Experimental Writing
Something About a Soldier.
by Mark Harris.
Macmillan. 175 pp. $3.00.

Mark Harris’s new novel, Something About a Soldier, is not a successful novel in the sense that it stands by itself as a new realization of experience—it is, among other things, too self-conscious, too coy, too vaguely abstract for that. But, on the other hand, neither is it one of those familiar, dismal rehearsals of the novelist’s “craft,” in which the syllabus of Creative Writing 101 is recapitulated for our edification. Mark Harris is, rather, a genuinely experimental writer, which is something of a rarity among the younger American novelists. Something About a Soldier is a thoroughgoing experiment—in form, in style, in character, in conception. Mr. Harris is too alive to the true work of the novel, its discovery and investigation of new forms of experience, to be satisfied with its current popular conventions. And yet Mr. Harris is not, I think, experimental enough, not enough of an innovator; for though he abandons the usual conventions he fixes upon others which, though he tries them out tentatively and cleverly, and though they are rather advanced and sophisticated, are unable to infuse his material with the energy and freshness of vision he aims at.

Something About a Soldier is about the 121 days in the army during World War II of one Jacob Epp, born Epstein—his family has changed its name, and throughout the novel Jacob tries unsuccessfully to reassume it; though we never learn whether after he is discharged he does retrieve his patronymic, it is very clear that Mr. Harris is interested in Jacob’s identity and in his confusion about it. Jacob comes from Perkinsville, New York, a euphemism, I suppose, for Scarsdale or Riverdale, or even perhaps for Peoria or Provo or Pitkin Avenue—again, and unfortunately for Mr. Harris’s novel, we never know. A great-uncle of Jacob’s fought in the Civil War: “He was left for dead on the battlefield but he got up and went home. There’s a page about him in The History of the Jews, not a whole page but almost.” Jacob’s father, a successful pawnbroker, whom Jacob refers to as a “financier,” lost a leg in World War I. Jacob himself is seventeen and just out of high school; he has a stratospheric IQ, an uncanny mechanical aptitude—in no time he is able to assemble his rifle faster than his platoon sergeant can—reads anything anywhere, believes in the war and in heroism, and says he loves the world. He is also in a perpetual daze: when one lens of his eyeglasses gets broken, he delays having it replaced, preferring to look out at the world with split vision; assigned to take charge of forty men on travel orders, he manages to lose them; his perceptions of people and his relations with them are fuddled, oblique, and disjointed.

Sent to Georgia for training, he meets two characters who are even less distinct than he: Dodd, his commanding officer, and Joleen, a girl who works in the PX. They all fall in love with each other, and Dodd goes to bed with Joleen, though Jacob does not. Through Joleen, whose father is vice-president of the local branch of the “Consolidated United Service Trades and Peanut Workers Union of America”—a union about as real as those organizations that Ginger Rogers used to go out onto the picket line for—Jacob gets involved with the neighborhood Communists. He wobbles about camp putting up stickers for the second front and against racial segregation in the army and is even chosen to do a little courier work, though actually he hasn’t a clue to what any of this is all about. Gradually, he becomes disconsolate and dissociated. Finally, at Dodd’s instigation he goes AWOL, is picked up by the MP’s, and after a series of appalling incarcerations winds up in the “nut-ward,” whence he is honorably discharged for medical reasons. He has, in fact, become quite mad.

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Who is Jacob? Mr. Harris is dealing with an established literary type, and it isn’t long before the reader comes to respond to Jacob as one of that ancient company of blessed fools—the Parsifals and Don Quixotes, the Candides and Myshkins and Ike Snopeses, the idiot geniuses, the innocents who never learn, the suffering incorruptibles, the anti-heroic heroes, the screwball saints, the sadly comic Christs. He is one of those men who seem to have been born into the world in order to demonstrate its gratuitous brutality; in men like him we are meant to see the conspiracy against humanity that life itself can often seem to be. Paradoxically, Mr. Harris’s Jewish American hero somehow turns out—just as does the hero of The Assistant by the very talented Bernard Malamud—to be the quintessence of “Christian” innocence and suffering: in Christian folk culture, the Wandering Jew is always on the verge of being assimilated to Jesus. To be sure, Mr. Harris’s conception of Jacob has a certain literary conventionality to it, but it is his manner of developing this traditional character and story that is uncommon.

