Fathoms (Collected Writings)

by Jack Cady

  The writer has no message when he is at his best. He tries only to discover the individual truth of an individual in a situation. If the reader reads well enough, and if the writer has worked hard enough and also has some luck, then the reader will discover his own truth. He will experience some degree of revelation; and the quality of the revelation depends on his own openness, tenacity, determination to understand . . . and on his ability to be humane. A good reader is almost more rare than a good writer, and he is as creative.

  Now I think we can turn to talking about war stories.

  The best that deal with the military aspect of war are The Thin Red Line by James Jones, One to Court Cadence by James Crumley, and Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis.

  The best that deal with the civilian population are The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow and The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski. To these, may be added The Diary of Anne Frank. A good reader will want to read that one in dedication to the glory and pathos possible for his own soul . . . and because good readers like ultimates. I call these six books the best because they are all written in the same severe honesty that one reads on that sign inside the gates at Quantico.

  Beyond these lie a great welter of writing that ranges from very fine to potboilers. There is plenty of causeserving tripe available. There is a lot of sentimentality. There are even a few by very great writers that are just terrible, because they are so clouded with young experience that the writer has been unable to rid himself of romance before hitting into his material. I’m not going to name any particular people, because I respect some of them and they are still alive. Yet, I will say that the Second World War produced stuff that was published before the writer got sufficient distance. If you’re interested, browse the five-cent racks in a used bookstore and look for famous names. War mostly attracts midgets, but a few giants almost always attend and some of them are going to stumble.

  Still, there are more than six good books on war. And it is a good thing to read some of them, because writers learn from one another. Jones could probably not, for example, have done Thin Red Line had he only had military experience. He also had the experience of reading a whole batch of other writers. So before discussing the six I’ve mentioned, I will mention some others and examine one that kind of sets the scene and the possibilities for at least four of the six.

  War books I like are: Stella by Jan DeHartog, The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarret, The Red Badge of Courage by Crane, For Whom the Bell Tolls by and Men at War (anthology edited by Hemingway), All Quiet on the Western Front, and U.S.A. which I want to discuss. There are a lot of others I like, but those will do for a start. If you read them you will find traces of heroics (unexplained), sentiment (uncontained), and preaching (as in the case of Red Badge) that maybe war ain’t good for everybody, but if it is an ill wind, etc. I like these books because they show what had to be done before the writers of Line, Dollmaker and Cadence could really get in and show what could be done. At least I think this is true.

  One more aside before getting into U.S.A. Sometimes a completely effective piece of writing comes from very average motives, and I especially like The Officer’s Guide, so beloved by graduates of The Point. I like it because of the bland regulation type chapter about making wills and preburial arrangements. The chapter is suitably titled, Death. I like the official U.S. Army recommended attitude to cultivate toward eternity; and the carefully committed and therefore obvious remark that once he is dead, gone and rotten, the officer corps’s ex-wife will be screwing someone else. The chapter is a small masterpiece.

  For it is true that one of the great victories of war is death. It is not the greatest victory, but it will do for openers.

  When you are dead you heart stops beating and your flesh gets very cold and you do not think or talk or love anymore. You need no space to move around in, and indeed, you need very little space anyway, no more than a hanging side of pork—which, if you are dead in a war you will probably resemble. Moreover, there is not real further use to be gotten from you, unless there are hogs rooting around on that battlefield (as there were in the Civil War, World War I & II, the Korean handslap and the Viet Nam fiasco.) If there are hogs then maybe the hogs will get hoggier and maybe someone will eventually get a slice of them. You can only see further use or creation by way of osmosis.

  Now we can talk about U.S.A.

  In my opinion the book is a demarcation point in the literature of war. Up to the time of its writing it still seems possible that a serious writer might have seriously considered writing a book in a war context where there was a winner. After the publication of U.S.A. it seems unlikely that any writer could be so deceived.

  It is a book peopled by losers, not simply by people who lose. The characters are juiceless, banal, willful and tepid. A principal character, J. Ward Moorehouse, kind of sets the stage and gives contrast to another character named Yossarian who would show up about thirty-five years later. J. Ward Moorehouse is a loser because he is able to rationalize something that Yossarian calls by its right name. Fear. Moorehouse spouts persuasions of honor and necessity and patriotism to himself. Yossarian plainly states that if he is killed no one wins as far as he is concerned. This isn’t exactly a winner mentality, either; but at least it is not the loser mentality of J. Ward Moorehouse . . . who is not even combatant. His fears are on the level of status, getting ahead, money and influence.

  U.S.A. is a grand, three-book portrayal of a bunch of losers who can hardly wait to lose, and who do lose, and all because they live on one of the greatest loser nations on earth and call it good. The nation that brought the European import notion of “The War to End All Wars.” The nation of sanctimony and good advice. The nation which at this very time has the capacity to kill everyone in the world seven times . . . and continues to record the biggest military arms budget in its history . . . but, I editorialize.

