When Cowboys Come Home: Veterans, Authenticity, and Manhood in Post–World War II America 9781978821606

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When Cowboys Come Home

When Cowboys Come Home Veterans, Authenticity, and Manhood in Post–­World War II Amer­i­ca

AARON GEORGE

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey London and Oxford

​ utgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of R the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: George, Aaron, author. Title: When cowboys come home : veterans, authenticity, and manhood in post–­World   War II Amer­i­ca / Aaron George. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023012479 | ISBN 9781978821569 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978821576   (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978821583 (epub) | ISBN 9781978821606 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Authors, American—20th ­century—­Biography. | World War,  1939–1945—­Veterans—­Biography. | Jones, James, 1921–1977. | Stern, Stewart. | Field, Edward, 1924–­| Masculinity in lit­er­a­ture. | LCGFT: Biographies. Classification: LCC PS129 .G46 2023 | DDC 810.9/35211—­dc23/eng/20230621 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2023012479 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2024 by Aaron George All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) w ­ ere accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. rutgersuniversitypress​.­org

T​ o Lawrence Lewis and Leonard George This is about you

Contents



Preface: What We Bring Home

ix

Introduction: Hemingway’s Shadow

1

Part I Cowboys on the W ­ artime Frontier 1

Never a Second­hand Man: James Jones and the Perils of Homecoming

21

2

The Big Noise: Stewart Stern’s Long March to Gar Naruah

51

3

The “Age of Heroes”: Edward Field and Gay Authenticity in the Midst of War

75

Part II  Coming Home 4

The Hipster, the Prophet, and the Angel: Writers on the Edge of Eternity

5

The Men Who Came ­Running: James Jones and the Handy Writers’ Colony

120

6

Waiting for Peter Pan: Adulthood and How to Attain It

141

7

The Continuing Adventures of Icarus: Edward Field’s Life in the Postwar Closet

167



Conclusion: A Nation of Gray Flannel Men

191

93

Acknowl­edgments 215 Notes 217 Index 247 vii

Preface What We Bring Home I never knew Leonard George. He died before I was born. His ­daughter, Sam, tells me that was for the best; he was a hard man to like, or even tolerate. Len, as his friends called him, was an angry, resentful man. He was frustrated at the years World War II had taken from him and resentful that domesticity ­wasn’t all he had been promised. He was the master of his ­house, requiring total obedience from his subordinates. He was also deeply devoted to his wife, and as she got sicker and sicker, trying to be a doting and loving husband subsumed his entire identity.1 Len had married young; his wife, Arlene, even youn­ger. She was pregnant a few months ­after they eloped, and only three months l­ ater J­ apanese bombers sank American battleships at the naval base in Pearl Harbor. He joined the military almost immediately. Possibly, his d­ aughter has always speculated, he joined ­because the situation was more than he had bargained for: he had never signed up to be a husband or take care of a child. It was easier for him to fight the Germans than deal with ­these realities, and for four years he was gone. He traveled to Paris, prob­ably around the rest of France, and into North Africa. He may have driven trucks ­there; no one knows, ­because he never talked about it, and his military rec­ords w ­ ere destroyed in a fire. ­A fter his homecoming, Len never quite wore a gray flannel suit, like the ­stereotype that populates so many cultural retrospectives of the 1950s. Still, his Eisenhower jacket stayed locked in the closet, making appearances only for Halloween. Like millions of men who returned home from the war, Len felt the pressures all around him to s­ ettle down into domesticity. He moved in with his wife and she had a second child. He got a job working ­middle management for Boeing and bought a ­house where he lived with his two ­children. As his wife ix

x • Preface

lost her mobility to disease, they stayed in and watched increasing amounts of ­television. He cooked, did the dishes, and brought home enough money to keep them all satisfied. He had all the accoutrements of a successful man. Yet it was clear this life chafed at Len’s ideas of who he should be. He returned home with an intense dislike of authority and ­couldn’t stand to be told what to do. His best friend joined the John Birch Society, and Len seemed sympathetic to right-­wing ideas—­not out of conservative allegiances, but b­ ecause they seemed to hate ­those in charge as much as he did. He drank profusely and grew angry at the slightest provocation. Dishes had to always be completely clean, dinner had to go exactly according to schedule, and reading books was disallowed when something useful could be done. Sometimes he told ­people that he wanted to go back to Paris; he missed it b­ ecause of how much of a “dirty city” it had been. He took care of his wife, but it became a duty he endured, a life he d­ idn’t deserve. ­W hatever he had experienced overseas, he missed what he no longer had in domestic Amer­i­ca. No one can know exactly how Len felt about the world he re­entered a­ fter the war. No one can know what he would have chosen for himself, had he had the chance. On the one hand, Len lived the life that postwar men ­were “supposed” to live. On the other hand, his frustration with authority, his dislike of the military, and his dreams of being unencumbered by wife and f­ amily all point to a man who never bought into postwar ideas of what men should aspire to. He played the game, certainly, but wished for something completely dif­fer­ent. This ­isn’t to apologize for the man, who continues to haunt my ­family. Despite the strong, vocal opinions of his ­children, Len George remains a mystery. He came home a hero; he had fought in the E ­ uropean theater, had prob­ably faced ­things he could never express to his c­ hildren. But he also accepted the duties and responsibilities a man of his generation was taught to don, and he seemed to believe that his life could be judged only by his fitness for that role. That role ate him up inside: he could be a ­father, but he could never be fulfilled. Leonard, a man defined by the war he fought, was nevertheless unsuited to the world the war made pos­si­ble. Men like Leonard George are the reason I wrote the book you have in front of you. Initially, I started this study based off a question I had about the experience of homecoming. Men who fought in World War II (or any other war, for that ­matter) spent the formative years of their lives in military companies and divisions, learning to value the connections they made with other men. And yet, soon a­ fter the war, this generation settled into domestic life, raised a rec­ord number of c­ hildren, and attempted to live an idealized single-­earner, heterosexual ­family. How did men, who w ­ ere taught in their formative years that warfare was the ­measure of manhood, react to a postwar landscape that asked them to forget the very skills they had prided themselves on just years before? What I found while researching this book was that, quite unlike what I had assumed, veterans of World War II did not easily fit into s­ tereotypes of fifties

Preface • xi

domesticity. Instead, veterans contested reintegration at e­ very stage. If you sift through the materials left over by postwar Americans at the ­middle of the ­century, it can be surprising to see just how much of that writing was preoccupied with men who, like Len, w ­ ere out of place in this new world. Even before the war ended, men like sociologist Willard Waller ­were warning that the men coming home would revolt against postwar society, possibly even seek to overthrow it. Lacking the feelings of solidarity t­ hese veterans had experienced alongside their units, Waller argued that “the veteran ha[d] been alienated from civilian society.”2 George Pratt, the chief medical psychiatrist for the army, warned that ­these men would go through bouts of anger, tell inappropriate stories about sex or vio­lence, and generally resist civilian life.3 ­Women’s magazines of the era w ­ ere filled with guides on how to deal with men angry at civilian life or unhappy with domesticity; the Best Picture of 1947, The Best Years of Our Lives, was a three-­hour epic focusing on the ways that men had trou­ble adjusting to home. Even eight years ­later, when the veteran Sloan Wilson wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, his book about the hostility veterans felt ­toward domesticity flew off the shelves. The film version of his novel was a massive hit with the public, demonstrating how concerns about his themes—­that the strug­ gles of domestic, suburban life often felt vapid and meaningless compared to the t­ rials faced in ­wartime—­were still very much in the public consciousness.4 Although ­there w ­ ere certainly cultural pressures pushing men into domestic lives ­after the war, critiques of what men had become in postwar Amer­i­ca also abounded. Some Americans, like Hugh Hefner, argued that men w ­ ere becoming soft and domesticated, while a cultural fascination with rebellion made figures like the Beats into heroes (and equally vilified as unmanly) for avoiding domestic responsibilities.5 Other critiques, like the one made by William Whyte in The ­Organization Man, focused on how men had become hollowed out, empty of their own inner drives and subsumed into the ­will of the group. To many Americans, the argument that American men w ­ ere “other-­directed,” or focused on the needs of other p­ eople, seemed to prove that they w ­ ere becoming feminized or weak.6 Thus, while scripts valorizing domesticity ­were available to men in the fifties, this was a hardly uncontested role. Instead, it was a manly ideal continually fought over throughout the d­ ecade.7 During my research, it became clear that the dissatisfaction veterans expressed at the end of the war shared many similarities with ­these dominant con­temporary critiques of manhood. Furthermore, the deeper I dove into the lives and writings of veterans, the more I discovered that the critiques t­ hese men made owed themselves to their experiences fighting the war. Soon, it became clear to me that ­there was a link, overlooked, between the return of men from overseas and ­popular critiques of weak and domesticated men. Two of the most well-­known writers of ­these critiques—­William Whyte and Sloan Wilson—­were veterans themselves, and though their books w ­ ere released in 1955 and 1956, their ideas could be found even e­ arlier in the writings of Norman Mailer, James Jones,

xii • Preface

Stewart Stern, Herman Wouk, and many other veterans-­cum-­writers. Thus, to understand ­these critiques it became impor­tant to understand what linked together all ­these writers.8 What I expected to find was that ­wartime had taught veterans to value turn-­of-­ the-­century identifiers of manhood: individualism, competitiveness, autonomy, and duty (­these traits, known throughout this book as “frontiersman masculinity,” w ­ ill be better defined in the next chapter). If that w ­ ere the case, the critiques of American men made by ­these veterans would be premised on the idea that civilian life had somehow made ­these men soft: that they had lost the heroic characteristics that had won Amer­i­ca the war. Instead, while reading the work and correspondence of t­ hese writers, I found that they often stressed completely dif­fer­ent markers of manhood. Most of the men I investigated doubted the importance of duty or competitiveness; they all stressed the need for men to pursue their au­then­tic desires and opined about the importance of sensitivity and male camaraderie. Even men who cultivated a “macho” persona, such as James Jones, argued that only emotional honesty could truly make a man. To be clear, dissatisfaction with civilian life was not unique to World War II. Histories and memoirs of the two major wars surrounding World War II, such as Paul Fussell’s The ­Great War and Modern Memory and Tobey Herzog’s Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, tend to devote large sections to the psychic trauma caused by the war and how difficult it was for men to overcome that trauma and reintegrate into society. Veterans of other American wars also often discuss experiences that mirror the scars brought home by the writers found h ­ ere. The naïveté of preparation, the feeling of “unmanning” during w ­ artime, and a loss of innocence as the soldier returned home w ­ ere virtually parts of a formula for World War I memoirs, and that same schema could easily apply to the remembrances of James Jones and Stewart Stern.9 Likewise, veterans of Vietnam discuss the trauma and alienation they felt upon coming home, and while the diagnosis posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ­wasn’t used in World War I or II, the symptoms that Vietnam veterans described also accurately reflect the experiences of e­ arlier veterans.10 Furthermore, Fussell’s history of World War I demonstrated the emotional intimacy the war fostered between men, making the same experience in World War II hardly unique.11 Aspects of what I discuss in this study can be found in the homecomings of veterans from any American war. However, the shared experiences of m ­ ental trauma and social dislocation fail to explain why the discourse surrounding manhood ­after World War II diverged so significantly from what came before. The ideal man of the twenties did not significantly differ from depictions of manhood in the 1890s, despite the Lost Generation’s loss of faith in the proj­ect. However, American culture of the forties and fifties was filled with anx­i­eties about the state of the modern man.12 Similarly, while Vietnam veterans discussed the resentment, anger, and difficulties of adjustment they faced ­after coming home, none of their critiques added up to a full-­blown debate over the place of men in the seventies.13 It ­isn’t, in my view,

Preface • xiii

enough to say that the tale of World War II is analogous to the experience of all American wars; instead, something unique was boiling u­ nder the surface. It is my contention, then, that World War II uniquely created the conditions for men to express dissent against the established regime of discourse that equated manliness with a set of traits such as individualism, competition, duty, and responsibility. ­Because the war was fought on a much larger scale than World War I, far more men ­were exposed to the conditions of ­wartime for far longer than was the case for the generation before them. The draft itself was much more inclusive than that during World War I, which meant that soldiers ­were exposed to a much more diverse range of American men. This, in turn, led to a breakdown of manly s­ tereotypes tied to white supremacy.14 And while the expression of homoerotic or romantic affection between soldiers during World War I is well documented, the relatively small number of veterans experiencing close male relationships during the war failed to make a dent in larger cultural connections between heterosexuality and manliness. This was not the case ­a fter World War II. By the 1950s, as James Gilbert has argued, ­there was no longer one single narrative but rather a “variety of possibilities available in the discourse of masculinity . . . ​that, by their mere presence in the public arena, offered distinct and differing models for be­hav­ior.”15 I contend that the sixteen million men who served during World War II played an impor­tant role in the breakdown of this single narrative. ­Because the war affected so many men, World War II provided the opportunity for many soldiers to adopt new ideals of what they believed made a man. ­Because of the way that the war threw old foundations into question, it created a flexible, plastic moment in which veterans could see beyond the values they had been inculcated with as ­children. To investigate this shift that happened a­ fter the war, I investigated just one strand of this unfolding discourse: a version of manliness, espoused by veterans, that often contradicted older ideas defined by bravery, stoicism, or competition. I used three men of diverse backgrounds to show how the war motivated very dif­fer­ent men to instead embrace values like authenticity, sensitivity, and male camaraderie. Though this was not the only reaction to serving World War II, and by far not the only reconceptualization of manhood available a­ fter the war, I believe it is a particularly impor­tant strand. Not the least impor­tant reason is how this critique (termed “the veterans’ critique” throughout) shared so many similarities and connections with the larger “­organization man” and “other-­ direction” criticisms of men in postwar society. By investigating the veterans’ critique, we can start to understand some of the overlooked motivations for ­those cultural discussions. My hope is that the three men explored in this book, though of course representing a tiny sample of the veterans who fought in World War II, can pre­sent us with three distinct reactions to homecoming and suggest to us the broader connections between w ­ artime s­ ervice and postwar anx­i­eties over male roles.

xiv • Preface

Thus, When Cowboys Come Home focuses on the lives of author James Jones, screenwriter Stewart Stern, and poet Edward Field. All three fought in the war, all three w ­ ere disenchanted with traditional ideals of masculinity, and all three became evangelicals of a new regime of manhood. They came from dif­fer­ent backgrounds, but each of their lives accentuates a par­tic­u­lar aspect of how the war pushed men to embrace the veterans’ critique. For instance, the life of James Jones, who in many ways was an archetypical candidate for frontiersman manhood, demonstrates exactly how ­wartime experiences could serve to deconstruct older ideals of manhood for World War II soldiers. His time ­after the war further shows the heretofore undiscussed relationship between the veteran experience of World War II and the popularity of the antiwoman and antior­ga­ni­za­tion man discourse that seemed to dominate postwar American lit­er­a­ture and sociology. The stories of Stewart Stern and Edward Field complement Jones’s story by showing that similar ­wartime experiences could have very dif­fer­ent effects on men from dif­fer­ent backgrounds. Stewart Stern, a Jewish man who fought in the ­Battle of the Bulge, thought his ethnicity barred him from frontiersman definitions of manhood. However, the war proved to him that despite his lack of bravery or stoicism he could survive and perform his duty, allowing him to reimagine what ­really was necessary to call himself a man. Edward Field, also Jewish and also someone who believed masculinity was off-­limits for someone of his background, used his w ­ artime experiences to eventually accept a form of gay manhood not predicated on hetero-­domestic assumptions. I do not argue that the au­then­tic, sensitive manhood sought by Jones, Stern, and Field somehow became dominant in postwar society. The 1950s witnessed a breakdown in one standard definition of what it means to be a man; James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field show three dimensions of what consequences that historical moment had. ­These men did not cause this breakdown, nor are their writings the main cultural proj­ects that spread new definitions of manhood. Instead, I follow ­these three men ­because they show us what tools veterans had to understand manhood differently ­after the war: each of ­these men, ­because of his par­tic­u­lar background, helps us understand the effects the war had on veterans as a ­whole. Though of course no man is identical to another, and of course ­these men are idiosyncratic due to their decision to be writers, they still allow us to see the cracks in the previous regime of manhood and show us what men could build out of that rubble. In using the stories of ­these men, I have two goals. First, I express how the complicated multiplicity of masculine scripts available in postwar Amer­i­ca owed an impor­tant debt to World War II and how the war was one of the main reasons that this previous regime could be challenged. Second, I provide evidence for a par­tic­u ­lar masculine subculture hitherto overlooked in 1950s Amer­i­ca. Historical writing on the fifties often stresses hetero-­domesticity as an all-­ encompassing power structure that dictated how Americans saw peacetime

Preface • xv

society. By examining men who had more complicated relationships with that power structure, we can better understand it not as hegemonic but as nuanced, complicated, and constantly challenged. This brings me back to Leonard George. Len was quite dif­fer­ent from t­ hese men, and his frustration at domestic life was dif­fer­ent from all three. I can never know what he might have thought about James Jones’s screed against the ordered, hierarchical, emasculating military he depicted in From ­Here to Eternity, nor can I know ­whether Len saw something of his own experiences in the self-­destructive love between boys depicted by Stewart Stern in Rebel Without a Cause. Certainly, Len had nothing in common with Edward Field; but would he have found something to envy in Field’s belief that manhood was found in pursuing one’s own desires? Learning about t­ hese men has not, and cannot, tell me what Len felt about manhood or American society. But it can tell me the possibilities that Len could have drawn from. Men like Len yearned for roles for men beyond husbands, beyond frontiersmen, and beyond what society had chosen for them. Though he prob­ably d­ idn’t know any of ­these authors, Len shared the same sense that something was wrong with the world he returned to. I am sure that, like them, Len felt constricted by postwar roles expected of him. I am sure that, like them, Len drew on his time in war to question exactly why his worth was defined by fatherhood. And I feel confident in saying that, like them, Len believed t­ here ­were more possibilities for men than cowboys or husbands.