One of the difficulties in Something About a Soldier is in the way he does this. Mr. Harris chooses to present his mythical character without any of the objective clarity that myth usually imposes upon literature. Most of the time we come at Jacob through his fantasies, and Mr. Harris’s prose is often on the point of dissolving into the formlessness of fantasy. Sometimes he brings it off; more often he fails:

I loved you when you danced with the mop, and I smelled you and wanted to touch you, but I thought I better not. . . . In my mind I moved with you, and I’ll move with you now . . . and you with me, and that’s love.

I must tell you, she said. You won’t believe it, but it’s true. I don’t know anything. They never tell you anything, and you hear it so many different ways you don’t know when you’re hearing right from wrong. You’ll think I don’t love you, but it won’t be I don’t love you, it’ll only be not knowing how.

Here Mr. Harris’s prose is characterized by what Edmund Wilson once called pseudo-poetic booziness—this passage is written in the imprecise, sentimentalizing language of William Saroyan. Mr. Harris also experiments with Joyce and Dos Passos, and at one point succeeds in getting onto paper what must be the first recorded evidence of the literary influence of Krazy Kat:

He hooked his hat on the wall, and she watched him, and he was handsome, and she mistrusted such hats, peaked, like policemen’s hats. How stole? he said. How stolen?

Shoot, she said, if I told you what I know you’d know as much as me. What do you wish, sir? We got very fine homemade soup, tomato, bean and chickennoodle.

How about sandwiches?

Pressedham, livwist, choppedegg, bacon, bacontomato, baconlettucetomato, frankonabun.

But I must report, he said, how they were stolen, and pass the word to the Regimental Commander, and he must pass the word to Washington, and Mr. Roosevelt, and Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stalin, all must know.

I’m not an employ of the Army, she said. I’m an employ of the PX only and not paid to answer questions of the Army.

Rummaging about in the warehouse of literature and popular culture to find adequate means for expressing this special kind of fanciful, quasi-vulgar, poignantly off-beat experience, Mr. Harris tends to become rather arch and self-protectively indirect, and sometimes it almost seems that he picks a “literary” way of dramatizing an incident merely for the sake of being literary.

The largest fault of the novel, however, is that it misses its best chance—we never really get a concrete sense of the army in it. There are only Jacob’s fantasies about the army and almost nothing to rectify or modulate them. But at the few places where Mr. Harris does let external reality barge into his novel his writing becomes alive and truly original: there is a wonderful re-creation of a roll call in the army, in which Mr. Harris perfectly catches the magic that can flow out of a roster of typically exotic American names; the only thing I’ve read which is as good in its kind as this is in Whitman at his best. Another very impressive passage is about Jacob’s experience in the stockade after he has gone AWOL. He is out of his mind by now, goes on a hunger strike and is locked up for several days in a coffin-like box called The Shelf. Here fantasy and hallucination come together with the unmistakable actualness of external fact, and the chaos and desolation of Jacob’s existence, his frightening incapacity to feel or know that he is being tormented or punished, or even that anything is being done to him, are fully achieved. These are isolated passages, however; usually Mr. Harris is so absorbed in rigging up Jacob’s musings and seeking out new techniques with which to express them that he fails to get at the object, or to get at it significantly and pointedly. Finally, one must say, his novel never really discovers what it is about.

Mr. Harris is both serious and talented, and he is going on his way. It is useless to make predictions about what novelists are going to do, but I feel that, as schoolmasters used to say of their young hopefuls, Mr. Harris bears watching.

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