by James Jones
Wilson’s mention of the rumours and the gripes brought back pictures into Johnny’s mind teeming with men, bitter men who griped, not because the custom was to gripe but because if they didn’t let out their hatred that way they would turn upon themselves and bite themselves like rattlesnakes and die of their own venom; unhappy men who lived by rumour because they had no other force to tie their lives to. Johnny remembered suddenly that he was a soldier in uniform, and that he was over-the-hill, and that in time he must go back.
“I’ve been doing a little composing, Johnny,” Wilson told him. “Nothing much. Just setting some poems I like to music. But I’m feeling my way around, in the dark sort of. Maybe when this silly war is over, I’ll be able to do something. I’ve seen some things in the past two years that I’d like to be able to say in music.”
Johnny watched Wilson light a cigaret. As kids, there had been a quality about Wilson that had always made Johnny feel loutish and uncouth, made him feel big and brutish and dumb, though actually he had been no bigger or stronger than Will. The feeling was still there. Johnny felt as if his fingers were all thumbs beside the superb coordination of Will’s body. He envied Will his relaxed and easy-going poise. He envied Will his outward calm. There was some inner conviction in Will that gave him an ability to take things as they came Johnny could feel the calm power that radiated from Will’s personality.
He and Will had lived side by side as children. They had been seated next to each other in almost every class in school, clear through high school. As far back as Johnny could remember, Wilson’s mother had dominated Wilson’s life with an iron-clad hand. He could still hear, her sharp insistent voice calling, “Will-l-l-l-son! You come home now. You have to practice.” He actually believed they could hear her a block away. Even as a small boy, a frown would pucker Will’s little pug-dog face, and he would say reluctantly, “Gee, I gotta go home. I’d sure like to stay and play some more, but I gotta do my practicing.” And he would trudge off home, his feet dragging, his hands jammed into his pockets. Wilson had never rebelled or fought back. He had always done what his mother told him; he was a “good son.” But Johnny knew there was more to it than that. The same situation of the mother’s dominance of the son occurred hundreds of times in every generation in every town. And almost invariably, it was a symbol for the failure of the young man who was dominated. The mother tied the boy to her apron strings, and the boy could never fight loose, from the moment he learned about sex, he turned his knowledge and twisted it around his mother; he fell in love with his mother, and—even like Stendhal—dreamed about sleeping with her and being her lover. He measured other women, as he grew older, alongside the yardstick of his mother, and none of them ever quite measured up. That was common knowledge, everyday psychology, known by laymen who never heard of the Oedipus complex. And yet the mothers continued to bind their sons with apron strings, in order to receive the pure kind of love their husbands could not give them, and never was there a surer recipe for failure. It made homosexuals, it made misfits who could not adjust to life, and still the mothers continued their ravenous eating of their young.
It was supposed to make great artists of men, but Johnny knew that such a superstition was untrue. A man could not become great at anything unless he found some way to combat the absorption of his soul. Most men did it by fighting and by rebellion, and by the time they had fought free, their freedom was lost in their own rebellion. But Wilson had never needed to fight free. Somewhere along the line as a child, he had learned some inner secret, had learned to tap some hidden wellspring of strength that other men did not know about. Wilson had found some way to be mentally free of his mother’s dominance, and so he could afford to ignore his physical dominance. It was this same source of spiritual knowledge that puzzled Johnny. He could feel its presence, but he could never grasp it.
Johnny shook his head and lit a cigaret, himself, noticing how awkwardly he did it compared to Will.
“I’ve got a Negro friend down at camp,” Will was saying, “Who’s doing some fine work. He’s from Terre Haute; I met him over a piano and we got to talking about Terre Haute. He’s really got a lot of talent. I’d like for you to meet him. He’s already finished a concerto since I’ve known him. His ear is so fine he doesn’t even need a piano to compose. He does it on paper right out of his head. I’ve been trying that some and I’m getting on to it. If I can do that, I’ll be able to work no matter where I am. I’ll need that knowledge, because I expect to be sent overseas as soon as I get myself kicked out of ASTP. My Negro friend has been helping me. We work together a lot.”
Wilson laughed. “I almost got beat up by a couple of guys who were in my barracks, because I ran around with this Negro boy. They told me I couldn’t associate with him, and that if I didn’t quit being friendly to him, they’d beat me up.” He laughed again, pleasantly.
Johnny’s face tightened up and became taut. Wilson was surprised to see how such subtle changes of expression could make his face into a diabolic mask. “What did you do?” Johnny asked in a flat voice.
“Nothing,” said Will. “I just talked to them. I told them in as calm a voice as I could muster that I’d kill them both if they ever laid a finger on me or the Negro. I wouldn’t of course; I wouldn’t know what to do but run if they started to beat me up. But my bluff worked; I impressed them enough so that they’ve left me alone. You wouldn’t think sane, intelligent men would act that way, would you?”
“No,” said Johnny. “Nobody could be intelligent and feel like that.”
