[The following excerpt is sure to offend some, given my father’s caustic characterization of the typical men in America’s army. Even he recognizes his “sullenly superior attitude,” which would quickly earn him an “elitist” denunciation from many in today’s America. He uses “the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks” as a springboard into a rumination about the state of American literature, and his own desire to ultimately write novels that do more than cater to the popular taste.
I like this excerpt because it illustrates my father’s ambitions and idealism as a young man, but also his realism and self-doubts. Tangentially, and sadly, one comment also references two marginalized professions of post-war America: fundamentalist ministers and book critics. One of those groups went on to thrive in the subsequent years, but not the one that my father would have hoped.]
May 6, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)
The first summer that I was in the Army I wrote a letter to President Hutchins of the University of Chicago suggesting, among other things, that the Army qualified as a mass school of democracy. When he answered, he said that the only thing he remembered learning in the Army was how to avoid details. He suggested politely that I was wrong as hell.
Three years later I know that he was right. Very few men, I believe, have been improved by their contact with the Army, democratically or otherwise, and a great many men have been worsened, at least temporarily. I myself have retained only tattered shreds of my respect for “the common man of democracy” whom I fancied I would meet in mass in the Army. Actually, of course, I was looking for one of those idealistic myths which sensitive undergraduates construct during their days on campus and in the classroom
This is no “common man of democracy” in actual fact, and the Army is an institution which will soon make the most starry-eyed dreamer aware of actual facts. Most of the men of the American Army are poorly-educated, loudmouthed, undisciplined, and excessively vulgar individuals. Many of the officers, I suspect, are fundamentally members of this same class, though social pressure and fear of punishment forces them to exhibit the mechanics, if not the spirit, of civilized behavior in public.
In one sense I have gained from the Army an important lesson in American democracy. The fact that it hasn’t been the type of lesson I expected to receive has not lessened its value. The danger for me, and fellows like me, is that the discrepancy between human nature in the barracks and in the political science textbooks will persuade us that somehow America has cheated us, and our former zeal for social service will turn into a disillusioned resentment. The way of the expatriate is extremely seductive to those who pass through this disillusionment to the conviction that it is impossible in America to win mass appreciation for any serious artistic work. But one may pertinently question whether a work of art, particularly in literature, can be serious when it is deliberately divorced from its national and social origins. Those who write purely to entertain, which is apparently a not unworthy motive in a world of entertainment-hungry people, may write about a 17th century English prostitute or a 20th century American race horse or a fairy princess. So far as I can remember, the so-called “literature of escape” has never been unpopular, and today there is a phenomenal demand for it. A number of young ladies, in particular, has discovered that there is great profit and fame to be gained in the writing of sexy tales of romance. Their books seem to impress favorably almost everyone except the book critics. This situation suggests that book critics are members of an obsolete profession still blindly faithful to the literary standards of a forgotten age. They stand in a class with fundamentalist ministers and a few other stubborn individualists as forlorn standard-bearers for a culture which was imported in chunks from Europe, never properly assimilated by the masses, and almost completely ignored by the population at large in the years since the first World War.
The traditions of literature as an art based on the study of contemporary conditions and characters in society has not entirely died out. Occasionally a young writer still comes to maturity with an inescapable urge to give his own honest reaction to and interpretation of the life he has observed in his society. For every ten “Forever Ambers,” perhaps, there is one “Winesburg, Ohio.” For every simple magazine of honest opinion there are perhaps twenty to thirty movie, detective, confession, and comic magazines. These proportions are not statistically accurate, of course, but they indicate closely enough the state of literature in America today.
There’s plenty to be said for following the popular taste. Even a moderately skillful writer can make a fortune if he lets his work be dictated by the demands of vulgarity and sensationalism, and hires a smart press agent. He will find Hollywood eating out of his hand. The polite disdain of a few unimportant critics is a small price to pay for such rewards. He has even satisfied the predominant American moral code which classifies right action in terms of profit and success.
The fact that I have not yet been won over to this theory of literature probably proves that I’m not capable of applying it successfully anyway. My sullenly superior attitude is no doubt a shield of vanity with which I contrive usually to hide my own incompetence and laziness even from myself. Without denying either of these charges, however, I maintain that if I do eventually write novels and stories they will be in the tradition of Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Lewis. If I do have a literary bent that’s the direction in which it turns.
To get back to the Army, which was mysteriously lost somewhere near the beginning of this discussion, I have found it disillusioning in terms of certain of my college concepts, but enormously revelatory of the type of society which produces the men who actually make up the Army. I don’t flatter myself that I have made any original discoveries. The originality in my work will have to come in my application of recognized generalities to specific characters. One thing in particular which I hope to learn quickly is how to prevent myself from spending an evening in dressing up banalities for no one’s edification.
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