves, war nerve, the courageous bullying of one’s war nerve, one’s gambling on this or that public attitude and this or that private one, that stuff goes up and down. I’ll become a guerilla fighter. If I get sent to a camp, I’ll laugh and work hard in the march to the camp. Maybe what seems strong will, in battle, prove to be weak-nerved, hysterical, physically and psychologically . . . if one sees battle. One was tormented by the torture or was tormented by being untormented—shallow, childish, whatever . . . among the killers. In a way, individuality in regard to mass actions is emphasized in the historic moment hereabouts and elsewhere—heroes are pointed out; slackers are named; commanders are appointed—and soon. It is an absolute historical moment, since so much death was involved. That is to say, it was a moment that was absolute in biological ways, although it was not absolute in meaning.
It had meaning in terms of one team and its nature over another team of a different nature and it had a meaning of lesser crimes against greater ones; but those are real, not absolute meanings. It was dreamlike it was so almost absolute at times or could be taken as that. And the displacement of meaning onto general issues of victory and freedom and onto less general issues but still quite general ones of suffering and dismay and chagrin of history replaced all other meanings for some people and supported certain meanings and attacked others. People kept their own counsel then and held off, or held back, if they preferred meanings of a different sort. The weak, huge forcefulness (and lies)—perhaps, relatively, a necessity once a certain sort of challenge is offered—do you know?—seemed to be a test of absolutes, as expensive and final as any believer could wish. What other true test of absolutes is there? What is the purpose of absolutes except to lead to this form of proof? Perhaps one can’t live without some absolutes,” which is to say, illogically in absolute terms, but logically if you grant the idea of some absolutes; and then, since one is using untrue and illogical systems, and most other people are too, it is semi-inevitable the world will go out of kilter. And this choking and burning of itself, our doing this, our obliterating great parts of what we are as a species, moves toward an ashen balance, a postwar awakening, simplified and a bit desperate—it seemed like that, too, when one was, a little blankly, in the midst of it.
Mobilization, Then War
A peacetime army of a hundred thousand men became an array of a million men; and then one of two million men—two million actual men, ta-ra, ta-ra . . . two million men, dressed alike, similarly jumpy, and indisputably only momentarily alive in this way, and morally at sea, smiling a lot, most of them, when on leave. Some didn’t smile. Ah God, the universal swagger. Which wasn’t universal. The slouch, the amble, the guys who slunk around . . . And the outbursts of tears. And the dry-eyed stuff. The sentiment, as I said, of ruthlessness . . . The worldwide school of ruthlessness, ruthless cleverness, of ruthless scandal. Actually, often, quite disciplined, oxymoronically—at least in the more successful armies: disciplined limitlessness . . . A calculated and not quite completely messy bloodthirstiness.
Around me, where I was, a jalopy rural society was transfixed into grieving self-surrender inseparable from self-importance and fear. You wrung the suburbs and the farming counties dry and the slums and the expensive parts of the city in order to produce army camps which were small cities really—mostly male cities—and the two million men became I don’t know how many finally—four, five, six, seven million men?—until all cities and all empty places everywhere (but in the end, proportionately, only a limited number of neighborhoods) had a different kind of reality, a different social reality, a different order of peace and of violence.
Existences were inundated with new events, military events, often, and with men in a newish form—compared to a few years before—khaki larvae, soldiers, new inhabitants—a new history, a new brutality, new habits, new thoughts, new postures, new affections and sorts of actions, government money splashing noisily in the streets while the living bodies, the thing of being young, the crime everywhere—people robbing the soldiers; the soldiers robbing people; girls hurting soldiers; soldiers hurting girls—the crimes were not all of the same order of criminality. A kind of universality as in a Golden Age or in a Golden Age reversed and become a Brazen Era of Blood, Heroism, and Death, no conversation was without reference to the war. Most decisions were unwise; what a stream of unwise decisions there were. Nothing was empty of content or was outside the context of cultural measurement and rivalry—the bloodbath of cultural measurements and rivalries was terrifying but exhilarating—nothing was entirely well run or well done. Everything was last-ditch, desperate, but bloodiedly interesting. And then the context of blundering, the slow music of a national consciousness of national and international blundering, of things unthought and badly thought, the human species and its pronouncedly evident trait of blundering became a sense of inevitable and unavoidable large-scale blundering, unimaginably worse than peacetime horrors, but, somehow, the major thing, the real determinant of national and cultural rivalrous mutual and heavily bloodied measurements.
The side that blunders least wins. And: Blunder for blunder, in the end, it is individual morale surviving the blunders and keeping on that decides battles . . .
And so on.
