Covers of Random House first edition, 1969, and of Bantam paperback, 1970
“We Are None of Us
Much”: Stephen Becker’s When the War Is
Over
by Tom Whalen
Krieg und Literatur/War and Literature, edited by Wolfgang Hochbruck, Vol.II, 1996,
61-67.
Based on the historical events leading up to the execution as a guerilla of the young Confederate soldier Thomas Martin on May 11, 1865,1 Becker's 1969 novel When the War Is Over takes as its main character a fictional twenty-four year old lieutenant in the Union Army named Marius Catto. Part of Becker's novelistic aim is to make the dichotomy between the historical and the fictional, the real and the imaginary, a moot point, as his bold endgame strategy (in an “epilogue” he identifies which of his characters were “real” and which “fictional”) makes clear. His methods of achieving this goal consist in part in his choice of a third person/central intelligence point of view—the world as seen through the eyes of the “fictional” Marius Catto, who is wounded by the “historical” Thomas Martin, and who will command the firing squad that executes Martin. Between these two events we observe Catto with his regiment in Cincinnati while the war winds down and obviously harmless Thomas Martin is free to work for “historical” General August Willich (Martin hopes to join the Union Army when the war is over), and we follow Catto's development from youthful, naive idealist (“He loved the birds and the beasts” (5)) to someone who “hawked and spat” (201) on the human race, “this whole race of pigs” (200).
What compels this change is a sequence of events and injustices, most prominently the execution of Thomas Martin eighteen days before President Johnson declares amnesty for all Southern soldiers. The irrevocableness of the military's decision leads a more experienced Catto, as he arrives at the execution ground, to such harsh realizations as the following: [end of p.61]
They all turned toward him, and he saw them as animals, brutes, carnivores. The moment was a flensing: layers of moral blubber, of fatty hope, of sentimental lard were stripped hot from his bones. He pulled up and stared contemptuously at the crowd. (198)
But a darker, even nihilistic force seems to be operating here, one related, yes, to that “certain natural depravity in man,” as General Willich puts it (119), but going beyond this, perhaps, to something as dark and implacable as Ishmael's “dumb blankness, full of meaning [. . .] a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink” (Melville 296). Throughout the novel, Becker weaves a number of leitmotifs and themes (wooden or waxwork soldiers, fools, men seen as animals, the refrain of the novel's title, religion, authority, hypocrisy, slavery, freedom, destiny) that are derived directly from Catto's character and situation, but that also point us toward a vision of life or of a force in nature that is brutal and meaningless. Catto, no matter how experienced or despairing he becomes, can never notice the pattern these images form or understand its meaning, and because of this, the reader's perception of the pattern underlines Catto's limited perspective and makes even his acquired existentialist creed (“He maintained that life had no meaning but what we brought to it” (210)) appear ineffectual and deluded. Nowhere is this effect more present than in Becker's use of the motifs of the passenger pigeons and the sun, which first appear early in the novel, the moment before Catto is shot and wounded by Thomas Martin.