  What I meant to say is that Dos Passos was doing pretty good considering that the romantic and naturalistic traditions in our literature were all around him. In U.S.A. even the winners are losers, probably the biggest losers. The intercalary writing on people like J.P. Morgan is some of the most powerful writing in the book.

  Dos Passos was angry, sometimes bitter, and sure was cynical. It is an occupational hazard of writers, for generally writers love their land and history and the vision they get from the other voices of their literature. Damned few writers have really loved the notion of killing, however.

  What war and killing does is shock a man’s innocence. It shocked Dos Passos, it shocks me, and if it does not shock you then I must remark you are much older than I.

  U.S.A. was the book that put the literary sanction on the end of American innocence. It would set the stage for the revulsion of the ’30s and the realities of the ’40s. I think I could talk for a century about that period. It was when I was born and grew up. Instead, I’ll just make a few remarks.

  Innocence was pretty well gone in the ’30s, but there was plenty of ignorance to make up for it. There was sociological reasons, of course, and if we had time they could be accurately traced. Sufficient to say that the depression finally required a scapegoat mild enough to attack, but luminous enough to make the attack feel valid and heroic. In the ’40s the American people would be led to hate the ‘dirty little Japs’ and the ‘Nazi murderers’ with some claim to validity. In the ’30s the most visible people to hate were the Jews; and the ‘International Cartel of Jewish Bankers.’ There were a hell of a lot of citizens who backed the Hitler-Mussolini team in ’38 and ’39. The depression was a hard time . . . surely the understatement of the year. It saw disillusion, guilt, self-hatred and boredom and fear. There is no reason to romanticize the depression. American innocence was at a low ebb, and even World War II would not supply the patriotic revival that had occurred during World War I.

  From the years 1939 to 1945 the world was steeped in blood. From Murmansk to New Zealand, across the Burma Road, through the tolling waters of the South Pacific, and the
torpedo wakes that were like a network of curses on the Atlantic. Combatants, civilians, natives of islands, jews and gypsies, and the workers on African rubber plantations. The rivers fed blood to the bloody oceans. In the industrial cities of big nations the workers were casualties of juryrigged equipment, blasted by unsafe conditions, sacrificed up to keep the various Victory E’s of the various killers waving from factory smokestacks. The victims of cost-plus-six. Death walked the world, but money was in the wind.

  Now I can quickly mention a couple of the books and you can read them and then everyone will understand each other.

  The Diary of Anne Frank and Guadalcanal Diary are very important because it is hard to make a tragedy out of statistics like six million Jews exterminated. If I tell you that a good low guess for casualties in World War II would run to a hundred fifty million people if would not impress you. The problem is that no one can imagine that much meat, leave alone the death of that much spirit.

  The mind stumbles before such figures, cannot comprehend that kind of fury.

  The Diary of Anne Frank is a diary kept by a young girl who happened to be a Jew and who happened to be in the wrong place at the same time. It records hopes, dreams, aspirations, the beauty that is implied in the growing notion of touching one another . . . and it ends when Nazis discover the hiding place and lead everyone off to extermination. I think you will cry a lot when you read it, and if you don’t cry don’t tell me about it. Instead of six million, the figure is one. Take that figure and abstract it one at a time six million times and you have about three percent of the violence and grief of World War II.

  Guadalcanal Diary is effective in another way. Tregaskis lets you know what is happening by objective reporting. He was dealing with twenty-six thousand deaths in three weeks, of which four thousand were American and the rest Japanese. At its best the book is flat as a camera, as reflective as a mirror. The constant beat through the book is death, death, death. It ticks and tocks and ticks with popping skulls under tank treads, flaming bodies, fearful men filled with bravado . . . and recounts that “We lost twenty people at that place,” and then goes ticking and tocking and death, death, death . . . “And we lost seventy people . . .”

  After you get done with it you might want to read a book by a Japanese writer called Fires on the Plain. The writer is Ooka Shohi.

  And now I can speak about the greatest war novels.

  James Jones is one of our great American writers, although no one in your English department will ever tell you that. One reason, I think, is that Jones does not write his books for English departments. Perhaps I am a tad bit biased here, but I must remark that professional readers often feel themselves so smart that they only end up reading about their own egos. To illustrate, here is a little story.

  In a book that Jones wrote titled Some Came Running the character Dave Hirsh is working on a combat novel in which death is a comic hero. I’d been reading Jones for a good many years and liking him a lot. One day I sat down and wrote to him and happened to mention that Thin Red Line was the book that his character David Hirsh had been working with. Jones wrote back in a slight state of shock. He told me that not one reviewer had ever caught that, and no one else had understood it except for one editor. It made me wonder how much critics miss, or if they read the books at all . . . for I have had students who loved to read and they caught the connection without help. It is very obvious.

  Anyway, Jones does not write for English departments. He writes to get at the truth of the matter, and in Thin Red Line he got all of the truth that will ever be needed about the fact of death in war.

