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 | Главная » 2010 » Август » 23 » Twenty-seven years ago I was fortunate enough . .
20:01 Twenty-seven years ago I was fortunate enough . . |
The artillery tonight started it all in my mind, but how much it is like a generative process except that its end is so different.. . Twenty-seven years ago I was fortunate enough to be associated with the publication of John Dos Passos' Three Soldiers. In no year since have I felt the same surge of excitement for a war novel -- not until the manuscript of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was readied for publication.
There is no direct parallel between the two books. The world has changed and toughened since Dos Passos wrote. The Naked and the Dead is a tougher book, one that reflects the variables that time and change have introduced. But, like its distinguished predecessor, Norman Mailer's book is essentially the story of men themselves rather than of their sometimes purposeless fighting. These men who tear their hearts out trying to capture an island from the Japanese are the product of the years they have lived. They have been formed by their wives, their sweethearts, their farms, their jobs, their colleges. To each, war has been an activating agent.
I believe you will never forget these men -- frightened men, sometimes obscene, humorous, sick, scabrous, full of yearning for home as it was, or home as it seems in memory. They are men in war, but like most of us, they do not know where they are going; they know only their own past.
Because I believe The Naked and the Dead is a great novel I can say that if you have read Thomas Boyd's Through the Wheat, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, or Three Soldiers, you cannot afford to pass by this astonishing performance by a young man who at twenty-five knows more about the core of man than many a writer of twice his years.
Stanley W. Rinehart Jr.
Rinehart & Company, Inc.
New York Toronto
Grateful thanks are expressed to the publishers and copyright owners
for permission to reprint lyrics from the following songs:
Betty Co-ed, by Paul Fogarty and Rudy Vallee.
Copyright, 1930, by Carl Fischer, Inc., New York, and used with their permission.
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Words by E. Y. Harburg, music by Jay Gorney.
Copyright, 1932, by Harms, Inc., and used with the permission of Music Publishers Holding Corporation.
Faded Summer Love, words and music by Phil Baxter.
Copyright, 1931, by Leo Feist, Inc., and used with their permission.
I Love a Parade, words by Ted Koehler, music by Harold Arlen.
Copyright, 1931, by Harms, Inc., and used with the permission of Music Publishers Holding Corporation.
Show Me I'm just jotting some rolex air king automatic watch memorandum."
Now he turned to the first blank page in his journal, held his pencil, and thought for a moment or two. Any number of new ideas and impressions had evolved on the trip back from the battery, and he waited, knowing his mind would produce them again. Once more he experienced the smooth ovoid surface of the lanyard handle. Like holding the beast at the end of a string, he thought.
The image set off a round of ideas. He inscribed the date at the head of the page, rolled his pencil once between his fingertips, and began to write.
It's a not entirely unproductive conceit to consider weapons as being something more than machines, as having personalities, perhaps, likenesses to the human. The artillery tonight started it all in my mind, but how much it is like a generative process except that its end is so different.
The imagery was a little unfamiliar to him; he noted the sexual symbols with some distaste, thought of DiVecchio.
The howitzer like a queen bee I suppose being nurtured by the common drones. The phallus-shell that rides through a shining vagina of steel, soars through the sky, and then ignites into the earth. The earth as the poet's image of womb-mother, I suppose.
Even the language for artillery commands, the obviously coarse connotations. Perhaps it satisfies an unconscious satisfaction in us serving the Death-Mother. Spread trails, level your bubbles, lay the piece. I recall that training class I inspected, the amusement of the trainees at that terminology, and the junior officer saying, "If you can't put the shell in that big hole, I don't know what you'll do when you get older." Perhaps it's a notion worth analyzing. Any psychoanalytical work on it?
But there are other weapons too. These booby traps in Europe that the Germans use, or even our own experience at Hill 318 on Motome. Dangerous things like a plague of vermin, squat black ugly little things, undermining the men with nausea and horror until the act of straightening a picture might make one weep -- from anticipation of the explosion or the fear that a few dark roaches might dart across the wall from the space one has uncovered.
The tank and truck like the heavy ponderous animals of the jungle, buck and rhinoceri, the machine gun as the chattering gossip snarling many lives at once? Or the rifle, the quiet personal arm, the extension of a man's power. Can't we relate all of them?
And for the obverse, in battle, men are c and Toyaku in tiffany and co bracelets front of us."
He conducted the pivoting operation with brilliance. There were many problems involved. He had to move his front line, stabilized at last, through a ninety-degree arc to the left, and it meant that, while the flank companies on the left who could anchor themselves by the sea would have to move only a half mile or so, the companies on the right would be obliged to wheel through a six-mile arc of jungle, and would be exposed through every hour of their march.
He had two alternatives. The safer plan was to have the battalion on his right flank drive straight inland until it reached the mountains. A temporary line could then be drawn up on a diagonal, and slowly he could have the right wing turn and drive along parallel to the mountains until his lines faced Toyaku. But that would take several days, possibly a week, and there might be a great deal of resistance. The other project, far more dangerous, was to move his right flank in a direct thrust to the mountain cliffs which abutted the Toyaku Line. That way, the entire front could be pivoted in a day.
