“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!”
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The Road Back is a book I’ve read a b o u t, but not yet actually read, having learned about it at ChicagoBoyz. There, the book is discussed in the context of literature of First World War in general, and, the war’s impact and legacy, in intellectual and cultural terms, in particular, on the generation of soldiers who fought in it. Much more importantly – with relevance for the world of 2022; our world – is the way in which the war altered ways of understanding, living in, and acting upon (and catastrophically against?) the world, for veterans of the conflict and especially those who came after.
Akin to Remarque’s to Arch of Triumph, The Road Back was transformed to film in 1937. The full movie, at Sir Jänskä’s YouTube channel, can be viewed here…
The Old Man decides to humor us at all costs. We are too many, and Willy stands there too formidably trumpeting before him. And who can say what these undisciplined fellows may not be doing next; they may even produce bombs from their pockets. He beats the air with his arms as an archangel his wings. But no on listens to him.
Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. There is silence. “Mr. Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice, “you have seen the war after your fashion – with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with it – we went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing, and about which there can be no speeches.”
Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. He passes his hand over his forehead and continues. “We have not come to ask a reckoning – that would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming. – But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the “Fatherland” on our lips – and we have returned in silence, but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. And now we ask you to be silent too. Have done with fine phrases. They are not fitting. Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. We saw them die. And the memory of it is still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are talking. They died for more than that.”
Now everywhere it is quiet. The Principal has his hands clasped together. “But, Breyer,” he says gently, “I – I did not mean to – “
Ludwig has done.
After a while the Principal continues. “But tell me then, what is it that you do want?”
We look at one another. What do we want? Yes, if it were so easy a thing to say in a sentence. A vague, urgent sense of it we have – but for words? We have no words for it, yet. But perhaps later we shall have. (97-98)
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At last came my turn. The man who had been before me stumbled out and I stepped into the room. It was low and dark, and reeked so of carbolic acid and sweat that I thought it strange to see the branches of a lime tree just outside the window, and the sun and wind playing in the fresh, green leaves – so withered and used up did everything in the room appear. There was a dish with pink water on a chair and in the corner a sort of camp-bed on which was spread a torn sheet. The woman was fat and had on a short, transparent chemise. She did not look at me at all, but straightway lay down. Only when I still did not come, did she look up impatiently; then a flicker of comprehension showed in her spongy face. She perceived that I was still quite young.
I simply could not; horror seized me and a chocking nausea. The woman made a few gestures to rouse me, gross, repulsive gestures; she tried to pull me to her and even smiled as she did so, sweetly and coyly, that I should have compassion on her – what was she, after all, but a poor, army mattress, that must bed twenty and more fellows every day? – but I laid down only the money beside her and went out hastily and down the stairs.
Jupp gave me a wink. “Well, how was it?”
“So, so”, I answered like an old hand, and we turned to go. But no, we must go first to the A.M.C corporal again and make water under his eyes. Then we received a further injection of protargol.
“So, that is love,” thought I dumbly, despairingly, as we picked up our things; “so that is the love my books at home were so full of – of which I had expected so much in the vague dreams of my youth!” I rolled up my great-coat and packed my ground-sheet, I received my ammunition and we marched out. I was silent and sorrowful, and I thought upon it: how now nothing was left me of those high-flying dreams of life and of love, but a rifle, a fat whore and the dull rumble out there on the sky-line whither we were now slowly marching. Then came darkness, and the trenches and death. – Franz Wagner fell that night, and we lost besides twenty-three men. (157-158)
For Further Thought
World War One, and the Transformation of Civilization, With Relevance for Our Times, atChicago Boyz…
Though I’ve been unable to find much about artist Tom Dunn, his work appears to be stylistically similar to that of Bayre Phillips, possibly – at least in this instance – because of Pocket Books’ desire to maintain consistency in style and cover design for Cardinal Edition paperbacks.
Dating from March of 2018, I’ve now updated this post to display the cover of a much better copy of Rembrandt’s Hat, than which originally appeared here. The “original” cover image can be viewed at the “bottom” of the post.
I’ve also – gadzooks, at last! – discovered the identity of the book’s previously-unknown-to-me-illustrator, whose initials, “A.M.” appear on the book’s cover. He’s Alan Magee, about whom you can read more here.
And, a chronological compilation of Bernard Malamud’s short stories can be found here.
