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

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, a 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 Scott 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 that 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 their bets at the literary racetrack. 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 that it's favorable. I am, as you know, talking about Norman Mailer. Mailer was born in 1924, three years after John Dispassus published the first important book about the First World War, Three Soldiers, and five years before Hemingway published the novel we talked about last time, A Farewell to Arms. When Mailer was only 16 years old, he read and was excited by Dispassus,

finest book USA, and Mailer himself has written that he does not think his own generation has written anything nearly so good. Mailer himself, in fact, sometimes sounds a little like Dispassus, and he uses some of the same technical devices to make his story move. Then Mailer 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, Advertisements for Myself, that he is a great admirer of Hemingway, though he complains of Ernest Hemingway's non -thinking heroes. Since we're 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's left us marooned in the nervous boredom of a world, which finally he did not try hard enough to change. After Mailer 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. Reinhardt published The Naked and

the Dead in 1948. Norman Mailer was twenty -four years old. No, he was twenty -five when it was published, twenty -four 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 Dispassus in Three Soldiers, Mailer uses the army as a microcosm of society. And I think that looking at The Naked and the Dead and maybe some of Mailer'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 Amour Cooper's Leather Stalking has had, you know, a cluster of continuing characteristics. First place, he's always brave. And in the second place, he exists on the edge of society. If 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 unintellectual 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 a Puritan society gone promiscuous, he's a promiscuous Puritan. But he's not the marrying kind. He is sensitive, but his emotions are very carefully sheathed. 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 passed through. And the last sentence of Mailer's 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 succeeds 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

Anapapai, and part of the time, Mount Anaka, on this island, the most threatening physical barrier to man. The story is the invasion of Anapapai 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 describer of persons and places. The technique, the scene of the novel, alternates between division headquarters, or the command post of division headquarters, and a single platoon out on the front doing the actual fighting and dying. Now command post and platoon contain parallel characters, in a sense, or perhaps

putting it vulgarly, 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 height, well fleshed, with a rather handsome suntan 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, impotervable, out coldly above the short, blunted, and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide, thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge 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 as 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, I think it sounds a little familiar, I think. As a 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 Croft. 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 gelat 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 the Sergeant, is the non -intellectual equivalent of general comings. What the general does by having someone cut a set of orders Sergeant Croft does with his fists and with a gun. Technically, he's an expert, but he's cruel, and his urge to

absolute power is analogous to Cummings' urge to absolute power. Croft never accepts any given situation. He never says anything is impossible. He thinks he can do something about it. He too is absolutely ruthless. Then there is Red Valson. Everything about him was bony and knobbed. 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. Valson, for me anyway, was reminiscent of Chris Field and just passed those three soldiers. Valson is a rebel, a little bit like Hearn, in his sense. He's the touted, non -conformist we're supposed to have so few of. The trouble is that Red Valson is a rebel without a cause, so it 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 Valson 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, Mailer ultimately defeats these two because they are

authoritarian, 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 it. 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 Valson share them a little too, but they seem pale behind the general and the Sergeant. It seems to me that the naked and the 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, a 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 Valson 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 are 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

less important, that the Romantic spirit has dried up, that there is almost no shame today like the terror before the Romantic. That is, 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. Whatever 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 coterminous with Palm Springs.

And the point is that, as with the army in the naked and the dead, Desert Door in the Deer Park becomes a synecdoche for society as a whole. 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, but by implication in the society, between appearance and reality, between illusion and actuality. I mean, between the surface calm of our society and the joy ride we're all taking toward destruction. Between the assumption of complete freedom or some freedom of action in 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 rule book 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. And Ralph Waldo Emerson knew it. 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 Dear Park, the Dear Park, is Charles Francis Eitel, a distinguished Hollywood director who fights the organization for a while, but eventually gives in. Now, this is a standard situation in the 20th century novel. But the truth is that the real hero of the Dear Park is Marion Faye, a young man who decided at the age of 21 to become a procure. I mean, he's a good deal more like Cummings and Croft than he is like

Hearn or Valsal. And Marion Faye is the hero, the natural hero of the Dear 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 a 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 instincts 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. It's 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 Anipaupai and Maunanaka 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, beards, 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 priapism, but there he is out there on the frontier of the mind, a love 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.

