Jews at War

I just finished re-reading Marge Piercy's historical novel of World War II, Gone to Soldiers (Summit Books, 1987).  I'd put it off for a few months because of its length, 700 pages (and she says in the afterword that it would have been a third longer if she'd gotten a grant to do research in the Soviet Union), which stopped my project of rereading all her work in chronological order.  Once I got going, it was a pleasure and toward the end I couldn't put it down -- though of course I knew how it turned out: what I wanted to know was how her characters would fare.

I haven't read much fiction set during World War II, and far from enough nonfiction about it, so I can't really compare Gone to Soldiers to anything except Sherri L. Smith's Flygirl (Putnam, 2009), about a young African American woman who passed as white to become a WASP.  I started to read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead a couple of years ago but only did a couple of chapters; maybe it's time to go back to it.  And I really should read From Here to Eternity and other of James Jones's works.  Piercy's characters are mostly Jewish, both in the Europe and in the US, and often lower-middle class, and as always her perspective is feminist, anti-racist, and pro-labor, so she covers the anti-Semitism that American Jews faced at home as well as what European Jews faced at the hands of the Third Reich and its collaborators.  She describes the harassment that women faced in the factories, and that the women fliers of the WASPS had to deal with.  Her account of the Detroit race riots of 1943 is chilling. White racists were using the same folklore they use today:

The buses and trolleys were overloaded with people jammed into each other, after waiting half an hour or longer. The whites said the colored belonged to bump clubs and sought opportunities to jostle whites [275].

Today it's called the "knockout game," and though according to this article the Justice Department says "there have been similar incidents dating as far back as 1992", Piercy's research turned up the same basic idea from fifty years earlier.  (She declares in the afterword that although the novel is fiction, she wanted everything in it to have really happened to someone.)

Another striking bit: the Nazis "opened the sea war by sinking an unarmed passenger liner, the Athenia, and then claimed the British had blown it up themselves for propaganda" (109).  That's familiar too.  Very familiar.  (Ironically, the best-documented case I know of where something like this actually happened was when US Special Forces soldiers killed three Afghan women -- two of them pregnant -- and dug the bullets out of their bodies, trying to make it look like an honor killing by the Bad Guys.)

Gone to Soldiers isn't a novel I'll reread often, because of its length and because much of it is so emotionally painful, but I'm glad I reread it this time.

I can't say the same for Veronica Roth's Divergent (Katherine Tegen, 2011), now a major motion picture but even more of a drag, as far as I'm concerned, than Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.  Partly because it's longer: the first volume is 500 pages long.  I picked up Divergent at the library a couple of days ago and am now about halfway through it.  For awhile I wasn't sure I'd read it all, but I think I can finish it in two days so I might as well.  The writing is adequate (she at least uses the verb "diffuse" correctly, which is more than I can say about many pop writers these days) but thin.  I don't think she's built her world very well, and her characters are cardboard. Roth's imagined dystopian future just doesn't make much sense to me.  Maybe I'm just too old for it.

The Man Who Got Away

I'll probably finish reading James Lord's My Queer War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), having passed the halfway point today. If I'd checked it out from a library, I probably wouldn't have gotten that far, but I bought it: partly because the subject was interesting -- the World War II experiences of a gay man of my parents' generation -- and partly because the book had received rapturous reviews. I'd only read one of Lord's previous books, the 1965 A Giacometti Portrait, and don't remember anything of it, for good or bad.

My Queer War has been a serious disappointment. The writing ranges from the serviceable -- when Lord writes about his interaction with other people -- to the dire. I've come to believe that there may be no objective criteria for good or bad writing, so I'll try to explain what bothers me about Lord's prose and let the reader form his or her own opinion. Maybe this is what's meant by good writing, who knows? But I don't think so.

Lord breaks one of the rules that got hammered into my head long ago, not only in school but in most of what I've read about being a good writer: don't overuse modifiers. Lord can't seem to use a noun without duct-taping an adjective to it, a verb without an adverb -- and he often chooses them badly. Here are some examples.

Presently, time having freed me from potato purgatory, the preposterous promise of Thanksgiving loomed. I had none to give, especially to myself, but welcomed with dogged stiffness of lip my parents, come to Atlantic City to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my birth [12].

Madame sat in a canvas camp chair under the grape arbor, as usual, a portrait of mature composure in the face of adversity. When I went to kiss her on both cheeks -- a la francaise -- she held in her lap a copy of Sagesse, and I thought she was wise indeed to seek the wisdom of quietude in the literature of her homeland as it lay under the dominion of diligent torturers [78].

