COMMENT
9
war in the Pacific. And Spencer Tracy has been guilty of grave
crimes and imprisoned in Alcatraz before being given a chance to sacri–
fice his life for his country. But in the past, death was unnecessary in
Hollywood and the hero who saved his country was decorated at the
end of the picture by the President of the United States, while the
lovable and heroic gangster was sometimes permitted to reform and
become a junior executive.
So too in John Ford's film,
When Johnny Comes Marching
Home,
the hero is prevented from being heroic by his excellence as
a teacher of aerial gunnery in a training camp. He succeeds in. escap–
ing the bondage and penalty of his pedagogic talent only because
another soldier has suddenly had an attack of acute appendicitis, and
he performs heroic exploits-which, it is loudly implied, have done
much to defeat Nazi Germany- largely through a series of accidents
and weaknesses, such as falling asleep at the wrong time and getting
drunk when he did not want a drink. He is rewarded for his feats
by being sent to a psychiatric ward: all his efforts to explain himself
are frustrated by high-ranking generals who insist on forcing him to
drink more alcohol so that he will regain his senses, and when he
escapes from the psychiatric ward, he has to climb back into his own
home in the early morning like a burglar, which is what his father
supposes him to be, clouting his son into unconsciousness with a
monkey wrench as he comes through the kitchen window and refusing
to believe any part of his son's account of his heroism except for the
visit to the psychiatric ward. At the very end of the picture, there
occurs the traditional decoration of the hero by high-ranking officials,
but only after many reels in which the most holy sanctions and mores
of America have been made the butts of scorn, slapstick, satire, and
in short the most merciless comic rejection.
From Hollywood to modern poetry is an enormous jump, but
since we are all involved with one another and in the same endangered
boat, poetry can also be a good index of the climate of society. As
R. P. Blackmur remarked in
Partisan Review's
symposium on the
state of American writing, Robert Lowell called his book of poems
Lord Weary's Castle,
Randall Jarrell his,
Losses,
and John Berryman
his,
The Dispossessed
(Saul Bellow's second novel is named
The
Victim,
Isaac Rosenfeld's first novel
Passage From Home,
and Hem–
ingway's latest novel derives its title from Stonewall Jackson's dying
