American Perspective; 16 & 17; The Hero as a Warrior: Norman Mailer; The Hero as a Warrior: John Hornw Burns

. You Hello, this is American perspective, and as you know, we've been talking about the American

hero. I want to go on talking about him if I may. This time I want to talk about a controversial young man. Well actually, he's not so young anymore, he's 37 years old. When he finished his first novel at the age of 24, the late John Lardner, compared him to Tolstoy, when he published his second novel three years later, the number of people compared him to a crazy man. And when he finished his third novel four years after that, he had to find a new publisher because the old one apparently felt he was a little too lively, yet when the novel finally was published, Malcolm Cowley wrote of it that it was, the serious and reckless book we have been waiting for since got Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon.

This not so young man was recently a guest at a literary symposium at the State University of Iowa. And when it was all over, it is said by a national news magazine, the students were ready to elect him president of the university. And in his latest book, A Combination Anthology and Autobiography, he takes on all comers. He takes them on from Madison Avenue to Palm Springs, clear back to Constitution Avenue. And about this latest book, The Critics have been just plain funny. They're all hedging there bets at the literary race track. They all know that they are in the presence of a man of great talent, but they're scared to death to say too much in his favorable. I am, as you know, talking about Norman Baylor. Baylor was born in 1924.

Three years after John Dispasses published the first important book about the First World War, Three Soldiers. In five years before Hemingway published the novel we talked about last time of farewell to arms. When Baylor was only 16 years old, he read and was excited by Dispasses, finest book USA, and Baylor himself has written that he does not think his own generation has written anything nearly so good. Baylor himself, in fact, sometimes sounds a little like Dispasses, and he uses some of the same technical devices to make his story move. They made our went up to Harvard, and by the time he was a sophomore, he was writing stories in the Hemingway tradition. And it is perfectly clear from his latest book, At Vertistments for Myself, that he is a great admire of Hemingway, though he complains of Ernest Hemingway's non-thinking heroes. Since we are by way of being experts on Hemingway heroes by now, he Hemingway went out

of his way to shoot a lion or two, maybe more. He almost captured Paris with a few hundred men. He did a lot of things, which very few of us could do, and I say this levelly, and not from hero worship, because for all his size, and all we've learned from him about the real importance of physical courage, he has still pretended to be ignorant of the notion that it is not enough to feel like a man. One must try to think like a man as well. Hemingway has always been afraid to think, afraid of losing even a little popularity, and his words excite no thought in the best of my rebel generation. He has no longer any help to us. He has left us marooned in the nervous boredom of a world, which finally he did not try hard enough to change. After Maynard got out of Harvard, he went into the army, he went into the infantry, he went to the lady, he was a rifleman, and there is some evidence that he already thought when he went into the army, that he was the guy who was going to write the best book

about World War II, and when he came home, he wrote it. Ryan Hart published The Naked and the Dead in 1948. Norman Maynard was 24 years old. No, it was 25 when it was published, 24 when he finished it. So was Stephen Crane when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage, what I think is the other great novel we have about war. But The Naked and the Dead really is about a great deal more than war. Like this pass us in three soldiers, Maynard uses the army as a microcosm of society. And I think that looking at The Naked and the Dead and maybe some of Maynard's other work, we can go ahead and our talk about the American hero, a guy who is really a myth, I think, but since James Van Amor Cooper is leather-stalking, has had a cluster of continuing characteristics.

First place, he's always brave, and in the second place he exists on the edge of society. There's any frontier left, he goes out on the frontier, if the frontier is gone, he lives in some kind of peripheral group. He is un-intellectual or anti-intellectual, though he has a great skill of some kind. He's not the marrying kind. In a Puritan society, he is essentially asexual. In Puritan society, he's gone promiscuous, he's a promiscuous Puritan, but he's not the marrying kind. He is sensitive, but his emotions are very carefully shaped. He is convinced that his personal code of justice is better than any that mankind may have written down. And always and ever the hero's problem, and I suppose to extend the problem of all of us, is to maintain individual liberty in a society which would take it away in one way or another. By physical pressure and open totalitarianism, by in more subtle ways, in more subtly authoritarian governments.

