TT 453: Fred Kaplan and Charles Willeford
Veteran's Day Post
I had such a good time reading Fred Kaplan’s new novel, A Capital Calamity, a humorous tale of Washington D.C. dealing and scheming. The opening sentences give the tone:
“Serge Willoughby just wanted to make money and have fun. He didn’t mean to start World War Three.”
Kaplan is best-known for journalism and non-fiction, often with a National Security slant. “Truth Stranger than ‘Strangelove,’” one of his many articles for the New York Times, is a smooth and on-topic introduction to A Capital Calamity. (If you admire Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove that article is simply a must-read.)
While Kaplan is an experienced writer, this is his first novel. Not every journalist can transition to fiction, but the plotting in A Capital Calamity is terrific. The style might recall Ross Thomas, and there is perhaps also something of Brian Garfield’s Hopscotch in the mix. Recommended for fans of espionage and political thrillers as a lighthearted caper with true doom and gloom in the background.
Grand conflict erases nuance and personal perspective. Kaplan’s D.C. insiders don’t think much about the soldiers on the ground, and I have no doubt this is true in real life as well as fiction. (In a different but related topic, the recent article “How Four Posts on Instagram Destroyed Her Life” by Jesse Barron is a desolate read.)
I talked to a conspiracy-oriented friend the other day who suggested that Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney got together for national security reasons. With Musk, Putin, and Trump now in the group chat, the global game of RISK could change dramatically. My friend suggested I watch the 1984 movie Red Dawn.
That’s not going to happen — I mean, I am not going to watch Red Dawn — but I did start to wonder about the NSA, the DIA, the CIA and so forth. They didn't seem to like Trump much the first time around, and I can only imagine the current conversations: “Let’s definitely ignore the incoming president. Of course, we always basically ignore the president anyway, but this time we won’t read a single email from the White House.”
On Veteran’s Day I always remember Charles Willeford, beloved author of Miami Blues and the other books starring detective Hoke Mosely.
The following is part of my longer essay, “Nothing is Inchoate.”
Willeford writes simple declarative sentences. His patrimony is the surreal humor of Franz Kafka, the hard-boiled action of Dashiell Hammett, the existential cry of Albert Camus, and the no-frills machismo of Ernest Hemingway.
To be fair, many American male authors could claim the same patrimony. What made Willeford Willeford was twenty years as a professional soldier. He joined the U.S. Army in 1935, learned to service planes, shoot guns, and shoe horses, graduated to tank commander, fought in World War II, and finally left active duty in 1956.
The very first book Willeford published, Proletarian Laughter (1948), has seven short and brutal “Schematics” that must be about his war experiences. Willeford’s nascent literary voice can be heard in “Schematic Number 1.”
A group of us soldiers were standing in back of a tank keeping warm by the engine. Everybody in town was waiting for the word to move out. We had our coats and gloves off and the blast from the radial engine delighted us.
The tank commander who ran the tank came out of the basement of the house the tank was parked next to, and joined the group. He told us that there was a blonde and an old lady downstairs and that he had raped the blonde. The old lady had raised so much hell about it that he had to kill her before he could finish raping the blonde.
That started a little conversation among us. One guy told the tank commander that when the Military Government came in a couple of days, and the blonde reported it, he would get into trouble. All of us told him about the same thing. He was worried about it, and finally he decided about the only thing he could do was to go down and shoot the blonde too. He was a nice guy though and asked first if anybody else wanted to rape the blonde. Nobody did because it was too cold.
He went back downstairs and we could hear the noise of his submachine gun. It sounded muffled down there in the basement. He came back upstairs to the tank and said he sure felt a lot better. He didn’t want to get in a jam over no damned heinie. It wasn’t long after that that we got the word and we all moved out.
Given the title, one would expect that the late-in-life Something About a Soldier (1986) might take up the thread of the early Schematics, but, no, it only covers Willeford’s teenage years when he joined the Army to escape the Depression. The book is a masterpiece, full of amusing and occasionally harrowing stories about hierarchy, cooking, whoring, driving, flying, sailing, horseback riding, and horseshoeing — but there’s nothing about battle.