When Cowboys Come Home

Introduction Hemingway’s Shadow I’ve seen quite a few wounded men. . . . ​ They ­were not s­ ilent. They d­ on’t care only ­whether or not they appear brave. The main reason anyone acts brave anytime is to impress other p­ eople & ­because they have an image in their minds . . . ​of a brave man suffering i­ mmense pain stoicly & silently. A ­ fter being in action, a man does not care what p­ eople think of him: he knows ­those who have been thru what he has ­will feel as he does, & the opinion of ­those who h ­ aven’t is distorted and consequently false. If groaning or crying can make him feel better, he does it. —­James Jones, Diary, 1943 If you read their ages they ­were all kids. But their occupations made them men. You ­don’t use kids for jobs like butchers or undertakers or soldiers. At least you ­don’t call them kids. If t­ hey’re big enough, ­they’re old enough. It was a ­little like getting laid. —­Stewart Stern, Memoirs, ca. 1946

1

2 • When Cowboys Come Home

That boy who took my place in the ­water who died instead of me I ­don’t remember his name even. It was like t­ hose who survived the death camps By letting ­others go into the ovens in their place. It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live . . . I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do t­ oday, although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world, even if, when opportunity knocked, I instinctively chose survival. —­Edward Field, “World War II,” 1967

In 1951, the publishing h ­ ouse Scribner’s prepared to release the novel From ­Here to Eternity. Written by James Jones, a veteran of Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal, the book has since entered into the literary canon of World War II: when a modern audience imagines the attack on Pearl Harbor, their ­mental picture of the attack in part owes itself to Jones’s description of the event. As part of the publicity for the book, Scribner’s asked Ernest Hemingway to review the manuscript. On its face, the idea seemed perfect. Hemingway, the writer of A Farewell to Arms, was famous as the voice of the previous generation of veterans, and Jones’s gruff, realistic portrayal of soldiers reminded his publishers, and many of his readers, of the style Hemingway had pioneered. What could be better than the voice of World War I symbolically handing off that honor to a veteran of the next war? Thus, it may have taken Jones’s agents by surprise when they read Hemingway’s response: It is not g­ reat no ­matter what they tell you. . . . ​­Things ­will catch up with him and he ­will prob­ably commit suicide. Who could announce in his publicity in this year 1951 that “he went over the hill” in 1944. That was a year in which many p­ eople w ­ ere very busy d­ oing their duty and in which many p­ eople died. To me he is an enormously skillful f-­ck-up and his book w ­ ill do ­great damage to our country. Prob­ably I should re-­read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know that they are scabs; nor suck a boil to know it is a boil; nor swim through a river of snot to know it is snot. I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not damage your or his sales. If

Introduction • 3

you give him a literary tea you might ask him to drain a bucket of snot and then suck the puss out of a dead n——’s ear.1

Taken aback, Scribner’s asked Hemingway for an explanation. Hemingway’s response was only marginally more enlightening. As far as he could tell, Hemingway explained, Jones was not what he claimed to be. “I spotted him for a psycho, not a real soldier,” Hemingway elaborated. “Served time, sure, but not as a soldier.” Once he had learned that Jones had returned from Guadalcanal “a whimpering neurotic,” he had felt only more validated in his analy­sis. Hemingway ended his letter by reiterating his hope that Jones would “hang[] himself as soon as is plausible.”2 This analy­sis must have stung Jones; Hemingway had been one of his early literary idols.3 A few years l­ ater, when Jones was asked about Hemingway’s apparent suicide—­the man had shot himself in the head with a double-­barreled shotgun—­Jones simply remarked, “Well, he fi­nally got to suck t­ hose two cocks.” When asked who the greatest living American writer was now that Hemingway was dead, Jones replied with just one word: “Me.”4 Much l­ater, however, Jones was able to offer a more thoughtful appraisal of Hemingway to fellow World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut. In a manuscript written in the 1990s, Vonnegut remembered asking Jones if Hemingway had ever killed someone; was the man’s self-­proclaimed heroism based upon acts of vio­ lence during the war? “What is easily missed,” Jones told Vonnegut, was “that Hemingway had never been a soldier, w ­ hether an officer or an enlisted man, any more than he had been a matador or a bull.” Vonnegut continued by noting his friend’s own credentials: “Jones had actually shot some ­people. I never had.”5 ­These statements from Hemingway and Jones not only reveal the fundamental disagreement at the heart of their rivalry; they also reflect how veterans such as Jones and Vonnegut had thought about manhood and heroism differently than Hemingway’s generation. Hemingway’s major objection to Jones was that Jones failed to display any of the qualities impor­tant to being a soldier. Hemingway’s novels ­were full of characters who modeled the ideal man: in his For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan made his way to the frontier of the Spanish Civil War to fight for what was honorable, despite the cost to himself. Jordan was stoic, controlled, and brave; he was manly ­because he showed the traits necessary for heroism.6 Jones was no Robert Jordan. He ran while other ­people died, Hemingway contended; he had no sense of duty. Jones ­wasn’t a soldier. When the time came, Jones had fled in fear. Jones’s argument was simpler. Hemingway ­hadn’t fought or killed; he had no claim to the manliness or heroism he m ­ easured in other p­ eople. To Jones, w ­ artime had proven that the values by which Hemingway graded manhood ­were constructed ­performances; they w ­ ere fictions created by p­ eople who h ­ adn’t served in war. Only men who had r­ eally fought in a war could understand the falseness

4 • When Cowboys Come Home

of bravery, the meaninglessness of duty, the horror of killing. Hemingway ­hadn’t killed a man. How could he claim the heroism he denied Jones? Hemingway judged men by a set of qualities like stoicism and bravery; Jones had come to doubt w ­ hether t­ hose qualities even existed. Veterans of World War II often made this complaint about the previous generation. Stewart Stern, ­later the writer of Rebel Without a Cause, entered the war sure that he ­wasn’t manly enough to be a soldier; however, his experiences taught him that surviving was proof enough of his manliness. Edward Field had been taught all his life his love for other men was a barrier to his a­ cceptance as a man; in the war, he found that loving other men was crucial to his success. Having imbibed heroic narratives from the Lost Generation, all three of ­these men found that the ­wartime models of manhood t­ hey’d been offered ­were unsatisfactory. ­These men, for whom World War II had been formative, had defined themselves in situations that ­were hierarchal, intensely homosocial, and emotionally taxing. They had followed ­orders, though they knew men should think for themselves. They had relied on other men for their romantic and emotional well-­ being, despite their understandings of manhood as properly heterosexual and stoic. They had seen other men fall apart ­under the dangerous conditions that they lived in, belying their assumptions that men ­were brave and power­ful. All ­these experiences made them doubt that manhood was constituted by martial prowess, competitive spirit, or self-­control, as the previous generation had assumed. Instead, throwing off their elders’ definitions of what it meant to be a man, veterans often returned believing that manhood could be found in the close emotional relationships between men and in the authenticity they gained through their experiences of war. While ­these veterans never completely agreed, even with each other, on how to interpret the truths they discovered in war, their challenge to what came before them played an impor­tant role in a postwar discourse that broadened the possibilities of what defined a man, creating space for compassionate, emotional manhood while also disentangling manhood from the whiteness implied by nineteenth-­century ideals. This is a story about how manhood changed. World War II thrust sixteen million men into an environment where older notions of manliness no longer made sense. Surviving that war often meant caring about the men around you or acknowledging your own weakness and fear or listening to your inner desires rather than what you’d been told soldiers should do.7 The war convinced a large cohort of men to question the foundations of masculinity that had informed their lives before the war. Many of t­ hese veterans de­cided that manhood could be founded on emotionality, intimacy between men, and authenticity, rather than dominance, bravery, and martial prowess. While the critiques made by veterans never fully challenged more dominant views of manhood in postwar Amer­i­ca, they nevertheless contributed to a breakdown of traditional ideas about male roles and opened the possibility for a full-­scale revolution a ­decade ­later.8

Introduction • 5

This ideal of a softer, more emotionally open manhood (which I term the veterans’ critique, despite it not being the only construction available to men ­after the war) was a direct reaction to the masculine social practices and norms that had crystalized at the turn of the twentieth ­century. Before the turn of the ­century, American manhood had been based on an ideal of the “self-­made man,” or a man who was ­independent, successful, and driven to succeed in the unleashed ­free market of the nineteenth ­century. However, though “self-­made men” ­were individuals, first and foremost, that very individualism was often seen as reckless or dangerous in a society that still valued community ties. Americans often ­were suspicious that the passions—­ambition, aggressiveness, competitiveness—­ that underlay men’s self-­interested aims would lead to societal dissolution and the abandonment of duties to o­ thers. Thus, the individualism at the core of the “self-­made man” was ideally tempered by virtues such as self-­control and stoicism. It was understood that an uncontrolled boy might show the competitive and ­independent spirit of a man, but in order to mature he would have to properly curb his impulses as he entered adulthood.9 By the turn of the twentieth c­ entury, manhood underwent another transformation. Men’s work had changed in such a way that distinction and success as a self-­made man w ­ ere increasingly hard to come by. Between 1870 and 1910, the number of white-­collar jobs available to men multiplied by more than a ­factor of eight; by 1910, 20 ­percent of the male workforce labored in t­ hese white-­collar jobs. Most of t­ hese positions w ­ ere heavi­ly bureaucratized and had l­ ittle hope of advancement, which led to men finding ave­nues outside of work to define themselves. Men turned to leisure time to fill that gap. By the 1880s, Americans increasingly shared a fascination with power­ful male bodies, competitive sports, and aggressive, dominant be­hav­iors in men. By the twentieth ­century, passionate drives in men ­were seen no longer as vices needed to be controlled but instead as traits to be embraced. Some men, like Theodore Roo­se­velt, urged for “the Strenuous Life”; that is, that men should embrace a strug­g le with the natu­ral world to build toughness in them. O ­ thers believed that military s­ ervice (or in its absence, competitive sports) would develop martial prowess and power­f ul physiques.10 Gail Bederman has shown that the new attention on “passionate manhood” was coupled with larger discussions of “civilization” and race.11 “Civilization,” originally a term to demarcate complex and nuanced socie­ties from lesser “barbarous” or “savage” ­peoples, had by the 1890s become a term used to connote a cultural and ge­ne­tic difference between dif­fer­ent races, usually to prove the superiority of Western culture. However, it was a complicated idea, and not always seen as positive. During the 1890s, many Americans worried that the prevalence of office jobs and white-­collar work would lead to “overcivilization”; men ­were weakened and drained of their vitality by living in modern cities. Overcivilization could be overcome only with power and strength, but ­these w ­ ere the traits of “savage” or less civilized p­ eople. To solve the prob­lems of overcivilization, some

6 • When Cowboys Come Home

Americans—­such as psychologist G. Stanley Hall and President Theodore Roosevelt—­argued that men could be imbued with primitive traits by facing strug­g le and aggression in early life. Thus, as they grew older they would be immune from the emasculating effects of urban American life.12 However, civilization played a complicated role in t­ hese discussions b­ ecause it also served as the defining trait that made manhood pos­si­ble for white men but not for their racial inferiors. Competition, aggression, and dominance may have made men manly, but civilization put them in control of themselves. Nonwhite men w ­ ere increasingly portrayed as out of control and dependent, lacking the comportment and self-­discipline that went alongside civilization. Bederman argues that while passionate manhood and the traits associated with civilization ­were in tension, the ideal man of the turn of the c­ entury was composed of a perfect mix of civilized traits and power­ful, passionate traits. Thus, importantly, the change to “passionate manhood” ­didn’t fully erase older notions of manhood, as notions of white supremacy used traits such as restraint and self-­discipline to justify existing racial hierarchies. Historians have mostly focused on the ways that turn-­of-­the-­century Americans esteemed aggressiveness and physical prowess, but this re­spect for older ideals such as self-­restraint and stoicism also survived well into the twentieth ­century. Throughout When Cowboys Come Home, I term the contradictory synthesis of ­these two ideals “frontiersman masculinity.” In part, I choose this term b­ ecause the myth of the frontier embodies the contradictions between passion and control: twentieth-­century Americans often idealized the frontiersman as a power­ful, autonomous, and i­ ndependent hero who had the strength of character to tame the West and defeat savage Indians. But the frontiersman figure was also defined by civilization: frontiersmen not only enforced law and order but also showed self-­restraint, honor, and honesty even when faced with the primitive lawlessness of the frontier. Thus, the frontiersman figure captures both facets of manhood: the passionate, i­ ndependent hero but also the controlled and virtuous gentlemen.13 The central traits of the frontiersman figure reoccurred frequently throughout the p­ opular culture of the thirties, forties, and fifties. The veterans examined ­here grew up saturated in this myth. As a result, it’s impor­tant to briefly examine the ways prewar ­popular culture reified this myth and note how often traits of “civilized” men, like self-­control and discipline, ­were echoed in cultural artifacts of the time. For instance, consider films of the era. Historians often overlook that in films of the period, especially t­ hose starring figures like John Wayne and Gary Cooper—­men vaunted as ideal examples of masculinity who started their c­ areers in Western films—­the heroes w ­ ere usually paragons of self-­restraint in addition to being ­independent and power­ful. Choosing just two midcentury examples, first consider John Wayne’s Flying Tigers (1942). Wayne, often synonymous with masculine heroism in twentieth-­ century American cinema, was often cast as a dashing lead hero, but in most of

Introduction • 7

t­ hose roles he depicted leadership through thoughtfulness and self-­control rather than raw passion.14 Nowhere is this clearer than in the ­wartime film Flying Tigers, a jingoistic story of the heroic ­pilots who volunteered to protect the Chinese from ­Japanese bombing raids in the 1930s, before the United States officially joined World War II. In the film, Wayne’s hero, ­Colonel Jim Gordon, was the leader of the Flying Tigers volunteers, and he repeatedly taught them to show discipline and to work together while flying. The film contrasted him with a new recruit, Woody Jason (John Carroll), who refused to listen to Gordon’s teachings on restraint. Jason flew dangerously b­ ecause he thought he’d be able to shoot down more J­ apanese planes and thus earn prize money. He flew so recklessly he got other ­pilots shot down and killed, ­until no one trusted him or was willing to fly with him. In the end, Gordon, not Jason, was depicted as a manly hero.15 Gary Cooper, likewise, made his c­ areer playing cowboys in the twenties and became a leading man the equal of Wayne by the thirties and forties.16 Like Wayne’s, Cooper’s characters w ­ ere defined not by their competitive nature but by their self-­control. For instance, consider Sergeant York, a film the equal to Flying Tigers in patriotic fervor. The film starred Cooper as the titular Alvin York, a real-­life hero from World War I. In Cooper’s depiction, York was initially an angry and out-­of-­control drunkard who eventually learned self-­control and the discipline. He found religion, which helped him control his temper and taught him to give up alcohol; to provide for his love interest, he began to work difficult odd jobs to earn enough money for a farm. When he was drafted to fight in World War I, York initially believed that killing was wrong and changed his mind only a­ fter examining his duty to God and country, not out of ambition or hatred for the ­enemy. He became a hero out of a desire “sav[e] lives,” not to prove his strength or to triumph over strug­gle.17 ­These two films gesture at the frontier myth rather than revel in it, but the ideal of the frontiersman hero was pre­sent in both. Flying Tigers was set in China, a lawless, barren place where American outposts w ­ ere u­ nder threat from faceless savages who just happened to be J­ apanese; Sergeant York was a movie about World War I, but the hero owed his ­independence and virtue to his upbringing in the backwoods of Appalachia. Other films starring ­these same men, such as Wayne’s Rio Grande and Cooper’s High Noon, used the frontier explic­itly as a setting, but even in t­ hose films the heroes Cooper and Wayne depicted w ­ eren’t purely aggressive, power­ful, or competitive but ­were instead self-­controlled men of character and restraint. The stoic “frontiersman” was also a recurring figure in other parts of mid-­ twentieth-­century ­popular culture, no better exemplified than in the radio show The Lone Ranger. First broadcast on January 31, 1933, The Lone Ranger was an im­mensely ­popular retelling of the American Western myth, narrated through the adventures of a former Texas Ranger and his close friend, the Native American Tonto.18 The titular hero, played by Brett Beemer through the thirties and forties, traveled the West and defeated outlaws, corrupt businessmen, and

8 • When Cowboys Come Home

Mexican villains. In so d­ oing he defined heroism through contradictory traits of the frontiersman: mastery and dominance over the wild and the savage, and virtue as a restrained, honorable man. While the show’s opening sequence stressed the Ranger’s “strength and courage, daring and resourcefulness,” an early character sketch created by the writers instead stressed his civilized traits. They noted that the Lone Ranger “never makes love, . . . ​never smokes, never uses profanity, and never uses intoxicating beverages. The Lone Ranger at all times uses precise speech, without slang or dialect. His grammar must be pure: he must make proper use of ‘who’ and ‘whom,’ ‘­shall’ and ‘­will.’ . . . ​The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill. . . . ​Play down gambling and drinking scenes as far as pos­si­ble.”19 The writers for the show nearly universally followed ­these guidelines, and Beemer played the Ranger as a stoic who never raised his voice and never lost his temper, and even when pretending to be an outlaw he was pleasant and polite. As mentioned, he never had relationships with ­women; he rarely killed. In fact, for a hero whose signature was his silver bullets, the Lone Ranger used them more often to prove his identity than to fire at criminals. Many episodes of the show presented situations in which the Ranger’s control of his passions was his greatest asset. In “Jane’s Jewels” (July 30, 1945) the Ranger acted as a neutral arbiter between two miners who accused each other of stealing gold; ­because the Ranger was above such passions as greed, he was able to find the true culprit. In “­Brothers of the West” (February 20, 1942) he defended a sheriff from a lynch mob; b­ ecause the Ranger was levelheaded and could restrain the mob’s anger, he helped ensure that justice was fairly served. And in “Jim Kalar” (May 10, 1944) the Ranger was contraposed with an outlaw almost his mirror image. However, b­ ecause Jim Kalar lacked the Ranger’s stoicism and instead felt a grievous need for revenge ­after being betrayed, Kalar became a violent outlaw, not a defender of justice like the Ranger.20 At the same time, the Ranger also stood for the traits of the passionate man, like i­ ndependence and mastery. The villains in The Lone Ranger (and often other Westerns) often threatened to make ­others into vassals: the eastern businessman John Kimberly, for instance, used debt and his own corrupt wealth to shackle ­people to his w ­ ill, while the villainous El Mundo used brainwashing to turn ­people into zombielike slaves.21 The Lone Ranger fought ­these men to secure the autonomy of ­others, while never sacrificing his own ­independence by working for someone ­else or by staying somewhere long enough to become intertwined in the affairs of ­others. Furthermore, his association with Tonto showed that the Ranger had mastered the primitive, savage world. His friendship with Tonto was not an equal one; it fit squarely into the long American practice of using depictions of Native Americans to demonstrate their own authenticity and to distance themselves from the artificiality of modern society. As Phillip Deloria has shown, in twentieth-­century American culture giving a character Native traits could imply

Introduction • 9

they w ­ ere closer to nature, honorable, and trustworthy, unlike the deceitful, dependent, and effeminate men who lived in urban environments. The show consistently tried to depict the Ranger as an honorary Indian through his relationship with Tonto, who called the Ranger “kemo sabe,” or “trusted friend.” Tonto also acted as a savage mirror to the Ranger, which demonstrated how the Ranger was comfortable in the savage frontier and also a master of it. This use of Tonto imbued the Lone Ranger with a savage nature and distanced him from the effeminizing effects of civilization even as he also demonstrated the positive self-­ restraint of a civilized man.22 The frontiersman blend of self-­control and dominance also bled into war reporting shortly a­ fter the outbreak of World War II. Life magazine, a ­popular photojournalist publication with a national reach, often made implicit comparisons between soldiers and frontiersman heroes. In a column of “Life’s Reports” titled “MacArthur’s Men: Bataan War Produces a Crop of Fabulous Fighters,” Melville Jacoby explained that the troops he followed ­were hardened fighters. “As far as Americans are concerned, the entire B ­ attle of the Philippines has been up to individuals,” Jacoby began. “In Bataan, where trench warfare was not successful, the unit commander must be able to show the men how to fight Indian style. ­There is no telephoning back to headquarters in this war asking for reserves or special sniper units when the outfit gets in trou­ble.” One soldier was a “bow-­legged” ranch hand; another a “big thick skulled” Texan who fixed a jammed gun simply by “punch[ing] the shell home with his bare fist.”23 ­These men displayed the hardness, courage, and individualism of the Lone Ranger; other articles used racialized narratives familiar to the frontiersman narrative to treat the war as a fight between primitivism and civilization. Life reports, for instance, often treated the fall of Bataan as an analogue to Custer’s Last Stand.24 In April 1942, Life described the American retreat from Bataan in the face of J­ apanese forces. Noting the failures of French colonizers, the article instead praised American courage in the face of overwhelming J­ apanese forces. Even though the Americans lost, the article nonetheless reconfigures the b­ attle into an example of American hardiness on the frontier: “It was more than destiny that in the ­whole sad pa­norama of white men’s ­bitter failure in the Far East, the only men who did not fail ­were Americans.”25 In contrast to the “tough” and “resolute” Americans, the ­Japanese w ­ ere primitives who would “spit in” the food of prisoners, “cuff them, and sometimes murder them.” Ernie Pyle, maybe the most famous and influential reporter of World War II, also i­magined heroism through t­ hese traits.26 Pyle’s most famous articles, like “The Goddamned Infantry,” painstakingly described the agony of exhaustion that came with being an infantryman in the war but also expressed admiration and re­spect for how ­those infantrymen had the inner strength to confront the challenges. In his article “Buck Eversole” Pyle described one of the most impressive soldiers he had met. Pyle described him as quiet and ordinary but “the kind of man you instinctively feel safer with than with other p­ eople. He is not

10 • When Cowboys Come Home

helpless like most of us. He is practical. He can improvise, patch ­things, fix ­things.”27 Despite his adeptness as a soldier, Pyle was most impressed by Eversole’s quiet temperament and his stoicism. He had no “hatred for Germans,” had no aggressive need to prove himself in combat, and had “armored himself with a philosophy of a­ cceptance of what may happen.” When asked about the war, Eversole explained, “­There ­ain’t no use to complain. I just figured it this way, that I’ve been given a job to do and I’ve got to do it. And if I ­don’t live through it, t­ here’s nothing I can do about it.”28 The point of this brief survey of midcentury American culture is to provide a brief sketch of the main cultural traits ascribed to manhood in the interregnum between the world wars. While a turn-­of-­the-­century emphasis on martial ability, passion, and power­ful bodies could easily be found in early twentieth-­ century cultural productions, m ­ etaphors of civilization, premised on notions of white supremacy, often worked to smuggle in ­earlier notions of Victorian restrained manliness. The frontiersman ideal—of a man both power­ful, brave, and competitive but also ­independent, restrained, and dutiful—­was power­f ul precisely b­ ecause it could marry together two larger and seemingly exclusive frameworks about what was valuable in a man. Despite its paradoxical nature, the frontiersman myth animated discussions about manhood throughout the early twentieth ­century and set the standard for how American boys and men understood what their roles would be. Frontiersman manhood was a myth, and like myths tend to, it failed to m ­ easure up to real experience. The first signs that frontiersman manhood was failing came during the ­Great Depression, when economic disaster made it impossible for many men to provide for their dependents despite their stoicism, bravery, and ­independence. While frontiersman ­popular culture still dominated mainstream cultural narratives, the crisis led many writers and filmmakers to write fiction that downplayed the power­ful, competitive, and “civilized” nature of American manhood in order to instead romanticize the hardworking laborer who worked to take care of his ­family. Writers of the time often depicted the ideal man as a worker or a farmer who endured hardship to provide for his dependents; rather than extraordinary heroes such as Roo­se­velt or the Lone Ranger, the subjects of ­these films and texts ­were decidedly regular, average ­people. While not directly challenging the main tenets of the frontiersman, ­these Depression-­era works such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and even WPA murals downplayed the competitive and autonomous nature of men in ­favor of their stoicism and identity as producers. In so d­ oing, t­ hese depictions challenged the notion that masculinity could be attained through one single script.29 If this was a crack in the wall, however, World War II shattered the edifice. Soldiers like Jones entered World War II having imbibed the broad strokes of frontiersman heroism only to find how unreasonable t­ hese virtues w ­ ere in the ­middle of ­wartime. Instead, he and ­others found manhood through survival.

