“I’m a writer,” I replied.
“You work around hosses?” he went on pleasantly.
“Not rider,” I said sharply, “writer. I’m a writer. I write books. Prose. Prose fiction. What the French call romans.” My sarcasm was heavy and intentional. A blaze of rage flared up behind my eyes, prompted in part by the Gunner’s well-meaning density but also because of the sense of crowdedness the room suddenly gave me—cramped enough with two persons, it was made to seem positively thronged by the presence of a third—and because of my despair over new rumors that we were soon to ship out for Korea and by a general sense of doom and frustration that had begun to overtake me more often as the summer passed, and that was in no way alleviated now by the feel in my pocket of a letter which I had received in the same mail as Laurel’s obscene bulletin: sent by my editor in New York, it contained the first review of my book, and although I had not yet read it I could somehow sense that the review was bad.
The Gunner went into a paroxysm of coughing as Dee explained to me: “Daddy’s an old-time marine, seen ’em all. Western Front in 1918, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guantánamo—wherever the action was at, Daddy was. Ain’t that right, boss man? French girls, Spanish girls, even nigger girls down in Haiti, whenever Daddy went ashore the word got around, ‘Stud Jeeter’s a-comin’, Stud Jeeter of the Horse Marines!’ Ain’t that right, boss man?”
“Well, Juney,” he said, wiping his eyes and with a rattle of phlegm at the back of this throat, “I like to say that I done my time thataway near about as good as the next marine around.”
“Tell about that whorehouse in—where was it, Daddy?—Cuba, wasn’t it, you know where they run a movie show on the ceiling and they washes off your pecker with coconut oil. Tell about that.”
I was quite frankly unaccustomed to such merry sexual candor between parent and offspring, and I listened restlessly for half an hour or so as the Gunner, coughing and obviously in real distress but still eager to recapture the roustabout joys of other days, methodically anatomized brothels in Havana, Port-au-Prince, and Buenos Aires. But finally the effort seemed too much for him; he half-strangled and turned an ashen gray, and Dee got up and led him out of the room, saying that what his father doubtless needed was a Dr. Pepper at the PX for a pick-me-up.
For a while, after they had gone, I lay on my bed in the terrible heat trying to muster courage to read the review. Having subsequently, over the years, received as much vituperative criticism as any of my colleagues in the trade, and in some respects considerably more, yet having perforce developed an all but impermeable skin, I marvel now as I recall the anguish with which I approached the review—my first as a bona fide writer. It was not, to be sure, a review in the most important sense of the word, being merely a prepublication appraisal in one of the journals of the book-publishing industry. But it must be remembered that it was my initiation. For me it was like a crucible, and I read it with a growing and sickening sense of ruin. I think my editor’s “Don’t let this bother you” had been the tip-off.
This fat, confident, deafening novel by a young Virginian has received such florid advance raves that it is bound to be widely discussed and widely read even though its author’s talent—while by no means inconsiderable—hardly measures up to the ex travagant claims being made for it. Set in the country-club atmosphere of a Tidewater Virginia city, the novel chronicles—at sometimes glacial pace—the woes and tribulations of a family which includes a neurotic mother, an alcoholic father, and two daughters—one a cripple and the other a nymphomaniac. Sounds like soap opera? It could be, but isn’t, for the twenty-six-year-old author is a skilled wordsmith and has a gift for dialogue and imagery which transforms his witches’ brew of guilt, jealousy, and Oedipal longings into a reading experience that often rises excitingly above the book’s hackneyed theme. But this newcomer is hardly the literary original he is being hailed as, and too often displays his debt to Faulkner, Warren, McCullers, and even Capote and Speed Lamkin, among other recent recruits to the doom-despair-decay school of southern letters. Nonetheless, despite its shopworn subject matter and all too frequent lapses into “purple” prose, the novel signifies the arrival of an interesting new talent and should be satisfying to those serious readers seeking a change from light hammock reading. (Sept. 10. First printing 10,000.)
—L.K.