And except at the very most popular level in the world of the Western story, or the detective story, you can't escape the struggle with society if you intend to retain your individuality. Hemingway says that life is to be lived not just past through. And the last sentence of mailers, the man who studied yoga reads, so Sam enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain and seek seeds merely in avoiding pleasure. Whatever else about Norman Mailer, he does not seek to avoid the pain. And one way to look at his work, I think, is as a search for the hero. Place to start, the naked and the dead.

The time, the second world war. The place, an ocarina-shaped island in the Pacific called Anapopai, and part of the time, Malanaka, on this island, the most threatening physical barrier to man. The story is the invasion of Anapopai by the American Army, from the initial landings to the mopping up operations. And not the least impressive thing about this book is, the way Mailer has organized what I suppose is a hypothetical campaign. The approach, the approach, realism. Mailer is a powerful storyteller and a powerful discriber of persons and places. The technique, the scene of the novel, alternates between division headquarters, or the command post at division headquarters, and a single platoon out on the front doing the actual fighting and dying.

Now command post and platoon contain parallel characters, so in a sense, perhaps putting it vulgarly, in a sense, Mailer tells his story both at the level of the officer and of the enlisted man. At the command post, two really significant characters. The first, major general, Edward Cummings. At first glance, he did not look unlike other general officers, a little over medium hide, well fleshed with a rather handsome, sun tan face and graying hair, but there were differences. His expression when he smiled was very close to the ruddy, complacent, and hard appearance of any number of American senators and businessmen, but the tough, good guy aura never quite remained.

There was a certain vacancy in his face. There was the appearance, and yet it was not there. Major general, Edward Cummings, West Point, Command Schools, a brilliant thinker, highly disciplined personally, and with a powerful drive to dominate anything that's around to be dominated, ruthless, perfectly at home, in the hierarchy of the army, except insofar as it interferes with his own will to absolute power. The other significant character at the command post, Lieutenant Robert Hearn. A big man with a shock of black hair and a small sharp voice, a heavy immobile face, his brown eyes impoturbable, stared out coldly above the short, blended, and slightly hooked arc of his nose.

His wide thin mouth was unexbressive, a top ledge of the salt to the solid mass of his chin. He liked very few people, and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes. He's young, he's rich, he's from the Midwest, he went to Harvard. He's the antithesis of general Cummings. He's a rebel. He rejects the army. He in effect rejects society. The only thing to do is to get by on style. Hearn said that once, and his mailer says, he lived by it in the absence of anything else. The only thing that had been important was to let no one in any ultimate issue ever violate your integrity. Now, sounds a little familiar, I think. Matter of fact, it sounds a little like Ernest Hemingway. Robert Hearn clearly refuses to battle with the givens of society. He just sits in the situation he is in.

There is the situation, there it is, and there it can stay. Now, out at platoon are the parallels for these two characters. The first is Sergeant Sam Krough. A lean man of medium height, but he held himself so erectly he appeared tall. His narrow triangular face was utterly without expression. There seemed nothing wasted in his hard, small jaw, gaunt, firm cheeks, and straight short nose. His gelatin eyes were very blue. He was efficient and strong and usually empty, and his main cast of mind was a superior contempt toward all other men. He hated weakness, and he loved practically nothing. There was a crude, unformed vision in his soul, but he was rarely conscious of it. Now, here in this sergeant is the non-intellectual equivalent of general comings.

What the general does by having someone cut a set of orders, Sergeant Krough does, with his fists, and with a gun. Technically, he's an expert, but he's cruel, and he's urged to absolute power is analogous to comings urged to absolute power. Krough never accepts any given situation. He never says anything is impossible, he thinks he can do something about it. He too is absolutely ruthless. And there is Red Volson. Everything about him was bony and gnobbed. He was over six feet tall without weighing 150 pounds. In silhouette, his profile consisted almost entirely of a large blob of a nose and a long, low-slung jaw, a combination which made his face seem boiled and angry.