Introduction • 11

Experiencing the agony of war privileged veterans with an authenticity that ­others lacked, they claimed, and made the veteran the best arbiter of what manhood r­ eally meant. For ­these veterans, the companionship and love they felt with other men during the war and their own ability to express their au­then­tic desires ­were real, not the false ideals presented by the frontiersman narrative. While the senseless vio­lence of World War I had challenged the tenets of the frontiersman as well, the war had failed to create more than a ­limited discussion about the nature of manhood. The G ­ reat War had sent thousands of men from the United States to E ­ urope, where they experienced the horrors of mechanized trench warfare. The Lost Generation who fought in t­ hese trenches often spoke of the horrors of war as “unmanning”; the fighting proved their aspirations to heroism insufficient and left them with a sense of emasculation ­after they came home.30 However, though many writers from World War I expressed disgust at the inhumanity of w ­ artime ­service, most writings from the war fit ­these misgivings into a narrative that reinforced existing manly norms. For instance, most American poetry concerning World War I was written about the concept of “sacrifice.”31 By turning the conflict into a narrative of sacrifice, the cruelty of the war was recast as men ­doing their duty for a greater cause; by giving their lives for their country, they showed honor, duty, and bravery in the face of danger. Other writers ­after World War I told stories of rebuilding manhood or wrote about traumatized veterans reconstructed into men during peacetime. In ­either case, older notions of manhood ­were not destabilized. Instead, veterans who failed to be men in war regained their self-­worth by realizing t­ hese traits a­ fter the war, proving they had them all along. Likewise, World War I fostered close emotional connections between men, which could have challenged ideals of stoicism and autonomy. Correspondence and poetry from the era demonstrated a pattern of soldiers talking about their compatriots in romantic terms or expressing physical intimacy with each other, such as kissing and touching.32 However, for the most part, t­ hese close relationships did not translate into a challenge to existing norms. Unlike the aftermath of World War II, ­there was no explosion of gay and lesbian communities that could be linked to veterans, and most of this be­hav­ior was interpreted through older Victorian notions of love between schoolboys, a narrative that folded this be­hav­ior into traditional manly scripts.33 In fact, George Chauncey has shown that during the twenties heterosexuality was increasingly intertwined with definitions of manliness, and t­here ­isn’t evidence that the experiences of male romance that war veterans felt on the battlefield altered how they saw manhood when they returned.34 World War I also did nothing to challenge the racialized aspects of the frontiersman. While the World War II draft led to an intermingling of ethnic Americans with white colleagues, the draft in World War I was much more l­imited and thus not significant enough to alter the prejudices in American culture. ­After the end of World War I, ethnic ghettos still predominated American cities,

12 • When Cowboys Come Home

antisemitism actually ­rose, and racial theories of cowardice ­were used to explain weakness in w ­ artime.35 This is to say nothing of the African American community, which found its standing a­ fter the war relatively unchanged. Any revolutionary potential that World War I had was contained within a gendered and racialized framework. Instead, it took ­until World War II for the narrative of the frontiersman to come u­ nder serious attack. Americans in the post–­World War II era w ­ ere seemingly preoccupied with the roles of men. The economic boom that followed the war started a massive economic transformation the equal of industrialization at the turn of the ­century, and like in that era, this transformation spurred a conversation about how manliness could be preserved and cultivated when American society seemed to degrade a man’s ­independence and autonomy. Intellectuals in the 1950s ­were obsessed with the possibility that masculinity was in decline; the visibility of homo­sexuality in American cities led to a paranoia that gay men ­were weakening the fiber of American society; psychiatrists decried the neurotic, maladjusted “moms” who coddled their hopelessly sensitive and dependent sons. Studies like William Whyte’s The O ­ rganization Man worried that society was becoming bureaucratized and thus rewarding ­those men who submerged their needs and desires to the demands of their jobs. The affluence that now defined American society seemed to challenge older modes of American life that required strug­ gle, seemingly creating a generation that lacked ambition or drive.36 David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, the most impor­tant con­temporary book on the subject of conformity, implicitly defined “other-­direction”—­the character traits of p­ eople who are attuned to the needs of o­ thers—­through coded gendered terminology that implied the modern “other-­directed” man was feminized.37 Modernity, many worried, seemed to be eroding men’s identities.38 Some reacted through a cultural fascination with male rebellion in postwar society. The eccentricities of the Beats w ­ ere both a preoccupation and a taboo; Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, founded in 1953, developed a vision of manliness in which men ­were ­free to chase ­after individual ­pleasure rather than provide for a wife and ­family.39 The genre of film noir also demonstrated an interest in countercultural icons, most commonly through a focus on hard-­boiled loners who stood in contrast to the effeminate, consumerist society that postwar Amer­i­ca had transformed into.40 As Grace Elizabeth Hale has argued, this large-­scale fascination with rebellion—­whether it was through Black race rec­ords, Holden Caulfield, or juvenile delinquency—­suggested a yearning for an authenticity Americans felt they lacked in postwar society.41 Within this tumult, the consensus of what manhood meant shattered. Some voices—­like ­those of Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac—­made the case that in order for men to regain their individuality, they had to reject domesticity and responsibility; ­others, like the sitcom star Ozzie Nelson, argued that men needed to learn how to fit into ­family relationships where men wielded less power

Introduction • 13

and learn to become partners to their wives. Even voices advocating a place for men who loved other men—­most prominently ­those of Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal—­were becoming more prominent.42 From this debate was birthed a full-­scale challenge of the frontiersman. Was rebellion manly, or was it a cowardly abstention from duty? Was the breadwinner the head of ­house­hold or an emasculated com­pany man? Did marriage make the man, or did it just produce a henpecked nobody? It was no longer clear.43 The veterans who came home from the war ­were some of the first prominent voices to question ­these larger ideals; the cracks ­were created, in part, by the discontent of their homecoming. Thus, the veterans’ critique can be felt, to some extent, in all of t­ hese models. By uncovering their par­tic­u­lar strand of the critique, we can better understand some of the motivation that contributed to the gender trou­ble that followed. Recently, John Ibson has characterized the postwar era as a ­decade of “mourning.” He argued that the feelings of loss and the absence of friends and lovers experienced by veterans led to an emotional distance and fear of intimacy that characterized masculinity in the 1950s. Furthermore, noting the ways that the war had blurred the s­ imple categories of gay and straight and allowed men to freely experiment with same-­sex intimacy, Ibson argued that the unique antipathy t­ oward homo­sexuality in the postwar period was, in part, a guilty reaction to what had happened during the war. Analyzing the early ­careers of the writers Gore Vidal and John Horne Burns, Ibson found that the homosexual themes found in their ­earlier, more ­popular works ­were derided and criticized a few years ­later, suggesting how American culture showed more distaste ­toward homo­sexuality as the country transitioned further away from the war.44 Ibson described a p­ rocess in which the Second World War destabilized aspects of male be­hav­ior, only to lead to an attempt ­after the war to reassert heterosexual imperatives. This is a pattern that reoccurs frequently in postwar American culture. The cultural imperative to convince w ­ omen to give up their jobs and raise ­children in the fifties reflected the newfound i­ ndependence they had gained in ­wartime; the focus on domestic roles for men was a response to fears that the war had made men savage and uncontrollable.45 But in t­ hese cases the reassertion of strict gender roles did not come from a place of strength. Instead, the heightened enforcement of masculinity and femininity shows an anxiety over the possibility that t­ hose concepts had grown fungible. The goal of When Cowboys Come Home is to investigate what could be dreamed up in that liminal space. In order to tell this story, When Cowboys Come Home focuses on the stories of three veterans: James Jones, the writer of the monumentally impor­tant war novel From ­Here to Eternity; Stewart Stern, one of the most impor­tant screenwriters of the fifties and sixties; and Edward Field, a bohemian poet who used poetry to explore his love for other men. Through each of t­ hese men, I investigate a dif­fer­ent reaction to the existing ideals of manhood in American society

14 • When Cowboys Come Home

and show how the war pushed veterans to embrace a hitherto unexplored alternative of judging manly be­hav­ior. While all of ­these men are individuals and thus unique in how they reacted to their circumstances, all three can provide an impor­tant vantage point into the effects of World War II on veterans. ­These three men ­were chosen for this study for two reasons. First, they are writers. While writers do not necessarily have a privileged view into cultural change (though, on average, they might be more reflective than the average person), they do happen to write down their own thoughts far more often than the ­people around them. In par­tic­u­lar, as writers of fiction, t­ hese three authors focused their writings on critiques of society, ones that make clear exactly the prob­lems that they had with the world they ­were living in. For the purposes of understanding how postwar discourse was changing, writings like t­ hese make Jones, Stern, and Field ideal subjects. The second reason t­ hese men are the focus of this study is b­ ecause each had a unique vantage point of exactly what was changing. Jones, as a white, midwestern man, could have been a prime candidate for frontiersman manhood before the war. As a young man, he believed this myth and intensely desired to prove himself on the battlefield. However, he failed; a­ fter a brief experience in combat, he returned home, traumatized, unable to perform the masculinity he had been taught was his birthright. Out of t­ hose ashes, he developed new priorities: men ­were au­then­tic, resisted the conformity of modern society, and could be truly emotional and sensitive only when in the com­pany of other men. By trying to recapture the au­then­tic, homosocial camaraderie he felt in war, Jones was able to transform manliness into something he could attain and could teach ­others to reach. Farther on the edges of American society, Stern and Field knew they ­were not eligible for manhood by the standards of their day. Both w ­ ere Jewish, both had largely internalized the idea that they ­were weak and cowardly, and Field knew that he loved other men.46 They entered the war assuming they ­were unfit, only to find that the bonds they made with other men made it pos­si­ble for them to do their duty despite the ways they c­ ouldn’t live up to frontiersman narratives of manhood. Adopting a model of manhood that placed primacy on t­ hose relationships they had in war, both men came home understanding that manhood was based on sensitivity and a connection to o­ thers. Stern, by virtue of his Jewishness, was on the margins, but Field’s homo­ sexuality had made him a full-­fledged outsider. Facing dif­fer­ent pressures, Field’s journey a­ fter the war helps us realize the homoerotic implications lingering within the constructions of manhood ­adopted by Jones and Stern. Jones believed that men, together and separate from w ­ omen, could be intimate and sensitive; Stern valued the close emotional connections he made with men in ­wartime and believed that his ability to do his manly duty was predicated on the strength of his feelings for t­ hose that depended on him. But Field went further and understood the connections he made with men in ­wartime to prove that

Introduction • 15

same-­sex love, far from being taboo, was vital to his sense of self as a man. By viewing Stern and Jones through the experiences of Field, we can see how the queered nature of postwar manhood could open space for the burgeoning gay community to see itself as an oppressed minority. Each of t­ hese men, due to their dif­fer­ent backgrounds, highlights some of the new transformations occurring ­because of World War II. Jones’s experiences show how the war could deconstruct the assumptions of frontiersman manhood even for someone who was deeply enmeshed in that culture. Furthermore, Jones’s postwar years highlight how the critique that developed from the war often could develop a misogynist dimension, and the ­later failure of his writers’ colony also demonstrates how difficult it was for men to let go of frontiersman premises. In contrast, Stern’s experiences help us understand why, a­ fter the war, Jewish men ­were able to claim space in American society as men. He also shows us how the veterans’ critique could be used to support the emerging domestic consensus in American society, while also keeping intact the foundational emphasis on authenticity and sensitivity. Fi­nally, we know from studies of gay men in World War II that the war was a foundational moment in the creation of a postwar gay community; Field’s life helps to explain how the same ideas that animated Jones, Stern, and other veterans also w ­ ere power­ful in motivating a recognition of gay pride. But by acknowledging the similarities between the lessons he learned from the war and the conclusions Stern and Jones came to, Field also helps us queer the veterans’ critique and note the ways that new definitions of manhood a­ fter World War II helped make the line between hetero-­and homosocial romance much more permeable. Jones’s and Stern’s works ­were both widely received in postwar American society, and this study points out the ways in which their works ­were both received and misinterpreted. But the point of studying t­ hese three is not to see how they disseminated this new style of masculinity; in fact, all three ­were mostly misunderstood in their time. The point is instead to recognize that through three very dif­fer­ent men we can see the outlines of a shared response. In fact, part of what makes their critique impor­tant is how closely it matches the concerns of much more well-­known critiques of manhood, such as t­ hose made by William Whyte or found in Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.47 This suggests, on the one hand, that the veterans’ critique helped motivate other discussions of gender and sexuality during the 1950s and better illuminates the reasons why ­those criticisms found such fertile ground. Beyond this, the writings of Jones, Stern, and Field demonstrate that in the breakdown of manly scripts in the 1950s w ­ ere the available tools to construct a sensitive, compassionate manhood previously unacknowledged. Before we begin, two definitions and a caveat. First, readers may notice that throughout this study I refer to the broad concept of “society.” While this may seem vague, I use the term intentionally, to mimic the ways that Jones (and, to a lesser extent, Stern) used the term to refer to the norms and mainstream

16 • When Cowboys Come Home

opinions that they thought w ­ ere dominant in postwar Amer­i­ca. “Society” was used in midcentury Amer­i­ca to denote the forces in opposition to the self: ­popular culture, marketing, social opinion, bureaucratic rules and dictates, and especially the approval of one’s peers. Intellectuals of the fifties—­including Norman Mailer, David Riesman, and Betty Friedan, among ­others—­understood the individual self as barraged by outside influences that sought to shape, and in some cases override, the individual’s wants and desires. Often (but not always) implicitly feminized, “society” often served to describe the same boogeyman that turn-­of-­the-­century writers used when discussing the prob­lems of “overcivilization”: a force that weakened and subordinated men, leaving them emasculated and dependent. When I use this term, it is deployed as t­ hese authors would use it: as a somewhat amorphous other from which manhood can be defined against.48 I also use the term “hetero-­domesticity” through this study to refer to two mutually reinforcing ideologies prevalent in midcentury American culture. First, the ever-­present pressures ­toward domesticity, as both Elaine Tyler May and Wini Breines have elaborated, meant that men and ­women in postwar Amer­i­ca faced many dif­fer­ent pressures to conform to a pro-­natal, single-­earner, nuclear ­family. At the same time, the homophobia of the period—as John Ibson and Barbara Ehrenreich have both noted—­strongly mandated that men limit intimacy with each other and instead focus their energies and leisure time on their families and homelife. The term “hetero-­domesticity” acknowledges the ways ­these two structures ­were mutually reinforcing: the rewards for men who w ­ ere married in the suburbs w ­ ere equally balanced by costs incurred if a man did not properly sell that heterosexual ­performance. I hope that by using one term for both, we can more easily see the ways domesticity and homophobia worked in concert to dictate to men (and ­women) how best to ­settle into postwar American life.49 One final point needs to be addressed. Simply put, none of the ­people covered herein ­were Black. While I fully admit this gap, it is one I have thoroughly considered. One reason for this is, in looking for candidates who might have elucidated the connection between postwar masculinity and African American experiences, I came to realize that the story of Black masculinity in the fifties was a much dif­fer­ent narrative, one that is far too complex to do justice to ­here. For example, Black postwar masculinity was often intrinsically linked to the Black freedom strug­gle. Mary Helen Washington’s excellent The Other Blacklist: The African-­American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s demonstrates the ways in which much of the impor­tant writing by Africans Americans of the postwar generation was po­liti­cally driven and focused around par­tic­u­lar goals relating to racial justice.50 Alongside this, for reasons related to discrimination, the same ave­nues of publishing available to up-­and-­coming white writers—­James Jones, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Edward Field all survived the fifties on the money they made by selling short fiction or poetry to magazines—­were not as readily available to Black authors. As a result, Black writers often published

Introduction • 17

their most impor­tant works l­ ater, in the sixties, when they w ­ ere surrounded by a dif­fer­ent context. John A. Williams, for instance, published The Angry Ones in 1960; John Oliver Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder ­wasn’t published ­until 1962. African American postwar writers also often had a unique relationship to the war. Ralph Ellison refused to be drafted into a war he thought was racist; Malcolm X reported that he was refused for the draft b­ ecause he showed excitement at the possibility of killing white p­ eople. The stories of writers like t­ hese are complex and so fall beyond the confines of this study. I hope to come back to the topic in a f­ uture work or that f­ uture historians w ­ ill investigate what I have missed on this subject. This does not mean discussions of race are absent; indeed, this is fundamentally a narrative about how whiteness was understood. Stern and Field’s Jewishness put both of them in a liminal space where whiteness could be, potentially, attainable, which makes both of their stories impor­tant in interrogating and outlining the borderlands of whiteness in postwar Amer­i­ca. Jones, likewise, demonstrates the ways that white veterans may have changed their views of racial ­others during the war as well as the limits of ostensibly race-­neutral constructions of manliness. The journeys Jewish men like Stern and Field faced also help show the ­performances required of them to gain a­ cceptance in postwar Amer­i­ca. While historians such as Debra Dash Moore and Matthew Frye Jacobson have shown that World War II created opportunities for Jewish Americans to demand inclusion, one of the key arguments I pre­sent is that this ­acceptance was predicated on a par­tic­u­lar ­performance of manhood ­after the war, one that traded ethnic distinctiveness for postwar homogeny.51 Stern took this bargain and hid his Jewish background in order to be accepted as a man. On the other hand, integral to Field’s identity was his refusal to perform as a gentile a­ fter the war, an act that tied the queerness of his sexuality to the nonconformity of his ethnic identity. Examples like ­these, as I ­shall demonstrate, show that white manhood was itself an artificial ­performance a­ fter the war, and though it was more inclusive than the dominant prewar narrative, it was no less alienating to the previously ethnic men who tried to perform it. To begin our story, then, we start at the eve of war. As a young man, Jones had ­imagined what it would be like to fight for his country. As the ­Japanese navy approached Pearl Harbor, he was soon able to live that very dream.