I was dead. Dead. Dead as a smelt. Skilled wordsmith. Speed Lamkin. Interesting new talent. Jesus Christ, in debt to Speed Lamkin! In retrospect I can see that the review, snotty as it really might have been, did not comprise the killing hatchet job I was convinced it was as I writhed in agony on that unhappy morning. But I had been cruelly clobbered. I can remember every nuance of my misery and mortification, can—even today—recall each raw detail of my thoughts as they sought to liberate me from this outrage, strove to diminish the intensity of the hurt. “L.K.” Who the fuck was “L.K.”? Lydia Kerr, surely—some smart-ass twenty-three-year-old Vassar graduate, an English major with a fabricated passion for medieval poetry looking down her snoot at every American novelist since Melville, a parched little dyke with blotched skin living in a Village walk-up filled with Partisan Reviews, Agatha Christie mysteries, and annotated editions of Piers Plowman—but no, a Vassar graduate wouldn’t write “wordsmith,” or, well, would she? A hater of southerners, then, Leo Kolodny, some failed writer turned hack reviewer, a CCNY type with a heart murmur, piles, and joyless Talmudic eyes, probably teaching a seminar in modern lit at a dismal uptown night school, where he purveyed muddy wisdom about Bellow, Malamud, and the Jewish renaissance. Leo Kolodny would use “wordsmith.” At any rate, I felt finished as a writer, sick at heart, and that night I went out with Lacy to Jacksonville—the garish honky-tonk town that adjoined the base—and drowned myself in a southern-made beer called Lion, so callow a concoction, and so foul, that the yeast floated in it like minute flakes of snow.
What occurred during the next forty-eight hours was improbable, bizarre, and in certain of its aspects beyond explanation—as it still is to me. When I first started to set down this chronicle, I was tempted not to include the episode (nor for that matter anything at all about Dee Jeeter and his father), feeling that it had so little to do with Paul Marriott that its presence would be superfluous and distracting. But on second thought I have decided to describe what happened, for I think it tells more about Paul than I had at first imagined, and about the Marine Corps, and what makes it such a mysterious community of men.
After coming back from Jacksonville that night I fell into a drugged sleep, only to be aroused some hours later by a dreadful racket which was unidentifiable at first and then, as I came to my senses, resolved itself into the noise of coughing. I sat upright in bed as dawn palely filtered through the windows. The spasm of coughing—from Gunner Jeeter—was truly awful to hear, a steady sepulchral hacking so helpless, so rending of the flesh that it seemed to breathe the very sound of mortality. And to my amazement, when my eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light, I saw that Dee had not simply relinquished his bed to his father (my first thought) but that they were both sleeping in it—a bed like mine, somewhat uncomfortably narrow for one. As I sat listening to the unceasing coughs I was filled with a number of emotions—chagrin, pity, concern, and, finally, anger. For while it was bad enough that these characters without so much as a by-your-leave to me (after all, I outranked both of them, though not greatly) should for whatever reason (I ruled out incest) double up in bed and further congest our tiny sleeping space, it was insufferable that there should be added to this intrusion such a slumber-destroying uproar. And why in God’s name wasn’t the old man in the hospital?
There was a lull in the coughing and I heard Dee say: “How you feelin’, Daddy?”
“Awright,” the Gunner replied. “Wisht I had some terrapin hydrate, or some Smith Brothers cherry drops. I’m burnin’ up with fever, though. What time is it, son?”
“’Bout half past five. Why don’t you set up, boss man, and have a cigarette? That might s
oothe you down.”
Even in those innocent days before the surgeon general’s report, when I myself was a dedicated smoker, I knew that a cigarette was hardly the anodyne for the Gunner’s ailment, whatever it might be, and I was about to peevishly say so when he lit his Zippo for a smoke, sitting up weakly in bed, his face a cadaverous white in the glow of the fire. I could not stand the sight. I buried my head in the pillow and slept fitfully until reveille, a cannonade of coughing agitating my dreams like the rumble of a thunder beyond a distant horizon.
When I awoke the pair of them was gone. Later in the day I saw Lacy, who thought the story was howlingly funny but was of the opinion too that in some way, if only for my own health, I should manage to throw the old man out.
“Poor old sod, I feel sorry for him,” I said, “but I can’t stand another night of that. I just have to get some decent sleep.”