He had an expression of concentrated contempt, but behind it, his tired eyes, a rather painful blue, were quiet, marooned by themselves in a web of wrinkles and freckles. Volson for me, anyway, was reminiscent of Chris Field in his past three soldiers. Volson is a rebel, a little bit like her in his sense. He's the touted non-conformist, we're supposed to have so few up. And the trouble is that Red Volson is a rebel without a cause so he can be no match for Sergeant Croft. And the point is that Lieutenant Hearn is not a match for general comings either. It turns out that style that is Hearn and resentment that is Volson are simply not enough to overcome anything when the chips are down.

What happens really is that the strong, even appealing characters of the naked and the dead, are general comings and Sergeant Croft. Now it may or ultimately defeats these two because they are Floritarians, but the defeat is never really, you know, very convincing Hearn, the Lieutenant, finally fights back or he decides he's going to fight back. He makes a decision to stand on principle, but he never gets around to stand on and he gets shot the next day. And I think that the truth is that comings and Croft share the characteristics of the American culture hero type. Hearn and Volson share them a little too, but they seem pale behind the general and the Sergeant. It seems to me that the negative and dead seems to imply that the hero may stay ahead of

society when there's still a physical frontier, that the hero type may exist in a fringe group when the frontier is gone. But this hero type with the characteristics we have been talking about must when he is forced to live in a functioning way within the society become a totalitarian. He is in effect the fascist. Whether he is or not, the truth is that in the naked and the dead, comings and Croft are more satisfactory than Hearn and Volson because they're alive because they are vital characters. You can't, or at least mailer can't, make a hero out of someone who is dead before he is killed. Mailer pretty clearly wants heroic figures. He wants people who were with it.

As he says elsewhere, in fact, the sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is almost no shame today like the terror before the romantic. But as you run away from the big in the romantic, the hero that Norman Mailer is looking for, or was looking for, did not come out of the naked and the dead. And it did not come out either of Barbary Shore, which was published a few years later. It's an allegory in which Mailer wrestles with the problems of the time. Very else you say about Mailer, he wrestles with the problems, wrestles with the time in Marxian terms.

And then in 1955, he wrote The Deer Park, published by Putnam. The Deer Park is the story of Desert Door. A Hollywood playground, apparently co-terminus, with palm springs. And the point is that, asked with the army in the naked and the dead, Desert Door in the Deer Park becomes a senedic, senedic-y for society as a whole. I mean, what I'm trying to say is that the part, Desert Door, the part of the society, is simply pushed out there to represent the whole society. And Mailer uses the book to emphasize the difference, well, at Desert Door, by implication in the society, between appearance and reality, between illusion and actuality. I mean, between the surface calm of our society and the joyride we're all taking toward

destruction, between the assumption of complete freedom of action, our society, in a society where every action and reaction really is pretty much in the hands of the manipulators. Or the fact that Mailer's characters at Desert Door sit around and talk about the pleasures of monogamy when they are actually living in a sexual jungle. Now, of course, there's nothing new about this. I mean, I think we all feel that there has long been a difference between the assumptions of the organizations which hold the rulebook for our society and the assumptions of those of us who actually live in society. I mean, it would seem to me that in Ralph Waldo Emerson's time, way back there when, the rational and theological assumptions for puritanism and, by extension, puritan behavior

had largely disappeared in Ralph Waldo Emerson knowing. But the psychological residue was strong enough to assure a satisfactorily puritan society. In Mailer's world, the psychological residue is no longer sufficient to have much effect on the behavior of the society. That is only the formalities of the machine remain. I mean, what remains is only the convention that one talks about a monogamous society. The psychological residue at Desert Door, anyway, is no longer there. I mean, so then I guess the point is that for Mailer, where there is little relation between what a society says it thinks and does and what a society actually thinks and does.

