http://bridgewaterfire.com/s_ne.php My 1989 copy of Samuel Hynes’ Flights of Passage has a quotation on its front cover from Paul Fussell, a man not known to this writer but sufficiently respected in 1989 to need no further identification, which describes the book as “A war memoir which will become a classic.” I believe we may conclude that this will not be the case. The book was crafted and published to satisfy the aging veteran market of its time and lacks any further engagement with deeper values. This is true even though Hynes went from being a military aviator to a long career as a professor of English at Princeton University – an unusual pairing of credentials which one might think would produce some intriguing depth. If it existed in the man, it is not in the book.
where to buy disulfiram But I did get one thing from a few hours’ engagement with this straightforward narrative of the functionary-life of a bomber pilot worth passing on to others. And that is to note that, contrary to American mythology, sexuality was not invented in the 1960s.
1940s America turns out to be a period of rampant sexual abandon, if we are to trust Hynes on this topic. The life of the military man, as he depicts it, is mechanical devotion to tasks when on-duty and uninterrupted pursuit of sex at all other times. Here is one of the less poetic young cavaliers in action:
I watched Puta moving from one girl to another at the other end of the
room. He would approach one, speak low for a moment, watch her face,
and pass on with a shrug. Some of the faces looked startled, some angry,
one or two laughed. In a few minutes he left with a BAM [Broad-Assed
Marine, their term for female marines]….
The next day, on the way back to Santa Barbara, I asked Puta what he
had said to those girls in the officers’ club. “Me, I got a very straight-
forward approach,” he said. “I go up to a girl, an’ I say, ‘Hey, honey, do
you fuck?’ Mostly they say ‘No,’ but the thing is, see, I don’t waste no
time.”
“And what did the BAM say, the one you went out with?”
Puta laughed. “She said, ‘I sure do, you smooth devil!’” (116-7)
Puta’s approach is unusually direct, but Hynes makes it clear that this was the basic activity of most of the young soldiers. And there is some remarkably rowdy behavior.
We met in bars and sang drunkenly with bands, or by ourselves if the
band wasn’t playing. Joe sang, with great feeling, a ballad about a girl
who married a man who had no testicles, and we all roared out the
chorus:
No balls at all,
No balls at all,
A very short peter
And no balls at all. (151)
On another occasion Puta and Rock and friend called Mac went
hustling at the Biltmore, but could only manage to pick up one girl.
“Never mind,” Puta said. “I got a system. You guys go back to the
hotel and hide in the john. I’ll take her in and screw her, and then I’ll
say, ‘Honey, I got to go to the toilet,’ and one of you come back and
have a piece, and do the same thing.” And that’s what they did. It
worked all right the first time: Rock was about Puta’s size, and had a crew
cut like Puta’s, but Mac was heavier, and had long curly hair, and when
he climbed aboard the girl sensed something had changed. She turned
the light on, and found the stranger sprawled in her lap, and she began
to cry, more and more hysterically. Puta and Rock had to come out of
the bathroom and try to calm her before the house detective heard her.
Finally her sobs subsided, and she got up and began to dress. As she
opened the door to leave she turned to the three still naked culprits sitting
on the edge of the bed: “That’s the trouble with you fucking Marines,”
she said, “you don’t know how to treat a lady.” (117)
This is not good behavior. And if it happened today in our military (the above would probably be a rape case), we would think it was due to the collapse of Western society and its code of social behavior (especially sexual behavior) which according to the myth came undone in 1968. But we find wild sex here in the 1940s (and a variant of the particular trick described above occurs in several of Shakespeare’s plays).
The book really is quite full of sex, but I’ll quote one more passage and be done with the whole thing. This is one of the very few real encounters with human depth described in the book:
The steaming summer air seemed to create an atmosphere of feverish
sexuality. There was a Wave [a term for a female cadet] from the Air
Station who took a leave and spent the whole time in a hotel room in
Daytona, taking on all comers, or so the story went. Taylor and his pal
Puta had found her, and told us about her. “Shit, man,” Taylor said,
“she ain’t very good-lookin’, not what you’d call a beauty. In fact” –
he began to laugh his high-pitched, wildman laugh – “she’s downright
ugly. But who cares?” Puta said nothing, but made an obscene
Portuguese gesture, winked, and laid an index finger alongside his nose –
a movement that apparently expressed satisfaction.
We went to see her, as you might go in a party to the zoo to look at a
rare new species; five or six of us trooped into the room in a cheap
tourist hotel, and had a drink, and just looked at her. There she was, in
bed all right. She was a big, husky girl, and Taylor was right – she wasn’t
very good looking. She might have been a farm girl or a singer in a
church choir, except for the look that never left her face – a despairing,
defiant look, the look of someone who had got to a place too far to come
back from. She lay in the bed, her big body covered by a sheet, and stared
back at us. Nobody touched her or suggested any sexual act. Partly we
were shy in front of each other, I suppose, but there was something else,
too. I remember what the atmosphere was like, now; it wasn’t like a zoo –
it was like a sick room in a hospital. We were visiting a patient, she was
sick and we were all well, and we drew back from her sickness. It
wasn’t a matter of VD, but of the look on her face. When we had finished
our drinks and clowned around self-consciously a little, we left. I looked
back from the door and she was just lying there, watching us go, not
saying anything. (94-5)
I may as well note the largest problem with the book, as the above passage indicates: there is no real action, no deep engagement with the problems that are implied by the narrative. There she is, in her bed – look at her. Then leave. Similarly there is no sense of the larger conflict or the horrible moral compromise of war – it is all a “tour of duty,” without any action. No one will be comparing material like this to the Iliad any time soon. As is often the case, its value is more as a document of an era than as literature. But at least we now know that the Rolling Stones didn’t invent casual sex.
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