Men Die Read online

  ALSO BY H. L. HUMES

  The Underground City

  For ALH

  Empress of All My Country

  & for K & JNB

  Who Cheered Her Musicians

  “… And if the Captain ask you,

  Tell him I'm going.

  Tell him I'm gone.

  If he ask you was I laughing,

  Tell him I was cryin'.

  Tell him I'm gone …”

  Leadbelly

  INTRODUCTION

  Alan Cheuse

  As much as I would like to offer a thoroughly persuasive and wholly sound critical appraisal of these two novels by Harold “Doc” Humes, one of the least-known and most enigmatic members of his writing generation, I won't be able to speak about the books without first explaining how they intertwined with my own education. Or more precisely, how they became part of my education, in the way that some fine (or sometimes merely ordinary) books often do during that special phase in your life when raw minutes and art bind together in what, years later, you might recognize as the first blush of vocation.

  I was completing my sophomore year at Rutgers and had taken over the editorship of the literary magazine, The Anthologist, from a fellow named James Shokoff (whose whereabouts today I sometimes wonder about) when William Sloane, who directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference with another teacher of mine, John Ciardi, offered me and a few others the chance to wait tables at the workshop that summer of 1958. We drove up to Vermont and carried trays for various famous writers and not-so-famous editors. One of them, a trim, dark-haired woman named Mary Heathcote, became a friend to the tall, stoop-shouldered, enthusiastic would-be bohemian that I was.

  That autumn she invited me and a few other Rutgers boys to parties at her apartment in Greenwich Village. At one of these pleasant little fiestas, I met a chunk-boned, jocular man a little shorter than me, with his lovely wife and some small children in arms. He turned out to be Harold Humes, a founder of the Paris Review, recently returned from a long postwar sojourn in Europe. His first novel, The Underground City, had just been published in New York. Unlike the work of some of the other writers I had met that summer (Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Yates, among others), Humes' fiction was unknown to me. Mary Heathcote sent me a copy of his massive book; I put aside my regular reading (an act not unknown to me in my student years) and spent some days in my dustbin of an apartment a few blocks from the Rutgers campus in dilapidated New Brunswick, New Jersey, feasting on Humes' story of politics and the disasters of war and love and peace and paternity in France circa 1944-47.

  That year—in the spring of 1959—we inaugurated a regular reading series by accomplished visiting writers, something that we take for granted as part of an undergraduate literature education these days. But in the late fifties and early sixties it was a trick that we had to learn to do by trying it out. With a little financial help and a lot of encouragement from a few sympathetic instructors in the Rutgers English department, those of us on the magazine staff invited Yates (who came to read), Mailer (who did not), Ciardi (who was already in place), and a few others, including Harold Humes.

  Humes showed up. In the front room of a splendid nineteenth-century townhouse appropriated by the university years before and with book in hand, he read vigorously from The Under-ground City. Head bobbing, arms waving, he looked like a middleweight boxer with his fight strategy in front of him. He then led a question-and-answer period about modern writing.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said to the audience. “How many of you”—there were about forty of us in the crowd before him, mostly students, a few faculty members including John McCormick (critic, bullfight expert, and biographer), and Ciardi and Sloane—”have read a book called Under the Volcano?”

  McCormick's hand shot up. Mine did, too, except that I hadn't read it, though as was often the case with my education in those days I found a copy of the novel and took care of that deficiency in my life soon after.

  “Three of us!” Humes chuckled. “Three good readers. The rest of you will remain flawed until you know that novel. Not damaged. But flawed somewhat. You're missing out on a great feast, a great fiesta of human frailty and extraordinary writing.”

  Talk about frailty—the next season saw Humes publish his second and only other novel, Men Die, a book as compact in its genius as The Underground City was huge and overbearing. Then he seemed to disappear from the New York scene. One heard rumors that he was experimenting with a new drug called LSD—and later in the decade I read accounts in the New York press that he was seen distributing five-dollar bills to crowds at the entrance to Columbia University. A scheme of his for building houses out of paper drew a write-up in The New York Times. But no more fiction came from him.