Half a year later, on his thirty-sixth birthday, Arkin, thinking of his lost cowboy hat and heaving heard from the Fine Arts secretary that Rubin was home sitting shiva for his recently deceased mother, was drawn to the sculptor’s studio – a jungle of stone and iron figures – to search for the hat. He found a discarded welder’s helmet but nothing he could call a cowboy hat. Arkin spent hours in the large sky-lighted studio, minutely inspecting the sculptor’s work in welded triangular iron pieces, set amid broken stone sanctuary he had been collecting for years – decorative garden figures placed charmingly among iron flowers seeking daylight. Flowers were what Rubin was mostly into now, on long stalk with small corollas, on short stalks with petaled blooms. Some of the flowers were mosaics of triangles.
Now both of them evaded the other;
but after a period of rarely meeting,
they began, ironically, Arkin thought, to encounter one another everywhere –
even in the streets of various neighborhoods,
especially near galleries on Madison, or Fifty-seventh, or in Soho;
or on entering or leaving movie houses,
and on occasion about to go into stores near the art school;
each of them hastily crossed the street to skirt the other;
twice ending up standing close by on the sidewalk.
In the art school both refused to serve together on committees.
One, if he entered the lavatory and saw the other,
stepped outside and remained a distance away till he had left.
Each hurried to be first into the basement cafeteria at lunch time
because when one followed the other in
and observed him standing on line at the counter,
or already eating at a table, alone or in the company of colleagues,
invariably he left and had his meal elsewhere.
Once, when they came together they hurriedly departed together.
After often losing out to Rabin,
who could get to the cafeteria easily from his studio,
Arkin began to eat sandwiches in his office.
Each had become a greater burden to the other, Arkin felt,
than he would have been if only one were doing the shunning.
Each was in the other’s mind to a degree and extent that bored him.
When they met unexpectedly in the building after turning a corner or opening a door,
or had come face-to-face on the stairs, one glanced at the other’s head to see what, if anything,
adorned it; then they hurried by, or away in opposite directions.
Arkin as a rule wore no hat unless he had a cold,
then he usually wore a black woolen knit hat all day;
and Rubin lately affected a railroad engineer’s cap.
The art historian felt a growth of repugnance for the other.
He hated Rubin for hating him and beheld hatred in Rubin’s eyes.
“It’s your doing,” he heard himself mutter to himself to the other.
“You brought me to this, it’s on your head.”
After hatred came coldness. Each froze the other out of his life; or froze him in. (pp. 130-131)
M. Hooks cover art for The Gunner appropriately depicts an aerial gunner in a shearling leather flying jacked and draped with a belt of 50-cailber ammunition, given that the protagonist of William Stevens’ 1967 novel is Sergeant Thomas Deacon, an aerial gunner on B-24 Liberator heavy bombers in the Italy-based American 15th Air Force.
Rather than being a fictional exploration of the nature of military service and combat flying in the Second World War, the novel’s focus is quite different: While the opening pages present a dramatic but somewhat abbreviated account of aerial combat culminating in the horrific crash-landing of Deacon’s B-24, virtually the entire remainder of the novel deals with Deacon’s adventures (and misadventures) on “the ground” afterwards, in terms of his psychological rehabilitation for combat, and, his interactions with non-flying military personnel, as well as civilians.
Though interesting in concept, unfortunately, I felt that the novel was more than underwhelming, dwelling until its conclusion (which I shall not divulge here!) on Deacon’s mental state and mood, to the point of real tediousness. The main problem is that Deacon seems to be a palimpsest or cipher, reacting “to” situations and people, yet lacking a true inner life, distinctive mental state, and character, let alone a fleshed-put pre-war biography in terms of family and social ties, vocational history, or formative experiences. Or, if he does possess any inner life, this remains largely unexpressed.
Of course, one can’t help but notice the one endorsement (by James Jones, a fantastic writer) and five book-review excerpts gracing the cover of this Signet edition. Perhaps these snippets are just that, mere snippets of the reviews in their entirety (with any criticisms of the novel left on the “cutting room floor”). Perhaps these reviewers genuinely felt positively of the book. If so, I can only conclude that I neither read nor recognized the “same” novel, for I felt that The Gunner, while nominally interesting in a fleeting way, was anything but brilliant.
On July 3, 1968, The Knickerbocker News published this brief news item about The Gunner:
‘The Gunner’ Novel To Become a Film
“The Gunner,” a World War 2 novel by William Stevens, has been purchased by Universal and will be produced by Dick Berg, it was recently announced.