The journalistically interpreted purposeful murders—the murder on such a mathematically gross plane—the blundering deaths that yet mattered, that yet are piled on the scales of victory and make the difference between whether our children live in freedom or slavery . . . and I being a child . . . less so each year . . . this meant that I could avoid seeing that people died with the taste of chagrin in their mouths. The blunders and the excitement and the need to fight-and-win was hardly a joke but what could you do about it in the face of the more and more national, more and more popular chagrin and vague, hysterically general censorship of what was too hard to face and realistic ruthlessness and resigned ruthlessness of approaching victory.
One’s complicity in this is, brutally, entire, all at once, and savage. Over and over, the invented thing—perhaps a true thing—was that it was beyond choice—and, in truth, to be beyond choice means one and everyone can be morally absent, morally obtuse, morally absent-minded. Or stylishly and patriotically ruthless. Or ideologically ruthless. For some people, it came to seem that all ruthlessness was suspect. Was paradoxically semi-absolute and therefore, false, and therefore, hysterical. Hallucinatory. One became more ruthlessly ruthless, hoping to be it, to prove one was it, was ruthless. To be in combat—and to be observed so that if one chose to follow out an act of cowardice—bailing out of an airplane or climbing out of range of the dogfight or turning around and barrelling toward home on the full rpm’s of the engine, burning out the cylinders—one was then shamed publicly or court-martialled; or officers covered up for you, it depended . . . It depended on which way the issue of ruthlessness bent inside the common ruthlessness of a male group. The measurements of focussed and of successful wills as a nationalistic male thing—and as a rare thing—seemed to be the social anatomy of successful communities. The nation . . . the ethnic group . . . and the politics of a successful war . . . and a kind of secret moral code, not so secret actually, but never publicly
worded to any great extent, came into existence in relation to death and the expenditure of time, money, and lives. To have spent so much money, to have come to believe in the national danger—some of which belief was true—to take on the absolute expense of the community and of lives as a serious matter; and then to weasel while urging others on—much of the war writing after 1943 was concerned with a war behind the other war, with this other war between those who inveighed against cowardice and those who governed the movements and weapons of men who had to display bravery and perhaps die—the months of the movement toward victory were littered with revelations, exposures, unmaskings of wartime identities; more and more generals were named as violent jerks.
So, the slow discretionary processes of evolving personal and national views of what a hero was, what a hero really was, and who had really behaved well and who really had not dwindled into a kind of antiheroic attitude. People praised the war, sort of, but no heroes emerged; I mean none were created. It was quite strange. It may have been ethnic rivalry and then tact that led to that, or social rivalry. Officers had not behaved so well (or so badly), and the men likewise, that any group could claim enough say to name its heroes or to judge who was heroic and who was not. One’s views of how much unity we had had actually, or how little, finally changed and were codified. The stage lighting changed; and we were not underdogs or Hamlets—or interested in heroes. The chagrin went away. It came again. We were figures of fate in the world; and we were ciphers and the rest of it. The swollenly semi-adroit military services and militarily productive civilian home front were partners in a silence inside a plenitude, a multitude of stories, all of them mistold. The ideological uproar, the right wing, the left (the right wing hadn’t done well in wartime), the sympathizers with this and that, the populists, the oldline upper-echelon government families (such as they were) drowned everything in disagreement. Wartime unions had threatened to strike and to hell with the war. Men had deserted. Generals had been drunk. The fear of personal and of national defeat exacted one thing from the war: no defeat for anyone in America, almost, for a while—perhaps a long while as such things go. Perhaps the most amazing amnesty and the most prolonged and mostly wordless and untheoretical exploration of various actualities of semi-actual Utopias—mental health and money and never being laughed at and soon—began here. Of course, it was merely human.
Songs and editorials pictured us in one or another simplified fashion without much, if any, reference to real things. Our automobiles and our houses, our movies, our psychological claims, our high art, our low art, our hopes became more and more fanciful—more and more like things in children’s books. The wartime simplicities became peacetime simplicities of an attempted sort, our reparations, our trophies: our nearly universal attribution, politically, of heroism: an extraordinarily disingenuous sentimentality. People did not crack up much. The Utopian thing spread and spread; and then people started cracking up, sort of on a national scale.
But, during the war, people of all sorts cracked up in the pressure of the so-called absolute situation—the simplifications (supposedly) of life-and-death stuff—cracked up in the pressure of knowing it was not absolute, it was personal, death was, death and the shaming and irreversible consequentiality of actions, of one’s life, of one’s consciousness in the months of violence, during a violent war, biologically, humanly at the edge of the absolute extinction of some and even all of us.