Then the member of a society no longer has any responsibility to that society. In fact, his responsibility becomes a responsibility to himself and the responsibility is to get out of it, to get out of that society. At one level, the hero of Deer Park, the Deer Park, is Charles, Francis, I tell, a distinguished Hollywood director who fights the organization for a while, but eventually gives in. Now, there's a standard situation in the 20th century novel. But the truth is that the real hero of the Deer Park is Mary and Fay, a young man who decided at the age of 21 to become a procure, I mean, he's a good deal more like coming friends and cropped than he is like Hearn or Volson.

And Mary and Fay is the hero, the natural hero, of the Deer Park, because he's hip. He's a hipster. And this is the position to which Norman Mailer has come in his search for an heroic figure in his search for values. In an now famous essay, The White Negro, Mailer writes, The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it. It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared, the American existentialist, the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the state, or with a slow death by conformity

with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves, no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry. If the fate of the 20th century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. And in fact, he goes on in an interview later. He says something else which I think is significant. What I would hope to do with my work is intensify a consciousness that the core of life cannot be cheated. Every moment of one's existence, one is growing into more or retreating into less.

One is always living a little more or dying a little bit, that the choice is not to live a little more or to not live a little more. It is to live a little more or to die a little more. And as one dies a little more, one enters the most dangerous moral condition for oneself because one starts making other people die a little more in order to stay alive oneself. I think this is exactly the murderous network in which we all live by now. I think there's a good deal. The appealing here, but if I understand it, the idea is that in the hipster world, the hero, that is the character to be approved by society or the society which is outside society, will pursue whatever he wants by any means. I mean, it looks to me as if the new frontier of our society is made up of the unexplored

areas of one's mind and of the unexperienced experiences of the race. It seems to me that in Deer Park, we go from the jungle and battlefield of actuality, from Antipopei and Mananaka to the jungle and battlefield of the human psyche. Mailer says, hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle. And so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man. So Mailer's hip hero turns from society, observes himself, and does what he wants to do, his standards created by himself.

Now, it seems to me somehow that what I'm looking at out here is old leather stocking, birds, sandal, and all, the frontier is now the frontier, the investigation of new experience. He's got a marijuana cigarette and a slight case of probabilism, but there he is out there on the frontier of the mind, a law unto himself and cool cat, cool. It seems to me that maybe essentially part of the ultimate question is, it's certainly true that we must ask the question, can a man who is going to live exist in an increasingly complex and demanding society with any individuality? But perhaps another question that could be asked is, can society any longer afford the leather stocking type?

I don't know. But it's another American perspective. Bye. Thank you. This is N-E-T National Educational Television. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Let's go back to August 1944, just two months after the launching of Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, and already the breakthrough has occurred, it's only shortly after the invasion of Elba and Pianosa carried on principally by free French troops on their way back to the homeland.

It was one of the bloodiest invasions of the war. It's just about the time of Anvil Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, August 1944, the Pacific. It is two months after the invasion of Saipan. It's about six weeks after the Marianne's Turkey shoot when Admiral Mitchell's carriers and planes brought off one of the greatest air sea victories of all time. It is one month after the invasion of Guam, August 1944, it's the year they passed the GI Bill. It's also the year that everyone was talking about Mary Cole Chase's big fuzzy rabbit named Harvey. Now one of the books I want to talk about today is far from any of these places, but the time is the same, the middle of the war, August 1944. The name of the book is the gallery, it's by John Horn Burns.

The frame of this book and the gallery of the title are the Galleria Umberto in Naples, Italy. The Galleria becomes Burns Portrait Gallery and he thus describes it. This is the very opening of the book. There's an arcade in Naples that they call a Galleria Umberto Primo, it's a cross between a railroad station and a church. You think you're in a museum until you see the bars and the shops. Once this Galleria had a dome of glass, but the bombings of Naples shattered this skylight and tinkling glass fell like cruel snow to the pavement. But life went on in the Galleria. In August 1944 it was the unofficial heart of Naples. It was a living and sub-dividing cell of vermouth, allied soldiery, and the Italian people. Everybody in Naples came to the Galleria Umberto.