Part 1

Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

1

Never a Second­hand Man James Jones and the Perils of Homecoming The war was a terrible t­ hing; like society, it was made by men and run by men, and, like society, it got beyond their control like an attempt to burn off a pasture that became a forest fire. The omnivorous war. Its waves uprooted ­these youngsters who ­weren’t ready to be move out [sic], cut them adrift with no mooring lines before they knew the meaning [of] ties. The swirling depths w ­ ere aweful [sic] and bottomless to them, and they w ­ ere washed over with a wave of fear that swept overboard all the t­ hings society had tried to foster for the safe course of an ordinary life. They looked to society for aid, but society could not help them, and so they turned against it. Society was not a god, it was only the manner in which man lived together with the least amount of trou­ble. It’s [sic] purpose to help men and make their lives better, more livable, 21

22 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

but it did not fulfill that purpose. Society was incompetent, composed of sentimental institutions like patriotism and race superiority; any man who was incompetent in his job would be discharged immediately. The incompetence of society was a startling fearsome ­thing. But ­these boys expected it to be omnipotent and able to provide them with answers to their doubts and fears. And it could not provide the justification they needed. They ­were two dimensional figures on a plane surface, hemmed in by straight lines that had no depth or thickness, but which nevertheless society decreed w ­ ere walls. —­James Jones, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, ca. 1944

On November 1, 1943, Corporal James Jones found himself sitting in the Memphis U ­ nion Bus Station. He had been rehabilitating nearby, in Kennedy General Hospital, suffering from an ankle injury he received while practicing football at the Schofield Barracks near Honolulu, Hawaii. He told p­ eople it was a war wound; it made him seem braver. He had seen combat during the ­Battle of Guadalcanal, had killed the ­enemy, and had lost friends. His ankle still hurt, and he had trou­ble ­doing military exercises on it. Still, the doctors de­cided his ankle had healed, which meant he was “fit for active duty.” His o­ rders w ­ ere to report to Camp Campbell, Kentucky, where he would be transferred to a new unit and soon enough sent back overseas to fight again. But, as he stood t­ here, in that bus station, Jones started to contemplate a dif­ fer­ent course of action. He had requested a thirty-­day furlough, which all soldiers usually received once per year. It had been denied, since his hospital had no such rule, but that d­ idn’t mean he d­ idn’t deserve it. Two other soldiers stood with him; they ­were both disabled and ­were also unfairly told to report for active duty. As they waited for the bus, he quietly listened to their complaints, and the longer he listened, the harder he found it to argue with them. They wanted a vacation before ­going to the camp, and who could blame them? And so, wishing them well as they walked away to their respective buses, Corporal Jones de­cided that Camp Campbell could wait. He was g­ oing home, to Robinson, Illinois, a place he ­hadn’t seen for over three years.1 In bits and pieces, h ­ ere and t­ here, Jones had already started a novel about the plight of returning veterans. By the time he finished the book, now called They

Never a Second­hand Man • 23

S­ hall Inherit the Laughter, it was a thinly fictionalized account of the events of his trip back home. The book took his fights with his aunt and ­uncle, his heavy drinking, and his disgust with the civilians around him and transformed them into a polemic against the American society to which he returned. Men w ­ ere emasculated by w ­ omen on the home front, he claimed. Civilians d­ idn’t understand what men like him felt. As Jones drafted this novel, he honed his own ideas about war, masculinity, and American society—­ideas that had been ­shaped and tempered by his experiences overseas. Jones had entered the war fully convinced of the tenets of frontiersman masculinity. He believed that war, as a site of conflict and competition, would help him prove to himself that he was a man. Hawaii initially reinforced the ideas of racial superiority embedded in frontiersman manhood, reminding Jones that his whiteness promised a heroism and bravery that he had only to fulfill. But, as he spent more time in war, he came to doubt the assumptions he brought with him. His tangles with the complex racial hierarchies of Hawaii and his interactions with w ­ omen who d­ idn’t see in him the dashing hero he hoped to be complicated his worldview. He began to see savagery in his friends, and he gained sympathy for the ­enemy. Warfare was a nightmare; nothing done during war could possibly be manly or heroic. He came home a failure; not only had he been sent home from an ankle injury, but he ran from his ­service—­and ran again—­until discharged as unfit. As a white American from the Midwest, he should have been capable of every­thing American manhood promised. And yet, while overseas, his whiteness had not made him more civilized than his e­ nemy, more heroic, or more brave. As he came to terms with t­ hese failures, Jones began to rethink the meanings embedded in cultural constructions of masculinity. Manhood w ­ asn’t about bravery; bravery was a story that he had been taught to trick him into fighting. Instead, manhood was about authenticity. Ultimately, Jones believed that the alienation he felt while embedded in civilian life stemmed from inauthentic American society. ­Later, Jones explained the lessons he had learned from war. Reflecting on his own expectations, he explained to an interviewer the pressures he and other men felt: “­There’re so many young guys, you know—­young Americans and, yes, young men everywhere—­a ­whole generation of ­people youn­ger than me who have grown up feeling inadequate as men b­ ecause they h ­ aven’t been able to fight in a war and find out w ­ hether they are brave or not. B ­ ecause it is in an effort to prove this bravery that we fight—in wars or in bars—­whereas if a man w ­ ere truly brave he ­wouldn’t have to be always proving it to himself. So therefore I am forced to consider bravery suspect, and ridicu­lous, and dangerous.”2 For Jones, this pressure to become brave came from society: it came from civilians, often ­women, who had never fought in the war. By being told he needed to prove himself or fight in a war to be brave, Jones thought, men ­were actually being taught to be inauthentic. They ­were following a script given to them by someone ­else; they

24 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

­ ere conforming, rather than cultivating i­ ndependence and self-­identity. By prew tending to be frontiersmen, men w ­ ere in fact being emasculated by a society that forced them into par­tic­u­lar molds. To a young Jones just returning from the war, society was not just an abstract topic: it was run by and composed of w ­ omen. Though Jones increasingly abandoned the racial dimensions of manhood implicit in the frontiersman narrative, he replaced a racial hierarchy with a misogynistic critique of w ­ omen. While masculinity and femininity are frequently defined in opposition, for Jones w ­ omen became adversaries who threatened to divide and conquer the male spirit.3 Manhood was authenticity and rebellion; its e­nemy was American society, controlled and propagated by shrewish, misogynist caricatures of ­women. If ­there was a place for men a­ fter war, it was a place w ­ omen could never go. Jones’s musings as he returned from the war, especially t­ hose found in his early writings like They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, reflect themes that l­ater became commonly discussed by intellectuals in postwar Amer­i­ca. His fear that society was inauthentic, his romance of rebellion, and his misogynistic digressions on ­women all became ­popular ele­ments of postwar discourse concerning manhood. However, while Jones was not the first to make ­these critiques, his complaints about postwar society predate many of the more p­ opular and well-­known discussions surrounding conformity and manhood. Furthermore, Jones’s critiques are inseparably connected to his experiences in ­wartime, suggesting how a dissatisfaction with homecoming could make veterans receptive to critiques concerning American society. James Jones was unique, and his par­tic­u­lar ­wartime epiphanies ­were his own. But, like Jones, many veterans experienced failure; many more returned from war angry, cynical, and ­bitter, frustrated at the trivialities of civilian life and consumed with a bitterness ­toward postwar American society.4 Jones shows how that dissatisfaction held the potential to destabilize American cultural norms. A few years l­ ater, when David Riesman explained that Americans w ­ ere becoming “other-­directed,” men like Jones ­were a ready-­made audience to rally against this distressing development. When Hugh Hefner’s new magazine argued that American men needed to f­ ree themselves from their wives in order to become their true selves, men like Jones ­were ready to listen. But Jones also demonstrates how a new ideal of manhood was available from the ashes of World War II. Bravery had been proved to be useless when the guns ­were firing; stoicism was a lie. While Jones is impor­tant b­ ecause of the light he shines upon the origins of postwar critiques, he also shows something much more in­ter­est­ing was g­ oing on. If Jones is any indication, disdain for male roles in the fifties w ­ asn’t just a reactionary push to reinstate older gender roles. Instead, u­ nder this critique, t­ here was energy to completely remake what manhood could mean. Jones wanted to be a hero. He failed. If American men felt overwhelming pressure to become the frontiersman, what happened when, despite their upbringing, they ran in terror?

Never a Second­hand Man • 25

On the Frontier Warfare, of course, has always held a prominent role in how Americans understand manhood. Often, war is seen as a crucible, in which American soldiers prove their toughness and resolve u­ nder extreme pressure. During the late nineteenth ­century, t­ hose who worried that the changing economy had weakened men hoped that war might counteract this trend and rejuvenate the manliness of American society. Theodore Roo­se­velt and other prominent men from the turn of the ­century had argued that war (or competitive sports, in its absence) could prevent American society from degrading into a soft and sensitive form. In e­ither case, the idea was that manhood needed to be proven through competition.5 During the interwar years, authors like Ernest Hemingway depicted war as a site where men could use their stoicism and bravery to prove themselves men; films like Sergeant York and The Lost Patrol ­imagined the previous war, World War I, as a frontier that could forge manliness.6 James Jones ­later remembered imagining World War I was a “romantic war”; writers like Norman Mailer grew up fascinated with it, especially as a new war loomed.7 Young men like James Jones grew up in this context, not questioning the need for them to prove themselves through w ­ artime heroism. Jones’s a­ ctual experience had the opposite effect. His time at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii challenged the assumptions he had brought with him, not only by challenging the racial assumptions built into turn of the ­century manhood but also by teaching him to expect a transactional relationship with ­women. Rather than seeing w ­ omen as p­ eople who might validate his manhood with their ­favors or as caregivers to rely on, Jones became convinced that w ­ omen used men for their own purposes. This complicated Jones’s assumptions about the nature of manhood and prepared the way for his eventual loss of faith in the meanings imbued in frontiersman masculinity. Jones was born in 1921, the son of a well-­respected dentist and a ­house­wife. By his teens, James Jones wanted to go to college, but with his middling grades and his rural background this was unlikely. Without any other prospects, Jones entered the military.8 He chose the Army Air Force and requested to be sent to Hawaii; his f­ ather, ironically, recommended the islands as the safest place to go if war broke out. By the end of 1939, Jones was living in the Pacific, working as a clerk during the day and practicing his writing in the ­evenings.9 In the thirties and forties, Hawaii was a complicated racial frontier; white soldiers who found themselves on the islands came face-­to-­face with dynamics that challenged the racial hierarchy assumed in American p­ opular thought. Frontiersman manhood, for instance, was defined in large part by contrasting a stoic and brave white American manhood with a savage, uncontrolled other. When World War II broke out, w ­ artime reporting, for instance, drew heavi­ly from ­these constructions to contrast American soldiers with inferior, dependent, Pacific

26 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

Islanders. For instance, consider “Filipino ‘Joe’ Packs a Wallop,” a Life magazine article written on April 13, 1942. In this article, Life introduced its readers to American allies in the Philippines. All Filipinos, the article noted, ­were called “Joe” by the Americans, w ­ ere all “dark and stocky,” could “smell out the Jap snipers,” and could hunt down J­ apanese troops through the jungle. They also ­were good allies b­ ecause of influence from the Americans: “US policy . . . ​[made] the Filipinos the most self-­respecting, educated, and prosperous islanders of the South Pacific.” As a result, “Joe” “trusts his American officers and worships General MacArthur,” providing due deference to the more civilized Americans.10 Hawaii, in par­tic­u­lar, was characterized in films and p­ opular culture as an exotic locale where the native population was less able to restrain their passions and subordinate to Americans.11 As Jones was growing up, p­ opular songs and films—­songs such as “When My Honolulu Lady Does the Honolulu Dip” and films with names like Passion Fruit and His Captive ­Woman, to name a few—­promised exotic sexual adventures on the islands, setting expectations of promiscuous, dependent nonwhite ­women available for the arriving soldiers.12 Upon arriving, ­these expectations ­were reinforced for visitors by the girls in hula dresses common on the main streets. A ­ fter Jones had arrived on the islands, he likely passed ­these ­women offering to take their picture with him, and he prob­ ably knew of the ­popular rumors that ­they’d do even more for the right price.13 ­These sorts of depictions would have characterized the islands as a Western frontier, where nonwhite p­ eople w ­ ere uncontrolled, sexually available, and dependent on stoic, controlled, white men. Rural Illinois was hardly diverse during Jones’s youth, and his interactions with ­people of differing backgrounds was ­limited; Jones’s knowledge of ­people unlike himself was likely molded more by culture than by experience. Hawaii, however, was very dif­fer­ent from the Midwest. Anglo-­A mericans ­were the minority in Hawaii: on the 1940 census, only 24.5 ­percent of the population was “Caucasian.”14 Arriving in Hawaii thrust him directly into a world he had expected much of but knew very ­little about. Jones was not initially impressed with the islands, and his comments demonstrate very l­ ittle knowledge of the nuanced racial landscape. While Honolulu was a “beautiful city,” as he told his ­brother, Jeff, “on the outskirts, about one of ­every three ­people are gooks.” The term “Gooks,” while common during the time, reinforced the assumptions of frontiersman manhood by dividing white citizens from ­Japanese Americans, Native Hawaiians, and any other racial group on the islands, flattening the island’s inhabitants into “us” and “them.” He also wrote about the famous Waikiki beach that “you can see old grapefruit rinds and orange peels around everywhere. The seaweed on the beach makes it look like a latrine,”15 an evaluation that further divided him from the dirty inhabitants of the island. Soldiers on the islands often judged the w ­ omen ­there by making ­these racial distinctions, separating desirable white ­women from less desirable ­others. A continuing complaint from newly arrived soldiers in the forties was the lack of ­women available on the islands; t­ here ­were “100 men to e­ very 1 ­woman,” some

Never a Second­hand Man • 27

newspapers claimed. In fact, this was a complaint about race: t­ here w ­ ere 3.9 men to ­every ­woman in 1940, but only one w ­ oman to ­every fifty men when only single white w ­ omen ­were counted.16 Despite t­ hese complaints, interracial relationships, taboo on the mainland, became far more common in Hawaii; however, ser­vicemen tended to treat t­ hese relationships as disposable, and often justified their transgressions by citing the scarcity of white ­women.17 Jones, for his part, once assured his b­ rother, “I w ­ ouldn’t marry the best white w ­ oman in the world, let alone a gook,” making t­ hese same distinctions between white and nonwhite ­women.18 Interactions with ­women ­were further complicated by the availability and pervasiveness of sex for money. Though prostitution was technically illegal in Hawaii, a large brothel system was officially condoned and monitored by the government. Prostitutes w ­ ere regulated by the government, given VD screenings, and paid a yearly license fee. Once war broke out, brothels turned into veritable factories, separating men into small rooms with thin partitions, which allowed the prostitutes to move from one customer to the next quickly and efficiently.19 Besides prostitution, t­ here ­were other common arrangements based on an informal exchange of goods. Soldiers commonly engaged in “shack up” relationships, in which they might have a casual sexual relationship with a civilian and stay part-­ time in their ­house, instead of the barracks, in exchange for material benefits.20 In e­ ither case, soldiers’ interactions with civilians ­were gendered, hierarchal interactions, which put soldiers in positions where they bartered and negotiated with w ­ omen on an economic basis for intimacy. Even if Jones had not personally been to the brothels, he was surrounded by soldiers who could, and likely did, swap stories about their most recent experiences; his ­later novel, From ­Here to Eternity, is filled with descriptions of prostitution on the island.21 On at least one occasion, Jones showed up to the hospital, worried he had venereal disease, only to find out the other soldiers treated it as a joke and a mark of experience.22 Jones was confronted by pervasive sex no m ­ atter where he went: once, while on guard duty, he found an officer and a ­woman in a compromising position inside a landed airplane.23 Enmeshed as he was in this culture, Jones would frequently write home to his ­brother to brag about his sexual conquests. In one typical case, Jones explained that he was seeing a girl named Edith: “­We’re quite frank now,” he wrote to Jeff, “[we] talk a lot about sex & so forth. She says it’s almost as [if] we w ­ ere husband & wife.” He went on, explaining that “I’m just teaching her a lot of ­things about sex that her husband d­ idn’t know.”24 He also proudly reported to his Aunt Mollie that he had gone out with a Hawaiian w ­ oman, though in a letter to his ­brother he admitted he discussed the date only to upset her conservative racial sensitivities. He ­wasn’t dating her seriously, he assured Jeff: he dated the ­woman “­because of the lack of whitestuff.”25 The culture surrounding ­women on this island could lead to an adversarial relationship between soldiers and civilians. Many men looked to the brothels as

28 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

a source of h ­ uman connection, which led to frustration with w ­ omen who treated the transactions as coldly businesslike.26 Certainly, Jones developed a resentment for ­these w ­ omen: in a 1940 letter to his b­ rother, he complained that the w ­ omen on the island ­either try to get engaged or “bleed you dry”; their goal was to make as much money as pos­si­ble and “still keep their virginity.”27 Jones also used martial ­metaphors in his letters to Jeff, once claiming that dating ­women was like facing them in the boxing ring and that they plan their “conquests” as though they ­were at war.28 His postwar novels continued to espouse this view of w ­ omen. In t­ hese writings, w ­ omen primarily used sex for material benefits; in fact, one of the principal female characters in From ­Here to Eternity, Alma, was a prostitute in Honolulu who used sex to make enough money that she could one day live a respectable life on the mainland. In contrast, Jones’s books depicted men to be in tune with their feelings and often explained that men enjoyed sex not as a transaction but out of an emotional need.29 Jones’s letters to his ­brother are especially significant ­because they ­were not true, but fictions created to make him look like a frontiersman hero. Jones ­later admitted that his boasts ­were largely fabricated: in late 1944 or 1945, Jones explained to his ­brother that most of his stories about ­women ­were “a lie.” “It was an attempt to make a hero out of myself,” he wrote. “It was a very swashbuckling picture, romantic, heart-­stirring; pretty, but untrue and in being untrue creating a false conception of a soldier, adventurer.”30 Most of Jones’s stories about ­women, alongside the racist jibes he sometimes made, ­were his way of telling Jeff what he expected a man to be. James Jones’s diary offers a completely dif­fer­ent version of the man. When writing privately Jones seemed clumsy and confused instead of the self-­assured rake of his letters. In an entry about October 23, 1942, before he left the island, he wrote about his attempt to have sex with Peggy Carson, a student at the University of Hawaii. Jones seemed at a loss to account for why he was not successful. He explained his attempts to kiss her and how she rebuffed him when he tried for more, telling him that “that rather spoils it.” Likewise, in another diary entry, he related his surprise when, a­ fter being invited over to the h ­ ouse of Laura Schwartz, one of his E ­ nglish professors, she eventually asked him to leave instead of also offering sex. In e­ ither case, Jones was frustrated with w ­ omen and unable to read the signals they offered him.31 In his diary, Jones despaired that w ­ omen only rarely felt “about sex the way I do.” Jones’s attitudes t­ oward w ­ omen ­were s­ haped by the ways his expectations w ­ ere not met in Hawaii: rather than revealing him as a virile, power­ful man, he found a world in which w ­ omen had power to deny themselves to him. In a diary entry written on September 5, 1941, for instance, Jones ranted about a c­ olonel’s d­ aughter that thought herself better than the average soldier. The ­woman flirted with lieutenants but “would not think of touching an enlisted man, a grimy ditch-­digger . . . ​ [and] soil her dainty hands.” He’d prefer to sleep with a whore before he

