Tonight the sergeant came in and wnated to play gin rummy. I knew it was coming on because he has been restless and nervy all day, almost as if he were afraid of himself. Gin rummy and poker and pinochle are the only games he knows. None of the others knows anything about cards but Meyer, the little dark fellow from Brooklyn, and I fancy he finds little pleasure in playing away from his family and his own special friends in Brooklyn. The muggy solitude and boredom of the island simply drive him deeper and deeper into himself and he spends hours lying on his cot under the mosquito netting in what I am certain are veritable orgies of brooding and self-pity.
Homer, the wool-hat Georgia boy, simply sleeps, eats, and goes off into the bushes with one of the black greasy native women with sores on their legs. He has to be kept dosed up with penicillin against yaws most of the time. When he talks it is mostly about how the Yankees don't understand the "nigger problem" or of the times he took part in "nigger hunts."
Al, the Kansas farm boy, tries to fight off boredom by reading books and farming on the small patch of ground cleared out of the frightening, ever-crowding jungle. At this he does a very good job, keeping us in fresh vegetables which are large and flamboyant and quick-growing but rather tasteless. He and Meyer take turns with the cooking and sometimes I put my hand in, a thing normally regarded as reprehensible on the part of an officer, but I like to eat well and I learned to be a pretty good cook at the backyard barbecues in Oakdale. I do not think it hurts my prestige as an officer. I never have any trouble with the boys, and of course I always have the Sergeant to back me up with strong-arm methods if necessary. I have to restrain him sometimes in dealing with wool-hat Homer for whom he feels a contempt which he shows by occasionally giving Homer what he calls a good "going-over." Probably it does no harm since that is the only kind of thing Homer understands, but it sometimes seems to me unfair since the Sergeant is a bruiser and Homer a poor weedy specimen of Southern white trash, undernourished all of his life on a diet of fat pork and combread, grown on miserably poor land, worn out under three hundred years of wretched agriculture. Homer is the only one who ever mentions little Meyer's being a Jew.
Commonly the Sergeant refers to Homer as the Rat, and he is right, but in a way you can't help feeling sorry for Homer because the others dislike him so much. Yet there isn't much to be done about it. If you try to talk to him about the virtues of cleanliness or of responsibility or of one's duty toward others, you get nowhere at all. He simply doesn't understand what you are talking about and, what is worse, he wouldn't care even if he understood. He never reads but looks at the paper comic books by the hour, apparently finding pleasure in them no matter how many times he has seen them. He said once that he did not get the full pleasure out of them until he had gone over them three times.
I have tried to imagine what it was like in his own community back in the hills of Georgia and what sort of position he occupied there, but I never get much out of him. I suspect that back there he was a loud-mouthed bully, but the Army has long since taught him that the same tactics do not work outside his own small community and he has come to adopt the one other alternative of the bully a hangdog, whining manner. Now and then there comes into his eyes a curious cornered, desperate, vicious look which gives me a terrifying indication of what he might be like on a "nigger hunt."
I don't know what there is to be done about such specimens as Homer or the people in the background out of which he came. Certainly they cannot be cured overnight no matter how many "do-gooders" undertake the job or how much money is spent on them. Behind him the trail of poverty and prejudice, ignorance and bad nutrition and possibly even incest, is too long and too intricate. If there are forgotten men in America they are Homer and his relatives, who are worse off than the pitiful Negroes from the same kind of poverty-stricken sordid background, for in Homer's kind there is no merriment and little emotion other than hatred and bitterness. I had never known his sort until I came into the Army, for they do not exist anywhere near Crescent City or even anywhere at all in my own prosperous northern state. I had read about them, but that was a pale experience compared to the reality. They are a contradiction of the pure Mendelians. The original genes, as many sentimentalists suppose, may have been of the finest Anglo-Saxon stock (a theory which I believe can be heavily discounted, especially in Georgia), but something certainly has deformed them a mixture of poverty and sordidness and poor diet continuing through generations.
But enough of Homer, although he is for me a perpetually fascinating if loathsome study. Even the fact that he is heartily disliked by all of us does not seem to disturb him.
