Company K (Library Alabama Classics) [Paperback]

William March (Author), Dr. Philip D. Beidler Ph.D. (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Library Alabama Classics | Publication Date: October 24, 1989

With an Introduction by Philip D. Beidler
 

This book was originally published in 1933. It is the first novel by William March, pen name for William Edward Campbell. Stemming directly from the author's experiences with the U.S. Marines in France during World War I, the book consists of 113 sketches, or chapters, tracing the fictional Company K's war exploits and providing an emotional history of the men of the company that extends beyond the boundaries of the war itself.

William Edward Campbell served courageously in France as evidenced by his chestful of medals and certificates, including the Croix de Guerre, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Navy Cross. However, without the medals and citations we would know of his bravery. For it is clear in the pages of Company K that this book was written by a man who had been to war, who had clearly seen his share of the worst of it, who had somehow survived, and who had committed himself afterward to the new bravery of sense-making embodied in the creation of major literary art. It is of that bravery that we still have the record of magnificent achievement, the brave terrible gift of Company K.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A rich novel, . . . the outstanding virtues of March’s work are those of complete lack of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement.”
—New York Times

“A sardonic minor masterpiece on World War I, . . . Company K observes all the antiheroic conventions of the between-wars decades; yet author March was himself a Marine Corps noncom wounded three times, who won a D.S.C., Navy Cross, and Croix de Guerre, and had every right to the bitter pity with which he wrote his novel. Among its 113 characters, every military type is represented— the good soldier, the coward, the goldbrick, the rank-happy shavetail, the lucky, and the wound-prone. Each is caught in one lurid moment of his life, as if March had composed by the light of a Very pistol.”
—Time

“March’s book has the force of a mob-protest; an outcry from anonymous throats. It is the only War-book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes.”
—Graham Greene in The Spectator

About the Author

A native of Mobile, AL, William March (1893-1954) studied law at The University of Alabama. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I, he worked as an executive with the Waterman Steamship Corporation and published novels and short stories. Writer and critic Alistair Cooke described March as “the unrecognized genius of our time.”

 

Philip D. Beidler is Professor of English at The University of Alabama and author of Rewriting America: Vietnam Authors in their Generation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: University Alabama Press (October 24, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0817304800
• ISBN-13: 978-0817304805
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a surprisingly modern old book, December 28, 2000

By 

Michel Aaij (Montgomery, AL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Company K (Library Alabama Classics) (Paperback)

This edition of "Company K," by William March (a native of Mobile, graduate of The University of Alabama's law school, and WW I veteran), is one in a series called The Library of Alabama Classics, and it warrants its status as a classic. It's a beautiful little book, nicely typeset in a somewhat nostalgic manner, and deserves to be better known than it is--as does its author. Kudos to Alabama's UP for making this book available in paperback for a wide audience.

The book, first published in 1933, is a collection of short first-person narratives by the members of a company caught in the frontline in the first World War. Remarkable is March's ability to place himself (and the reader) in the positions of a great many very different characters--the company is a cross section of American society. This, his first novel, shows that March is an intelligent and sensitive storyteller.

More remarkable, perhaps, is how easily this book might be hypertexted--since all the narratives intersect, and various characters appear in various guises in other's narratives, it would lend itself easily to an HTML version in which a reader could click their way through the book without having to follow the book's order. Surely March must have seen this as a possible way of reading, since the chapter headings are the characters' names, allowing a reader of the book to easily flip from one character to another. The book, which seems to be suitable more for a spatial than a chronological way of reading, disrupts the boundaries of its printed format. I don't mean to call March a post-structuralist avant la lettre, but it is a feature that enhances, in my opinion, one of the themes of the book: the horror of war recognizes no hierarchy; war disrupts the human order.

As for horror, there is plenty of that. The point of view March has chosen is excellent in that it allows for multiple readings of the same event (for instance, the unnecessary and criminal shelling of a recon party); some of the voices come from beyond the grave and are particularly chilling.

One final note on the edition: it is introduced (not designed, as the Amazon heading states erroneously) by Phil Beidler, a professor of American lit at U of A. Beidler has shown a great interest in and loyalty to the literature of Alabama (see, for instance, his anthologies "The Art of Fiction in the Heart of Dixie" and "Many Voices, Many Rooms"), and his introduction to this book is insightful and touching. Beidler obviously knows his stuff; he knows both war and Alabama.

I believe that this book, as has been noted by others, is of the rank of Remarque's "All Quiet," and it is a wonderful and chilling read. Like most good war novels, it says "don't let this happen again," while realizing that it probably will, knowing human nature.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a classic veteran's tale from WW1, July 10, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (RI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Company K (Library Alabama Classics) (Paperback)

Slaughterhouse-five, and Catch-22 both borrowed from a powerful predecessor. Company-k is a simple read, short chapters each one a character of many narratives. Each one an insightful and heart-rending tale. It would be easy to ignore Company-K and most don't know it - except that it's written by a man who was there. Hemingway glorified war made it seem almost fun - March tells it as it was. Only Johnny Got His Gun, and All Quite On the Western Front come close to this passionate and shocking book.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost a Classic, July 4, 2004

By 

Stephen M. Kerwick (Wichita, KS United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Company K (Library Alabama Classics) (Paperback)

March makes a compelling case in this text that he should be well entrenched in the second tier of American authors, if not the first. His WWI recollections do a fine job of bringing out the terrors and guilts of a war long forgotton and little remembered, except for the short period of the Twenties. If there is any shortcoming in this fine work, it is that it draws far too much from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthologies. My guess is that March, who was trained as a lawyer like Masters (a former partner of the unethical (...) Clarence Darrow) grasped onto Masters' then-current work . It's not a heroic idea, but one that's occurred to me. In any event, Company K is a work that ought to be read far more than it is a century later. WWI [is] seldom remembered as the great trauma that it was in the US. Here's a book that tells how bad it was, and more importantly, why.