  When Line was published the fairly standard reaction by reviewers was that it was another combat potboiler written in the very conventional form of a company going to battle. If one reads it with even ten percent of the seriousness that it was written, then it is quickly seen death is the only hero in the book. Death gets all the funny lines, and the straight men get death. The funny lines are not funny but absurd; as for example, when a man accidentally grabs a grenade on his belt by the pin. The grenade blows, and the dying man says something like, “what a stupid, recroot stunt.” No one is likely to crack any ribs laughing, but any reader will quickly understand that one of war’s great victories is death. He will also understand a bit more about the comic, and the human pain that often composes the comic element. I think it is especially important that we pay attention to such things in a world largely dominated by the president, the congress, the F.B.I. and Donald Duck.

  The other victory of war, and war’s greatest victory, is dehumanization. There is plenty of this shown in Line, and in Dollmaker, but it really is the main subject of One to Count Cadence. The ironies, the bitterness, the comic and the absurd all combine in the figure of The Warrior.

  In Cadence the profession of giving and receiving death is brought to a strong emotional sense, a way of becoming. It is very strictly moral, and it will remain moral for just as long as bankers and tank manufacturers and tinhorn patriots and flag waving mothers insist on honorably killing everybody who offends them. The emotional becoming is a very warm sense, finally. It is an intelligent business. In fact, it is the only intelligent business . . . given the world in which the D.A.R., and C.I.A. and the V.F.W. function well and happily. The fury of the book is in complete and perfect control. It is like Crumley has muzzled the toughest tiger that ever lived and then taught that tiger to beg for bowls of whipped cream.

  It is a great book and Line is a great book. I use the word ‘great’ advisedly.

  Let me distinguish. I would not, for example, describe the U.S.A. as a great nation. It is a damned big nation, and it makes monumental successes and mistakes, but it does not at present have the quality of greatness. Too many lies and violences have been happening for too long.

  Yet, I am easily persuaded that the American people are or can be great. During the turbulence of the ’60s I thought this. Divided they may have been, but the greatness was pulsing. They were certainly great through the Second World War when they were killed, lied to, conned spiritually and fed the same old warmed over pap about God, Country, and Destiny. In fact, any people who through seventy years of the 20th century have been able to prevail in spite of the U.S. government almost have to be great by definition. In my opinion our last great nation dissolved when Andrew Jackson allowed the railroading of the Cherokees, and when Chief Joseph laid down his arms.

  This illustration is to give the feel of what I mean about a book. It is not to draw tight guidelines. I judge a book by asking three things. It is about somebody? It is about something? Does the writer search and truly say the truth of the material? When these things are all present the book is likely to be great. It can even be that way when some part is missing. U.S.A. would by this definition be a loser, if the something it was about was not so important and the characters who volunteered spoke to that importance . . . and if Dos Passos had not worked so hard.

  The greatest books are those that handle all three at their highest pitch, and the best book I know of that does this is The Dollmaker. I consider it to be of the best novels of this century, or any century; for it handles completely the aspect of dehumanization and realizes a victory over what seems totally crushing dehumanizing force. It denies in its truth that the original state of man is depravity. It affirms with its truth the creative capacity of human, and in spite of every hell that can be wrought by an industrialized, greed-filled society, it ends in beauty.

  Briefly, The Dollmaker is about Gertie Nevels, who, with her husband and family, moves to Detroit during the Second War. Her husband works in a war plant and the family begins to die while everything is dying around them. To call it simply a war book is to miscall it badly. It is a great book, and that is speaking exactly to the point. Read it. It is good for the heart. It evokes compassion beyond all fact or statistic or fundamentalist social science argument. It is heaven and hell, and finally it is the transcending spirit of mankind . . . and it is also the best book
on war about a civilian population.

  The last book I want to talk about also deals with dehumanization. It is The Painted Bird. It makes the writings of DeSade look like an adolescent hiding in the john and masturbating. Do not read the book if you are totally convinced that evil exists for there is no reason to bludgeon your mind. Instead, give it to your friendly neighborhood preacher, politician or English professor. Tell them it is a story about a small, refugee boy being shuttled around through the peasantry of Europe during World War II; after all the men of God, the Gods of politics, and the tweed-bottomed professors have proved that their freedom really was an academic question after all.

  One note before conclusion. I will say that the degradation and insanity of war does not preclude the valiant gesture, the loving heart, or even the courageous act. These are however, not expressions of war but expressions of people who happen to be trapped by war. The incidents are countless. I suppose that symbolically they are best summed by two of the most heroic battles in history: the battle of Thermopylae and the battle of Britain. Churchill’s remark, “That never have so many owed so much to so few,” is apt for both occasions.

  Finally, there is only one thing more to say about all this. That is to apologize for the lack of stage props. To properly evoke what I’ve been trying to say here, it would really have only been necessary to have brought along in my arms a human being killed by violence. You would not have liked it very much, but perhaps it would not be disliked as much as you will individually dislike the results . . . if some personal insecurity ever prompts you to indulge in, or advocate the violence of war.