The five of us, so dissimilar, manage to get on pretty well despite steaming rains and bugs and boredom, and I have been able to maintain my prestige and discipline. Perhaps this is because I have been completely and utterly objective, removed from all of them and very nearly as impartial as God himself should be. Of course, the backing of the Sergeant is important, just as a police force is important in a world in which mankind is still not sufficiently civilized to do without one, as the Anarchists propose. The Sergeant holds me a little in awe because I can read and can write and speak passable English. Sometimes he scratches his head and declares openly his regret that he quit in the eighth grade of the Roxbury, Massachusetts, schools.
My four companions in this morose green hell are as dissimilar in appearance as in character. Meyer is small and dark with great liquid eyes which seem perpetually filled with unshed tears. His beard is very heavy and blue-black whether freshly shaven or not.
He is very orthodox and will eat no food cooked on Saturday, observes Friday prayers, and I think would like a masusah attached to the door to kiss as he goes in or out of the Quonset hut.
Homer, the wool-hat, is lean and sallow with very small cold blue eyes and sandy hair and a skin that never tans but merely turns red and is covered with freckles. He has a rather squashed nose, which may have come from some fight, and a large loose mouth with uneven teeth usually stained with tobacco juice.
Only Al, the Kansas farm boy, has any pretensions at good looks, and these pretensions are certainly wholly unconscious. He is a well-built boy, with a very clean look always, as if he had just come out of the shower. He is rather like the photographs of "the healthiest Four-H boy in the state." There is nothing of the "hick" in him, but there is a kind of profound simplicity in his approach to life and a good deal of genuine innocence. He is a "nice ?> boy, as the ladies would say. He performs his tasks efficiently and has a genuine talent and love for the earth. He does not seem to be homesick, but the farm in Kansas is his idea of paradise and he wants the war to be over quickly so that he can go back there.
As for the Sergeant whose name is Dennis Burke, I thought as I sat playing gin rummy with him tonight that he might well be called, "The Male Principle." If it is true, as many psychiatrists claim, that there is no such thing as the absolute male or the absolute female but that we are all only in varying degree combinations of male and female, then the Sergeant would come pretty close to the extreme male end of the yardstick.
He is not very tall and is immensely muscular. It is difficult to discover where his chest ends and his stomach begins, but there is no fat on him. He is just thick-bodied and heavy with big feet and hands with fingers like clusters of sausages which are nevertheless extremely and surprisingly deft in performing delicate operations and putting things together. He is in charge of the medicine department, and when Homer, the wool-hat, got his head bashed open somehow on one of his night prowls, the Sergeant washed and sewed up the scalp wound with as delicate a touch as that of any expert nurse or surgeon. He is very hairy with a kind of beard sprouting from the top of his undershirt, and the dark hair on his head is rough and almost bristly. It is difficult for him to say "Yes" grammatically. In my presence he makes a desperate attempt to speak correctly and falls into the vulgar overelegance of the people who say, 'lie asked he and F to do something or other. Also, like the classic sergeant, he has a fine vocabulary of elaborate profanity. We get on very well together and I think he likes me, although I clearly puzzle him. In his brutal directness he cannot understand all the inhibitions, the conventions, the restraints, the hypocrisies of the life which has complicated the whole of my character and existence. With him there are no reticences about what he thinks or what he does even to the most intimate details of his experiences with sex in almost all its forms. I puzzle him because he cannot make out whether I am without experience or whether I simply prefer not to discuss such things. He is further puzzled by the fact that I do not seem to disapprove of his behavior. He has been used to lectures with slides, warnings, and moral exhortations from chaplains, Y.M.C.A. workers, and "P.I." officers, none of which has, of course, made any impression whatever upon his behavior.
When, he plays rummy he plays with all his might. If he loses he is depressed and if he wins everything is fine for the next twenty-four hours. He seems to forget even about women. So whenever possible I let him win. I think he feels that victory over me is a real triumph, much better than defeating Al, because I have been to college.
Tonight he seemed to be in a particularly good mood perhaps because we shared between us part of a bottle which I managed to have sent on to me along with some other things.
He said, <e l don't know what the hell we're doing out here. I only hope that they don't forget us when the war is over and leave us here forever. Sometimes I think I'm just dreaming all this and it ain't happening at all. It shouldn't happen to a dog."