I told Mother and Dad the tale of my devil-may-care escape from the implausible bouts of chemical warfare caused by an urbane display of intellectual know-how [78].

As I read it, that last sentence implies that Lord had seen actual (if implausible) bouts of chemical warfare, when in fact he'd been stationed at a chemical-weapons storage site in Nevada, working in an office. And, as written, it was those bouts of chemical warfare, rather than his escape from them, that were caused by an urbane display of intellectual know-how.

Frank Mariano Fasolo was born in Brooklyn, brought up in a large, old-fashioned brownstone house, almost a mansion, in Park Slope, spacious enough to lodge Frank's parents, grandparents, and one great-aunt, all of whom to their everlasting honor dwelt together in judicious compatibility. Such a serene exception to the contentiousness of human nature was surely due to the atavistic affinity of the Fasolo men for civil harmony [284].

When I showed some of these gems to a bookseller I know, after groaning about purple prose he muttered that no one edits books these days. That's not true, but it does seem to be haphazard, and not just for prestigious writers and their products. If only James Lord had had a Sassy Gay Friend to cry "What, what, what are you doing?" whenever he sat down to write, this book might have been avoided.

The examples I've given could be multiplied (I took notes!), but my reader will either have suffered enough already, or have been so enthralled by Lord's writing that he or she will have run out to buy the book. They aren't the whole story, though. When Lord describes his coming-out in the gay underworld of Boston, My Queer War changes manner and becomes more like a 1940s or 1950s gay novel, the kind described so well by Angelo D'Arcangelo in The Homosexual Handbook (Olympia Press, 1968):

If, in first years of the fifties, you had a box of bonbons and a chaise longue, it was perfect reading. One could weep tears of immaculate self-pity, as with anguished self-identification, we read of the twisted, blighted-too-soon love of these unfortunates. ... How we loved it! Oh, well, you couldn't get anything else then. But it set the tone [230].

It was interesting to hear about the difficulties and rewards of finding other gay men as friends and sex partners in a very different era, though despite gay men's greater cultural visibility nowadays I'm not sure things have changed that much. In particular his account of the golden Hanno, another GI he met while stationed in Nevada, could have happened today.

Lord also was apparently a believer in Genius, which he conceived as a sort of sun lamp, in whose rays he could bask to get a spiritual tan. He was fickle, though:

Ulysses meanwhile had fallen out of luck for me. The recondite tribulations of a prestidigitator with language no longer felt quite so relevant. What was wanted now was something more warming to the workaday heart, less chilled by arcana of the intellect. Joyce said that a man of genius changes the world. He does. And I believed with all my being in the life-enhancing grandeur of genius. Individual men had brought about all the momentous advances of civilization. Dante and Newton, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. Only four of that stature were then living -- Einstein, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, and Picasso - and they were all regrettably remote from Reno, Nevada [48].

In time, Lord managed to meet Picasso, and even to get the great man to sketch his portrait. But when he held the sketch in his hands,

I was disappointed. ... It's true Picasso's attention and creative faculties had not been engaged to serious effect either by his model or by his drawing while I sat before him in the restaurant. I saw in my portrait principally evidences of haste and indifference, its inadequacy, not my own [209].

So he set himself to getting Picasso to do it again, but this time "something more worthy of a creative future" (248). Later he wrote a postcard to Thomas Mann, assuring the author that he'd been meaning to write a letter but had been too busy, "so I write this now to say that I am thinking of the letter and will write it when I have time" (237). You'd think that Mann, not Lord, was the suppliant. For someone who claimed to adore Genius, Lord was oddly willing to judge it and order it around.

All this makes for a frustrating reading experience, given the material's inherent interest, but finishing the book is my penance for having bought it without looking at it more closely. Contrary to the blurb from Larry Kramer (whose endorsement should have warned me off right away), there has been anything quite like My Queer War before, from the graphic biography Alan's War by Emmanuel Guibert (First Second, 2008), which has some incidental gay characters; to Sanford Friedman's novel Totempole (Dutton, 1965), which features a romance between an American GI and a Korean POW; to Allan Berube's oral history of gay and lesbian World War II vets Coming Out Under Fire (Free Press, 1990); to Mary Renault's The Charioteer (Longmans Green, 1953) about a gay British soldier in World War II. For memoirs by gay men of my parents' generation or before, there's always Christopher Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976), which it's high time I reread.