Customer Reviews

The Long March and In the Clap Shack (2 Books in 1)

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The Long March: A novella set in a Marine training area during the Korean War. An officer sets his battalion on a forced march over 36 miles to complement his swaggering self-image. Soldiers drop out by the truckload in the sweltering heat, and one is driven to insubordination by his conflicting senses of self and duty.

In the Clap Shack: A play in which a young Marine tested positive for syphilis is taken advantage of by an egotistical doctor. Styron witholds little in his depiction of the unpleasantries to be found in a World War II Naval Hospital urological ward: "short arm inspections," racism, doctors' lack of compassion. Despite this, a grim humor can be found in several scenes.

William Styron (himself a Marine) gives us believable characters facing an environment that seeks to depersonalize them and shows how the military's command structure can leave little room for individuality.

Mr Styron's theatre play is set in 1943 in a urological ward of a Navy hospital. There are several soldiers all of whom suffer from various venereal diseases, their presence being "a sign of the moral breakdown the war has brought about". Schwartz, a solemn Jew, a South-born black called Lorenzo Clark and a syphilis patient, Wally Magruder. The latter has to wear a special bathrobe marked with a yellow "S" and he has to use a washbasin reserved for patients suffering from the same disease.
Among the staff, there is Dr Glanz, well known for "always wanting people to be sick" and the homosexual male nurse Lineweaver who naturally delights in examining the patients in the ward.
A tragic and at the same time comic play about the way patients can be manipulated and mislead by the medical profession, the competence of which is clearly to be mistrusted according to Mr Styron.