The dramatic story centered around an Air Force sergeant in Europe was published recently by Atheneum.
It would seem that things never proceeded beyond the “purchased” stage. As memory serves, and verified at the Internet Movie Database, no such motion picture ever emerged.
Being that the novel was penned in 1967, I wonder about the degree – if any – to which Stevens was influenced by Louis Falstein’s 1950 Face Of A Hero, or Joseph Heller’s astonishingly over-rated, near-irredeemably over-inflated, fortuitously-timed Catch-22 (*** gag ***)which without question is the worst of the trio, while the forgotten Face of a Hero is easily the best. It’s notable that the three works all center around the experiences of American airmen in either the 12th or 15th Air Forces in Italy, circa 1944-1945 (this was noted for Falstein’s and Heller’s novels, back in 1999), thus revealing a commonality of influence which found markedly different expression – well, yeah, admittedly, there are some similarities across all three works – in terms of the protagonist’s understanding and interpretation of his experiences and self-understanding, manifested through plot, character development, literary style (and for lack of a better word!) ideology, albeit the latter is really only manifest in Face Of A Hero.
As for Stevens, I know little about him, other than the blurb that appears on the jacket of the hardbound edition of The Gunner: “William Stevens was born in Flushing, New York, in 1925. He served with the U.S. Army during the Second World War and then worked as an electromechanic on guided missiles. Subsequently he was a war-surplus junkyard scout, a buyer and a purchasing agent from 1947 until 1964, when he moved his family to Marth’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and began writing seriously. His first novel, The Peddler, was published in 1966.” So, just a thought: Given that so much of the The Gunner – at least early in the novel – occurs in the context of combat fatigue and psychological rehabilitation, and for this his writing is crisp and delineated – I wonder if Stevens’ military service occurred in a medical setting, rather than as an aircrewman. Just an idea.
According to Worldcat, Stevens’ literary oeuvre consists of the following titles:
The Peddler, 1966, Little, Brown
The literary “flavor” of The Peddler – perhaps drawn verbatim from the blurb on the book’s flyjacket? – can be found in an advertisement for the ninety-seventh anniversary of Ulbrich’s (whatever Ulbrich’s was!) in the Buffalo Courier-Express of October 6, 1968:
Book Sale $1 and up. Publ. at much higher prices
Reprints of bestsellers, publisher’s overstocks – many in full color
Subjects of interest to everyone. Treasures for your own library – welcome gifts for friends. All at once-a-year savings!
The Life and death of a salesman, THE PEDDLER, by William Stevens. The story of a twelve-grand-a-year peddler who hawks goods in the most ruthless market place in the world – New York City. Like thousands of other peddlers hustling their ware in the city before catching the 5:12 to suburbia, he dreams of making it. Whenever the pack grows too heavy he puts it down and swings through a few martinis. But he cannot swing indefinitely, andthere is always another buyer to see, another sale to close. Pub. at $5.95. Sale $1.00.
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The Gunner, 1968, Atheneum
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Cannibal Isle; A Novel, 1970, Little, Brown
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Best of Our Time, 1973, Random House
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William Stevens, in a jacket photograph (by Howell’s Photo Studios) from the hardbound edition of The Gunner.
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To conclude, here is an opening passage from The Gunner:
One there had been one crew, one ship. They trained on the flat Midwestern plains, in untroubled skies, dropped dummy bombs and made long transitional flights. They beered it up in Lincoln, Kansas City, Cheyenne, sported coin-silver wings and corporal’s stripes. One crew, forging an arrow, men and machine a single instrument to be brought to the war.
The airplane was taken away. They were jammed into bucket seats along with other crews and flown across the ocean in a C-47. They were not surprised to touch down in England. Everyone knew that it was one huge airfield, that the Eighth was winning the war, that flight pay brought a lot of action in Piccadilly. The Quonset huts were bearable, the beer strong, everyone spoke the same language. That was what the war was all about – off to a day’s work, then home at five to pipe and slippers. But the Eighth was primarily a B-17 air force. The ship the crew had been trained for was being flown from Italy. Someone arranged a slow boat for them, arranged to have waiting an airplane that could fly.
Jerry Juicer had made sixty-three missions, too many. They knew it would never take them through their tour, knew that no ship could last one hundred and thirteen missions. Jerry Juicer was a relic, bald spots showing through its olive-drab paint, flak patches creating crazy checkerboard patterns on the wings and empennage. It was sure to die, to take them with it. They needed a brand-new airplane, a new average to work against, new luck.