At night the flags, the columns, the archangels, blowing their trumpets on the cornices, which you just saw, the metal grids that held the glass before the bombs broke it, heard more than they saw in the daytime. There was the pad of American combat boots on the prowl, the slide of Neapolitan sandals. The click of British hobnails out of rhythm from vermouth. There were screams and coups and slaps and stumbles. There were the hasty press of kisses and cibilence. By moon night, shadow singly and in pairs chased from corner to corner. In the Galleria Umberto you could walk from portrait to portrait, thinking to yourself during your promenade. Before we look at the pictures hung there, I'd like to back up a little if I may. We've been talking for some time about the American hero and the American soldier, sailor. The ideas that have come out have been pretty bleak and some matter of fact they've

turned out to be a good deal more bleak than I thought they would be when about a year ago I picked out a list of books I would like to talk about. We have over and over again seen the military organization as a kind of symbol, a metaphor, as representative of the total society and by and large at least in its wartime capacity it's been destructive of a good deal of things that Americans think important and good. We have seen a few who thrive and many who perish either psychically or physically. We have talked specifically about John Dispasses the Three Soldiers, Ernest Hemingway's of Farewell to Arms and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead but we could have talked about others. We could have talked about Gorby Dolls, Willow Wall, we could have talked about Erwin Shaw's from James Jones, sorry from here to eternity or Erwin Shaw's the Young Lions and so forth. There are however a number of books which in a way are really a little different. These books are about the American military man in the conquered country after at least

part of it is conquered. The soldier or sailor on brief leave or liberty from the lines or from his ship. The soldier in the Army of Occupation or the soldier in that sprawling bureaucracy that builds up behind the man who carries the rifle in the proportion of about 20 to 1. There are for instance books like John Hershey's a Bell for Adano which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and I'm sure you remember this book there was a major jopelow himself an Italian American and he was the chief officer or whatever it is in the captured village of Adano. He made some honest effort to bring a little humor and understanding to the business of being an occupying force and for his trouble of course he was transferred by a general officer but before he was transferred he had helped to bring a little understanding, little between the conquered and the conqueror.

It is a hopeful book and it's one of the few in this category. There's casualty by Robert Lowry who was later to be a book reviewer for time, a tale of just plain moral rottenness in an army camp in Italy and then there are two books by Alfred Hayes, all like Conquests. This is the tale of the rise and fall of a fascist Hulam and then there's the girl on the Via Flaminia. This I think was the first of the tales about GI plundering of the human wreckage in a conquered country, plundering, however gently and however reluctantly but plundering and so on. One might mention just in passing that there are also this person, this occupying soldiers is mentioned both sympathetically and destructively in a number of works by foreign authors. So Malaparti works on the old team of American innocents in the skin, bone-ruco-shishi

in Yasamosa, gives us an American GI whose goodness is pretty much synonymous with stupidity and he has an American lieutenant who might take to be the typical American. He's practical, he's sociable, he's frank, he's full of irony and wit and he's extremely informal. And then there is a powerful section in Alberto Moravius, two women. This section dwells on the American army as it fights and occupies moving northward from Salerno de Rome. Moravius narrowed her as you know when this book is a virtually illiterate peasant and she describes at one point the conquered conquer philosophy. There were some Americans on the balcony and they were throwing down sweets and cigarettes

to the evacuees and the peasants and the latter were all hurling themselves on these things, scrambling and scuffling in the dust, it was really an indecent spectacle. You could see perfectly well that these sweets and cigarettes were of no great importance to them but that they were the nevertheless fighting for them with all this ferocity because they felt that the Americans were expecting them to behave like that. In those few hours, in fact, the atmosphere had already been created which I had occasion to observe later in Rome during the whole period that the Allied occupation lasted. The Italians would ask for things in order to please the Americans and the Americans would give the things in order to please the Italians and neither of the two was aware that they were giving the other no pleasure whatsoever and I do not believe that anyone desires these things but that they happen of themselves as if by mutual disagreement. The Americans were the conquerors and the Italians the conquered and that was that. Of course, the point is that to some American writers, that was not that.