  I encountered him again in Bennington, Vermont, in the early seventies. I was teaching there and one of his daughters was a student. Humes seemed to have made himself over into a character from a novel in progress. He was a graying, shambling wrack of paranoia and good cheer, talking of a massage cure for heroin addicts, which he had tried to promote in Italy and the United States, and explaining that it was well understood in certain circles that the CIA could monitor the progress of radical dissidents, of whom he was one, from seemingly innocuous clouds that traveled above them on roadways across the country. He bunked in his daughter's dormitory. Students gathered around him. They had just read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and here was the mariner in the flesh.

  I never saw Humes again after his Bennington visitations, but fifteen years later his remark about Malcolm Lowry's work came to mind when, invited by David Madden to contribute to the second of his “Rediscoveries” volumes, I chose Humes' books as the fiction I thought ought to come back into print. I discovered upon rereading them that he made rare books in the best sense, great feasts and fiestas, and my reencounters with them convinced me that in the raw, instinctual days of early recognitions, my admiration for Humes' writing was not at all misplaced. I recommended them at nineteen because I found the books thrilling in ways that I could not at the time explain. In my late forties, I found them just as thrilling, and in addition I could muster a few ideas as to why.

  The Underground City stands as one of those rare birds of American fiction, a true novel of ideas with credible characters and a powerful realistic plot. Humes divides the book into three large chunks, and by the way he sets his first scene, with a vast canvas of cloud and sky above Paris at the opening of a day about a year or so following the end of World War II, he seems to have nothing less in mind than the desire to create a monumental story of epic range:

  The eastern sun, full and fiery orange, just risen clear of the horizon, began slowly to sink back into the gray ocean of clouds as the plane started down; the sky altered; clouds changed aspects. To the southeast, delicate as frozen breath, an icy herd of mare's tails rode high and sparkling in the upper light of the vanishing sun; they were veiled in crystalline haze as the plane descended through stratocirrus, the sun in iridescent halo at its disappearing upper limb. And below, slowly rising closer, the soft floor of carpeting clouds gradually changed into an ugly boil of endless gray billows, ominous, huge. Against the east, rayed out in a vast standing fan: five fingers of the plummeting sun.…

  That airplane carries the crippled and ailing American ambassador to France, the portentously named Bruce Peel Sheppard, back to Paris after a medical leave, in order to deal with an impending crisis: the war-crimes trial of a collaborator named Du-jardin, whose case the French Communist Party has just taken up—on the side of the supposed war criminal—as a way of attacking the U.S. presence in postwar Europe. Caught in the middle of this rising political storm is New Jersey-born John Stone, a heroic but now burned-out alcoholic American undercover agent. Under the code-na
me “Dante,” Stone led a group of commandos who smuggled arms to the French Resistance in advance of the Allied invasion. Stone, appropriately enough, now works in the civilian wing of the U.S. embassy under the guise of a graves registration official. As Ambassador Peel's aircraft prepares to make its descent below the clouds into what Humes, with deliberate homage to Andre Malraux (author of that great novel of ideas, Man's Fate) calls “the world of men,” we encounter a broad cast of characters and become engaged in a masterly setup for a dramatization of the world of modern Western geopolitical affairs. Just as the trial will rip open the wounds on the French body politic still fresh from the war, the large central portion of the novel gives us the narrative of Stone's undercover work during the war—a dense, dramatic novel within the novel that may be the best story of the Resistance told by anyone in English (which stands as the testimony Stone will give at the trial of the accused and contentious Du-jardin). The last third of the novel shows us the aftermath of the trial, and the unfolding fates of Ambassador Sheppard, Stone, a Resistance leader named Merseault, the Communists Picard and Carnot, and a number of other characters involved in the wartime and postwar drama.