The crew took the ship up to get used to it. The pilot found the controls sluggish, and number-four engine touchy. He wanted the ship worked on, wanted an instrument fit for combat. They were put on a mission alert their second day in the field; if Jerry Juicer could get off the ground, it was fit enough. It took them through four missions, through a seven-hundred-plane raid on Ploesti where ships much newer glittered all the more for being torn into fragments.
Jerry Juicer was breached over Toulon. Flak shattered the nose section, cleared away the co-pilot and bombardier. It took a skilled nurse, a determined hand, to get them back. They put down at Foggia, left the ancient bird to be towed to the junkpile where it would be cannibalized and made a part of other ships. The crew was taken by truck sixty twisting miles to their own field, had their first real look at Italy: barren roads, sodden orchards, the dismal towns of Apulia. They crossed the Ofanto on a pontoon bridge stretched next to a string of bombed-out arches, came home just as the uncertain sun failed, came home to the strange corroded gullies, the bleached stones, the sky turned a red deeper than that on the splotched walls of Jerry Juicer.
The crew got their new luck, their new airplane. Shining silver, it was christened Peaches, the name running beneath the figure of a flamboyant nude with fuzzy breasts. Their replacement bombardier was a recruit, their co-pilot a seedy-looking second lieutenant with twelve missions. Both were outsiders. Although their number had been diminished, there was still a single crew.
Peaches seemed to be a lucky ship – for everyone but the ball gunner. He was blown out over Salon. Caesar Cantori joined them, another veteran from a broken crew, already twenty-one missions up the ladder. Peaches lucked them right through a Bucharest raid where the crazy Luftwaffe put up an effort so intense they attacked the bombers over the target, braving their own flak, salvoing into the hunched formations. The enemy fighter quit only when they were out of ammunition, low on gas. Peaches came through it with no more than a few small holes, but the radio operator went on sick call for the next nine consecutive mornings. He was finally removed from flight duty. Zimmerman, who had been flying as a temporary replacement, became a fixture.
The original crew was down to a slim six, but they still had something of that old nostalgic hang-together. With their fatalities already thirty percent, they were approaching the point where the averages began to work for the survivors. The furious Oil Campaign kinked the graph slightly; it figured that one, maybe two, more would have to go to the long way before percentages swung solidly in favor of the rest. Tough on the losers, but you couldn’t have winners without them.
They lost another charter member, but it didn’t count on the scale. On a raid over Vienna the sky seemed to come apart and most of the controls were shot out. Both Horton and the pilot were wounded, the pilot stiff and bleeding at the wheel as he wrestled and coaxed the ship, a piece of Swiss cheese hanging on shredded propellers. It was a marvelous performance, took them all the way home. They fell into each other’s arms, a lucky crew after all. Horton and the pilot compared wounds. Both showed more blood than hurt.
Jerry Juicer had made sixty-three missions, too many. They knew it would never take them through their tour, knew that no ship could last one hundred and thirteen missions. Jerry Juicer was a relic, bald spots showing through its olive-drab paint, flak patches creating crazy checkerboard patterns on the wings and empennage. It was sure to die, to take them with it. They needed a brand-new airplane, a new average to work against, new luck.
The seedy shavetail became a first lieutenant and the airplane commander. They got a co-pilot from a broken crew. The tail gunner came down with malaria just as the weather broke. Quinn joined them fresh from the replacement point. They were given Bawl, Buster. The ship had made eleven runs, a good safe number. It had enough in it to take them through their tour.
But now they had been up seven straight days without incident and Bawl, Buster was daring them for the eighth. And now they were no longer a crew, or lucky. Only the navigator was left of the original officers, of the gunners only Deacon and Horton and Fitzgerald. The men of Bawl, Buster were sweating out individual tours, each deep in his own net of Fifty. They were strangers, riding strange airplanes. Each thumbed blindly for the catch of his own release, had his own magic number.
Paralleling the covers of Great Jewish Short Stories, and, Famous Chinese Short Stories, John Alcorn’s cover illustration of Norris Houghton’s anthology Great Russian Short Stories displays the dual-headed eagle of the Russian coat-of-arms, a symbol having antecedents actually dating back to the Bronze Age.