“Well, they’re supposed to be intelligent,” Will said quietly. “They seem to be pretty smart. I suppose they just don’t think much.”
Fanny pulled the car into Sandy’s driveway, and they got out. Johnny’s face remained taut and his eyes cold and hard. Wilson had never seen him look like that before, and he was sorry he had ever mentioned the affair. He wondered what Johnny was thinking to make his face look so.
Actually, Johnny was not thinking anything. Several visions were in his mind, swirlingly mingled together so that he couldn’t have sorted one from the other. One memory was a scene from a novel by Jim Tully, a scene which told in brutal photographic words of the lynching and burning of a Negro. Another was a scene he had himself witnessed in Honolulu; three MPs beating a helpless drunken soldier unmercifully with their loaded sticks. The other memory he had also seen; three American Infantrymen, carrying a sick and helpless Jap prisoner, stripped naked, carrying him back to the rear. They carried him face down; the Jap was sick with dysentery and the excreta dribbled from him in a yellow stream; every time the three soldiers came near a rock in their path, they would bounce the Jap viciously against it either on his chest or on his face or perhaps his crotch. If Johnny had been asked to voice his thought, he would have mumbled something about it being an inhuman perverse thing that made strong men, powerful in number, enjoy oppressing and injuring a helpless defenseless man, all of which would have sounded rather trite and platitudinous to a listener.
Fanny led them to the front door where she knocked several times. Sandy came and let them in. She took them through the house to the sunroom where George Schwartz sat sullen and defensively in a deep chair, his right pants leg pinned up and his crutches leaning against the wall behind him. On the floor of the room were two large cardboard boxes filled with books, wrapping paper, and cut cord lying in disarray around them.
“You’ll have to excuse the way things look, Fanny,” Sandy said, with what might have been a touch of irony. “I just got some books in today from Indianapolis. George and I have been giving them the once-over.” She moved a stack of books from the divan to make room and set them haphazardly in a corner. Johnny and Wilson sat down on the vacated divan near George’s chair. Johnny was half lost in his own chain of thoughts begun by Wilson’s remark about the Negro, and Wilson seemed his usual easy self, but both of them partially felt that feeling of awkwardness that belongs to just-arrived guests who as yet don’t know what to
do with themselves or what to say.
The room was a small one with a low ceiling that made it seem smaller than it was, in comparison to the larger and higher-ceilinged other rooms. It had the effect of a hidden private alcove. There was one big easy chair, an antique love-seat, and a big couch-bed covered with a green and cream plaid that looked soft and comfortably mussable. There were small windows along two sides, and the other two were covered with shelves of books. Bookcases had been built in over the couch to form a tiny canopy at the head which concealed two fluorescent reading lamps. The other wall was covered with bookshelves to the low ceiling, leaving only room for the door into the next room. It was a comfortable, lived-in room, a hodge-podge with no pretension toward “style” or “period.” It was a room people walked into and made themselves at home, at the same time feeling self-conscious about doing so.
Fanny leaned over the boxes sitting in the center of the floor and inspected book titles without much interest.
“Oh, that’s all right, Sandy,” she answered in her rough friendly Southerner’s voice. Fanny had seen Sandy’s books before; the whole house was filled with them as this room. Sandy’s mania for books was a frequent topic whenever her name came up at a party. It was always mentioned that Sandy probably had as many books as the Endymion Carnegie Library. Fanny could never get over her amazement at the thought of so many books. It wasn’t natural to spend so much money for books.
“Do you want a drink?” Sandy asked them. “I’ve been trying to keep George off the liquor. He’s been hitting the bottle too much, but I don’t guess one more will hurt him.” Sandy winked at George and laughed.
“Yes, by God!” said George with a surly grin. “I’ve been trying to get a drink all day. If you people hadn’t come down here, I probably never would’ve got one.” George’s voice was heavy with jocularity, as if he were making an effort that didn’t quite take. His grin, too, was heavy and seemed about to fall apart from its own weight. There was a false belligerence in his manner.
George was long-boned and big. His head was long and meaty and thin-lipped. His hands were large and heavy. He seemed to radiate physical strength, but there were circles under his eyes and he moved the stump of his leg, amputated just below the knee, gingerly, as if it hurt him and he was still feeling around, trying to get used to its being gone. He was a fine specimen of the American athlete, and so made a rather sad sight, like a pianist minus his hands.
Johnny assented, and Wilson also, to Johnny’s surprise, accepted a drink. Sandy rose and went into the kitchen to mix them. Johnny, knowing how disgusted and embarrassed he felt when some fool tried to be sympathetic about his own limp, tuned to George and began to talk, trying hard to ignore George’s missing leg. He and George felt a sense of intimacy from which the others were excluded, and they talked about combat using terms and phrases that the others, even Wilson, did not understand.