Never a Second­hand Man • 29

considered her, he claimed. The thought is repeated in From ­Here to Eternity: recalling the attitude of a soldier on the island, Jones’s protagonist Prewitt complained that white ­women in Hawaii w ­ ere “snobs” and that even “gook girls” thought it was a “disgrace to be seen talking to a soldier.”32 In Hawaiian society, ­Japanese American and Hawaiian ­women had a much higher standing on the islands than they might have had on the mainland, giving them power that they may not have had in other circumstances. It was common that ­these ­women might avoid soldiers ­because it threatened their own positions in society: local communities often disapproved of interracial dating, and soldiers w ­ ere usually considered on an even lower rung than other white citizens in Hawaii. As a result, often pressure against interracial relationships came not from the ser­vicemen but from the families and friends of local w ­ omen.33 As an example of how the realities of the island may not have matched up to expectations, consider Jones’s brief relationship with a ­woman named Tsuneko Ogure, ­later known as the reporter “Scoops Casey.” While attending the University of Hawaii, Jones and Ogure briefly dated u­ ntil she broke off the relationship when the dean of w ­ omen warned her that association with soldiers might damage her reputation. Jones, for his part, was proud of his connection with her ­because it was a sign he could break down racial barriers; to be rebuffed by her ­because he was a soldier reversed the hierarchies men took for granted.34 But when he wrote about the relationship l­ater, Jones reversed the power dynamics, depicting the soldier as a man with a reputation that could be tarnished. A ­ fter the war, in From ­Here to Eternity, Jones included a character loosely based on Tsuneko, now unsubtly named “Violet” Ogure. Prewitt and Ogure had a “shack-up” arrangement, but he was transferring to the infantry, and the transfer would leave him far away from her. As a result, Prewitt demanded that Ogure move with him closer to the barracks so they could continue their relationship. Ogure refused, arguing that she could not move and give up her ­family for him, and so he broke off their relationship.35 Her refusal, importantly, exposed the racial assumptions implicit in this dynamic. Violet Ogure suggested to Prewitt that she would move with him if he married her and dared him to offer marriage, knowing that a soldier like Prewitt would never, in the end, marry a ­Japanese American ­woman like herself. Prewitt knew she was right: as an interracial c­ ouple, t­ hey’d be outcasts on the mainland, he maintained; as a soldier, he c­ ouldn’t think of marriage. But, a­ fter she called him on ­these rationalizations, he lost his temper: “Why in hell would I marry you? Have a raft of snot-­nosed n—­—­brats? Be a goddam squawman and work in the goddamn pineapple fields the rest of my life? or drive a Schofield taxi?”36 It is not easy to unravel Jones’s intentions when he wrote this exchange. In the context of the scene, Prewitt was clearly at fault for his ability to discard Ogure, but it ­isn’t clear how much Jones may have sympathized with soldiers who felt like they lacked any other option. Certainly, the way in which Prewitt’s words

30 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

conflate complicated racial categories into white and “squawman” is a damning indictment of the racial attitudes of soldiers and is likely a reflection on the reflexive racism that Jones witnessed on the islands. But even if his reversal of the relationship makes clearer the racism soldiers carried with them, it keeps intact a larger truth Jones had become more certain of: that w ­ omen tried to manipulate men. Violet Ogure falls into the same pattern as all the other female characters in the book: she is a w ­ oman trying to tie down and domesticate a man for her own benefit and security. The real Ogure fought against her character’s inclusion in the film version of Eternity. While the film was shooting on location in Hawaii, Ogure (now Scoops Casey) went to the set to make sure that Violet did not appear. Casey wanted to avoid the embarrassment an implication of a relationship with a soldier—­ especially a “shack-up” relationship with its suggestions of sex for money—­ would create for her, fictional or not. As quoted in a newspaper, she explained, “When ‘From H ­ ere to Eternity’ became a best-­seller and I was described as a girl with pretty vague ideas of right and wrong, I de­cided Jones had gone too far and wrote to him telling him so.”37 If Jones used her character to demonstrate how w ­ omen ensnared men, Ogure had her own ideas about the meaning of the story and was clearly unhappy with how Eternity did not reflect the power dynamics pre­sent in her real life. The racial and sexual dynamics of Hawaii did not, on their own, lead to a reappraisal of James Jones’s values. Jones still expected that men ­were competitive, brave, sexually virile, and white, like frontiersman masculinity had dictated to him. But they dented his expectations. When war broke out and Jones left to see combat, his views on manhood ­were more directly confronted by the actions of the soldiers around him, who performed none of the traits he expected. Together, the failure of the frontiersman’s racial structures, its promises of sexual virility, and its failure to capture the be­hav­ior of men at war led Jones to a reappraisal.

The Making of a Man On December  7, 1941, J­apanese airplanes descended on Pearl Harbor. The ­Japanese bombers arrived first, dropping bombs on military bases across Oahu. Air raid sirens blared; voices on the radio exclaimed that this was no drill. By the time the attack was over, more than a thousand Americans w ­ ere dead, many of them soldiers who ­were sleeping or unprepared when the attack took place. James Jones was eating eggs.38 He had just woken up and gone downstairs for breakfast when he heard an explosion. Someone asked if they ­were d­ oing any blasting that day, but Jones and the other soldiers at Schofield Barracks rushed outside to see the commotion, clutching their half gallons of milk so no one would steal them. As he told the story much ­later, he remembered huddling on the street with t­ hese soldiers and watching a J­ apanese plane fly by them, low to

Never a Second­hand Man • 31

the ground. He remembered the plane passing so close he could see the p­ ilot wave.39 Despite the tragedy, James Jones was excited: he would actually see war for himself. Jones’s ideas of heroism centered on his romanticized notions of what a soldier was like. Depicting himself as a virile womanizer was one way for Jones to pre­sent himself with a par­tic­u­lar, masculine image; another was to prove that he was power­ful, self-­assured, and able to meet the challenges of ­wartime. It was only when he actually saw combat that he realized his idea of a soldier was fiction, war itself cruel. This contrast led to Jones’s eventual abandonment of his preconceived notions of the frontiersman, allowing him the space to build a new narrative from the rubble. The months before Jones shipped off w ­ ere a mix of training, taking classes at the University of Hawaii, and waiting. During this period, Jones worked through a period of m ­ ental preparation. Memoirs of the First World War, the Vietnam War, and the Second World War very commonly speak of a period of “innocence” or “farcical preparation,” before combat, in which soon-­to-be soldiers i­ magined combat quite differently than it actually was; this is usually followed by an “unmanning” in which t­ hese soldiers learn the true horror of warfare and how much it did not match the romantic images in their minds. Though Jones’s diary was much more immediate than a memoir might be, his recollections as he prepared and then faced combat closely mimic this larger pattern. As Jones faced the “unmanning” of modern warfare, he also discarded much of what he thought he knew about heroism on the battlefield.40 ­A fter Pearl Harbor, Jones’s letters alternated between anxiety and enthusiasm, demonstrating the rift between his own fears and his compulsion to live up to the image of the ideal hero he i­ magined. He continually told his b­ rother that he expected to die; on the day of Pearl Harbor he made arrangements for all of his writing, notes, and diaries to be sent to Jeff so if he “[did] not live to make a story of them, [Jeff] ­will be able to do it.”41 On the other hand, he was obsessed with transferring to the infantry so that he could take part in the war. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m g­ oing to sit ­behind a typewriter or gas up the planes while other guys fly them and do the fiting [sic],” he wrote to Jeff in May 1940. “If I’ve got to be in a war, I’m sure as hell g­ oing to see something of it.”42 Preoccupied with proving that he had the character to be a heroic soldier, Jones spent considerable effort trying to get out of his typist position. Before the attack, he applied multiple times for a transfer to the infantry, fi­nally succeeding in 1941. The transfer was an unusual one: it took him out of a job with opportunity for advancement to one of the most arduous and dangerous tasks in the military. He told Jeff that he fought for that transfer to prove that he was a man. “I was scared to admit to myself that I was afraid of ­doing it,”43 he told his ­brother, but he felt that “if I ­don’t get out ­there, I’ll never find out ­whether I’d have turned yellow or not.”44 He was eventually accepted and moved to Schofield Barracks while he trained for a war that was fast approaching.

32 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

During this time, he wrote several unfinished fragments of writing; in many of them, he contemplated how a war might change men into ideal, brave soldiers.45 In a two-­page fragment titled “December 7th, 1941,” Jones wrote that the bombing had the potential to transform immature adolescents into heroes: men whom civilians had accused of being “drunkards” or “whore-­chasers” now displayed “bronzed chests” and took the role of valorous defenders of the islands’ honor.46 Similarly, in an outline titled “The Making of a Man,” he compared the growth of a young man to the forging of steel. Echoing Teddy Roo­se­velt’s call for “the Strenuous Life,” Jones ­imagined that, like steel, men needed to face ­trials in order to be forged into power­ful and useful metal.47 While at points Jones did question the nature of heroism, t­ hese fragments still show faith in the precepts of frontiersman masculinity: that ­wartime was a test that could imbue men with characteristics such as bravery, strength, and self-­control. War was a contest, and w ­ hatever the failings of the men on Hawaii before the war, they would return from ­wartime remade as heroes. At least, that was the hope. On December 6, 1942, Jones left Hawaii; by December 30, he arrived on the front lines. His com­pany, along with the Twenty-­Fifth and Twenty-­Seventh Infantries, had deployed to Guadalcanal. The B ­ attle of Guadalcanal was one of the most impor­tant events in the Pacific Theater of World War II and was one of the major victories for American troops against the ­Japanese. Between August 7, 1942, and February 9, 1943, American and ­Japanese ships and troops fought over a series of islands around the Guadalcanal region. A ­ fter heavy fighting, the ­Japanese forces eventually retreated, leaving the islands for the Americans and giving their forces time to regroup. It was at Guadalcanal that James Jones experienced combat for the first and only time.48 Even before arriving, the military w ­ asn’t what Jones had expected. Jones chafed at the hierarchy and bureaucracy that seemed at odds with his re­spect for individualism and ­independence. ­Colonels compared recruits, at times, to untrained dogs.49 Furthermore, as he observed his fellow soldiers, he did not note the frontiersman bravery or self-­discipline he hoped to see. Instead, he met irresponsible ­children. In his diary, Jones wrote about their reaction to a plane crash. The soldiers all went to see the wreckage to prove their fearlessness, but Jones found the entire scene, including the “morbid thrill” ­these men got from their posturing, off-­putting and fake. Viewing strangers “dead and mutilated” was “adventurous & gives them a thrill,” but would they find it as exciting if the dead ­were their friends? He noted that one man who bragged about the ­whole situation did it only to “show how tough and hard he was.” Another, who chided them all for their reactions, Jones found to be “false and hypocritical,” judging the ­others ­because he could appear superior by “adopt[ing] a character false to [him].”50 It struck Jones that the bravery t­ hese men affected was an act they put on ­because every­one around them expected them to act in a specific way. The act of viewing the dead bodies was almost childish, as though they ­were

Never a Second­hand Man • 33

schoolboys seeing something gruesome so they could brag about it to their friends. ­Were ­these men actually brave, or w ­ ere they just mimicking what they had seen in films? Jones was not seeing the transformation he had so hoped for; instead, he felt increasingly as though the soldiers in his unit w ­ ere out of control. Four days before they deployed fifteen men went AWOL. They left, Jones wrote, not out of any tangible issues, but “they get so they ­don’t give a damn.” This led Jones to won­der about the nature of the army: “­We’ve found the army ­doesn’t miraculously change on g­ oing into action. The change must come u­ nder fire, b­ ecause ­there must be a change if we are to keep fighting. We have to have some belief. The change must have come in past wars, for Amer­i­ca has never lost one, & you ­can’t win a war thru disbelief. ­There’s something that changes in US soldiers—­ whether a birth of conventional patriotism or some unconventional belief.”51 The change Jones awaited never came. Instead, combat shattered his belief in heroism completely. In a chilling diary entry, Jones recorded how the men had “snapped; they went half crazy, kill crazy. They d­ idn’t give a damn for anything. They bayoneted sick & wounded Japs. . . . ​They spit in the ­faces of ­dying Japs.—­ Ferrullo shot one sitting head in hands on trail & took his watch. King hunted for them to kill and rob.”52 ­These same men ­were now contemptuous of authority and out of control emotionally—­the opposite of the stoic, brave men Jones ­imagined fighting in war. Soldiers w ­ ere not courageous or restrained; a­ ctual combat was perverse, out of control, and fundamentally uninhibited. As he watched ­these atrocities, Jones also saw how re­spect for authority had further eroded among his unit. Jones’s friend, Maggio, shouted obscenities at his commanding officer, only to be congratulated by the rest of the unit. A ­ fter the ­battle, a few soldiers blatantly stole supplies from the ration dump to make improvised alcohol. They rebelliously walked by the guards who threatened to shoot them, knowing the threat was empty. Heroes ­wouldn’t shoot someone for a watch; they d­ idn’t kill prisoners. A ­ fter seeing action, Jones realized that war did not unite soldiers together or give them something to believe in. Instead, it turned his unit into murderers.53 Much ­later, Jones remembered that even his arrival on Guadalcanal had dismantled the connection between w ­ artime and manhood. The dazed and haunted soldiers they relieved ­weren’t heroic: they w ­ ere “bloodstained, staggering, their eyeballs rolling . . . ​they faltered up the slope to lie or sit, dazed and indifferent. . . . ​ They had crossed this strange line and every­body realized, including themselves dimly, that now they ­were dif­fer­ent.”54 ­These soldiers made Jones realize that men ­didn’t leave ­battle forged into steel. Instead, they w ­ ere left dependent, weak, and damaged. His 1963 novel The Thin Red Line—­a fictionalized account of his time on Guadalcanal—­also suggests that combat impressed upon Jones how unreasonable s­ tereotypes of stoic heroism ­were. In the novel, Jones related a meeting between an American soldier, Bead, and a J­ apanese ambusher (­there is evidence

34 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

to believe this is a true incident, though it is not clear w ­ hether Jones experienced it or heard the story).55 Jones’s soldier had left his division temporarily to find a place to defecate when, in the m ­ iddle of d­ oing so, a J­ apanese soldier charged at him with his bayonet. ­A fter a violent encounter, Bead gained control and killed his adversary; but, a­ fter searching the man, he found a picture of the man’s wife in his wallet—­a discovery that drove home his ­enemy’s humanity: “Bead heard a high, keening scream and thought it was the J­ apanese begging for mercy u­ ntil he slowly became aware that the J­ apanese man was now unconscious. Then he realized it was himself making that animal scream. He could not, however, stop it. The J­ apanese man’s face was now r­ unning blood from the clawing, and several of his teeth had been broken back into his throat from the punches. But Bead could not stop. Sobbing and wailing, he continued to belabor the unconscious ­Japanese with fingernail and fist.”56 War ­wasn’t brave or even stoic, the act of killing uncontrolled and traumatic. Bead regressed to an emotional, wild state—­a far cry from the stoic, dignified warrior Jones had ­imagined war forging him into. The passage also suggests that combat may have helped to erode Jones’s ­earlier racial s­ tereotypes. While the widespread racism of the Western theater is well documented, Bead’s horror comes from the recognition that the ­Japanese ­weren’t dif­fer­ent from him.57 Furthermore, Jones’s writing suggests that Bead was no more manly or self-­controlled than his adversary, and the wallet Bead finds demonstrated that the two w ­ ere similarly h ­ uman. Jones’s other postwar writing also consistently refrained from demonizing ­Japanese soldiers, and combat may have convinced him that ­these racist constructions only demonized o­ thers. Maybe the central reason Jones rethought manhood ­after Guadalcanal was his confrontation with his own failure. Jones did very ­little fighting in Guadalcanal. In combat, he was grazed by a bullet, which knocked his glasses off and opened a wound on his head. The wound w ­ asn’t serious, though he received a Purple Heart. But, soon ­after, he transferred to the hospital to treat the ankle wound from playing football at the Schofield Barracks. He was sent back to the United States to receive surgery and would never return to the front lines; when the military tried to send him back to combat duty, he went AWOL twice u­ ntil he was discharged for psychiatric reasons. He knew he had seen combat and failed to face it head-on. It was only a question of how he would understand his own actions.58 As he dwelt on this failure and his horrific experiences of combat, Jones slowly started to develop a critique of the heroism he had so far taken for granted.

“They ­Were Not S ­ ilent” Though Jones tried to hide the injury for some time, eventually his ankle became serious enough to require hospital treatment. He told p­ eople it was an injury from being shot in combat; even ­after what he had seen, he clung to the appearance of bravery.59 ­A fter a painful surgery, he convalesced among other injured soldiers, giving himself time to think about the experience of war.60 Jones was depressed.

Never a Second­hand Man • 35

He wrote very ­little during this period, mostly ruminations in his diary or poetry that dwelled on the horrific scenes he had witnessed.61 He was haunted by nightmares and dreaded returning. Wounded men, w ­ hether they left physically or psychologically injured, came starkly face-­to-­face with what manhood and heroism meant. Disabled veterans ­were “­bitter,” Willard Waller claimed in his study of homecoming written in 1944. They believed they could never have a wife or a child or hold a normal job; typical markers of manliness ­were now out of reach. Describing the feelings of one disabled veteran, Thomas Childers wrote, “When he closed his eyes, the figure before him was the Willis he had always known, the old physical self, unchanged, unsullied by the war. . . . ​But that man had abandoned him leaving him imprisoned inside the pathetic son of a b-­tch he now saw in the mirror.” While Jones was not physically disabled, he still had to face the fear he felt at the possibility of his death. He had to recognize that he had dropped out of a war that other men ­were able to endure. He knew he ­wasn’t the type of man he and other soldiers had been conditioned to expect.62 To get treatment, Jones was evacuated from Guadalcanal, then moved to New Zealand, then to San Francisco, and fi­nally to Memphis. Th ­ ese trips provided him with a surfeit of ­free time, and despite his ankle, he had relatively ­free movement around the ships and the hospitals. He spent his time talking to other wounded men. He was amazed by their be­hav­ior as they convalesced: t­ hese men expressed their feelings openly; they w ­ ere in a state of utter helplessness but felt no shame. If war did this to men, then was the brave, stoic frontiersman nothing but a fiction?63 He met one man suffering from intense back pain; his doctors refused him medi­cation in case he was just faking to receive drugs. The incident incensed Jones but also drove home the helplessness of wounded soldiers; if men ­were supposed to be i­ndependent, then was this veteran somehow not a man? Another soldier, who had lost both his legs and half of his right arm, asked the doctors why they had both­ered to save him at all; this hardly reflected the stoicism Jones had expected men to embody.64 One man in par­tic­u ­lar left a lasting impression on Jones. This man, an unnamed soldier from the Eighth Infantry, was so badly wounded that he lost all control of his bodily functions. Jones’s diary described his condition graphically: He c­ an’t hold his ­water or control the muscles of his rectum. They ­were cleaning him off when I was ­there. They had a rubber ring ­under his hips to catch the feces. They have a tub & tape & to his prick that runs to a duct on the floor. They turned him on his side to clean him, the shit was soft & mushy & stuck to the cheeks of his ass. E ­ very time they moved him, he would moan or say something in a [illegible] voice that reminded me of a child. He was not heroic.65

36 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

Something about this scene pushed Jones to describe it in detail, if only to himself. The man’s injuries left him in a pathetic condition, leading Jones to further muse on the nature of manliness: I’ve seen quite a few wounded men & I’ve never seen them act as [illegible]—­ scribed them in his books [illegible] Pearl Harbor. They ­were not s­ ilent. They ­don’t care only w ­ hether or not they appear brave. The main reason anyone acts brave anytime is to impress other ­people & b­ ecause they have an image in their minds (built up by the tredr [illegible]—­tions of the movies, adventure novels, & public opinion) of a brave man suffering i­ mmense pain stoicly & silently. ­A fter being in action, a man does not care what p­ eople think of him: he knows t­ hose who have been thru what he has w ­ ill feel as he does, & the opinion of ­those who h ­ aven’t is distorted and consequently false. If groaning or crying can make him feel better, he does it. If a man is in a r­ eally tight spot, the tremendous fear he feels drives back the curtain so to speak & lets him see the distortions & falseness of the untrue set of values he has been taught. He is never the same again.66

The honesty of ­these men entranced Jones: they cried when they felt pain, screamed when they w ­ ere scared. Was stoicism r­ eally more manly than this honesty? P ­ opular notions of manhood, as t­ hese men showed, w ­ ere false, perpetuated by films and books that glorify war and heroes without having any close connection to real­ity. Ideas of heroism and bravery simply did not describe the experiences of ­actual soldiers; they ­were projections made by “the movies . . . ​, and public opinion.” In falling victim to t­ hese narratives, men w ­ ere led to perform the be­hav­iors ­others wanted them to, and in ­doing so they ­were untrue to themselves. They ­weren’t men; they just acted the part.