More importantly, the simplicity of Alcorn’s composition gives one no inkling as to the superb quality of the tales in this collection, the most striking aspect of the anthology being how despite the natural differences in plot, theme, and style among the thirteen tales therein, the literary quality of the tales is uniformly excellent. (Well, as for my own taste, I’ve always been very partial to the stories of Anton Chechkov.)
I haven’t actually read this one, but I’m still displaying it for the sake of the cover painting.
The initials in the upper left corner – 孔子 – are not (!) those of the anonymous cover artist, who in this case is most definitely not Robert Jonas. Rather, they’re those of Confucius himself. According to Wikipedia, they represent, “Kǒng Fūzǐ”, or, “Master Kǒng””.
Like Great Chinese Short Stories, I’m presenting Great Jewish Short Stories far more for virtue of its content that its cover. The latter is nice enough and entirely appropriate, but nothing that too dramatic, thus, leaving not-too-much to discuss.
The content, of which there is very much, taking precedence, I’ve included links to a variety of websites for eighteen of the nineteen authors whose works appears in the book, as well as to the Apocrypha and Aggadah.
Contents
Tobit, from the Apocrypha
The Lord Helpeth Man and Beast, from the Aggadah
Hadrian and The Aged Planter, from the Aggadah
The Rabbi’s Son, by Reb Nachman of Bratzlav
The Judgement, by Martin Buber
The Rabbi of Bacherach, A Fragment, by Heinrich Heine
While the cover art of the Washington Square Press edition of Famous Chinese Short Stories is, well, nice, it’s nothing so dramatic in visual impact as to “make me write home about”. (Or * ahem * specifically blog about.) Rather, I’m presenting this book by virtue of its content, which is excellent, if not fascinating, if not enchanting.
Notably, Lin Yutang is listed as neither the compiler nor the editor of the twenty tales comprising this collection. Rather, he is dubbed is a reteller: The stories herein have not simply been collected-and-there-you-have-them-and-no-more, a la science fiction anthologies by Asimov & Greenberg, Knight, Conklin, Bleiler & Dikty, or, Wollheim. Likewise, they are probably not direct translations from original manuscripts or sources, regardless of wherever and whenever those documents may have originated. Rather, Lin Yutang has modified the stories – to an indeterminate degree – to make them more accessible and appealing to a non-Chinese readership, in terms of plot, characters, and literary style.
In this, he has succeeded. While I have no idea if these stories actually are genuinely significant in terms of Chinese literature and culture, I immensely enjoyed this volume. The tales flow rapidly, and from them one immediately gains a sense of the sheer universality of human experience, in terms of emotion, eroticism, relationships, love, fate and justice, and – yes – the supernatural, regardless of differences in history and language.
Contents
Adventure and Mystery
Curly-Beard, by Tu Kwang-t’ing The White Monkey, by anonymous The Stranger’s Note, by “Ch’ingp’ingshan T’ang”
Love
The Jade Goddess, by “Chingpen T’ungshu” Chastity, a popular anecdote Passion, by Yuan Chen Chienniang, by Chen Hsuanyu Madame D., by Lien Pu
Ghosts
Jealousy, by “Chingpen T’ungshu” Jojo, by P’u Sung-ling
Juvenile
Cinderella, by Tuan Ch’eng-shih The Cricket Boy, by P’u Sung-ling
Satire
The Poet’s Club, by Wang Chu The Bookworm, by P’u Sung-ling The Wolf of Chungshan (otherwise “The Wolf of Zhongshan“), by Hsieh Liang
Tales of Fancy and Humor
A Lodging for the Night, by Li Fu-yen The Man Who Became a Fish, by Li Fu-yen The Tiger, by Li Fu-yen Matrimony Inn, by Li Fu-yen The Drunkard’s Dream, by Li Kung-tso
A Reference or Two. Or three. (Perhaps four?) ((Even five?))
Famous Chinese Short Stories (this book itself!), at…
Well… I’ve absolutely no idea who “Hofmann” is, but more importantly, having read The Assistant – in a much later paperback edition – years ago – I remember it as an excellent novel.