It was time to rise from his knees and go to work, but he was once more distracted, this time by a shadow, a cloud, whiffling across the face of the sun in a thunderous whisper; he was confused by the windy roar and rustle, by the moment of fear and loss, by a message undelivered, and looked up first in dismay and sorrow and resentment, like a traveler in a cloudburst, and only a second later with a lightning smile of deep pleasure. The sky to the east was black with bird, the sun itself disguised. Thousands of passenger pigeons beat southward, a flying carpet of them. Catto held his breath. A hundred thousand, might be. They were free. Marveling up at them he felt pure, the innocence of dawn. He watched in welcome every spring, in godspeed every fall. The birds flew in a vast oval mass, no pairs, no skeins, no wedges, only the great mass of them, and the steady, fading rush across the face of the sun. A dark mass, the blushing breasts obscured, they dimmed the golden morning. Catto flew with them, broke away, soared. Lords of the sky. Catto one of them. He loved the birds and the beasts. (5)
This paragraph suggests the shifting,
deceptive nature of the world (and Becker's prose) and the shifting, deluded
nature of Catto's mind. What Catto takes
to be “a shadow, a cloud” as he looks up and is buffeted (as are we) by the
oxymoron “thunderous whisper” turns out to be thousands of passenger
pigeons. But before he realizes what he
has seen, Catto is “confused [. . .] by the moment of fear and loss, by a
message undelivered,” a message that, by my reading, even though Catto will
later appear to shed his romanticism, will remain undelivered to the end of his
life. In rapid succession feelings of “dismay
and sorrow and resentment” follow [end of p.62] his sense of fear and loss, and
then “like a traveler in a cloudburst, and only a second later with a lightning
smile of deep pleasure” he recognizes what he has seen. The reward of recognition is “deep pleasure.” (We should also note here the reward for the
reader in seeing the close relationship of content to style when the simile “like
a traveler in a cloudburst” leads to the metaphor “lightning smile”.) This traveler (frequently we see Catto
walking down the company streets and the streets of
How true is Catto's revelatory moment? Not very, it turns out. This “flying carpet” (later in the novel he will seek but not find “some magic word” [173] to reverse the execution order) also possesses the means to deceive. Catto thinks: “They were free. Marvelling up at them he felt pure, the innocence of dawn.” A questionable purity when we recall that passenger pigeons will become extinct and when we learn a few pages later, as he tells his friend Jack Phelan, the company's surgeon,
Once we shot about a thousand in half an hour. [. . .] We filled a wagon, and we fed the leftovers to the pigs. We killed and killed. As fast as we could load. Three, four with one blast” (14).
The pigeons' “blushing breasts” point toward this massacre, as well as to the firing-squad execution of Thomas Martin. With each successive appearance of the motif (e.g., “'Roast pigeons, corn bread and beer,' Phelan promised” [130]; “The killing is at an end, and your passenger pigeons are back, and the dogwood has flowered again. Redemption and resurrection” [183]) we recall the ironic “moment of grace” when Catto thinks himself as free as the soon-to-be extinct passenger pigeon.
The depth (or heights) of Catto's deception can also be found in his comparing himself to these “[l]ords of the sky.” At first naive and comic, Catto's attitude toward religion turns to anger and disgust. “Do you know, Jack, I believe you must be right: there is a god. Man alone could not contrive this evil” (197). The lords of the sky, unbeknownst to Catto, will die off, and the Lord of man Catto will develop a disgust for. Before he orders the squad to fire, he shouts, “Thomas! Thomas! You'll be in heaven tonight! Remember that! You'll be in heaven tonight!” (201), but when the priest accompanying the firing squad and their victim, Father Garesche, thanks him for what he has said, Catto's response is “Go to hell” (202).
Catto's false epiphany when he sees the pigeons cover the sun leads to a further vision or delusion, an almost fatal one, in the next paragraph:
Soon
the pigeons were gone, and Catto was staring into the sun. He glanced down into the forest before him,
and panicked: he was blind. He saw
wheels and hoops and waves of yellow light, the hollows beneath the trees black
and purple and writhing, and as he knelt blinking life back into his eyes he
thought he saw a boy. [end of p.63] The
boy was carrying a staff and rising out of the purple shade, all fair and
golden-haired, with loops and circles of yellow and red all about him, and then
green and blue. For one moment Catto
thought he must be going mad, or receiving visions, this golden child in the
wilderness like a fairy tale; and then he saw the boy raise the staff and point
to him. Catto understood. He sprawled forward onto his belly, but a bit
too late, and a red-hot hammer smashed his left shoulder. Damn! Wrong
again! (5-6)
Often in the novel, the sun is linked
to unclear vision—blinding or making a character squint or blink—and to
death. Sergeant Haller tells Catto that
he “knew a man had both legs crushed by a cannonball. He was just standing there in the sunshine
wondering which way to run. Hell of a
thing” (40). After
I always thought that when the war was over I'd know. Have a vision. Instructions: Catto, rise up and go breed hogs. Instead of which they kill my president (161).
To which Silliman responds,
It's all so strange [. . .] Everything so empty. Like the sun would never set again. A war is your whole life, and when it ends you just stand there blinking (161).