“You’ve got to have him evicted,” Lacy insisted. “It’s not just an imposition on your own rights and privacy, but it sounds to me like he’s got a really virulent case of TB. Think of all those bacteria floating down on you. Get him out of there, for Christ’s sake!”
That night our company had a compass problem in the woods, and I arrived back at the B.O.Q. after one o’clock, worn out, to face the same ordeal: the drowned sleep, the diabolical interruption, the long hours as I lay, rigid as a mummy, listening to the tormented hacking and hawking and the inane colloquy between father and son. Again only at dawn did I drift off to sleep, awaking a couple of hours later feeling dopey and stupefied, like one who has been given too strong a dose of barbiturates. Both of my roommates were gone.
I encountered Dee in the shower room a few minutes later. “Where’s your father?” I demanded.
“Went down to the mess hall for breakfast,” he replied, soaping lather over the acne pits of his jowls. “How’s things, old buddy? You surely look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
“Then your eyesight is even poorer than you imagined,” I said testily. “I’ve had hardly a moment’s sleep in two nights now. Listen, Dee, I want to tell you something. I think your father is in very bad shape physically. I strongly suggest that you get him over to the hospital, and right away. There’s something wrong, I mean seriously wrong, with a cough like that.”
“That’s all right. Daddy’s always had a lot of trouble with his bronchials, ever since the war of ’18. Cough like that just hangs on and hangs on, ’specially after when he gets a cold like he done a week or so ago.” Steam from the shaving water had fogged over his glasses and this opaque effect, together with the mounds of white lather, made him seem to me particularly grotesque and repellent. He had just finished stropping an old-fashioned straight-edged razor—a dangerous-looking brilliant thing, the first I had seen in years—and was clothed in only a jockstrap, which I assumed was a necessary accouterment for a knife fighter. “Daddy’s goin’ to be all right,” he went on. “Don’t you worry about the ole boss man.”
“Well, I don’t agree with you,” I said, and I heard my voice grow sharp and impatient. “But even if I did I would still be talking to you this way, because all that coughing is getting in the way of my sleep. I haven’t slept for two nights now on account of that coughing. It’s as simple as that. I hate to say it, but goddammit, I want your father out of that room today. Do you understand?”
He was silent for a moment, gazing at himself in the mirror, then turned slowly toward me and said in an edgy, evil, smile-when-you-say-that voice: “Gettin’ a tiny bit Asiatic, ain’t you, ole buddy? What’s the matter, tryin’ to pull rank on your ole roomie?”
“Just get him out of there,” I retorted, feeling an alarming coronary turbulence as I strove to control my rage. “Just get him the fuck out of there, that’s all I have to say!” And I turned and left.
Perhaps Dee would finally have complied with my ultimatum; I’ll never know. That same day after lunch I returned to the room to change into my dungarees for an afternoon field problem. When I opened the door I immediately sensed something askew, and as I entered the room I saw that the Gunner, alone in the place, propped up feebly at the desk, had begun to hemorrhage; incredibly there was no sound, no coughing now, and very little motion. He merely sat leaning forward slightly with both hands clutched to his mouth, regarding me with a look of silent, abyssal fear. In rivulets the color of freshly decanted claret, blood oozed between his fingers—fingers which seemed fumblingly to be trying to force back between his lips the remorseless flow streaming over the backs of his hands and down his arms. The whole upheaval must have begun only seconds before I arrived. I was riven with panic, having no notion of what to do, whether to lay him down or stand him up, apply manual pressure somewhere or cold compresses, perhaps hot ones, fearful—as one always is when faced with the crisis of first aid—that what one might do would not just be approximately wrong but the exact opposite of right. But I did manage to yell to the corporal, on orderly duty down the hall, to summon an ambulance from the regimental dispensary, and then I grabbed a towel and thrust it into the Gunner’s groping hands, figuring that he was better able to soak up the stream than I was. He had begun to moan distantly and his eyes beseeched mine in fathomless terror. And at last I could only stand there helpless, delicately stroking his wasted old shoulders and murmuring foolish words of reassurance while the blood dribbled in vermilion runnels down the stringy arms, across the bruise-hued tattoo of the grand old Marine Corps globe and anchor embossed there God knew how many years ago during some whoring, celebrant shore leave in Seattle or Valparaíso or Shanghai, when those forearms, young and hard as whalebone, belonged to Stud Jeeter of the Horse Marines, and trickling finally into a puddle on the desk amid the candy boxes, the Gene Autry albums, the muscle magazines, the glittering knives. “Juney,” I heard him blubber. “I want to see Juney.” But I could do nothing about that either.
