Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some solid achievements remain, of course. The American Language (and its supplements) has justly become a classic. Mencken's lively journalistic talents invigorated a generation of practitioners. The American Mercury waged brisk verbal war against Bostonian cultural fuddy-duddyism. The green cover of the Mercury, in fact, was once the badge of the campus intellectual. The views expressed seem far from revolutionary today, but they are more trenchant and readable than Marcuse or Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung...
William (Castle Keep) Eastlake has visited Southeast Asia twice since 1966, but no one could be less of a war-correspondent novelist. In The Bamboo Bed, he approaches the struggle in Viet Nam not as a three-dimensional event but as the frighteningly abstract piece of surrealism that we all share on the evening news. Black comedy, myth, shaggy parables of the top secrets of the human heart-these are the literary forms war takes for Eastlake...
...fantasy swaggers Captain Clancy. Clancy wears a Roman helmet with the red, white and blue parrot plume. Clancy is prepared to draw his sword and lead a charge at the drop of a paradiddle from his native drummer boy. Clancy is Eastlake's personification of the Viet Nam war. Clancy, in fact, is war. Never asking why, he leads his men up those lonely, death-strewn Viet Nam hills, and as long as Clancy is leading, his troops don't ask why either. But then Clancy imperceptibly cracks...
...Whatever the cause, Clancy tarnishes his hero's image and lets down his troops as well. Deep in a forest he dies a slow, solitary death, while both his own side and the Viet Cong hunt for him as if he possessed some solution to the war, or perhaps to life itself...
Eastlake, unlike the old-school war novelists, never divorces the two. War is not the madness that contradicts life but only the extreme insanity that confirms life's other irrationalities. As he describes Clancy being tracked down, Eastlake's quest is to understand why war figures as a sort of final test. War, he concludes, is the confrontation to end all confrontations, not only between men but between a man and himself. It is mortality at its most unbearable-life with "death ticking off inside...