The Writer Who Renounced Society Though World War II had been mythologized as a noble, good war by the mid-­ fifties, during the forties Americans ­were quite aware of the prob­lems that returning veterans faced. A slew of books, pamphlets, and guidebooks written between 1944 and 1948 offered advice on how to deal with the unique prob­lem of the returning veteran. One author, sociologist Willard Waller, argued that “the veteran who comes home is a social prob­lem, and certainly the major social prob­ lem of the next few years.” Without proper attention to veterans’ prob­lems, Waller maintained, the United States might have to worry about a revolution or a fascist uprising.67 While many of ­these tracts ­were technical or meant for specialized audiences, they w ­ ere multiplied tenfold by articles written in ­popular magazines, with titles such as “What You Can Do to Help the Returning Veteran” and “­Will You Be Ready When Johnny Comes Marching Home?”68

Never a Second­hand Man • 37

By 1944, a million and a half men had returned home, almost half of ­those due to physical or psychiatric injuries. Already the country was bracing itself, trying to learn how to help ­these men adjust. In order to explain how hard this adjustment would be and to try to fight the stigmas of m ­ ental illness, George Pratt, a medical examiner for the armed forces, released the book Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment to warn families about what to expect from their returning loved ones. Pratt’s book, based upon his work with returning soldiers, came to the conclusion that most soldiers would have trou­ble functioning without the discipline of the army, that they would feel “disillusionment” with the frustrations of homelife, and that they would feel a profound loneliness due to how dif­fer­ent their experiences w ­ ere compared to the civilians they had left ­behind. The disillusionment was “inescapable,” Pratt maintained. In one example, Pratt discussed the return of Frank Mullins, who quickly became frustrated with the “pinpricks” and annoyances of his f­ amily that he had forgotten during ­wartime. Unable to understand his dissatisfaction, Mullins “becomes snappish and impatient. He finds fault and complains. His speech is sarcastic at one time and sullen at another. . . . ​The ­family is unhappy and so is he.”69 Mullins retreated from f­ amily life and spent his time with other veterans, who he felt could understand him better. Pratt argued that many of ­these ex-­soldiers, as they grasped for explanations about why they w ­ ere so unhappy, grew to blame their families and the civilian society around them, unable to realize that “the dissatisfaction lies chiefly within himself rather than with ­others.”70 Some of ­these men retreated almost completely into veterans’ ­organizations b­ ecause of their discomfort around ­people who d­ idn’t understand them. In other cases, soldiers returning to war brides balked at the duties and responsibilities of marriage and blamed their wives for forcing them into that life.71 Pratt even pointed to veterans’ rebellion against their wives’ excessive “mothering” as the root of some dissatisfaction, hinting at the gendered scripts he and many of t­ hese veterans assumed during their return.72 It was no won­der that, soon ­after the war, ­women ­were scapegoated as the cause of many “neuropsychiatric” cases: m ­ others w ­ ere blamed for the psychological damage of returned veterans b­ ecause they excessively coddled or softened their sons.73 In many of t­ hese cases Pratt found that veterans’ frustrations w ­ ere vented against civilian society: by being unable to recognize their own personal prob­ lems with readjustment, they blamed the society around them. James Jones had a homecoming experience that fit many of the patterns Pratt had seen in returning soldiers. ­A fter returning to the United States for treatment of his injuries he went AWOL twice, refusing to go back to a military he was convinced would send him overseas and kill him. He returned home in November 1943 and was officially discharged in June 1944 as a psychoneurotic, a term used for veterans who had symptoms now commonly associated with posttraumatic stress disorder. During the first desertion Jones had gone to see his Aunt

38 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

Sadie and his ­Uncle Charlie; tragically, his ­mother and ­father had both died when he was overseas. But he c­ ouldn’t get along with them. He spent most of his time at bars; at home, he got into ­bitter arguments about his drinking.74 Instead of looking for a job, he was confident in being a successful writer, much to the consternation of his relatives. L ­ ater, when he visited his ­brother in the fall of 1944, Jeff Jones noticed James displaying many symptoms of what would now be termed posttraumatic stress disorder: he got into bar brawls for no reason, and he had nightmares of being caught in a bombing raid. He also exhibited “startle” reactions—as Pratt also warned about—in one instance ducking ­under a ­table when a venetian blind loudly shuttered.75 Jones returned troubled. He had begun the war wondering if he could face the trial before him. He had found his answer.76 But, rather than reconcile himself with this failure, Jones changed the terms of the debate. Jones meditated on what he had seen in the hospital. The injured men he wrote about seemed to him a model of what manhood actually was: they rejected the be­hav­iors of a proper man and instead acted out their feelings as they felt them. Jones grew to believe bravery w ­ asn’t manly but instead foolish: to act brave was to let society tell you how you ­were supposed to act. It took more strength of character to reject society and live according to your own desires. Through a rejection of traditional manly virtue, men would live authentically; through authenticity, they could embrace an i­ ndependence and individuality denied to them and thus reclaim a manhood eroded by the Amer­i­ca he returned to. Jones became convinced that American society was inauthentic: it taught men to fill roles that w ­ ere untrue to their natures. Jones’s model of manhood became the writer. A writer could be the ideal man: a hardworking, reclusive individual who could distance himself entirely from society and then use his prose to critique the falseness and pretensions of society. Regular ­people might believe, for instance, that war was courageous and glamorous; but Jones’s writer, offering a privileged vantage point, could show them other­wise. Writers could be au­then­ tic in a world that expected men to live up to unreasonable standards. Writers could point out where societal values w ­ ere wrong. Pratt’s interactions with veterans led him to believe that many might grow frustrated and ­bitter at American society. Jones supported Pratt’s diagnosis. In one telling letter he described to Jeff how his ­uncle, fed up with his drinking, left him in jail overnight rather than take him back home. Jones’s response to this chain of events w ­ asn’t shame or anger but glee. “I know it was unbecoming of a hero,” Jones explained, but he loved proving to the “puzzled & shocked” ­people around him “that heroes do not fit the propagandized molds taught them by the govt.”77 In a ­later letter, he used his ­uncle as an example of the inauthenticity he was fighting against: “They [the Jones ­family] think that . . . ​they, like all men, have the capacity to rise above society into the rarified air of honesty. But they d­ on’t, and that is the weakness. Instead-­they do like Chas [his u­ ncle Charlie], and they lie to themselves, so completely and so heartily, that they

Never a Second­hand Man • 39

convince themselves of their own heroism, and they live the rest of their lives with this sop, this shriveled dug [sic] at which they try to suck solace and spiritual nourishment.”78 Jones had done the opposite, he claimed—he “[had] at last renounced society.” Society told men to model bravery; Jones told his ­brother he would play no part in this. Proving he no longer had to fake his manliness, James Jones explained to his b­ rother how his past liaisons with w ­ omen ­were faked; Jones wrote that ­there was “no answer in playing roles.”79 According to Jones, conforming to frontiersman roles was not manly but paradoxically effeminizing. A man who bought into the frontiersman was ­really, in fact, dependent on society’s approval, and society was run by and for ­women. Thus, a man who acted brave, stoic, and competitive was not ­independent: he was controlled by a ­woman. Two of his earliest short stories—­“Second­hand Man” and “None Sing So Wildly”—­dramatized the choice a man makes between isolating himself from civilization, and thus preserving his creativity and vigor, or succumbing to societal demands to get a job and to raise a ­family.80 In both cases, Jones used female characters to voice the demands of society. In the former, the hero gave in when his girlfriend became pregnant and reconciled himself to being a domesticated man; committed to her, he was unable to write the novel he dreamed of. In the latter, the hero faced writer’s block u­ ntil he fi­nally refused his fiancée’s demands to get a steady job; when she left him, only then did he find his inspiration once more. Jones’s belief that au­then­tic manhood must reject feminine society also surfaced in his correspondence. In 1947, through a series of letters to his old friend from Hawaii, Peggy Carson, he lectured on his misogynist theories. W ­ omen, as he understood, relied on society far more than men for stability and security. ­Because they could get pregnant, they ­were biologically tied to the well-­being of the ­family and thus “ha[d] to fight the hand of nature more than men.” As a result, w ­ omen could not see “real­ity” for how it is, lest they “endanger their homes or security or the faithfulness of their husbands.” W ­ omen, according to Jones, ­were the “arch conservatives of life” and resisted rebellion from traditional mores.81 Thus, unlike for men, the authenticity of the writer was off-­limits for ­women, who w ­ ere doomed to propagate manipulative, societal narratives for their own benefit. In contrast, Jones explained to Carson the obstacles facing men in becoming writers: ­ ecause if a man ­really wants to write, he finds that all of life and Society B conspires against him. Even his own body fights him, b­ ecause the desire in him for a ­woman is forever pushing him t­ oward marriage, and any writer who marries before he becomes financially self-­sufficient in his writing is through. He has to go to work to support a wife and the offspring, and his writing becomes ­either a childish dream, or e­ lse is relegated to the position of an avocation, a hobby. Then too, to find the Truth, the real Truth, unvarnished by the social mores, or the ­R ighteous Ethics, he has to go against every­thing he

40 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

has been taught from childhood on, and against every­thing he is being taught now and urged to do. It’s a tough row to how, [sic] if a man is serious about it. ­Because he has to give up almost every­thing that the world offers to one who is willing to knuckle down, both in body, in mind, and in spirit. When a man decides to be a writer, he at once becomes a man against the world, standing out against it, alone, completely.82

Unlike w ­ omen, men could practice self-­denial, and only then could they find “Truth.” Echoing the self-­control of the frontiersman narrative, Jones thought men had to even master their own biology: to find “Truth” they must control their sexual urges. ­Women ­were sirens, luring men to give up their dreams in exchange for a comfy but unchallenging life. If men gave in, w ­ omen would inevitably mold them into docile husbands.83 ­Popular culture during the reconversion years often assumed that ­women would help “adjust” men to civilian life: they would be the loving caretakers that helped ­these men regain their confidence and character in order to take on peacetime duties. But Jones flipped the script. If a veteran was skeptical of readjustment and angry at the civilian world he returned to, ­women could instead easily become a symbol of what they w ­ ere being forced to become.84 Jones’s critique w ­ asn’t hatched out of the blue. It owes at least something to the ­popular concept of “momism,” created by Philip Wylie in Generation of Vipers (1942). Generation of Vipers—­a complicated, sometimes bizarre, satirical attack on American institutions—­was a best seller upon its release and became even more p­ opular in the latter years of the 1940s. We know that Jones had read it, as he made sure to mention the book in his first novel, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, as one of the books owned by the wisest character, Corny Marion. Generation of Vipers is most remembered for Wylie’s claims that Amer­i­ca’s “moms”—­ overbearing, psychologically needy modern housewives—­were stifling the growth of American boys. “Momism” became a go-to critique for writers, psychiatrists, and cultural critics of the fifties and was used to declaim a variety of evils caused by overdominant w ­ omen. Both Jones’s strug­gles with w ­ omen on Hawaii and his return home to a civilian world he decried primed him to be attentive to this critique, as it prob­ably did for the numerous other veterans who adjusted poorly to postwar life.85 But if Jones was ­eager to blame “society” on domineering ­women, his early writings ­were much more reticent to discuss race. One exception, in his short story “Second­hand Man,” demonstrates just how Jones’s understanding of the frontiersman myth had evolved since the beginning of the war. In this story a traumatized veteran, Floyd, retreated to the mountains to be closer to nature and rebuild himself a­ fter the war. Th ­ ere, the veteran basks in the power and strength that he feels while being on his own: “He felt very Indian as he moved his near naked body through the trees as brush, and he enjoyed it,” Jones writes. “It was a fine feeling of freedom and being his own master. With nothing but

Never a Second­hand Man • 41

moccasins and breechclout and his ax, he would carve his life, his home, out of ­these strong friendly woods.”86 While on the surface this looks as though Jones was reifying the frontiersman, letters to the editor of Atlantic Monthly make it clear that Jones was in fact criticizing it. He explained of his protagonist that “I didnt want to make a hero out of Floyd, ­because in life ­there arent any heroes. I didnt want the reader to particularly re­spect him; I wanted to show him like he was. Floyd thought he was a hero, giving all the rest for his c­ hildren. He thought he was squaring off, like the thousands of other men you mention think they ­were squaring off; in real­ity, ­they’re all lying to themselves, and enjoying a martyr’s self-­pity.”87 Floyd’s use of frontiersman imagery demonstrated that he was not, in fact, manly but was happy to playact the role by taking on the accoutrements of the frontiersman. When Floyd gave up his dreams and his writing to become a married, domestic, “Second­hand Man” at the story’s climax, it was further proof that Floyd never had the strength to be a man. Before the war, Jones’s letters assumed white superiority; a­ fter the war, he used racial language specifically to criticize prewar conceptions of manhood linked to race. By the late forties James Jones’s critique of manliness, developed out of his own discomfort at returning home, had started to take shape. Most p­ eople lived their lives as a p­ erformance, put on for the benefit of ­others; ­women spoke for a society that tried to force men to continue to perform ­these false acts. Jones was the gadfly, he argued, who would irritate o­ thers by showing how false their preconceptions ­were. He could fight against feminized society, and his pen could become his weapon of choice. He would give up every­thing and become a writer on the margins. Of course, he c­ ouldn’t do all this alone. He’d need the help of a w ­ oman.

Angels and ­Devils in Endymion On November 3, 1943, James Jones wandered into the home of Lowney Handy. He’d been in Robinson for two days, and his aunt and u­ ncle d­ idn’t know what to do with him. They c­ ouldn’t talk to him about what he had been through and they ­couldn’t control his drinking. Out of desperation, Jones’s Aunt Sadie asked an acquaintance, Lowney Handy, for help. It turned out to be one of the most impor­tant meetings of Jones’s life.88 Lowney Handy, seventeen years Jones’s ­senior, was a ­woman of notoriety in Robinson, Illinois. Married to Harry Handy, a well-­off o­ wner of the Ohio Oil Com­pany in town, Lowney was known to take in juvenile delinquents, alcoholics, and other troubled men of the community. During the war, veterans often stayed at her ­house, grateful for her charity. Among other ­things, Lowney thought of herself as an artist and had once tried to write a novel. Between Lowney’s knowledge about writing and her familiarity with veterans, Sadie thought she might be able to help Jones.89

42 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

Jones met Lowney during his first unauthorized visit to Robinson but soon a­ fter returned to the army, where he was demoted to private for g­ oing AWOL. He abandoned his post again shortly thereafter and was punished again. Fi­nally, in August 1944, he returned to Robinson, had a falling out with his aunt and ­uncle (partially due to the amount of time he wanted to spend with Lowney), and moved into Lowney and Harry Handy’s ­house. Lowney knew a military psychiatrist, whom she pleaded with to diagnose Jones. By the end of 1944 Jones had been officially discharged from the military as a “neuropsychotic” and granted a monthly disability stipend.90 For the next ten years Lowney and Jones ­were nearly inseparable. Their relationship was complicated. Lowney was a m ­ other figure: she took Jones in when he was emotionally damaged, cared for him, and was the decisive voice that fi­nally got him out of the military. She was his mentor and writing coach: Lowney was the only one Jones trusted with his drafts, the only person other than his editor whose criticism he would take seriously. They would intimately discuss his writing, and she would suggest plots, characters, and any other ideas she had. Most importantly, she was his lover. From nearly the moment they met Lowney and Jones ­were engaged in a romantic, sexual relationship that dominated Jones’s world for the next ­decade.91 With Lowney’s help Jones reached the most creative point in his life. While she and her husband ­housed Jones, fed him, and supplied him with writing materials, Jones wrote three novels and many short stories and became a best-­selling writer. In his early works, written just as Lowney took him ­under her wing, Jones asked how manhood could be preserved when men ­were confronted with an inauthentic peacetime society. In exploring themes such as alienation, ­independence, and authenticity, Jones tried to be the writer he ­imagined and point out all the paradoxes that forced men to live untrue to themselves. But despite Jones’s ability to diagnose the prob­lems facing American men a­ fter the war, he was unable to find a solution; he could only content himself with railing against the status quo. Consider “The Temper of Steel,” Jones’s first published work, written during the summer of 1947 and published in March 1948.92 The story was an investigation of the feeling of alienation experienced by the returned veteran. Johnny, a man who had just come home, was at a cocktail party listening from the corner while the host regaled his audience with his collection of knives the stories of their origins. As Johnny listened he was brought back to his own time in war: instead of the romantic stories the host was telling, he remembered a horrible scuffle between himself and a J­ apanese soldier.93 Lying in a slit trench, covered in mud, Johnny remembered putting his hand over the ­enemy soldier’s mouth, how the soldier bit his fin­ger, and how he calmly thrust his knife into the man’s belly. The entire memory is written clinically and unromantically, to stress the lack of heroism in the act. “The Jap hardly made a sound, only a sharp ‘unh’ as the knife went into him. . . . ​such a s­ ilent war this one was,” Jones wrote.94 Once

Never a Second­hand Man • 43

the soldier was dead, Johnny just lay back down in the slit trench, avoiding the pool of blood as best he could. Jones ­later explained that the point of the story was to show how World War II was an unromantic war, implicitly also questioning the nature of war as a manly enterprise. While the partygoers treated Johnny as a hero (“You veterans, you who have done so much, you need to relax,” they say), his a­ ctual experiences ­were at odds with this narrative.95 Johnny’s fight was gruesome, but more importantly it was meaningless. When the host asked about Johnny’s own war stories, he could not provide any: the killing of the J­ apanese soldier was so routine, so bereft of heroes, villains, and morals, that ­there was no story to tell at all. It was Jones’s unpublished first novel, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, in which Jones made the link between his homecoming and criticism of w ­ omen and society explicit. Closely based on Jones’s own return to Robinson, Illinois, in 1943—­among other similarities, the main character, Johnny Car­ter, fought in Guadalcanal, lost his parents during the war, and went AWOL back to his hometown in near-­identical circumstances to ­those of Jones—­the book fictionalized that return experience to deliver a stinging indictment of a woman-­dominated civilian Amer­i­ca. The manuscript was dark, ­bitter, and cynical; it followed three veterans as they attempted to reintegrate into a society that, at ­every turn, wanted to twist them into heroes that they ­were not.96 The novel is set in the fictional small town of Endymion, Indiana, and the protagonists demonstrated how society tried to mold men into inauthentic “heroes.” George, the first veteran, had a “physical futility”—he had lost his leg—­ which left him feeling b­ itter and emasculated. Al, on the other hand, had a “spiritual futility.” He came home not believing in anything at all, leaving him disillusioned and drifting. Fi­nally, Johnny returned with a “­mental futility,” which most obviously manifested as a drinking prob­lem but was also the source of Johnny’s rude be­hav­ior to the ­people around him. They each “revolt against their lives” to get over ­these prob­lems—­a normal reaction, according to Jones.97 Opposed to ­these three men was a woman-­led society. ­These men’s wives and girlfriends refused to help them recover and instead tried to shape them into feminized husbands. This was a subversion of ­popular cultural narratives, which stressed that w ­ omen’s job was to rebuild men a­ fter the war stripped them of their manhood; for instance, the winner of the Best Picture Acad­emy Award for 1947, The Best Years of Our Lives, depicted the ways that three dif­fer­ent veterans w ­ ere reassimilated into society by the loving w ­ omen in their lives. Upending this, Jones’s Laughter argued that ­women ­were the prob­lem and that, by not listening to veterans, they exacerbated the prob­lems veterans faced. Upon homecoming, ­women ­didn’t fix men; they stripped them of their manliness to make them into submissive husbands.98 For Jones, the only ray of hope for ­these men lay in civilians who did understand the plight of veterans and ­weren’t servants to societal pressures. Jones represented this savior with a fourth character, Corny Marion, an outcast w ­ oman

44 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

clearly based on Lowney Handy. Corny was an older ­woman who, like Handy, sheltered troubled veterans and helped them adjust by offering both an understanding shoulder and a well-­stocked bar. Rather than worry about what society thought about her, Corny acted as a supportive voice no ­matter how the town might gossip about her. Gossip seemed to be the main occupation in Endymion. The novel was filled with w ­ omen who, obsessed with their own image, restricted and controlled the men in their lives to protect their standing and wielded disapproval as their weapon. Agnes Camelot, a representative example, “[wa]sn’t wrapped up in herself so much as she’s wrapped up in how she makes other ­people see herself. She had a need for superiority and she only exists in how other p­ eople acknowledge it. That supersedes every­thing; it blinds her to every­thing.”99 Jones took this even further with his “Endymion Under­ground.” In one of the least subtle (and most obviously fictionalized) passages of the novel, Jones explained the Endymion Under­ground as such: This unsung unofficial o­ rganization was composed of the wives of vari­ous businessmen of the more respected types. . . . ​When a husband got in some kind of business or personal trou­ble, the wife would go to the phone and via this secret weapon ­organize a r­ esistance. The other wives would put pressure to bear upon their own husbands, using the vari­ous methods at which at which they ­were so deft, and the troubled husband would suddenly find his trou­bles evaporated. He would come home patting himself proudly on the back and tell his wife the good news, and the wife would go to the phone and give the all-­clear signal to the rest of the Endymion Under­ground.100