But it was very dangerous. Toyaku undoubtedly would have a striking force ready to knife around the edge of the advancing troops, and turn their flank. During the entire day he would be pivoting his troops, the General would have an undefended right flank. He took the chance, and turned it into an advantage. On the day of the operation he withdrew a battalion from the road and kept them in reserve. He gave instructions to the commanders of the companies on the right flank to advance through the jungle without concerning themselves with their flank or rear. Their mission was merely to make the six-mile march through no man's land, and establish a defense position by that night at the mountain cliffs a mile away from the outposts of the Toyaku Line.
The General guessed correctly. Toyaku sneaked a company of Japanese troops around the flank while the movement was in progress, but the General met them with his reserve battalion, and encircled them almost completely. For several days an extremely confused battle went on in the jungle behind the division's new lines, but by the end of that time, all but a few stragglers of the company Toyaku had dispatched into the division's rear had been killed. There were more snipers behind the lines, and once or twice a pack train was ambushed, but these were minor incidents. The General did not concern himself with that. After the pivotingbut cheap replica rolex mentioning no names theah's a couple of the big boys kinda like the way they work against the international plot, you know the one the rich kikes got all figured out to bring us communism.
On the payroll at ten dollars a week even though he is only working nights. The office is on the top of a two-story loft, a desk and a room filled with pamphlets and magazines tied in bundles. Behind the desk there is a large banner with a cross and an interlocking C and U.
Christians United, that's the name of this here outfit, Gallagheh, CHRISTIANS. . . UNITED, you get it, we're out to break the goddam conspiracy, what this country needs is some blood, y'afraid of blood? the big guy behind the desk asks. He has pale-brown eyes like panes of dull glass. We gotta staart mobilizing and get ready, the International Jews is tryin' to get us to war, an' we gotta get them first, ya see the way they take away all the jobs, we let it go an' we won't have a fuggin chance, they're high up but we got our friends too.
He sells magazines on street corners (READ ABOUT THE BIG FOREIGN PLOT! GET FATHER KILIAN'S MAGAZINE AND LEARN THE TRUTH!), he goes to secret meetings, drills for an hour a week in a sporting club which uses old Springfields.
What I wanta know is when we gonna staart, I wanta see some action.
Y' got to take it easy, Gallagheh, it takes time, we gotta get everything set up and then we can come out in the open, we're gonna get this country run right, you come in with us at the bottom and you're in.
Yeah. (At night sometimes he cannot sleep, the thick lusting dreams, the quick ache in his chest.) I swear I'm gonna bust up if we don't. . . we don't get goin'.
But. . .
The girl friend at last, the hormones no longer distilled into vinegar.
You know, Gallagher says to Mary, you're really a swell kid, I. . . I get a bang outa talkin' to ya.
This is a swell night, Roy. (Looking off across the beach, searching the lights of Boston Harbor, which flicker like star formations in an uncertain clouded sky. She picks up a handful of sand, and pours it on her shoe, the glare from the bonfire making her hair seem golden. Her slim long face, freckled and sad, seems pleasant, almost lovely.)
Ya want me to toast a hot dog?
Let's just talk, Roy.
Around them, the couples with whom they have come have deserted the fire and are giggling in the shadowed hollows of the beach. A girl screams in mock fright, and he strains at the noise; uncomforix chanel handbags for sale months after a crane crushes his pickup
truck and his body, self-made millionaire Edgar
Freemantle launches into a new life. His wife
asked for a divorce after he stabbed her with a
plastic knife and tried to strangle her one-handed
(he lost his arm and for a time his rational brain
in the accident). He divides his wealth into four
equal parts for his wife, his two daughters and
himself and leaves Minnesota for Duma Key, a
stunningly beautiful, eerily remote stretch of the
Florida coast where he has rented a house. All of
the land on Duma Key, and the few houses, are
owned by Elizabeth Eastlake, an octogenarian whose
tragic and mysterious past unfolds perilously.
When Edgar begins to paint, his formidable talent
seems to come from someplace outside him, and the
paintings, many of them, have a power that cannot
be controlled.
Soon the ghosts of Elizabeth's childhood return,
and the damage of which they are capable is truly
terrifying.
Like Lisey's Story, this is a novel about the
tenacity of love and the perils of creativity. Its
supernatural elements will have King fans reeling.
3
DUMA KEY
By Stephen King
Copyright (c) 2008 by Stephen King
For Barbara Ann and Jimmy
Memory... is an internal rumor.
- GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is more than love and pleasure,
I came here to dig for treasure.
If you want to play you gotta pay
You know it's always been that way,
We all came to dig for treasure.
- SHARK PUPPY
4
How to Draw a Picture (I)
Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be
paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We
call it white because we need a word, but its true
name is nothing. Black is the absence of light,
but white is the absence of memory, the color of
can't remember.
How do we remember to remember? That's a question
I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key,
often in the small hours of the morning, looking
up into the absence of light, remembering absent
friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think
about the horizon. You have to establish the
horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple
enough act, you might say, but any act that remakes
the world is heroic. Or so I've come to
believe.
Imagine a little girl, hardly more than a baby.
She fell from a carriage almost ninety years ago,
struck her head on a stone, and forgot everything.
Not just her name; everything! And then one day
she recalled just enough to pick up a pencil and
make that first denim louis vuitton handbag hesitant
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