Most of these books in one way or another deal with our failure, the failure of Americanism abroad and without exception they deal once again with that old theme, the difference between the ideal and the reality, between what we profess to believe in and what we really do, how in short we won the war and almost lost the peace. Now I certainly do not pretend for one second to know what the best of these books is, but let me get back for a while anyway to John Horne Burns, the gallery published by Harpers in 1947. Burns died in Leg Horne in 1953, he was 36 years old. He had been born, he was born, and of her Massachusetts in 1916, he went to Andover and then he went on to Harvard to major in English.

After he got out of college, he was a teacher in prep school from 1937 to 1942 and then he went into the army. He went into the infantry, but because he knew Italian, he was sent to the adjutant general school in Washington, D.C., he came out a second lieutenant, he went to Africa, moved from Algiers to Fett Hala to Tunis, finally to Naples, but what he did was sit out the war reading prisoner of war mail after he finally got out of the service in 1946, he went back to teach school for a while, but as I have said in 1947 he published his first book, The Gallery, then a couple of years later he published another one, Lucifer with a book and then in 1952, a cry of children. The last two books weren't very successful and during these years he supported himself principally by writing travel articles for holiday magazine.

At the time of his death he was finishing a novel on St. Francis of Assisi in the modern world. I don't think there's any doubt that the gallery is Horne's best book, like Mailer is the naked and the dead, it concerns itself with the power of war for total evil, and I realize that's a slippery expression. Mailer however tries to give a complete picture, you will remember that he gives us really a detailed account of a total operation on a single island. This method is quite different, his method is to select a number of special cases, give us some details and let us, if we will, conclude the significance of the whole. Now the famous I have said is the Galleria in Naples. The book is about equally divided between what Burns calls portraits and what he calls

promenades, or in other words, between rather elaborate character studies and personal reminiscences of one kind or another. There are nine portraits and there are eight promenades, and I suppose that Burns intends that the promenades be sort of his account, his personal account, certainly they cover the same ground as he did. They go from Casablanca to the Dala to Algiers to Naples. This is about all the form there is. There just isn't any plot to the book, but obviously, I suppose, obviously, any way there are some recurring themes, and both the portraits and the promenades deal with the same points over and over again. For one thing, with very few exceptions, the portraits nearly all conclude in some kind of defeat, one Italian girl survives with some strength, but the nearly all the rest are

destroyed in some way or another. And another point that is made over and over again is that no one can face up to the reality of the situation he is actually in, for example. Among those in the portrait gallery are major modes, a sad, dislocated, scared, phony, martinette, who ends up running the mail censoring program in Italy, a paperwork major trying to be a warrior. And when he walks in the gallery, when he walks in the gallery, he can only complain, yes, I'm out of my time, I'm a gentleman from Virginia, such must suffer in Naples in August 1944. And then there is how, young lieutenant, 29, who was one critic, I think John Aldridge, but actually I forget, has said, seeks values in the world in which all values have been

stripped away. So by the time Hal gets to Naples, he can't really take it anymore. You will notice that I'm using the banum edition of the book, not the harpers. It's arriving in Naples. Now he understood the difference between being and no being there in the silence and the heat and the mess of Naples at high noon. The lovely, the cruel and the opportunist were all entombed here in this shambles around the Bay of Naples. Some self trembling and weary and reduced to a zero before the horror of it saw the aftermath. He saw clearly what he had been feeling dimly for 29 years, but to human life and striving, there's no point, whatever, that we are all of us bugs, writhing under the eye of God, begging to be squashed, that as evidence of our mortality, all we leave behind us is the green way of a fly that is swatted to death.