As long as he has something for his hands to do he is fairly happy, but when he finishes a tinkering job and is at a loss for one to follow it lie gets into a bad temper and is likely to give Homer a "working-over" or make derisive remarks to poor little Meyer who just wants to be left alone to feel sorry for himself. I am probably the happiest of all because I have time and am resting, and out of all this thinking and writing I am doing the same kind of tinkering job which Dennis does when he is putting together some new Rube Goldberg contraption. Only my tinkering is steady and consistent and continual and doesn't, like his, come to an end so that I have to think up something else.
When I think of Dennis it occurs to me that it would be a good thing if half our colleges were turned into trade schools where boys could learn to use their hands (and their brains) in creating new mechanical marvels so worshiped in our civilization. But there is still a lag from the nineteenth century and the frontier which induces most people to think that what is called a "college education" is not only important but indispensable. The country is filled with engineers and lawyers who are unwanted and can't make a living and are unhappy when they might be infinitely more prosperous and happy with a machine shop or honestly working a good farm. And there is the whole residue of the 'liberal arts college" graduates, most of whom add up to nothing in so far as learning and culture are concerned. After Dennis, well oiled, finally went to bed, I lay under the mosquito netting for a long time thinking about myself and how I had never found out what it was I really wanted to do.
Every now and again the rain would come down, in torrents, as if someone had opened a gigantic water tap, and in the moments between the deluges the night was unnaturally still so that you could seem to hear the jungle breathing, and above the soft breathing there would be the sound of faint rustlings and the occasional raucous cry of a bird or some tree animal. It is these sounds, this mystery, this hostile terrifying feeling of the awful jungle fertility, which binds us all together far more than any other factor in our existence. In the end, of course, it will have a disastrous effect upon some one of us, if for no other reason than because each day we seem a little more lost and remote from all the rest of the world, as if all restraint, all convention, no longer applied here, as if we had to start all over at the beginning of things to create a society and manners and civilization and devise ways and means of living with each other without violence or murder. I do not know how long it can last without trouble of some kind. I am better off perhaps than the others because I have gone backward into the past.
The odd thing is that even after months of this monotony I am happy here and most of the time I am alone and I have time to exist and to be. Most of us have no conception of what time is. The man back home whizzing along the road by motor or in the air by plane from one town to another thinks he is saving time, but when he gets to his destination he merely starts out whizzing off to the next objective. The man riding a horse or driving in a buggy along the same road in the past had much more time, for he could think and reflect and doze and grow in his mind, in his spirit, and in his soul. This is the first time in many years I have had time, and there is no one preying upon me to do this or that, to play golf or to drink, to go to conventions or any number of meaningless things. There is no one who wants to "share" me. The boys here don't prey upon me. They are friendly enough but I think they consider me a bore.
The tired feeling has been dissipated a little. Now and then I feel a faint desire to return to Oakdale and see my friends and live again in the house with the dull rich "drapes" and Enid constantly emptying the ashtrays and flicking up invisible bits of dust or cigarette ash from her precious carpets and chairs. But it is never Enid I want to see. I know now that everything concerned with Enid is finished. I would like to see the children and my bit of garden at the back of that suburban plot. By now the hedge must have grown high enough to shut out the eyes of the Burdens who live on one side and the Prescotts who live on the other, so that I could go there and lie in the hammock and read in the certainty that someone was not watching me out of a neighboring window every time I scratched myself. Of course there would always be Enid coming out at once to join me with her mending and sit near me so that she could "share" everything, even the beauty and solitude of this little corner which I think she actually dislikes.
When I planted the hedge, she didn't like it. She said she thought it was unfriendly, like a spite fence. It is not impossible that when I return home I shall not find it has grown but that she has in my absence dug it up because it prevented her from calling across to the Prescotts or the Burdens whenever she felt like it and because it prevented her from seeing what they were doing and sharing that too.
But perhaps I shall never return home. I don't know. If it were not for the children, there would be no question. I would not return. Children anchor you down because they are a part of you and because you have a responsibility toward them. But with me there is a third reason that I am afraid of what Enid will do to them, of how she may limit them and warp the fabric of the rest of their lives by forcing them into the pattern of her own shallow, superficial world in which the greatest terror is of thought or of solitude.