“Morris,” frank said, at agonizing last, “I have something important I want to tell you. I tried to tell you before only I couldn’t work my nerve up. Morris, don’t blame me now for what I once did, because now I am now a changed man, but I was one of the guys that held you up that night. I swear to God I didn’t want to once I got in here, but I couldn’t get out of it. I tried to tell you about it – that’s why I came back here in the first place, and the first chance got I put my share of money back in the register – but I didn’t have the guts to say it. I wouldn’t look you in the eye. Even now I feel sick about what I am saying, but I’m telling it to you so you will know how much I suffered on account of what I did, and that I am very sorry you were hurt on your head – even though not by me. The thing you got to understand is I am not the same person I once was. I might look so to you, but if you could see what’s been going on in my heart you would know I have changed. You can trust me now, I swear it, and that’s why I am asking you to let me stay and help you.”
Having said this, the clerk experienced a moment of extraordinary relief – a treeful of bids broke into song; but the song was silence when Morris, his eyes heavy, said, “This I already know, you don’t tell me anything new.”
The clerk groaned, “How do you know it?”
“I figured out when I was laying upstairs in bed. I had once a bad dream that you hurt me, then I remembered – ”
“But I didn’t hurt you,” the clerk broke in emotionally. “I was the one that gave you the water to drink. Remember?”
“I remember. I remember your hands. I remember your eyes. This day when the detective brought in here the holdupnik that he didn’t hold me up I saw in your eyes that you did something wrong. Then when I stayed behind the hall door and you stole from me a dollar and put it in your pocket. I thought I saw you before in some place but I didn’t know where. That day you saved me from the gas I almost recognized you; then when I was laying in bed I had nothing to think about, only my worries and how I threw away my life in this store, then I remembered when you first came here, when we sat at this table, you told me you always did the wrong thing in your life; this minute when I remembered this I said to myself, “Frank is the one that made me on the holdup.”
“Morris,” said Frank hoarsely, “I am very sorry.” (156-157)
[Though I created this post back on August 15, 2021, I’ve felt through the intervening year (it’s now July of 2022) that a central aspect of the story of “Red Sky at Morning” – the movie “Red Sky”, rather than Richard Bradford’s original novel upon which the film is based – has been missing. That missing piece is, given the centrality of Catherine Burns’ performance to the movie “Red Sky”, the story of Burns’ own life. While some of the links listed below, such as Wikipedia and IMDB, shed light on Burns’ life and brief acting career, by nature the information therein is limited in scope and depth.
However, the puzzle is a puzzle no longer. Scott Feinberg and Scott Johnson’s poignant and moving article “Catherine Burns: The Vanishing of an Oscar-Nominated Actress”, from February 3, 2020, atHollywoodReporter.com, provides a much fuller biography of Burns, encompassing her upbringing, brief acting career, and subsequent, intentionally anonymous life as a writer.]
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“I am one of a kind,” she said. “Ah, but what kind?” – Catherine Burns, 1989
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There wasn’t anything I could do. I just stood there with my hands behind me, wondering what was happening, and what was going to happen.
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“How old is this friend of yours that has the figure?” “My age. Seventeen.” “My God, are you insane? I already have a civic reputation as a lewd old man.” “This is a really nice girl. Her father’s a minister.” “Worse and worse.”
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“Red sky at night, sailors’ delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.”
Red Sky at Morning. I remember this movie.
I remember catching it on NBC television in the 1970s. (The specific date and time were, just now I’ve found, Wednesday, January 30, 1974, at ten PM. )
I remember being as uninterested as I was unimpressed with the film – “Boring!”– which – looking back – was probably more reflective of my age than the film itself. Yet even then, to the small extent that I viewed it (“Isn’t anything going to happen?! It’s World War Two after all…!”) I noticed what I’d deem, in retrospect, to have been the air of skepticism? – distance? – deliberate anti-nostalgia? – surrounding the characters and story, especially in light of it having been set well into America’s engagement in the Second World War. The events of which, I noticed, were far, far more backdrop than central to the story.
And, I remember the presence of Richard Thomas in the film. That guy from The Waltons… What was he doing in New Mexico? I thought he was in Virginia…
(I was always interested in movies, television programs, and books dealing with history, but somehow, The Waltons left me cold. The show seemed to have been permeated by a Potekmin-Village-like air of near mathematically-generated-sentimentality, especially the grating, contrived, ingenuous “Niiight, ‘sooo-and-sooo’…. routine that accompanied each episode’s closing credits (I’d turn the volume down whenever that came on) particularly ironic given the post-WW II ideological ethos of the CBS Television network (and not just CBS) – which today, looking back from 2021, seems quaint.)
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So, moving forward.