Well, in Naples of 1944, Hal simply withdraws, like Frederick Henry, and if they're well to arms, he makes a separate piece. Unlike Frederick Henry, he goes to bed alone and he looks at the ceiling. They take him away. He's insane. They took him in an ambulance to the 45th General Hospital, where he was given a knockout drop for paranoia and delusions of persecution. A nurse there was a first lieutenant. She said to the psychiatrist of Major, Gee, sir, nuts are all so individual. They're not ordinary people. Now you take that tall, good looking one who thinks he's Jesus Christ. Why if he grew a beard? I'd believe he was. All hell had been looking for was something to love, and he couldn't find it. Then there are father Donovan and chaplain Bascom, Catholic and Baptist, mutually suspicious,

mutually tolerant, and gratuitously killed in a world-gone man. Then there's Luela. No Luela was wonderful. I recognized her immediately. She's the Red Cross nurse with a mission, a siberite among the savages, hopelessly unaware of the difference between what is needed in the Naples of 1944 in the middle of a war and what she actually is. Luela is from life. This creature who can take her clothes, mind, full of assorted prejudices, few lie ideas into a city like Naples in fall of 44 or late summer of 44 where life was at its absolute rawest and roughest, and somehow managed to wash it all away with a hot bath, a cold drink, and a second all.

Luela is one of those incredible blind virgins who somehow draw life from the fact that other people are bleeding to death. This tells Luela's story from Luela's own point of view, so the impact, of course, has to be ironic and it is very powerful. Then there's Mama, the Italian woman who runs a special sort of bar, the customers of which she adores, really adores, because they are so much more sensitive and gentle than the other men of the Allies. Mama is so unaware, so unconscious of what is going on, that when a nasty homosexual brawl breaks out in this Cambridge tea room with its heady wine, she dissolves an absurd and effectiveness because she doesn't even know what is going on. See all of these illustrate a kind of either unconscious or willful ignoring of reality. There is Lieutenant Mo Schulman, Mo is an infantry platoon leader, he's come to the gallery

from the hospital, he will soon be on his way back to his company near Florence, he knows he's going to die, he does, Schulman is cold, bitter, romantic, tender. I recognize him immediately, Ernest Hemingway has been writing about him for 40 years. This is sometimes criticized for being a little overdramatic for overstating the case a little, but it seems to me that psychologically Mo Schulman's case and attitude are identical, not actually, but psychologically, to that of a young British pilot, maybe you know him Richard Hope Hillary, who won the 10th of August, 1941, during the Battle of Britain, flew out to sea with twenty-four other airplanes, all piloted by members of what had been

in the old days, the University Flying Club. Eight came back, Hillary wasn't one of them, they fished him out of the sea out of the channel, horribly burned, and for two years the doctors worked on him and passed him up enough, so he looked almost like a human being again. They had to redo the tire inside of an airplane so he could do it, but Hillary flew again, and you know what happened, he flew almost immediately to his death. The death was in Schulman and the death was in Hillary, are the same. You may be aesthetically unsatisfactory in talking about this thing, but you can't write about anything that hasn't happened, I think, when you're talking about war. And there are others, now we'll go through them all, anyone who has ever been really mixed up in a war will recognize them, some of them are strong, most of us are weak, but there isn't anything you can say about any of this story that's very dignified or has much

virtue, burns in a way tries to make up for this and the promenades. He tries to evoke the air of the places where he is stationed, and in a sense his approach is primitiveistic, I mean he sees the plain people of Casablanca, of Algiers and Naples, as somehow pure than the warrior, the noble savage business. I don't agree with this at all, but it's not really relevant to what I want to talk about here. What is relevant is that he seems to be trying to set in the early promenades anyway, is that even in the most awful of human conditions, even in war, somehow love and human dignity can survive, and maybe if you're lucky, be victorious. Of course, in some of the promenades we simply get interesting observations about American military life, and I think a couple of them are worth mentioning, for instance he talks