In these times it is little use to work hard in order to save money to leave to one's children. With taxes you can't save very much, and even if you put it into insurance the government takes most of it from them when you die in order to use it for other people who need bureaucrat's jobs or are shiftless or lazy or improvident. So you kill yourself to make money only to have it taken from you and given to those who' have never worked or saved or contributed anything to society or even to their own welfare. And, anyway, every year money becomes worth less and less. For fifteen years I have been paying in hundred-cent dollars for annuities and life insurance, and already if I chose to cash in my annuity I would be getting back only sixty cents for the hundred cents I paid in, and if and when I die my children may get back only five cents for every dollar I worked hard to accumulate for them, and the government will take the better part of even the five cents. And even if the company went on paying the commissions to my family on the insurance I have sold, their incomes would shrink and shrink as the cost of everything went up. And all this is done, so they say, for the benefit of the American citizen, to make life richer for him and more secure, not in his will and spirit but in plumbing and electric blankets for everybody.
So working to make and save money for your wife and children is scarcely worth while. Like as not you will leave them not security but liability. The best thing you can leave them is an education, preferably for a trade, in the world that lies ahead of us the means of making a living with their hands since less and less do brains and education receive their reward save in terms of vicious and corrupting power. Or in rewards for having designed some evil new missile which can tear living men, women and children apart or burn them alive. You can leave your children, perhaps, a sense of values, a taste for music or the out-of-doors or something which can make life more interesting and more possible of endurance.
Here in the wet jungle I have had time to think. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure I have ever known, but at times I become the victim of some grotesque and terrible thoughts. At moments it seems to me that mankind has devised all the means of his own destruction always in the deceptive guise of scientific advance. But there are other factors the careful preservation of all idiots and physical weaklings and the lowest elements of the human stock which breed and increase their numbers far out of all proportion to those elements which might improve the race and make the world a better and more civilized place. And there is the great American illusion that plumbing and water closets and automobiles are civilization, when a hermit living in a cave may be a million times more civilized than the country-club member with three cars in his garage. And there is the great materialist illusion which has corrupted, like the yaws which .afflict the dirty jungle natives, both Russians and Americans, where all value is placed upon machines and radios and plumbing and material security. One hears a great deal about material living standards and how many hours of labor it takes in one country or another to produce a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread, but never anything about freedom of the spirit or the intellect or the simple delights of leading a civilized existence or even the pleasure and satisfaction of eating good food or making something with one's hands. And there is the plague of statisticians, the falsest of all men, who measure everything in numbers, or in dollars, or in inhuman abstractions, lacking the intelligence or sensitivity or perception to understand that man is neither a mechanical invention nor an adding machine nor yet an angel. Most of the "do-gooders" concern their anxious thoughts not with any plans for the spiritual or the intellectual sides of life or the things men really live by, such as work and love and creation. They are concerned only with doing away with the outside privy, the amount of income, with providing "security/* with keeping alive the unfit. Their philosophy is a baffled, perverse, unnatural one, but it makes them feel warm inside and good regardless of its long-range evil results.
Sometimes it seems to me that Enid is the perfect product of the age in which we live. She leads an existence which is almost wholly material and even mechanical, without depth or perception, without questioning anything save those who rebel against her kind of living. She lives in a world of conformity in which she herself has no freedom (although the thought never occurs to her) . She has no right to be an individual or a character or an eccentric because this is the unforgivable crime. The character, the eccentric has gone out of American life and it is the poorer for it. If one questions the routine materialist world, one is a Red or a Fascist, a crackpot or fit only to be committed. It is in a way dangerous even to speak a fundamental truth. And through it all the professional politicians worm their way like maggots in a cheese, always offering the "peepul" more and more money which comes not out of the politicians' pockets but out of the "peepulY' own. The whole of our political economy is like a monster devouring itself bit by bit, chewing its own tail until at last both digestion and evacuation become impossible and it dies of internal putrescence.