Here’s the 1986 Harper Perennial edition of Richard Bradford’s Red Sky At Morning. What really caught my attention far more than the story itself (!) – well, thus far! – is William Low’s lovely, subtle, and entirely well-conceived cover art, which expresses a transition from youth to adulthood; the uncertainty between moods of “beginning”, “possibility”, and the arrival of a new horizon – or impending danger, the “unknown”, and “oncoming challenge” – all depending on the viewer’s mindset – “Do you see morning or evening?”; the manner in which most of the composition is actually occupied by horizon and sky, rather than characters and action; the characters themselves, representing a triad of youth, young adulthood, and (wizened? detached? patient? skeptical?) middle age:
There’s a conversation going on…
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So. I have not read the novel just yet (too much of a backlog!), but these excerpts give an appreciation for Bradford’s prose…
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“Amadeo,” she said, “seems to be forgetting that he’s a servant and not a member of the family. Your father’s always been too lenient with both of them. He seems to lose all perspective when he come to Sagrado, and forgets his class distinctions. Class distinctions are extremely important, because without them nobody knows where his place in life is. A stable society is a society in which everyone knows his situation.”
“And anything else is Red Communism, right?”
“Don’t you dare be sarcastic with me. Don’t you dare be snotty. You’re already picking up a lot of filthy manners from those tacky trash you go to school with, that Greek boy and that Davidson girl. Do you know that she’s Jewish?”
“I thought her father was the Episcopal minister,” I said.
“He is,” she said. “That’s just the point. That’s the first thing they do, become Episcopals.”
“Well, if they’re Episcopals, how can they be Jewish? I mean, if you switch from being a Baptist to being a Methodist, you’re not a Baptist any more.”
“I don’t care how Episcopalian they pretend to be. I don’t care if one of them becomes the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“Okay,” I said. “First thing tomorrow I’ll go out and paint a swastika on St. Thomas’s.”
“You just shut your mouth, Joshua M. Arnold, or I’ll come over there and slap it shut for you. I’m going to write your father about your behavior.”
“You might mention in the same letter that Kimbob’s got pneumonia. Dad might need some cheering up.”
She got up from he chair and walked three or four steps and slapped me on the check with her right hand. I didn’t even have time to finch; she’d never slapped me before. It didn’t really hurt, but it stung, and it made me sick to my stomach. I felt as though I’d been hit by a crazy stranger. I wanted to hit her back, to slug her a good one, so I locked my hands behind my back to be sure I wouldn’t. She cracked me another one, backhand, on the nose, and it made tears come to my eyes. I could feel my nose starting to bleed. There wasn’t anything I could do. I just stood there with my hands behind me, wondering what was happening, and what was going to happen. I was much bigger than she was, and heavier and stronger. I’d never noticed before what a little woman my mother was. I looked at her face closely while she was hitting me, and it was a stranger’s face. Her cheeks were fuller than they’d ever been, and her skin was gray. There were tiny grape-colored lines in her cheeks near her nose, and the whites of her eyes were pink, as it she’d been swimming in a chlorinated pool. Each time she slapped me I caught a whiff of sherry.
She said, “Apologize! Apologize! Apologize!” and each time she said it she slapped me. But when I opened my mouth she hit me in it. I don’t know how many time she slapped me. My face was getting numb, and the slaps sent little dark red drops of blood from my nose flying around the room. After five or six blows, I realized, in a detached and clear-headed way, that I wasn’t angry any more, just bored. So I finally brought my hands around in front of me and grabbed her wrists and held them. They were thin and without strength. I said, as slowly and clearly as I could, “I’m sorry, Mother,” and dropped her wrists and walked into my bedroom. It was only after I’d sat down on the side of the bed that my legs began to tremble.
I sat in the dark for several minutes, waiting for her to come in and start again, but she didn’t. I turned on the light and went into the bathroom and wiped the blood off my face with a wet washcloth, and then I threw up the coffee that Chango’s parents had served me. (115-117)
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I walked home alone, and saw that the frying pan from breakfast was still in the sink where I’d left it. My mother was still in her room; I could hear her humming tunelessly to herself. I washed the frying pan and put it away, and then went down the hill, turning left on Camino Chiquito to go to Romeo’s studio.
He had a dirty white bandage wrapped around his head, and a purple bruise extending down his jaw. He pointed to it. “Anna moved out, and left me with this. She hit me with an iron saucepan during a perfectly civil discussion about art, and when I awoke she was gone, along with eighteen dollars and several cases of Vienna sausage, which I’d been saving for when I was really broke. Come in. I want you to meet Shirley.”