  Humes' treatment of the military and political aspects of the events alone would have been brilliant enough, but he under-girds these public matters with the burning psychology of personal motives, stories of lost sons and troubled fathers that involve both Ambassador Sheppard and Stone, as well as a mysterious member of the Resistance code-named Berger (again Humes plays tribute to Malraux by using the writer's own wartime code name). There is, too, a philosophical level to the book: the presentation of a number of warring views of history and politics, from the ill-fated notions of the ambassador on through the paranoid psycho-historical theories of the Communist manipulator Picard (which, as critic James Bloom pointed out in the original version of a brief note on Humes—perhaps the only critical notice that the book has received in the thirty years since its publication—portends the now-fashionable strategies of paranoiac fiction as exemplified by the work of Thomas Pynchon). Moreover, there is a rich mythological overlay to the story, beginning with the ambassador's descent from the heavens at the beginning of the book, on through the central return back in time to the years of the Resistance in the Stone narrative—as well as a lot of seeming counterparts to figures out of European poetry and myth among various characters, including Stone (“Dante”) who makes his physical descent into the underworld of the sewers in the final section of the novel.

  If The Underground City appears, deceptively at first, to be one of those loose and baggy monsters of which Henry James complained, the compactness of Men Die, published less than a year later, might give the initial impression of simplistic storytelling about a complex period: the months leading up to the United States' entry into the Pacific War. The Underground City seems almost wholly anomalous in its essence, a work that no other American writer tried to write before Humes (except for the neophyte attempt of Humes' Paris Review compatriot Peter Matthiessen, whose now deservedly forgotten early novel, Partisans, unlike his triumphant later work, comes nowhere near the success of Humes' book). Men Die has a number of echoes and companion works, beginning with James Jones' From Here to Eternity, Warren Eyster's (equally) ignored Far From the Customary Skies, William Styron's novella The Long March, and George Garrett's Which Ones are the Enemy?—these last two being, of course, books with postwar settings.

  Men Die is set in a United States-occupied Caribbean island that has been carved out into a honeycomb of tunnels by a battalion of black navy laborers in anticipation of the outbreak of World War n. Lording over the operation is Commander Bo-nuso Hake, a Captain Queeg-like figure who fascinates young Lieutenant Everett Sulgrave, the officer in charge of the actual tunneling and stockpiling operations. Ben Dolfuss, Hake's former first in command, is the third white man on the island. He appears to have had an affair with Vannessa Hake, the commander's sensual wife. The entire narrative explodes at the outset as the ammunition dump goes sky-high, leaving alive only Sulgrave and six black mutineers, who piece together the corpse of the commander—and the story of his life and command. Thus the novel itself is a series of highly charged narrative fragments that take us back and forth in time, from Hake's assumption of command on through the explosion, the funeral of Hake in Washington, and Sulgrave's pathetic love affair with Vannessa. Some sections include overtly stream-of-consciousness vignettes from the untimely widowed Vannessa's point of view.

  With all this you might think that the book itself was a disaster, as though James Jones had never recovered from a reading of The Sound and the Fury. But Humes' novel is tersely and convincingly composed, and while it echoes other works it never seems derivative, the result perhaps of its powerfully made scenes (such as a fire drill on the arsenal island in which a fire hose takes on a life of its own and nearly kills some men) and the essentially clear and direct nature of Humes' prose. Fathers searching for sons, sons looking for fathers, and a military structure destroying that which it is meant to defend: These are some of the motifs from Humes' first novel that we notice at work again in this second book. In the philosophical musings of the slightly demented Commander Hake we find some of the paranoid theories of The Underground City emerging as a prelude for war in another theater (and clearly echoing some of the chords struck by Mailer in his portrayal of the commanding general in The Naked and the Dead). Men Die is a finely executed, dramatic curtain raiser to the great story of the war, whose last year and aftermath Humes himself portrays with such breadth in his earlier novel.