When Catto finds himself staring into the sun after the pigeons have flown away, he is at first blinded and then presented with a vision: he sees the fairy tale-like (and religious) figure of a boy “with loops and circles of yellow and red all about him.” But “Nature,” we must remember, “absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within” (Melville 296). Blinded by the sun and entranced by his vision, Catto's point of view and his inclination to dream almost kill him. And though he can say “Damn! Wrong again!” he will continue to be wrong time and again. “When he grew up,” Catto muses about the boy whom he will finally help to kill, “he would make a lot of trouble for a lot of girls” (30). To his men in the barracks he says, “this is probably the last war this country will ever fight” (48). He is also prone to being deluded by authority when in the presence of his military superiors. Standing before General Hooker, the man most responsible for pushing through Martin's execution, Catto can't help but like him, but wonders if he isn't “in envy? or fear? Damn! [. . .] and for a moment could not speak, torn between his pleasure and his confusion” (92-93). “Grow up, grow up, grow up! You have killed!” (91) Catto thinks, but even the grown-up and— it seems—morally superior General Willich deludes himself as to the fate of Thomas Martin.
For heaven's sake, Catto, what must you think of me? The court-martial was necessary. The verdict was necessary. The boy will have the freedom of the city [end of p.64] and will do odd jobs for my staff. When the war ends I will give him a gold piece and a suit of clothes and send him home (54).
The
inability of Catto and others to stop the execution, along with the ease with which Catto deceives himself, moves the question of
Thomas's death and the issues of the novel into the realm of the
metaphysical. If “[a]ll they have to do
is not kill him [. . .] That's all they
have to do” (194)—as Jacob, the freed slave who befriends Thomas, says—then why
can't they do that? When the War Is Over implies that the answer to this question can't be found simply in
stating, as Jacob does, “They crazy men” (194).
Our natural standpoint in the universe and our limited means of understanding it are at least equally to blame. How can we live with the dichotomy of “man's
whatness and nature's so-whatness” (204) as Becker puts it in Dog Tags
(1973)? In that novel, as Benny Beer
returns from years in a North Korean prisoner of war
camp, he and his fellow POWs are questioned aboard the ship by intelligence
officers about the ones who had acquiesced to the enemy's demands. Unable to make them understand the prisoner's
point of view, Benny finally says, “I favor letting no general or politician
make a war until he has personally bayoneted a pregnant woman in the belly” (Dog Tags, 195). One understands Benny's point, but after the
recent war in the former
Catto's moral stance notwithstanding (after the war, even when he serves as a sergeant in the army during campaigns against the Indians, he never kills again), Becker's novel is filled with a “great bitterness” (18), as he writes of the surgeon Jack Phelan. “Perhaps,” he goes on to say, “it had to do with doctoring. Or with being so educated” (18). Or perhaps it has to do with the nature of things, a nature that presents us with an implacable face, an indifference that marks us at best as ignorant, at worst as irrelevant. The images of the passenger pigeon and the sun serve to emphasize our own impermanence and limitations, to increase the bitterness. The ambiguity and dark irony of these two motifs are concisely revealed when Catto tells Phelan about the moment before he is shot: “A big flight of passenger pigeons. They darkened the sun. Pretty” (11).
The novel itself performs its own trick of deception when it begins “Once upon a time” (1). Like the vision of the boy, it is “like a fairy tale,” but it is not a fairy tale. Our hero cannot save the condemned boy. No magic word can undo the evil spell. Becker frames the closely rendered point of view of Catto with a darkly ironic omniscient voice, evident in what immediately follows his “Once upon a time” opening: “Once upon a time, God save us all, there was an orphan boy called Marius Catto who grew up to be a lieutenant of infantry in the Army of the United States” (1; my emphasis). We hear this voice again when the Civil War ends:
And where was Marius Catto, the savior and prop of the beloved republic, when the War Between the States came to an end? Sad to tell he was standing buck na- [end of p.65] ked at a third-floor window of the Opera House rubbernecking out at the Fifth Street Market [. . .]” (133)
And we hear it at the end of the novel, when Becker, after immersing us in the world of Catto, shows his hand as to which characters were real and which fictional.
