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.
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.
The End of Books II: The Greenwich Expedition.
04-Dec-08After my previous book expedition, I still had seven boxes of books which had been purged from the Richmond Hill collection. These were the dregs of the dregs – the kind of books that are required in college courses, cost a great deal of money, are turned into new editions in a few years, and immediately lose all value. Some of them were Catholic books which had been required of my father in seminary, many others were physics textbooks or criminal justice textbooks and the like.
Some of them had some use but not for me: paperback English dictionaries or English grammar workbooks or Readers’ Digest condensed books (who reads those, I wonder?). I figured I would let someone who knows bad books do the final sorting.
So I found a charity that ships books to people who need them, mostly in the Third World. Their website indicated both caring and competence, but the nearest collection box was in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Even at this stage I realized that I was going to recapitulate the story of my encounter with wealth (Princeton, Saint David’s, Delbarton, etc.): wealthy society has certain virtues but you always have to make the journey to it. It will not come to you.
But Greenwich is not that far, and since I was going to my sister’s place in Putnam County anyway, I drove to Greenwich. I arrived at the Town Dump in the evening (where the book collection was located). It was closed and very locked. I thought about leaving the books at the gate, but I figured I might get arrested for dumping (you’re always on your guard in these fancy places) and what the heck, I’d come this far for these books’ sake, it wasn’t that hard to get there, I’d come back in the morning.
This I did. I got to see the Greenwich dump, and it was impressive. The place was humming with activity, despite it being a Wednesday midmorning. The road led through several enfenced areas for different forms of trash disposal, like a cow’s seven-chambered heart: recyclables, electronics, scrap, cellphones, Goodwill donations, “swapshop,” the works. It was all the intelligent stupidity that makes the wealthy in this country so repulsive and attractive: look at all the marvellous recycling they were doing! Look at how orderly and efficient they are! Even their dump is clean! And yet the main question is, why are they consuming all this junk in the first place? Recycling is like giving to charity: a virtuous cover for the terrible truth that some people have far too much while so many have nothing.
There was a little red shed with a small table outside it. The table had books stacked on it. I pulled the truck up there. A fine-looking older gentleman who looked like he had lived a life of comfort was there moving books around. I grabbed the first box of books and brought it to the table.
“You’ve got a nice little operation here,” I said. “I’ve just come up from New York City. I’ve been looking for a place where I can donate books, and I checked on the internet and found there was a collection spot here in Greenwich. And here you are.”
“I’m sorry this is for Greenwich residents only,” he said. How lovely to see that the residents of Greenwich had kept their ancestral charm.
“I can’t donate unless I’m a Greenwich resident?”
“Didn’t you see the sign?” He pointed to the gate of the dump complex, which had a sign warning off all non-Greenwich residents.
“I just want to donate books. I heard that there’s a charity operating here that sends books to places where they’re needed. Surely the people who receive them don’t insist the books come from Greenwich.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
I’ll confess that I crumple into a ball when I meet resistance, especially resistance in the form of stupid, impersonal rules which don’t seem to serve any good purpose.
“So you don’t want books.”
“Look, I’m not going to stand here dealing with this.”
Conversation was fruitless, so I walked back to my truck, pondering the situation. I saw the Goodwill station, which was separate from the book operation. A man was standing outside it talking on a cellphone. A mere glance showed he was nice. I walked up to him.
“Do you guys take books?” I asked.
“You see that red shed over there?” was the reply. His voice indicated that he might be slightly retarded. “That’s where books go.”
“Yeah, but that guy won’t take mine.”
“Okay, fine,” was the response. “We’ll take them.”
So I thanked him profusely, and gave him seven boxes of books.
So what threatened to end in frustration and waste was resolved happily, and the goal was achieved, but in a slightly different form. He who has ears to ear, let him ear.