about officers. American officers falling to three easy slots of the donut machine, feminine ones, I mean those who registered life and are acted upon by become motherly, fussy, and on the receiving him from the G.I.'s under them. If they rule it all, it's by the power of their gentleness, which can fasten a G.I. in tight bonds, once his will consents and admires. Secondly, there are the violent and the aggressive, who asked commissioned officers assume a male and fatherly part, ranging from drunken paws who whale their sons on Saturday nights, to the male and nursing tenderness of an athletic coach. At these most masculine men aren't always the best officers in the crisis or showdown. Third, there are those commissioned non-entities who, as civilians, were male stenographers, file clerks, and x-ray technicians. They are neither masculine nor feminine. They move through the army in polyp groups of their own sort. They're never alone. I can be in the same

room with such officers without feeling the presence of anything or anyone. Touching their personalities is like poking in a dish of lemon jello. They smile and assume another shape. There's not an awful lot of that kind of thing. Very early on in the book, Burns realizes the fracturing nature of going overseas in time of war, the essential disassociation of the man in the armed forces from the society through which he moves. But he does fall in love with Naples as soon as he gets there. Immediately, completely, apparently in Burns case, forever. I remember that Italian used to amuse me till it caught me in its silken web. I remember how kind the neopolitans were to me when I was learning it, the sweetness of their grammatical corrections, the look of joy on an Italian's face when you address him in his tongue, however poorly. Italian is the most sociable and Christian language in the world. But this kind of thing can't go on for very long. The corruption

of war is eventually too much for him. And he gets down to talking what the gallery is really about. The fact that there's a lot of difference between the ideal and the reality and more specifically, one of the reasons is that a war dehumanizes almost all of us. Some of this you're familiar with. He says, I remember that my heart finally broken Naples, not over a girl or a thing, but over an idea. And it was over the idea that he realized that maybe we Americans weren't so much after all. We were nice enough guys in our own country, most of us. But when we got overseas, we couldn't resist the temptation to turn a dollar or two at the expense of people who were already down. I can speak only of Italy for I didn't see France or Germany. I'm sure some of you did. But with our Hollywood ethics and our radio network reasoning, we didn't take the trouble to think out the fact

that the war was supposed to be against fascism, not against every man, woman, and child in Italy. But then a modern war is total. Armies on the battlefield are simply a remnant from the old kind of war. In the 1944 war, everyone's hand ended by being against everyone else's. Civilization was already dead, but nobody bothered to admit it to himself. I remember too that in honest American in August 1944 was almost as hard to find as the neapolitan who owned up to having been a fascist. See, it burns after all, it's not entirely blind. The fact that there are two sides of this question, all Germans and Italians work for the post office during the war. I don't know why, but most Americans had a blanket hatred of all Italians. They figured it this way. These ginsos have made war on us so it doesn't matter what we do to them. Boost their prices, shatter their economy, and shack up with their women. I imagine there's some fallacy in my reasoning here. I guess I was asking for the impossible. This was war, and I wanted it to be conducted with honor. I suppose

that's as phony reasoning as talking about an honest murder or a respectable rape, and so on. And he's right. The gallery is really John Horne Burns' metaphor for the world. For the situation the world was in in 1944, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, wherever. And he really says as much on the last page of the book. In August 1944, everyone in Naples, sooner or later, found his way into this place and became like a picture on the wall of the museum. They were all there in the Galleria Umberto in August 1944. They were all in Naples, where something in them got shaken up. They'd never be the same. Either dead or changed somehow. And these people who became living portraits in this gallery were synecticies for most of the people anywhere in the world. Outside

the Galleria Umberto is a sea of Naples, and Naples is on the bay in the Torinian Sea on the Mediterranean. This sea is a center of human life and thought, wonderful and sad things have come out of Italy. And they came back there in August 1944, where they were dots in a circle that never stops. So really, for all its gentleness, for all its so occasional lyricism, maybe sometimes in the gallery there's too much lyricism. The gallery, by John Hornburns, is a desperate play against war. And it seems to me not a bad American perspective. This is N-E-T National Educational Television.

Thank you.