I couldn't think these things out at home in Oakdale. There was never time. And my neighbors never had time. Their mechanical world, full of washing machines and automobiles and bathrooms and airplanes, never left them time from saving time. They never had time to ponder the iniquities of their own government and rise with indignation against it as a monster which swindled and engulfed them. The most they could do was to shrug their shoulders and say, "What can you expect of politicians?" or, again shrugging, <e Why bother to vote? My vote won't count for anything. It's just one vote against a million." To vote took time away from their squirrel-cage activities, without sense or meaning. But they never stopped whining over each rise in taxes.
And all the noble plans to impose democracy and good government and liberty and freedom upon people like these in this teeming, maggoty East who cannot read or write and actually have no words in their language for these abstractions whose meaning has been painfully evolved through centuries of trial and error, of persecution and martyrdom, of education and enlightenment. They have no words for "freedom" or "democracy" or even "dignity." Small wonder that when they are given freedom they become the immediate victims of the first ruthless and criminal exploiter and dictator... the victims of their own animalism. The element of quality seems to have gone out of a soggy world, except among the advertising hucksters who apply the word only to what machinery has created.
I do not think I am crazy. Sitting here in this hot moist solitude it seems to me that all the rest of the world is crazy a thought which, if I uttered it at home in Oakdale, would certainly bring about my prompt incarceration in a booby hatch. It is the old saying, the supposed test of insanity that everyone is crazy but you and me and you are a little crazy. It seems to me that if I were shut up as mad, I should only be occupying a madhouse within a madhouse and that in such a concentrated center of madness I might find again at least here and there an element of sense, because through the double madness one might fulfill the circle and achieve at last a return to at least some fragments of sense.
My Sergeant too thinks that he lives in a crazy world, but he has not arrived at that conclusion by any intellectual process but through his senses, since that is how he lives. He merely says, "Me for myself... a good meal, some good draft beer, a passable woman, and to hell with the rest of them. I can always make a living because I am smart with my hands and all the rest of them can't live without their washing machines and automobiles and radios. Turn off the electric current and they would be a bunch of helpless sonsofbitches." Sometimes when I think that I may be nuts he reassures me. Quite obviously, by the most basic and fundamental standards, he is not, yet we react and think in a remarkably similar fashion. His scorn of the world in which we live is much greater and certainly more violent than mine.
Sometimes lying awake in the night it seems to me that man has lost his dignity, that he has been robbed of it by the machines to which he has become a slave, by the machines which draw him and his kind together to live in huddled concentrations of huts removed from all contact with the natural universe of which, from the day he is torn painfully from his mother's womb until the day he is laid in the ground with a handful of earth in his face, he is hopelessly and inevitably a part. He has been degraded both in body and in spirit for there is denied him more and more each day the dignity, which belongs even to the animals, of making their own life, or finding food and shelter, of living as free creatures to whom death is but an incident.
During centuries man has built, with suffering and martyrdom and some wisdom, a structure which has begun to disintegrate, to rot from within so that to diagnose the ills and check them has become impossible since man himself is so confused by his mechanical and political achievements that at length all judgment and all standards are lost. He expects machines to do the honest and beautiful work his hands once did and the state (which inevitably is himself and fellows) to make his decisions, to pension him and provide the security which he himself once provided with dignity and with that satisfaction which is the blessing of all creators downward from God and which the kept, the shiftless, the indolent cannot and never will know or understand. He comes to believe that the state is an entity wholly separate from himself which will arrange his life and feed and shelter him. But the state is never a thing apart save in the worst sense, never is it either wise or benevolent, but essentially destructive in its impersonality, in its materialism, in its ruthlessness, in its corruption, in its stupidity. Calling it democracy does not alter its power of destroying the spirit, the intelligence, the creative forces which essentially separate man from the lower animals.
I am but a single man, a fragile spark of life subject to all manner of ills, an infinitesimal speck in the universe, of no intrinsic or basic importance whatever to the operations of that universe, as little in respect to all of this universe as the ant trodden under foot. I am only fighting now to bring myself understanding and consequently dignity without which man himself is of less importance than the squid or the primitive lamprey.
On reading this over it seems to me presumptuous to have such thoughts. I am a mediocrity, limited and bound, who should be content with all the wonders and benefits of modern and mechanical democracy and a "modern" existence. Well, I am not.