As it turned out, a conspiratorial cabal of w ­ omen did in fact run society, making e­ very secret decision from b­ ehind closed doors. In Laughter, “momism” was made literal. ­Women actively threatened masculine ­independence, ran their husbands’ lives, and kept them subservient.101 Run by w ­ omen, policed by w ­ omen, and obsessed with propriety, American society served to restrict the choices men could make and left them victims of the judgments of o­ thers. Each veteran faced emasculation at the hands of the ­women of Endymion. George, having lost his leg in the war, was now completely dependent on his fiancée, Riley. He spent most of his time at Corny’s, drinking and attempting to escape his fiancée.102 Riley did try to help him recover by offering him a job at her real estate firm, but he refused. The job would make him “Mr.  Riley Stafford.” Real estate was also itself a feminizing profession, he claimed: it was “selling ­things, not making t­hings.” Unwilling to be made subservient to a ­woman, George eventually called off his engagement, if only to prove he was still an i­ ndependent man. But on his own George was no better; instead, b­ itter and angry that the world took his leg, he escaped into meaningless drinking with other veterans.103 He in­ven­ted stories that turn him into a victim of

Never a Second­hand Man • 45

society but never learned how to be true to himself in the real­ity of his new circumstances. Jones used the story of his second veteran, Al, to discuss the ways veterans strug­gled to conform to the expectations of inauthentic civilian society. Al came home angry at the civilian world and felt disgust at the feminine city of Endymion. He wanted to be left alone, but the p­ eople of Endymion tried to force him to conform to their norms. He was pressured into dating R ­ ose Camelot, a figure who represented all inauthentic, unsympathetic civilians. She tried to make him into a hero by ignoring who he ­really was: for instance, she knew he cheated on her during ­wartime but ignored it ­because it was unbecoming of a hero. She wanted him to love her but refused to understand his trauma. But Al desperately needed someone to acknowledge what he did in war. In one scene, Al cannot stop thinking about his dead friend while dancing with R ­ ose. She rebuffed him: “­Don’t be morbid. He’s dead. ­There’s no use thinking about him. Come on and dance with me.” Al’s needs ­were ignored while ­Rose—­and society—­rejected anything that did not fit their image of his s­ ervice. If he forgot his war s­ ervice—­and who he r­ eally was—­A l would betray himself and resign himself to inauthenticity. Instead, Al strug­g led to preserve his manhood. “[Al] wanted to be able to remember that he had lived that other life, and not just dreamed it,” Jones wrote. “He needed to remember that this life was the dream, if any of them ­were.”104 The best Al could do was “mechanical[ly]” dance as he tried to fit in to polite society, but the juxtaposition of the truth of ­wartime and the superficiality of society was too much for him. Without anything to believe in, Al descended further into depression, and despite Corny’s comfort, he grew angrier each day. He died overseas ­after returning to his outfit ­because he had nothing he still believed in fighting for.105 Civilian life emasculated both George and Al. Johnny, Jones’s final protagonist, was the only character whose story offered some hope for postwar men. Like Jones, Johnny went AWOL to visit Endymion, and like Jones, his rude and frank attitude to the civilians of his hometown alienated and repelled ­those around him. Johnny ­couldn’t deal with the niceties of society and got joy out of shocking p­ eople who expected veterans to be heroes or at least well-­behaved. He proclaimed to every­one in town that he was AWOL to violate their sense of propriety; he joked to a Red Cross worker that she would better serve the troops with whisky and sex than with f­ ree coffee; and when a w ­ oman made insinuations about his friend W ­ ill’s pos­si­ble homo­sexuality, he angrily called her out for her sly intimations.106 Like Al, Johnny found himself disgusted with postwar Americans, whom he saw as artificial and dishonest. In par­tic­u­lar, he hated how civilians treated his ­service as a noble act. They acted like he was a hero, but Johnny knew how soldiers drank, had sex, even murdered innocents. When forced into giving a speech to new recruits, Johnny delivered a message at odds with notions of w ­ artime heroism and bravery, reflecting Jones’s own understanding of w ­ artime s­ervice:

46 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

“Some of you may go overseas, and some of you may never get over. If you ever do, remember this. You must learn to hate. Brotherly love and mercy are all very fine back ­here. Th ­ ere they are worth nothing. . . . ​When you are in combat, you are not fighting for freedom or anything e­ lse. You are fighting only to save your life. . . . ​You have to learn to hate, b­ ecause in hating without mercy you can kill better. And that is what you are for, if y­ ou’re a soldier.”107 Johnny’s speech was a direct attack on the romanticism of war. War was about killing as efficiently as pos­si­ble, not high ideals. Jones’s thesis through ­these passages was that American society, by treating veterans as heroes and portraying them as noble, erased their ­actual experiences and forced them to playact fake s­ tereotypes of manhood. Civilians w ­ ere so busy “reflect[ing] the image” of the veteran “back and forth among themselves” that their preconceptions of veteran heroism soon overpowered real­ity; “the mass reflection became so strong that no man could deny it.”108 ­These expectations and false models led to alienation, as Jones’s poem, “The White and the Black,” reflected. Ascribed to Johnny in Laughter but actually written during Jones’s time in the hospital, the poem expressed how lonely civilian society made men like Johnny and Jones feel: ­These ­people of Amer­i­ca Knit sweaters And “Do Their Bit” By g­ oing to the USO They volunteer for the Red Cross work, And all the time my friends Are ­dying With curses in their mouths. They live in the black. I; I am a mutation. A lucky one. I am back inside the white, But my soul’s still in the black.109

For all of Laughter’s stinging indictments, however, James Jones was unsure about how to solve ­these prob­lems. The novel, despite his best efforts, fell apart in the last chapters when he tried to offer solutions; t­ hese solutions, however, w ­ ere vague and underdeveloped. Jones believed that men like Johnny, if they could dispense with their anger, could find themselves in a position to critique society and, in ­doing so, set themselves apart from the feminized postwar United States. But Jones had no idea what the a­ ctual critique should be. How should men retain their manliness, their integrity, amid this society? Too close to the bitterness and frustration still, Jones could only flail t­ oward an answer. They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter ended with a series of long meandering

Never a Second­hand Man • 47

speeches. ­These speeches—­which almost entirely dispensed with the pretense of the fourth wall—­were confused, didactic, and out of place with the realism at the heart of the rest of the novel. Preaching to his readers, Jones asked them to understand veterans and be willing to listen to the prob­lems their loved ones faced.110 As he went on, Jones’s critique lost focus. Nestled within a passage that goes everywhere from Louisa May Alcott to Nazi Germany and British Imperialism in India, Jones tried to offer an alternative to ­running from society. The following is a typical excerpt: “Society implied interdependence, but interdependence by its very nature must logically mean mutual sharing; not dependence of the many upon dominance of the few. Reciprocal giving and receiving, the interdependence of equally balanced scales. . . . ​India, ­under the dominance of the British Empire and with an average per capita income of $20 a year, was a part of the same society as the United States, with its high standard of living. As long as t­ here was mass illiteracy in Spain and China and India and anywhere e­ lse, no man could be smugly literate, and at ease.”111 Jones believed that once he had “renounced society” he would be able to use his writing to expose the lies of society. But his ­actual revelation fell short: he urged something about sharing, interdependence, and social justice. Society was a rotten concept ­because it needed to be fixed and ­people needed to realize how injustice somewhere is injustice everywhere. When asked what he was g­ oing to do ­a fter the war, Johnny implied he would fight to make society better. Transparently paraphrasing a line from The Grapes of Wrath, Johnny explained, “Wherever ­there’s something to work on, that’s where I’ll be. Wherever t­ here’s a man persecuted or not ­free that’s where I’m ­going to be. Wherever ­there’s a fight for justice, any fight g­ oing on for what men need, that’s where I’m g­ oing to put myself.”112 Even if this was an insightful diagnosis of the prob­lems of American society, what did Jones offer as a solution to the prob­lems of veterans? This passage offered no clues about what manhood could mean instead. Johnny regained his authenticity b­ ecause he found meaning in fighting injustice, but what did that mean for other men faced with societal pressures? Johnny d­ idn’t seem to pre­sent a model or to give much insight into the prob­lems the novel diagnoses. At its core, this is where James Jones’s ideal faltered. Not every­one could be Jones’s manly writer, and the act of critiquing a false society, while gratifying to the writer, did not offer a way for ­those men to live. Jones i­ magined that real men could see “truth”; what should they do once ­they’d found it? If the novel, in the end, failed to solve the prob­lems Jones saw in society, it was b­ ecause Jones himself did not yet have an answer. Jones wrote They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter to give voice to his pain, his confusion, and his frustration upon coming home from the war. He hoped that, by telling this story, other ­people would understand what being a veteran was like, and so he might shatter the romantic notions p­ eople had of war. But that purpose was self-­fulfilling: by telling his story, Jones might have understood it better. He could not give an

48 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

answer to his pain b­ ecause he was still feeling it. As a result, the novel had to fall back on vague platitudes and unspecific proclamations, in the end petering out rather than giving true closure. By 1948, when Jones had completed They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, the outlines of his new conception of masculinity ­were vis­i­ble. The prob­lems of readjusting ­after war had led Jones to conceive of a series of binaries: between society and ­independence; between the comforting rules of propriety and the brutal truths of w ­ artime; between fakeness and authenticity; and between society’s defenders—­women—­and men, the au­then­tic rebels. In some ways, this borrowed from the frontiersman narrative, in that it posited a feminine civilized space that men had to oppose in order to preserve their strength and character. However, Jones also departed from older frontiersman notions by actively questioning stoicism, bravery, and self-­restraint as masculine traits, instead focusing on men’s ability to authentically live out their desires. In ­doing so, the focus changed: men ­were no longer a blend of civilization and primitive power but instead rebels who found authenticity in separating themselves from societal expectations. A few years ­after Jones had submitted Laughter to his agent, sociologist David Riesman released The Lonely Crowd. A ­ fter a paperback release in 1953, the book became a best seller, and a number of books following its same broad themes—­ Must You Conform? By Robert Lindner, The O ­ rganization Man by William Whyte, The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, among many ­others—­a ll became ­popular in the next few years. While most of the books following The Lonely Crowd ­were polemics, Riesman’s study was a neutral analy­sis of the changing character of American society. Riesman argued that as population density ­rose Americans ­were less likely to have “inner-­directed” personalities, in which they had an “inner moral gyroscope” that told them what to do, and more likely to become “other-­directed,” or happy to work with the group and imbibe the social mores of the world around them.113 Riesman h ­ adn’t meant for this to be a critique, but his terminology soon fell into h ­ ouse­hold use, and he was widely misinterpreted to be saying that Americans—­especially men—­were losing their individualism, ambition, and drive and becoming feminized, soft, and ready to conform to the group’s wishes. Rebels w ­ ere becoming faceless men in business suits. ­Popular discussions among Americans during the 1950s revolved around a fear that men w ­ ere losing their individuality or that men ­were somehow becoming less of men a­ fter the war. Sometimes, this conversation looked backward t­ oward the frontiersman, wondering why men no longer seemed to fit the bravery, stoicism, and competitiveness of that construction while they whiled away their time in the newly formed suburbs.114 James Jones prefigured t­hese cultural anx­i­eties about other direction in Laughter, arguing that American society sought to soften American men by making them conform to societal expectations. But he also showed why t­ here

Never a Second­hand Man • 49

might have been a latent audience ready to read Riesman’s book as a warning. Jones returned to civilian life convinced that rebellion from its inauthentic mores was the only way to preserve the manliness he learned in war. How many other men felt the same?

Conclusion They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter was never published. Jones’s editor, Maxwell Aley, asked him to make extensive changes: the tone was too solemn and overly serious, the book often lingered on inconsequential tangents, the poems felt “sophomoric” (a criticism that must have stung Jones, though he never removed the poems). ­A fter a lengthy back-­and-­forth, a new editor, Maxwell Perkins, offered Jones a five-­hundred-­dollar advance if he would, for the time being, focus his efforts on his second novel, which was tentatively about Jones’s experiences during World War II. Jones agreed and turned to what eventually became his masterpiece, From ­Here to Eternity.115 Jones always planned on returning to this first book, but as the years went by the issues it was concerned with must have resonated less vividly in his mind. He would continue to explore prob­lems of homecoming literally to his deathbed: his final novel, Whistle, returned to the same premise of the plight of returning veterans. However, in Whistle no happy ending was tacked on: of the four characters, two committed suicide, one let himself die in a bar fight, and the last was sent to an insane asylum.116 Jones died while trying to finish Whistle, still unable to put to words a way to recover from what he’d seen in Guadalcanal. Failure was a common experience, one that countless other veterans held within them. Like Jones, other veterans faced alienation, trauma, and anger upon their own return to civilian life; unlike Jones, many got married, found jobs, and, slowly but surely, buried their frustrations, pretending that it was easier to move on than to address why they drank each night a­ fter work or why they awoke each night screaming. The obstacles Jones wrote about in They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter, the ways in which Johnny, Al, and George each dealt with their anger differently, all reflected the experiences of a cohort much larger than Jones alone. Jones’s relationship with existing ideals of masculinity likely reflected other veterans who returned home like him. The sense of dissatisfaction and alienation Jones felt was so widespread it was the subject of myriad psychological studies.117 As Jones rebelled against cultural prescriptions that assumed the heroism—­and domesticity—of returning men, many other veterans loudly complained about the same pressures. Al, George, and Johnny ­were not alone; they w ­ ere joined by men across the country in their anger. As Jones put Laughter aside, Jones and Lowney w ­ ere working on a new proj­ ect. Jones still believed in the importance of his rebellious writer, and to make that life achievable, he and Lowney planned to build a commune. ­There, Jones

50 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

and Lowney could teach p­ eople (almost entirely men) to be writers by turning their backs on society, ­women, and any other distractions from truth. He explained the idea to Jeff: The last time I was up [Lowney] told me (oddly enuf) the same t­ hing you said in a letter: that perhaps her destiny is to aid me to “furnish a haven” for me. That are her words. She & Hap [her husband, Harry] have collected sundry writers about them into a group. They plan to convert Lowney’s 400 acre farm into a Mecca for writers, young writers of promise, that they know. It’s Lowney’s idea, a crazy, beautiful idea. I told I would never believe so magnificent a dream. But she is just crazy enuf to pull it off.118

Jones had constructed an idea, as vague and incomplete as it was, of what he, as a man and a veteran, could contribute to postwar American society. Based upon what he learned from war, Jones knew that by withdrawing from society he could critique it and show his readers what was wrong with the world around them. He had spent 1944 to 1948 figuring out what this role meant and what it entailed for him. Now, with the help of Lowney, he could do more. He, Lowney, and all the writers at what came to be known as the Handy Writers Colony ­wouldn’t just talk about what makes the ideal man. ­They’d live it.

2

The Big Noise Stewart Stern’s Long March to Gar Naruah He was on his way to see Jim’s ­family. He was ­really ­here. P ­ eople in uniform look like babies in a maternity ward at noon—­a ll the boy babies with blue ribbons on them, the girls with pink. You ­can’t tell by the baby what color his ­mother’s living room is or ­whether she’s got a living room or w ­ hether they eat in the kitchen or ­whether they eat at all. A boy in khaki keeps his khaki clean with the hangers pointing the same way and all the pockets buttoned. Th ­ ere’s no dust on the shelf if he’s clean—­there is if he’s dirty. The khaki is the same except for size. A guy wears chevrons and t­ hey’re the same too except for the numbers of stripes but one pfc’s chevrons i­ sn’t made of purple spangles and another of cheese cloth—in the army men all look as if ­they’d come from the same place, you accept them as the joe you happen to like 51

52 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

is taking shots for poison ivy or for syphilis—at least the feeling of I ­shouldn’t be seen with him ­isn’t ­there in the army. No fraternities except where every­one belongs ­because ­they’re ­brothers, . . . That’s why he h ­ adn’t even thought that maybe he s­ houldn’t go and see Jim’s folks. . . . ​He h ­ adn’t asked Jim ­whether his ­house was old the night they had used a live calf for a blanket in Belgium. . . . ​It ­didn’t ­matter at all then. All that mattered then w ­ ere the shells, the creak of the screaming meemies and the fact that it was thirty below and nobody had any blankets and that Jim and Tony had figured on being dead by morning and that it might as well be together. So he had stuck his face into Jim’s collar and waited for it—­but they d­ idn’t die. It seemed silly now. —­Stewart Stern, “Notes of an Infantryman,” ca. 1951

It was 1945, and Stewart Stern was lost. Chicago ­wasn’t at all like New York and, even though it was a big city, Stern felt like an alien. The buildings and streets ­were similar enough to home that Stern kept catching himself looking for familiar landmarks like Central Park or the Times Square building. When he d­ idn’t find them, it left him more confused than ever. He had been given an address on West Harrison but had no idea where that was, and so, tripping on a street curb that was about half an inch higher than they ­were in New York, he caught his balance before asking for directions from a man dressed as a sailor. “I ­don’t know and I ­don’t care,” the sailor told him. “You can shove Chicago. It’s the assh-le of the universe anyhow.” Stern kindly thanked him and continued to look on his own.1 Stern’s friend, Jim Sramek, had given him the address and asked Stern to let his ­mother know he was safe. Jim was still in the hospital; Stern had been released ahead of him. They both had narrowly escaped death at the hands of advancing German forces during the B ­ attle of the Bulge. Stern still could feel the cold from their endless retreat; his feet still ­were not yet fully healed from the ravages of the march. Official reports told of a concentrated German effort to cut through

The Big Noise • 53

Allied lines in eastern France and of the strategic emplacement of the American infantry that had effectively routed the advance. But this h ­ adn’t been Stern’s experience. To him, it had been a “journey into the noise”: it had been chaos, a mad scramble to escape the German forces who should not have been so close, and yet ­were drawing ever nearer.2 To Stern, the ­battle was a mass of indistinct men all marching as fast as they could, hoping to reach the Atlantic before it too fell to German firepower. It was as if Stern “had been to the moon,” as he ­later tried to explain to his ­family. “And it’s too big, you c­ an’t photo­graph it, you c­ an’t bring back a snapshot of it and say, ‘­here’s Mars,’ ” he explained. “You look at it and e­ very feeling and ­every memory comes back, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, looks like Arizona.’ You know, you say, ‘Well, it’s the moon.’ ”3 Stern’s retreat from the German forces had been nightmarish. He remembered marching through the snow, deliriously chanting to himself “let me die” over and over. His friend Macalouso had broken down in tears during the march, overcome by bomb blasts all around him.4 Another friend had regressed to a child and babbled on as they retreated.5 While Stern did make it to safety, his feet and fin­gers had blackened from frostbite and only his tearful begging ­stopped the army doctors from amputating.6 And yet Stern made it. He, and all his men, had made it home, thanks to his doting, his affection, and his strength of character. Stern, the sensitive Jewish boy from New York, against all odds, had proven to every­one that he was a man. From the moment he had entered the infantry, Stern believed he would never be the best soldier. He was thoughtful and emotional—­not a fighter, but an artist. And yet he had kept marching. ­Whether or not he could kill a man with a bayonet, w ­ hether or not he had cried in his foxhole when he fi­nally managed to prove that he could, despite his weakness in the face of death, Stern marched. By marching, he proved that he could take care of his own. ­Because of his diligence and his shepherding, he h ­ adn’t lost a single soldier in the hellish retreat: they had all made it to safety when the American medics found them stumbling from the Ardennes. When Stern was strong enough to leave the hospital, he continued to take care of his men: he contacted the m ­ others and f­ athers of the men in his platoon, telling them all he knew of their sons.7 As Stern continued to wander blindly through Chicago looking for West Harrison, he tried to imagine how he might explain to Jim’s ­mother what the war had been like and how much Jim meant to him. He loved Jim. He w ­ asn’t sure Jim’s ­mother would understand. ­Whether or not she understood, his men did. Loving each other was key to success in war. Through his march into the noise, Stern learned that his ability to care for the men around him was the key trait that made him a good soldier. Stern, the “sensitive sergeant,” as a soldier once called him, could not play the role of the brave frontiersman cowboy, but his compassion could give him the

