Customer Reviews

The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps

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I finished these "five tales of the Marine Corps" wishing that Willam Styron had written more, specifically that he had finished the section called "My Father's House," which he wrote in 1985 and was the opening section of a novel never finished. As always with this great writer, these stories convey the complexity of that animal known as a human. The narrator of "My Father's House" is Paul Whitehurst, recently returned to Virginia-- the time is 1946-- from a three year stint in the Marine Corps fighting in "the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars" who can see the awful contradiction that, in order to be a good soldier, he has to hate the Japanese enemy, described by his commander as "subhuman," while feeling guilty over his memento of the war, an exquisite gold locket obviously taken from a dead Japanese soldier Paul won from a tipsy warrant officer in a poker game in Saipan. At first Paul thinks the locket is solid gold but then discovers a photograph inside of two little girls "who appeared to be sisters" on a ferryboat. "So I kept the picture in the locket and from time to time stole a peek at the ferryboat children, always making my mind an absolute blank whenever my thoughts began to stray toward the father from whose dead neck my trophy had been torn."

Then there is the specter of race. In "Marriott, the Marine," it is rumored that half dozen or so black people had committed suicide rather than be uprooted from their homes to make way for what would eventually be called Camp Lejeune. And Paul in "My Father's House" has a heated argument with his stepmother Isabel over whether or not a black man convicted of raping a white woman should be executed. He, a liberal for the times who carried a copy of POCKET BOOK OF VERSE with him throughout the war, weighs in on a prison sentence since the rapist had not killed anyone. In the eyes of Isabel, however, he is a "monster," who has committed a crime worse than murder and moreover is represented by a New York "little Jew" lawyer. Finally Paul runs into the family cook Florence, who had been fired by his stepmother over a clash of personalities and whom he loves. She is thrilled to see that he has returned from the war unscathed. "'My my, you is some big boy now.'" Paul's character surely is on some level autobiographical as he says that since boyhood "the whole conundrum of color and slavery's cruel bequest--had begun to absorb me." Readers of Styron know that he went on to write the controversial CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER.

No writer comes to mind better than Mr. Styron at character development, often extended but sometimes by a few deft sentences artfully constructed: Blankenkenship from the first story; Marriott, the Marine who speaks fluent French, reads Flaubert but in the end is a Marine to the core; Darling (Dee) Jeeter, Jr., the country boy from South Carolina who cannot wait to kill the first enemy soldier; his father, "Daddy" Jeeter dying from lung cancer, a "boozer, brawler," but also a decorated war hero; Mamie Eubanks, the twenty-year-old Baptist girl, with whom Paul is smitten-- at least for carnal reasons. She reads THE ROBE (a novel I had not thought about since high school) and ends phone conversations with "God bless."

Styron is a master of metaphor. A character has eyes with irises "like thin blue flakes of splintered glass, twinkly with scorn." Fallen soldiers have "pureed brains." On a more pleasant note, the "afternoon sacrament of ice cream." In a parade on Fifth Avenue in New York, the narrator of "Marriott, the Marine" sees General Douglas MacArthur, just having been removed by President Truman from his post as commander of United Nations and Amerian forces in the Far East. He glances straight at the narrator and "behind the raspberry-tinted sunglasses his eyes appeared as glassily opaque and mysterious as those of an old, sated lion pensively digesting a wildebeest." Finally the same narrator says "Flaubert's enormous craft, his monkish dedication, his irony, his painstaking regard for the nuances of language--all of these commanded my passionate admiration." These very words could be used to describe the genius of Styron, himself.

Suicide Run is a well-written novel by a respected author. I have not read all of his work, but I was deeply impressed by The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, both of which were extremely good.

In Blankenship, Styron does not delve very deeply into the personalities of Blankenship or the prisoner who drives him beyond his self-constraint. For example, I thought it would have been interesting for Styron to have written something about the prisoner's experiences in World War II, particularly his combat experience.

In one story, one outstanding bit of writing is about a Marine who must defend himself from an attacking house dog while under fire on Okinawa, and who suffers a bad wound with lasting scars from the experience.

Suicide Run contains several observations about the sacrifices people in the military will make in order to satisfy their nonmilitary drives, but then it just ends. A well-written story, which fires the imagination, but in end leaves the reader hanging.

The story about Colonel Merriot was very, very good. A non-military artist recalled to Marine Corps duty meets a Marine officer who is impressively cultured, but who in the end turns out to be a dedicated and committed Marine with a strongly-felt bond to a deceased fellow Marine who is disrespected by the main character. I know something of the feelings the protagonist feels. It's unfortunate that Styron allowed his sense of cultural superiority to military people to tinge the story, but perhaps he intended to show his main character as having feet of clay (although I doubt it - the story and the group of stories simply aren't written that way).

In My Father's House is very good on the anti-racist feelings of whites toward blacks and captures the paternalism of those early civil rights tendencies among whites. The fault of this story is that Isabel is kept so one-dimensional.

My main complaint about William Styron is his apparent inability to point out his own blind spots, assumptions, and prejudices, and assuming that his perceptions are so obviously the right ones. In that regard, in war stories, he's a lot like Paul Fussel. My main favorable impression of his writing is his ability to capture certain universal impressions and feelings, particularly with regard to military life.

Originally intended to form the basis of a novel-which Styron abandoned-these five stories of Marine Corps life interlink well and are as absorbing as anything Styron has written.
All set between the brutal Japanese war at the close of WW2, and the call up for the Korean campaign just a few years after,Styron -speaking from personal experience-is uncompromising on the brutalities of war; from killing and seeing your comrades die to the vapid stupidities and mistakes of senior personnel. He notes the real human fear of entering these notorious battles; the desire to live, the trauma of survival with indelible memories of horror.
The stories concern the psyche of a marine; how art literature and gentility are human but uneasy bedfellows for a trade that requires mans most basest instincts to carry out. There is nothing aesthetic about war.
Styron was never prolific.Maybe a streak of perfectionism in him prevented this, but everything he did write is perfect which makes Styron arguably the greatest writer never to have won the nobel prize.

Whether or not you will enjoy this book will probably come down to how you like a wordy style of writing. Let me say that I came by an audio CD version of the book for free and I found the author's descriptive style so overblown and full of haughty adjectives that I stopped listening halfway through. Note that this was after two complete stories of the collection of five, so I feel I got a fair taste of the book; I am not judging by the cover.

I see that another reviewer thinks that Styron is some sort of literary master. Maybe. And if you like reading the "great novelists," with their slow, drawn out, meaningless sad little stories where at the end you can have tea with someone and celebrate Styron's "character development," then perhaps this is a good book. But if you actually want something fun or engaging to read, no thanks. This is high school English class "literary" stuff and in my opinion the title is misleading. The "Suicide Run" in the title? It is about a marine driving too fast to go see his mistress over a weekend. Tales of the Marine Corp? Hardly. The Marines just happen to be the backdrop; the stories would work equally well in most other settings, so if you are led to expect that a "Tale of the Marine Corp" involving a "Suicide Run" might be vaguely martial in character, you'd be complete off. It would be like renaming "The Scarlet Letter" "Lust and Abuse Among the Puritans" in order to spice it up a bit.

If you miss the days of writing essays about the books you have read; if you long to return to college English classes and the overly serious discussions in campus coffee shops, this book is for you. Everyone else, this book will make you want to go on your very own Suicide Run as your ears (or eyes) bleed from the stuffy, pointless style.