Abstractedly, Johnny was surprised by Sandy Marion. He had expected some heavily literary female with gray or even white hair and horse-like hips, a woman frustrated by her own life who had turned to being a littérateur. Sandy was nothing like these. She looked startlingly young, and her long loose hair was black as coal with only a single gray hair here and there. Her body was that of a young woman of twenty-five. But even more startling, there was some youthfulness of spirit about her that made her seem to be enjoying with relish all the world of experience that a young person suddenly discovers is at his command. She seemed to be more contemporary of the two young men than of Fanny and George.
She came back with four drinks, handed them around without taking one herself, and sat down on the end of the large couch-like bed beside Fanny.
“Did George tell you about his leg?” she asked quietly. “Kirby’s going to do a story on it for him. Do you remember Kirby Atkinson?” She looked at Johnny and Will with a quick smile. Johnny remembered Kirby vaguely as a tall, gangling boy several years older than himself who never talked much; he nodded to her question, wondering if she had called attention to George’s leg on purpose. The remark should have been out of place, but oddly enough, when she said it, everything became less strained; the tension of trying to ignore George’s missing leg relaxed.
“He’s a fine musician.” Wilson said in his rich pleasing voice. “I didn’t know he was writing.”
“Is Kirby Atkinson a writer?” Fanny asked with surprise.
Sandy smiled. “Well, he’s struggling at it. If he isn’t, he’s having a lot of fun.”
“Why don’t you show Sandy your poem?” Fanny asked Johnny. “Johnny’s a writer, too,” she told Sandy.
“I’m not a writer,” Johnny said quickly. Fanny sounded like a kid who had the biggest agate on the block.
“I’d like to see it,” Sandy said. “If you want to show it.” She looked at Johnny’s perpetually dour face. No one would have taken him for another would-be writer. It was an amazing thing how so many of these boys in the war turned to something like that for expression. Sandy had seen it a number of times. When a man was bound up externally so that he had no release for his individuality, he would always turn to some form of art for release. She remembered a remark Maugham had made in one of his recent anthologies, about the great amount of poetry that had come out of the last war as a result of the moral shock of the war. She was more inclined to think it because the men who wrote it were unhappy and had no other way of getting rid of it.
“I liked it,” Will said, “when I read it. Why don’t you show it to them? It’s on the war, too.”
“Sure,” said George roughly. “Let’s see it.” George acquired a quick interest upon finding the poem was on the war.
Feeling foolish and inwardly cursing Fanny, Johnny pulled the poem out of his pocket and began to read it, wasting no time on preliminaries.
“The White and The Black.
See this picture:
A hotel room
In a Southern city,
And in the room a soldier sits.
He sits relaxed—and happy—
In a saddened fashion.
His shirt is off;
The blond hairs upon his chest
Glisten
With a salty dew of Southern heat.
His shoes are off;
His stockinged feet are cocked
Upon the window sill.
The fan drones with the weariness
Of never-ending energy,
A sound unheard through repetition.
A scotch and soda sits,
Smoking with coldness,
Upon the ashstand at his elbow.
A cigaret smoulders away its life
Waiting on his pleasure.
The upholstered rocking chair
Rolls gently with contentment.
The soldier is at peace—
A saddened peace—
But still a peace.
He has much money in his pocket,
And a three-day pass lies on the dresser.
The soldier sits
And rocks
And thinks
And stares out of his hotel room window
High above the tiny Lilliputians
Who rush about their daily business
With a zest that is amusing
To the soldier.
For the soldier
(Though he is but twenty-one)
Is old and tired.
He’s fresh from overseas,
And the ribbons on his shirt
That is hanging neatly in the closet
Speak of battles, wounds, and fighting.
And as he stares out across the city
To the greenness of the farms beyond,
He sees America—
That abstraction he’s been fighting for—
Spread out before him.
And perhaps it is the scotch
That flows pleasantly through his muscles,
But every sound and smell and sight
Is pregnant . . .
&nbs
p; With America.
And the soldier sits
And rocks
And thinks
And, in thinking, wonders
And, in wondering,
Feels happy—
Yet unhappy,
Feels proud—
Yet feels ashamed.
The scotch has freed his brain,
And the thoughts he thinks are never thoughts
But misty moods,
Impressions.
Have you seen the picture?
Then feel the thoughts
That are not thoughts:
This is America,
This is the life I’ve lived.
It is inconceivable
To me
That this life might someday be gone;
That trains,
That buses,
That this hotel,
Will someday not exist,
And being non-existent
Also unremembered;
That I,
My friends,
The life I know,
Might someday
Be the reason for the speculation
Of historians,
For the vast energetic diggings
Of bearded and be-spectacled professors.
But Rome fell—
And, in falling, believed
Beyond any doubt whatever
That it would never fall.
This city is America,
And in being America,
And part and parcel of America,
Is foolish, asinine, and wrong—
And yet is wise, magnificent, and right.
And while these people read
The newspapers and magazines
That tell how many thousand men have died
Today
And tell stories of the mighty heroes
Of freedom
And of Democracy,
My gang, my friends, my fellow drunks and cocksmen
Are cursing them, Democracy, and freedom—
And are dying for them
And the things they curse.