This is NET, National Educational Television. Let's go back to August 1944. It's 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 Marianas -Turkey shoot when Admiral Mitchers, carriers and planes brought off one of the greatest 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 Coil 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 the Galleria Umberto Primo. It's a cross between a railroad station and a church. You think you're in a museum till 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 subdividing 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 sibilance. By moonlight, 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. But 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. As a 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, 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 Dispass's The Three Soldiers, Ernest Hemingway's The Farewell to Arms, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. But we could have talked about others. We could have talked about Gore Vidal's

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 Hersey's A Bell for Adano, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945. And I'm sure you remember this book. There was a major Giappolo 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, a little between the conquered and the conqueror. It is, it's 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 Conquest. This is the tale of the rise and fall of a fascist hoodlum. 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, this person, this occupying soldier is, is mentioned both sympathetically and destructively in a number of works by foreign authors. Curzio Malaparte works on the old theme of American innocence in the skin. Bone Ruko Shishi in Yosemosa gives us an American GI whose, whose goodness is, is pretty much synonymous with stupidity. And he has an American lieutenant, whom I 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 Moravia's Two

Women. This section dwells on the American army as it fights and occupies moving northward from Salerno to Rome. Moravia's narrative, 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, 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 Leghorn in 1953. He was 36 years old. He had been born. He was born in Andover, Massachusetts in 1916. He went to Andover. Then he went on to Harvard as a 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 Fethala to Tunis, finally to Naples. But what he did was sit out the war, reading Prisoner of War Mail.

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 burns best book. Like Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, it concerns itself with the power of war for total evil. Now, 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. Burns' method is quite different. His method

is to select a number of special cases, give us some details, and let us, if we will, the significance of the whole. Now, the frame, as 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 Vidala to Algiers to Naples. And this is about all the form there is. There just isn't any plot to the book, but obviously, I suppose, obviously, anyway,

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 Mottes, a sad, dislocated, scared, phony, martinette, who ends up running the male censoring program in Italy, a paperwork major trying to be a warrior. And when he walks in

the gallery, when he walks in the Galleria, he can only complain, guess I'm out of my time. I'm a gentleman from Virginia. Such must suffer in Naples in August 1944. And then there is Hal, 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. Well, by the time Hal gets to Naples, he can't really take it anymore. You will notice that I'm using the Bannum edition of the book, Not the Harper's. It's arriving in Naples. Now we 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, himself trembling and weary and reduced to a zero before the horror of it saw the aftermath.

He saw clearly what he'd been feeling dimly for 29 years, that 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 the Naples of 1944, Hal simply withdraws. Like Frederick Henry, in a farewell to arms, he makes a separate peace. 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 a

major, Gee, sir, nuts are also individual. They're not ordinary people. Now you take that tall, good -looking one who thinks he's Jesus Christ. Well, if he grew a beard, I'd believe he was. All Hal had been looking for was something to love and he couldn't find it. Then there are Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascombe, Catholic and Baptist, mutually suspicious, mutually tolerant, gratuitously killed in a world gone mad. Then there's Luella. You know Luella was wonderful. I recognized her immediately. She's the Red Cross nurse with a mission, a sibirite 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. Luella is from life. This creature who can take her closed mind,

full of assorted prejudices, futile ideas into a city like Naples in the fall of 1944 or late summer of 1944 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. Luella is one of those incredible blind virgins who somehow draw life from the fact that other people are bleeding to death. Burns tells Luella's story from Luella'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 in absurd ineffectiveness 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 recognized him immediately. Ernest Hemingway has been writing about him for 40 years. Burns is sometimes criticized for being a little over dramatic, for overstating the case a little. 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 on the 10th of August 1941, during the Battle of Britain, flew out to sea with 24 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 patched him up enough so he looked almost like a human being again. They had to redo the entire 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 wish of Schulman and the death

wish of 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. I won't 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. Bernstein, in a way, tries to make up for this in the promenades. He tries to evoke the air of the places where he is stationed. And in a sense, his approach is primitivistic. mean, he sees the plain people of Casablanca, of Algiers, and Naples as somehow purer than the warrior, you know, 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 say 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. Now, 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 doughnut machine. The feminine ones, I mean, those who register life and are acted upon by it, become motherly, fussy, and on the receiving end from the GIs under them. If they rule it all, it's by the power of their gentleness, which can fasten a GI in tight bonds once his will consents and admires. Secondly, there are the violent and the aggressive, who, as commissioned officers, assume a male and fatherly

part, ranging from drunk and pause, who wail their sons on Saturday nights to the male and missing male and nursing tenderness of an athletic coach. Yet 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, phial 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 silk and web. I remember how kind the Neapolitan's 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 about 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 broke in 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. And 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 an honest American in August 1944 was almost as hard to find as a 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 to 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 guinzos 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 Horn 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 synecdochies for most of the people anywhere in the world. Outside the Galleria Umberto is the Sea of Naples, and Naples is on the bay in the Turinian 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 there were dots in a circle that never stops. So really, for all its gentleness, for all its

occasional lyricism, maybe sometimes in the gallery there's too much lyricism. The gallery by John Horn Burns is a desperate plea against war. And it seems to me not a bad American perspective. you for