The ambulance arrived soon, in no more than five minutes, dispatched with that remarkable efficiency of which the military service is rarely but sometimes capable. I accompanied the Gunner to the hospital and stayed there until Dee turned up, all pinched and pale with dread. But there was no hope for his boss man. He had gone into a coma. He died early the next morning, and an autopsy revealed the existence of advanced carcinoma of the lung.
The episode shook me up terribly and left me in a state of black depression. Why this was so was difficult for me to explain to myself. It hardly involved anything approaching bereavement. My acquaintance with the Gunner, largely nocturnal and unpleasant, had been so brief that I could not say that the gentle quality he had displayed at first encounter had inspired in me even so warm a response as mild liking. And as for a liking for Dee—the squalid fruit of his loins—I had none. Yet obscurely and unshakably I was haunted by the event for days afterward, without success pondering the reason why a man who must have known himself seriously ill had not sought the refuge of a hospital, and feeling a persistent, perhaps unnecessary guilt—he would have died anyway, I kept telling myself—over the fact that I myself had been so dilatory in my efforts to force him to get his lungs attended to.
Several days after all this happened, and Dee had gotten leave to go down to South Carolina to bury his father—having in the meantime, to my great relief, decamped permanently and without explanation from our room, leaving me free and solitary once more—I ran into Paul Marriott at the bar of the officers’ club, where he invited me to have a drink. My oversensitiveness at the time still amazes me, but some masochistic impulse had compelled me to carry the review of my book in my wallet, from which I would extract it from time to time and reread it, digesting anew the few patronizing crumbs of praise it contained and at the same moment flagellating myself with its general tone of deprecation. It embarrasses me to recall that I forced it upon Paul to read, which he did, rapidly, with a slight smile.
Saying only, “You don’t take that seriously, do you, really?” he handed the review back to me.
“It’s a pain in the ass,” I gro
aned, “just an omen of what’s to come.”
“Bullshit,” he replied. “That’s the work of someone who’s very young or very jealous of you or both, and in any case a mediocrity. Put it out of your mind.”
There was such firm, final authority in his reaction and his manner that it gave me tremendous heart, and I drank three martinis in quick succession as a kind of diminutive celebration. Paul, I had noticed before, always drank carefully, even abstemiously, and although at home he had been most generous with alcohol for his guests I noticed that he appeared consciously to hold back, sipping perhaps two very light bourbons with water before dinner and, after the wine, a single brandy and nothing more. In a way this sparing indulgence seemed to suit him, seemed to go with the image he conveyed of a stunning fitness and vitality. He had a superb physique—the kind of supple, feline, coordinated body that one envied so at the age of fourteen, and caused one to send off for a Charles Atlas course in muscle building—and an air of ravishing health: any excess of booze would have soon coarsened and made soggy those remarkably well-proportioned features. Paul was nursing a single bottle of Carlsberg beer. We were joined by a major and a captain, both regulars, whom I was introduced to by Paul, and the talk turned to baseball—a subject which (perversely for an American) tends to bring on in me such devastating ennui that I can feel it as an actual soreness or inflammation at the back of my skull. The conversation here did not descend to anything so ignoble as batting averages; it was Mickey Mantle I think they were talking about, he was very big that year, and they were comparing him to some other batter or pitcher or whatever, from Chicago or Boston or somewhere; I lost track of it all, noting only that Paul spoke knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the sport, which did not seem at all out of character when I recollected that Lacy had told me that he had been a triple-threat athlete at V.M.I. Then after a bit the talk became more general, and I found myself morosely telling about the old Gunner who had started to die in my room just a few days before. Save for Lacy, I had not mentioned the matter to anyone, and now as I described the whole strange event in detail I found that it had for me a liberating, almost cathartic effect.