Shirley was sitting at the table, smoking a cigarette, and wearing the same dirty bathrobe that Anna had worn. She was very large and sleepy-looking, and acknowledged my presence by slowly nodding her head. Her bathrobe was untied, and she was naked underneath it. She arranged it arranged her very deliberately, without changing her expression. “Romeo”, she said, yawning, “I’m tired. Can I rest now?”
“Shirley, my dear, you’ve been resting for half an hour. Don’t you remember? Look at all the cigarette butts in the ashtray.”
“Oh,” she said, “half an hour. I’m so-o-o tired.” She cradled her head on her arms and conked off.
Romeo took the burning cigarette from between her fingers and put it out. “You want some coffee?”
I nodded, and we walked over to the kitchen area. “Have you been giving her sleeping pills?” I asked him.
“No, it’s her thyroid. When she first came three days ago I took her down to my doctor, and he gave her a basal metabolism test. He told me that clinically she’s been dead for some time. Has no thyroid gland at all. He wrote a prescription for thyroid stimulants, but I like her this way. If I gave her the pills she might get jumpy and start throwing things, like Anna. This way she’s easy to handle.”
“Can she model?”
“She’s a terrific model. She’s like a catatonic. I can arrange her in any position, standing, sitting, kneeling, leaning over, balanced on one toe, and she falls asleep and never moves. Of course, she’s not very good as a housekeeper, but she eats very little. It doesn’t take much fuel to keep an engine that sluggish moving. All in all, I’d say she was about perfect. She may even be intelligent, but she can’t stay alert long enough to let me know.”
“I know a girl who’d be a good model,” I said. “She has a good figure, anyway.”
“Good figures have nothing to do with it. Or very little. A model has to have some imagination and lots of muscular control, and she has to know how to take orders. If she looks like Miss America she’ll probably be a lousy model. Girls that are always preening themselves and showing you their profiles and wondering if they have a pimple on their behinds. How old is this friend of yours that has the figure?”
“My age. Seventeen.”
“My God, are you insane? I already have a civic reputation as a lewd old man.”
“This is a really nice girl. Her father’s a minister.”
“Worse and worse. I can see that you have no appreciation for the niceties. Here, drink your coffee. It may help to clear your mind.” (120-122)
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“At the heart of this coming-of-age story of young man sitting out World War II with his mother is a father-son relationship of intense mutual respect and loyalty. The year is 1944. When Mr. Arnold volunteers his services to the navy, Josh Arnold and his mother are transplanted from Mobile, Alabama, to the hills of New Mexico. The leading player is seventeen-year-old Josh, who narrates the story with deadpan irreverent humor. Miss Anne, Josh’s genteel Southern Belle mother, gradually withers in Sagrado, tippling sherry and playing bridge with Jimbob Buel, their permanent houseguest, while Josh becomes an integral member of the Corazon, Sagrado community – Chango, a criminal kid turned softie and Chango’s sister Viola, a would-be-nun-turned criminal; Steenie Stenopolus, who collects sex facts from his father, the OB-GYN; Marcia, the rector’s daughter; and others. The group is as delightful as they disreputable. In the correspondence between father and son, we watch Josh come into his own as he reconciles news of the war with the events and people that are shaping his life in Sagrado. In this New Mexican hill town, Bradford takes a piece of America and catches the enduring spirit of youth and the values of life that count.”
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The 1971 film Red Sky at Morning is the subject of Larry Karaszewski’s review, at Trailers from Hell.
On another note, it was only while completing this post that I learned about the extraordinarily talented Catherine Burns who played Marcia Davidson, her acting career having spanned 1967 through 1984. Burns also published a children’s novel, The Winter Bird (link given below), possibly (?) one of a number of works. According to Wikipedia, “Little is known about Burns’ life following her acting career; Shire said that she had resented the publicity and scrutiny from it, saying “She hated the movie [Last Summer]… and most everything that came with it. She wanted to be remembered as a published writer of novels.”
You can listen to the movie’s theme, “Red Sky at Morning Suite” (quite an appropriate name!), by Billy Goldenberg (William Leon Goldenberg), at Valdez444’s YouTube Channel.
And – yes! – you can view the full movie at Christian Arthur’s YouTube Channel (Gadzooks – download it now while you still can….!) ((Just kidding.)) (((Or am I…?))) ((((!))))