And the
epilogue: Thomas Martin, who was real, who lived and died as here recorded,
lies moldering in his grave, somewhere in or around Cincinnati. (203)
Jacob,
who was fictional, disappeared into Bucktown and paid no further attention to
white men except as necessary to avoid, placate or dupe them. [. . .]
When he spoke of Catto he spat. (204)
And on: “General Joseph 'Fighting Joe' Hooker, who was real” (204); Edward Flag Silliman, who was fictional” (205); “Judge William Martin Dickson, who was real” (206); “Jack Phelan, who was fictional [. . .] died in 1897 of what used to be called an apoplexy. God knows what became of him then” (207); “General August Willich, who was real” (207)—alternating the real with the fictional, until the difference between the two no longer matters, and Becker can conclude with a summary of Catto's life (and death) after the war:
Marius
Catto, who was fictional [. . .] maintained that life had no meaning but what
we brought to it, and he considered himself the last truly free man in a world
careering toward universal slavery. He
had no time at the end to reflect or repent, and so died intact; he lived to be
eighty-two and was killed by the sun while he marched in a Memorial Day
parade. At last his war was over. (208,
210)
Might it not be the case that Catto is wrong again when he believes that life is without meaning except that which one brings to it? Might not there be a meaning, but the message remain undelivered? That he thinks himself “the last truly free man” is certainly a confirmation of his continuing self-deception. And it is the sun, that arch revealer and deceiver, that kills him.
In the novel's last line (“At last his war was over.”), Becker extends the war to refer to all of life, a war that doesn't end until we die. No answers are given. A statement such as Phelan's “The human race is a great mistake” (87) is description, not an answer. Why is it that all the men “who were real” allowed Thomas Martin to die? When the fictional Catto, “[i]n a blinding and mournful moment [. . .] realize[s] that he was sick of them, and one of them” (123), aren't we too implicated in the order?
Catto's journey from innocence to experience leads him inevitably to misanthropy. “All of a sudden it's come down to me,” he tells Phelan, “what we are and what we're up to, this whole race of pigs, and never mind your god damn God” (200). In the context of the death of Thomas Martin, Catto's misanthropic sentiments have more validity than his belief “that more than most men he had fashioned his own destiny” (201). After the execution, Silliman says, “Oh my God, [end of p.66] Marius, I am nothing. Nothing!” To which Catto replies, “We are none of us much” (202).
Have I painted too dark a picture of this novel? I don't think so. War, after all, not only brings out the worst in man, it is the worst in man. The only release from the darkness, if any there be, is in one's admiration for Becker's artistry. This article barely grazes the plenitude of Becker's novel and craft. To explore these fully, one would have to examine each chapter, each paragraph and sentence for their music, rhythm, narrative pacing, characterization, sensory detailing, emotional and thematic content. I hope, however, that in limiting my analysis primarily to two dominant motifs I have at least succeeded in suggesting the complexity of the novel's themes.
When the War Is Over has been out of print now for several years. In fact, all eleven of Becker's novels are currently out of print, including Dog Tags and The Blue-Eyed Shan (1982), both of which I consider equal in achievement to When the War Is Over. Though less a stain on our national conscience than the execution of Thomas Martin or (contemporaneous with the publication of When the War Is Over) the Vietnam War, this sad fact serves as a reminder of the state of literary culture at the end of the millennium.
For four decades Becker has been one of those men “chained to the word, serving a life sentence in the name of an art, struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of classical tradition, entertainment and livelihood,” as he writes in his essay on De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (24). While the occupying armies of the meretricious and inflated attend their literary soirees, it is of some comfort to know that, just beyond the perimeter, a little band of serious novelists, Becker among them, are digging in for the long winter.2
Notes
1. Cf. James Barnett, “The Death of Thomas
Martin,” The Bulletin of the
2. I would like to thank George Garrett for
introducing me to Becker's work and When
the War Is Over in a graduate course on the modern novel, Spring 1971, at
Works
Cited
Becker, Stephen. Dog Tags.
_____. “On John
William De
_____. When the War Is Over.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
[end of p.67]
COPYRIGHT 1998 The editors of Krieg und Literature / War and Literature