  It is nearly fifty years later, and now both books have come back into print. It remains unclear to me why they ever disappeared, except that perhaps when Humes himself went, in his own way, “underground,” there was no one else partisan enough to lobby on behalf of further editions. Taken together they show the hand of a writer whose inventive projections and first-rate narratives deserve to see the light of day again. These books hold up the way Under the Volcano holds up. Until you read them, as Humes himself remarked to us all those many decades ago about the Lowry novel, “you will remain flawed. Not damaged. But flawed somewhat. You're missing out on a great feast, a great fiesta of human frailty and extraordinary writing.”

  When the blast finally came it came foreseen, like the end of the world. In a shuddering chamber of solid rock the walls shook as though swayed in a windstorm; seven men were sprinkled with chunks of rock and ashen dust from the ceiling of their underground bunker. Instantly they knew that outside, men were dying: knew with a certainty that comes only from having imagined the event a thousand times; from having lived with it, in dreams, daytime nightmares; from having expected it, waited for it even; from having almost come to look forward to an end—whatever end—to suspense, daily monotony, fear. But even then none of them could foresee that they, six black prisoners and their white warder, would be the only beings left alive on Manacle Shoal Rock. Outside, over the entire lee side of the island, even the birds were already dead.

  After the first blast—more a series of blasts, a sustained shaking of the earth—in the first brief astonishment of silence, Lieutenant Junior Grade Everett Turner Sulgrave, USNR, self-appointed warder of the six mutineers, put down the ladle with which he was doling out the noontime beef stew, and said NO God no.

  Fireman First Class Randolph Handy, who had a brother outside, slammed down his mess gear and said Lord Lord I knew it; barechested and black, he sat down on an empty fifty-caliber ammunition box, put his head in his hands, and cried. The raging sound of grief was shocking in that incredible space of sifting dust and silence; the others simply stared, immobile in the downdrifting dust that settled whitely into close black hair and about bare black shoulders. Lieutenant Sulgrave, white, uncertain and very young, said Maybe your brother wasn't on the pier, and Big Randy looked up bitterly and laughed, a snort of tender contempt for weak-sighted whitefolks sympathy: You go on believing it, whiteboy. And that was all that was said until the Lie
utenant unlocked the iron gate to the bunker and the ammunition ship went up where it had been unloading in the harbor below: he unlocked the gate and stood framed in the opening an instant, blasted with silent white, blazing, blinding light, silent only for that arrested instant of surprise, followed by a roaring wall of heat and sound, a concussive punch that slammed him down like a rag doll into the dust. The Lieutenant rolled sideways out of the doorway and staggered up, groaning from having the breath knocked out of him, fell again, dragged clear of the door just as another paralyzing blast shook loose more rocks from the ceiling. The prisoners, except Randy, ducked into the corners in fear that the roof would collapse under the trembling tons of rock in the hillside above the bunker. Randy still sat apparently untouched or unreached by the buffeting concussions, his black face illumined with each successive flash. Outside, debris was starting to fall, hot shards of metal, smoking chunks of stone and steel and timber that clanged and thudded off the rock-and-concrete bunker like cosmic hail. Explosion followed explosion in the bunkers and tunnels below; the rocking earth cracked and rumbled.

  Finally rumbling ceased, cracking and quivering ceased, and there was only the steady rainfall thud of debris; then the silence, the sky black, the noon sun a dull red orb through the cataclysmic dust.

  When they came out they saw what hell had been: the piers and buildings were no more, and the fifteen-thousand ton ammunition ship that had been unloading was vanished to nowhere. The turquoise water of the bay was milky with pulverized coral.

  First to find the living: there were none. Find then the first among the dead. Find then the Commander. Bonuso Severn Hake, Commander, USN.

  Nightfall. Walking eyedeep in hell amid fires, occasional explosions, they heard the plane sent from San Juan, a hundred miles away; the blast had broken windows there. The Commander was already assembled in a box when the plane arrived, a PBY amphibian that circled like a carrion bird before settling to the blackened corpse.