Surrender protected nothing. Words fail us. One’s life was already different. After all, what continuity of sense there was had rested on what a writer describing an earlier war had called a hedge of men bloodily renewed every day. The reasons and the degree to which men were willing, had to be willing to be murdered, to be chewed and pierced and picked and torn apart and ground up—that and the brilliance and honesty of the weapons, such as it was, those as the determining things, or as things of great importance, if one cared about the war, that ended with the war—as a kind of death of unsentimental realism and as the birth of sentimental brutality and rebelliousness and new definitions of normalcy—as universal—in contradistinction to the actual meaning of the term before the war.
S.L. said, “Shame makes men crooks.” It was very strange the crooked ruthlessness and seeming directness of the war, and then the Utopian and avid crooked ruthlessness of will and fantasy, of hallucination, as victory neared.
It was very strange during the war, the events, the absolutions. It was as if the bloodied and essential figures in dreams of adventure and combat were living as images within a terrible rate of change and with a good deal of waiting around and with daily falsity.
But in my dreams, the long gliding crash of an airplane—a long expiring under a bush of a wounded guy in a woods, in battle—the slow appearance of a giant (in the dream) rising as slowly as a sun on a dream horizon to decide the battle: this stuff became for me the curse of the known human absolute, the force it takes to shut up all the others once and for all.
And, in my dreams, the secret force had to do with a kitchen in a bombed house where soldiers rape a woman who looks like a movie star and who betrays them to a warplane that then strafes the house . . .
It was too much logic illogically deployed . . . The wrong premises, the wrong sense of reality—my dreams, I mean, and some of the lies about the war.
The scenes disappear when it begins to be light.
I named the issue Subjection to Others’ Wills.
My dad, S.L., laughed at me for my childhood patriotism. He became a pacifist in The First World War in the course of fighting in three famous and tremendous battles—all of them unnecessary, he learned afterwards, he said. I know what this stuff is all about . . . You don’t know . . . Well, don’t be cannon fodder, he said.
War: we, we Americans, I was, we were OPPOSED to careless, greedy, merciless, foreign wills. To their statistically massive indifference toward us—impertinence really, and on a very grand scale at that—to our lives, our tempers, our deaths, my death and yours and the deaths of others.
And the massed warplanes overhead on their flyovers and the barges of war matériel on the Mississippi and the weird density of the steel used in armaments were part of one’s youth and of one’s adolescence. One could measure one’s growth against the length and weight of a rifle, for instance. The public displays of weaponry, and the military parades, the thrilling element in the sight of so many men marching, the peculiar and dirty effectuality suggested that it was peculiar and dirty, war was, the majesty and reality of war. The thing, over and over, of being of the lineage of God in order to bear and explain wartime reality, the terms of national and of personal self-worship: this was called morale.
But Fate concerned with one’s self . . . a single dark, or half-lit, service of one’s sense of this, of it—and who was there who could have an impersonal sense of fate, who was there who was alive and not alive to think in the way shadows seem to do, convincingly, as if thought was ever not enclosed in flesh-and-blood?
Fate, I was saying, took on a nationally noble unselfishness—we all almost loved any number of things more than life itself, or we felt like that for a while when we were led to do so, when we were inspired to do so.
I mean ideals in that sense were present although not always very well worded. But ideal meant more-absolute-than-death. Among human absolutes, it meant something even more absolute than death and defeat, I would say.
But, still, there was something almost like a vacuum of selfish will—a nation of women loving its male leaders or its leader, loving him best—and into that vacuum rushed the pressure of Providence and of a sense of Providence, a Presence of Fate, of fatedness, that seemed an echo of an angelic service: meaning, meanings everywhere, purpose and rank, a vicious grayness, or steel, of human service, not fictional at all.
The unreasonable became reasonable purpose, in which the vagueness of some conclusions in ordinary life, as when you say, Are you REALLY hurt? and even to a dead body, Are you REALLY dead, S.L.?, tha
t vagueness is more and more identified as madness, as a symptom of your breaking down.
War strips away sleep and ordinary wakefulness and becomes a specialized wakefulness among the crotches and butts, the eyes and haircuts, the cripplings and the deaths, not like any other wakefulness one will ever know.
SAINT NONIE
or The War
Forestville or The History of Envy
Not able to bear our life at home, or for some other reason (or for a number of reasons), Nonie, in 1941, went to live in Forestville, in North Carolina, to live with S.L.’s sister, our Aunt Casey, my aunt by adoption, of course, and with S.L.’s brother-in-law and their three mostly grown children. One said of them that they were quite well off, or that they were “rich people—Southerners”—that is to say, they were not as rich as rich Northerners back then, in those days.
The Runaway Soul Page 48