At the close, the very young Willeford is happy to get a promotion and a pay raise.
It just went to prove that all a man had to do in the Army was to live right, work hard, and all the good things would eventually come his way.
It had certainly worked out that way for me.
It’s rather an abrupt end to such a long and complex tale. Confused, the reader turns the final blank page to find the author bio:
Charles Willeford served in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force for twenty years, retiring from the U.S.A.F. as a master sergeant in 1956. During World War II he was a tank commander with the 10th Armored Division and was awarded the Silver Star, for gallantry in action; the Bronze Star, for valor; the Purple Heart, with one oak leaf cluster; and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre, during the Battle of the Bulge. Following the war he was a rifle company sergeant for three years with the Army of Occupation in Japan. He reenlisted in the U.S.A.F. as a base historian.
In other words, while this may be Something about a soldier, it is hardly Everything.
Not too many professional soldiers end up as literary types. Willeford knew from the beginning that it was almost a contradiction.
In the Army, if a man has scruples of any kind, his only protection against ridicule is to keep them to himself. I had already noticed the line I had drawn for myself was getting narrower and fainter as time passed. If a man wasn’t careful the Army could coarsen him, and I knew I had to protect my sensitivity if I was ever going to write anything first-rate.
How can one be emotionally vulnerable and be a soldier? The answer is: you can’t. Willeford didn’t get out of the Army when he was teenager. He stayed there for twenty years and killed a lot of men. He lost a lot of sensitivity.
Willeford invented the phrase “immobilized man” to describe the physically active yet emotionally stunted male. Parsing the feelings of emotionally stunted men would become Willeford’s life work. This was also a preoccupation of Kafka, Hammett, Camus, and Hemingway, but all those authors were comparatively direct. Willeford took the long way around.
Humor would be key. For Willeford, humor was the path. If something terrible was also absurd, then laughter would be a reasonable response.
In the barracks, Willeford and his friend D’Angelo observed a strange scenario: A few hours before an Igorot is shot by the authorities for cannibalism, he is chased around his cell by a drunk Texan who wants to convert the Igorot to Christianity (so that the Igorot could be forgiven and go to heaven).
This is is a terrible situation, literally one of life and death, but the two young soldiers roar with laughter.
“You know,” D’Angelo said after we sat down at the table and filled our plates, “that was the hardest I’ve ever laughed in my life. My stomach still hurts. But I don’t think I’ll ever tell anybody about it.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But I might write something about it someday.”
“That’s the best way, Will. That way, nobody’ll understand why we laughed.”
“Fuck you.”
D’Angelo laughed, reached out, and speared another pork chop.
D’Angelo’s comment, “That way, nobody’ll understand why we laughed,” foreshadows how many readers would misunderstand Willeford’s books.
Not that being understood ever mattered to Willeford much. In his excellent biography, Don Herron quotes a valuable letter written by Willeford to his old bunkmate (and major player in Something About A Soldier) Elmer Canavin:
I remember once a technical order at Ft. Benning that came out about “how to use a shovel.” It was so complicated that no one could follow it. I was a first sergeant, and as a gag (one that only I could appreciate), I put it on the board with a company roster, stating that everyone would read and put their intitials after their name stating they they understood it. I got initials from everyone except three holdouts. I had the change of quarters take these three into the dayroom and read the order over and over until they finally said they understood it, and initialed it. Things like this kept me sane in the army, and I, of course, never explained.
Like any first sergeant, all of Willeford’s major male characters love to tell other men what to do. In almost every book there are lectures by men who think they are right.
“Lectures by men who think they are right” is Willeford’s classic satirical voice.
While these self-involved, lecturing men aren’t totally right, they aren’t completely wrong, either. Just like men in the Army, they defer to men above them in rank, willing to listen to another lecturer if need be. If they disagree with the superior officer, they won’t say, but will file it away for future reference. They (or their superior officers) are never completely wrong. They know a lot. Most of it is right. But some of it is ridiculous. Willeford is very careful to always let the reader decide.
My favorite Fred Kaplan book is 1959, a glorious account of how so much of what seems new and different about our contemporary world took off in the late 1950s, a decade commentators have long dismissed as sleepy.