54 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

strength to carry his men through the experience. Love for other men—­a love that transcended hetero-­or homo­sexuality—­could give men the strength to do their duty in w ­ artime. Loving Jim proved Stern was a man. Veterans of World War II frequently reminisced on the bonds they formed between with other men in ­wartime. In fact, the experience of closeness between soldiers is well documented and seems to be one of the key features of w ­ artime experience, not only in World War II but of combat in general. Stern’s experiences of compassion for his fellow soldiers ­were not unique; they echo the close relationships formed between other soldiers who ­were trying to survive the dangerous ­trials they ­were put through. But Stern also shows that that compassion could and did became a central feature in how some men understood their roles ­after the war. Through Stern, we can see that the “buddy” relationships and bonds between ­brothers, so integral to ­wartime veterans, did not just fade away ­after the war. Instead, ­these relationships could become the foundations for an au­then­ tic, caring, and emotional ideal of midcentury manhood.8 Furthermore, this ­wartime, compassionate manhood is impor­tant ­because it was an inclusive ideal, one that opened space for ethnic or other­wise marginalized men. During the turn of the ­century, frontiersman masculinity had, in large part, been defined in the relationship between strong, manly, white heroes and ethnic or racial foils, aligning the individualistic, controlled, and stoic traits of manhood solidly with the traits of whiteness.9 However, if manhood could be realigned to focus on experiences rather than ­these traits—­such as Stern’s experiences of male love—­racialized ideals of stoicism and self-­restraint would no longer be an obstacle for ethnic men to claim their own chance at manhood. ­These men experienced and survived war: thus, they w ­ ere men w ­ hether or not they had frontiersman traits. Instead of trying to fit ethnic men into the Hollywood role of a ­wartime manly hero, this new discourse realigned manhood around traits that ethnic men had been traditionally maligned for. For instance, Jewish men like Stern had often largely internalized the common ethnic s­ tereotypes of the time, which painted Jewish men as weak, sensitive, and effete.10 ­Under the dominant frontiersman discourse, men with ­these traits could never be candidates for manliness. While some Jewish writers fought ­these ­stereotypes by depicting power­ful, macho, frontiersman Jewish heroes ­after the war, a response like Stern’s could transform prevalent ethnic ­stereotypes from liabilities into strengths. If Jewish men’s emotionality and sensitivity proved them unable to perform the stoicism and bravery of the frontiersman, it was an asset when taking care of ­others. If Jewishness implied an insular ethnic community unsuited to individualism, it also could imply a special concern with taking care of dependents.11 James Jones’s journey through the war helped posit a connection between the difficulties men had with homecoming and l­ater critiques of inauthentic, feminized, peacetime society. Stern’s experiences can likewise demonstrate how a dif­fer­ent aspect of w ­ artime s­ervice undermined a key aspect of frontiersman

The Big Noise • 55

masculinity. The experience of emotional intimacy between men could teach— as in Stern’s case—­first, that success in w ­ artime was not determined necessarily by bravery, stoicism, or power but could be predicated on softer values. Second, ­wartime experiences could easily unravel the racial assumptions at the heart of frontiersman masculinity. Stern’s experiences show how other men who had been relegated to the margins of the American cultural imagination could also prove their manliness and in so d­ oing prove their right to full participation in American society.

Escaping New York The world Stern grew up in had long made up its mind about p­ eople like him. Prominent ­stereotypes abounded that assumed Jewish men ­were overly effeminate or untrustworthy or that Jewish ­women ­were materialistic or shrewish. Warren Hoffman has remarked how the Jewish ­family was often marked as “queer” for how it differed from Protestant norms, and Sander Gilman has demonstrated how doctors had even determined that Jewish men ­were prone to feminine outbursts of emotions. On the eve of war, Jewish American men frequently found themselves fighting back against unmanly s­ tereotypes: they w ­ ere draft dodgers, some said; their bodies ­were unfit for combat; their connections would keep them at safe desk jobs. As World War II began, Jewish men had to push against suspicions that they ­weren’t true Americans or even true men.12 Debra Dash Moore has contended that the war not only allowed Jewish men to prove their masculinity to themselves and American society but also changed how Americanism was defined, creating a space for a Jewish American citizenry ­after the war. Many of her subjects found that the act of fighting proved to them that their Jewishness was compatible with Americanism by demonstrating how a Jewish man could also be a patriotic warrior.13 All of this is echoed by Stern’s experiences before and during the war. However, the ­simple narrative that the war helped create Jewish American manhood overlooks the way that ­wartime ­service d­ idn’t just prove to men like Stern that they ­were manly; it also deconstructed the traditional notions of masculinity that they ­were expected to adhere to. By being accepted and by feeling compassion and closeness with the men around him, Stern was able to emphasize emotionality and sensitivity and key traits necessary to his success in war. By foregrounding camaraderie, Jewish men ­were not necessarily made men simply by aping the frontiersman ethos; they became men ­after questioning the worth of that ethos. Stewart Stern was born in New York in 1922 to a Jewish doctor named Emmanuel and the aspiring actress Frances Stern.14 Though not particularly devout, Stern’s ­family was well connected in Jewish circles in New York, leaving Stern relatively unaware of how non–­Jewish Americans might view him. His extended ­family was further connected with the burgeoning film industry; his ­mother’s brother-­in-­law was Adolf Zukor, the famous film entrepreneur who

56 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

helped found Paramount Pictures, and another relative, Arthur Loew  Sr., founded MGM and lent his name to Loew’s cinemas. Through t­ hese connections, the ­family was modestly wealthy and well known. Stern’s childhood was marked by summer trips to his ­uncle’s ­house, where he met Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and a host of other stars.15 During the twenties and thirties, amid Stern’s adolescence, the Jewish community in the United States was undergoing a transition. No longer confined to red-­light or immigrant districts, a new Jewish ­middle class had begun to flourish. Many Jewish Americans of Stern’s generation had grown up in the United States and identified as Americans much more closely than did their parents. Despite the way this generation had assimilated into American society, the twenties and the thirties brought a renewed antisemitism, leading many Jewish men and w ­ omen to downplay their distinctiveness in an effort to avoid discrimination. Stern’s ­family, deeply enmeshed in this Jewish professional class, likely felt ­these tensions as much as any other Jewish ­family: a sense of widening opportunities available in American society balanced against a palpable fear of how tenuous their ­acceptance actually was.16 While the relative affluence of his f­ amily—­and his membership in New York’s Jewish community—­shielded Stern from much of the antisemitism common to prewar Amer­i­ca, he still grew up in the midst of frontiersman discourse. While for Jones that discourse had made promises, the heroes Stern saw in early films implicitly suggested that urban Jews ­were not authentically American. Thus, from a young age, Stern was fascinated with the West. Some of the earliest footage of Stern—in an early home movie taken at Zukor’s ranch—­showed a young boy dressing up as a pirate or a cowboy, playacting the wild frontier with his cousin Arthur Loew Jr.17 The young Stern was also a talented artist, and all of Stern’s early sketches and drawings ­were of cows, farm animals, and Western landscapes. He also avidly consumed stories of his grand­father and grand­mother, who had been Jewish homesteaders in North Dakota in the late 1800s, as evidence of his f­ amily’s own claim to American my­thol­ogy. He l­ ater explained his somewhat aty­pi­cal decision to leave New York for the University of Iowa by appealing to the authenticity of the Midwest. He explained that “art, being a form of communication, demanded that I surrender temporarily the enclosed, protective, and special life of a middle-­class New York Jewish ­family and seek out p­ eople whose values w ­ ere more closely tied to the land. I wanted to learn my audience.”18 In traveling across the country, Stern was able to become “closer” to the land and abandon an urban identity for a rural one. Even while at Iowa, Stern fantasized with his friends about ­going to Mexico, “sleep[ing] on the desert and rid[ing] on burros” and seeing the “black silhouettes of cactus against the sky.”19 Glorification of an au­then­tic, “real” rural Amer­i­ca was common in lit­er­a­ ture and film during the thirties. Artists of the era ­were obsessed with the average man: they idolized the working man who could provide for ­others and

The Big Noise • 57

create with his own two hands. P ­ opular culture would have inundated the young Stern with a sense that, somehow, the real Amer­i­ca lay not in the busy streets of Manhattan or the paths of Central Park but among the farmers and ranchers of the West.20 At the same time, the West, associated as it was with the frontiersman, was also a site that was closely identified with whiteness, as was the case of the Lone Ranger who tamed it and made it fit for civilization.21 It was also starkly dif­fer­ ent from New York, where Stern and the majority of American Jews resided, which served only to emphasize the difference inherent in Jewish men. For instance, when the war broke out and Jewish recruits ­were often sent around the country for basic training, ­those soldiers often commented on the striking differences between rural Amer­i­ca and what they knew from home: they had never seen “one street towns,” or “primitive farm­houses,” not to mention having ever ridden a train or eaten ham or nonkosher foods. To ­these Jewish men leaving New York for the first time, it was easy to feel alienated from “true” American life.22 Thus, as a rich, urban Jewish boy, Stern was doubly removed from American manhood: not only was his upbringing unlike the rural American cowboy, but his Jewishness also excluded him from the frontiersman myth. To some extent, Stern’s fascination with the West was also a fascination with what he was not. While Stern had been relatively unaware of his difference in New York, g­ oing to the University of Iowa confronted him with antisemitic attitudes he was unprepared for. He was alarmed at the prejudice he encountered; when he wrote to a ­family friend, the advice he received told him to prove to bigoted Iowans that “the Jew was a white man a­ fter all.”23 As a theater major, Stern was constantly reminded of his unfitness to be a hero: while he had some success as an actor in Iowa, he was told by his instructor that he could never be convincing playing a leading man ­because he did not have the face for it. His most prominent role was Shakespeare’s antisemitic Jewish ­stereotype Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice.24 Stern, like other Jewish men, could be considered a villain or a supporting character, but never Antonio. Stern never felt like a leading man anyway: he always harbored anxiety that he was “sensitive” and thoughtful, not the stuff of manly heroes. He was ­nervous and anxious when reading lines for acting auditions; he was not self-­assured around ­others.25 When his schooling was cut short by the draft, Stern was sure he was not the right fit. He was scared to kill another man and wrote alarmist letters to his ­father, frightened of the possibility. When he went in for the physical exam, he was mistakenly pronounced colorblind b­ ecause he was so “hysterical” he flunked the test. ­Whether surrounded by southerners with accents too thick to understand or the butt of ignorant jokes, many Jewish recruits spoke of basic training as an experience that singled them out as dif­fer­ent.26 Stern’s time t­ here echoed this testimony: basic training made him fully aware of what he was not. He was the lone

58 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

city kid in a field of men who seemed to know what they ­were ­doing; his time in Iowa did nothing to divest him of his urban comportment nor teach him skills, such as shooting a gun, that w ­ ere second nature to the men around him.27 Stern was also likely almost completely alone as a Jewish man forced to quickly learn how to interact with gentiles.28 One par­tic­u­lar memory stuck with Stern—­his inability to master the “spirit of the bayonet.” In basic training, each soldier was to line up and thrust their bayonets violently, in unison, while screaming at the top of their lungs. Stern was embarrassed to find that he could barely muster a half-­hearted yelp, and he felt awkward and clumsy holding the gun.29 Screams erupted from all around him, as Stern tried to hide the shaking in his knees as best he could. He wanted out. When he wrote to his ­father, Stern suggested a transfer from the infantry to the navy; in that branch he might not be forced to kill. His ­father’s words back to Stern w ­ ere revealing; rather than admonish him for weakness, his ­father tried to comfort him by reminding him of his duty. “It is not given to the soldier to do aught but follow o­ rders, wherever t­ hose o­ rders make take him,” Emanuel Stern told his son, “victory must be accomplished for us or our c­ hildren to be able to survive.” His f­ ather acknowledged that “the job of t­ hose forces of ours is to vanquish the foe, by strategy, combat, slaughter, and even starvation if necessary. This is war. It is bound to leave an imprint on each and e­ very one of us.”30 What is significant about this letter is what it leaves out. Stern’s ­father never asked his son to prove anything about himself or ­imagined that his son would become heroic by facing the t­ rials of combat. He acknowledged that war was hard—­and sometimes gruesome—­work. But he justified fighting the war by asserting that Stern’s job was to take care of ­others. In so d­ oing, Stern’s ­father offered a model of manhood to his son that did not require him to attain ­those virtues Stern had so often i­ magined in white, gentile heroes. Stern did not need to be brave; he needed to care for o­ thers. Stern espoused a similar philosophy to the magazine Design in 1944, a few months before his first engagement with combat in the B ­ attle of the Bulge. In a “Letter from a Soldier,” Stern wrote to the magazine from the point of view of a ser­viceman to explain why he fought in the war. Stern explained that he had begun to believe that fighting the war was necessary penance to pay before he could become an artist; his slogan became, “Destruction for creation; destroy to create.” By repeating that man­tra, “the bayonet sickened [him] less”; “the sight picture on the machine gun range became the composition of a photo­graph.” He acknowledged that the act of fighting was terrible but told himself that such acts would make it pos­si­ble to create something new a­ fter the war, w ­ hether that was art to better express the experiences of t­ hose fighting or a world where “man re­spects man b­ ecause of the differences that identify him and make him unique.” In e­ ither case, Stern related a version of w ­ artime duty similar to his f­ ather’s: war was an evil that must be faced, so that soldiers can make a better world for ­others.31

The Big Noise • 59

In some ways a focus on duty ­toward ­others still mimicked frontiersman formulations of manhood, in that duty implied a self-­restraint to control one’s own passions in the s­ ervice of helping o­ thers. It also mimicked writers and poets of the previous war who often depicted war as a tragic sacrifice to be endured for the good of ­others.32 But, Stern gradually took ­these traditional conceptions of manliness as duty and attached them to a newer idea. Jettisoning the stoicism often associated with responsibility, Stern began to conceive of duty t­ oward ­others as flowing from compassion and emotion. As Stern found his place with his com­pany, he came to understand stoicism as an inauthentic ­performance, an act men put on to pretend to be heroic. Love, on the other hand, was real. That revelation helped him recognize a commonality with the men around him and, in d­ oing so, created the fundamental building blocks for understanding Jewish men as no dif­fer­ent from their gentile colleagues. This epiphany happened in concert with Stern learning to bond with his unit. ­A fter failing to properly ­handle a bayonet, Stern was put into the 106th Division, a “casual” com­pany made up of men who ­were, in Stern’s description, rejects or incompetents. Most ­were from the South or ­were working-­class men from Chicago, and they had trained together before Stern joined. Neither ­factor made them welcoming to an insecure, college-­educated New Yorker. His fellow soldiers whispered antisemitic slurs; he knew they thought him a weakling and laughed about it b­ ehind his back.33 His f­ ather, increasingly concerned, pulled strings to secure Stern a transfer to the Signal Corps, a noncombat branch tasked with documenting the war. Stern, unfortunately, did not know how to work a camera. His ­father continued to work through back channels to secure an exemption for his son, who increasingly feared being sent overseas.34 In the first month with his new com­pany, Stern’s misery reached its height. The infantry had no shoes that would fit his feet and had failed to deliver sleeping packs on time, which left Stern without supplies and sleeping uncomfortably on the wet, muddy ground. When he fi­nally got his gear, Stern had no idea how to even roll up his sleeping pack, a s­ imple failure that may have been the breaking point. As his frustration mounted, Tony Frier, the “toughest” man in the division, walked over, pulled him aside, and helped with the pack, teaching how to roll it properly. It was a s­ imple act of kindness, but it left an indelible mark on Stern.35 Tony Frier’s actions had shown Stern how even a tough, imposing man could show kindness, which made Stern realize that, despite their differences, he could relate to the men around him. Even more impor­tant to Stern was his friendship with a man named Jim Sramek. Jim was u­ nder Stern’s command, but Stern saw him as a mature mentor, more confident and “tough” than Stern could even hope to be. Stern heard that Sramek had stood up for him when another man called Stern a “k-ke” and started a bar brawl to defend Stern’s name from the antisemitic slur.36 They soon became close friends, and Stern referred to Jim in romantic, and sometimes homoerotic, terms throughout his memoirs of the

60 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

war. Friendships like t­ hese helped Stern imagine manhood through the bonds he had with o­ thers, not through the lens of competition or mastery.37 Stern soon found he could relate to the men u­ nder his command through gentleness. He treated the men ­under him as ­family he was tasked with caring for. He wrote to his f­ ather, asking him to stop attempts to get him exempted from the military. Stern had de­cided that even if he was afraid of fighting, he owed it to the men to serve alongside them. As he explained l­ater, “I de­cided ­these w ­ ere the ­people I wanted to be with, and if I was ever g­ oing to find out who I was, it was ­going to be t­ here and then.”38 As Stern began to think of his s­ ervice outwardly, as a way to work alongside and protect o­ thers, he s­topped worrying about his own weakness and cowardice, allowing him to face the tasks set before him. Many Jewish American soldiers l­ ater reflected that they went through a cycle of feeling unfit, of culture shock when they met ­people dif­fer­ent from themselves, and of fi­nally finding re­spect among the men they worked alongside.39 Stern’s story indicates that this cycle also reflected an active re­orientation to new values and new ideas of what heroism and masculinity looked like. The p­ rocess Stern went through was not simply a p­ rocess of becoming accepted; it challenged and replaced notions of what made a man. Stern’s ­actual engagement with war was relatively brief. ­A fter basic training, he found himself on a ship to E ­ ngland, where he and the eight men u­ nder his command waited u­ ntil they w ­ ere deployed into E ­ urope. Th ­ ere, they contemplated what it would mean to risk their lives. In the meantime, Stern explored the theaters in London and he and Jim Sramek had a ­couple of unsuccessful liaisons with British w ­ omen. But soon they w ­ ere shipped to France, where the 106th Division was tasked with relieving support troops ­a fter the landing at D-­Day.40

The Big Noise Sgt. Stewart Stern and his men had no experience, ­were only lightly trained, and ­were never expected to see combat; nevertheless, Stern and the 106th Division ­were caught up in one of the largest ­battles of the ­European theater, known ­later as the B ­ attle of the Bulge.41 In December 1944, the Germans launched their last major offensive, hoping to breach the American and British defensive lines in France and destabilize their defenses, ideally causing the British and the Americans to s­ ettle for an i­ ndependent peace. The Germans launched the attack in secrecy, catching the Allies off guard and making huge offensive gains in France before fi­nally being routed by American forces. By targeting the Ardennes, the Germans faced mostly inexperienced troops, like the 106th, making their attack all the more effective. Before the Germans ­were pushed back, they managed to capture two of the three regiments of the 106th. Stern was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape.42

The Big Noise • 61

This bird’s-­eye operational view was the main way the ­Battle of the Bulge was reported to Americans back home. But this description did not match Stern’s own experience. For years, he had a hard time explaining it to o­ thers: it was “too big, too loud, too chaotic” to put into words.43 Still, Stern tried. He wrote the first draft of his memoir, “War on West Harrison,” in the hospital while he recovered from his injuries (it may have been dictated to the soldier in the bunk below him while Stern’s hands healed); he revised this memoir twice, into “Bulge!” and, by 1951, “Notes of an Infantryman.”44 The memoirs, while unpublished, demonstrate the evolving way he was starting to understand manhood: they show how Stern i­magined his escape was a product of his affective ties to other men. In ­these narratives, Stern argued that traits like bravery and stoicism ­were ­performances rather than core traits that defined men. If they ­were ­performances, t­ hese w ­ ere traits anyone could express. Even a Jewish kid like Stern could be the frontiersman if he was able to act the right scenes and say the right lines. The frontiersman ideal might have been a ­performance, but Stern’s memoirs supplanted it with something he felt was real: comradeship. That soldiers like Stern felt close affective ties for each other is nothing new. Gerald Linderman has argued that camaraderie was one of the universal experiences of combat soldiers in World War II; drawing from many dif­fer­ent interviews and reports from veterans, he has argued that the camaraderie between soldiers was essential to their morale and to their sense of why they ­were fighting and often overtook even allegiance to the ­orders of their commanding officers. Paul Fussell, discussing British soldiers in World War I, has documented the vari­ous homoerotic and romantic poetry and lit­er­a­ture that was written by veterans, showing how much the experience of that war was predicated on love between men.45 Veterans of ­either war might reminisce fondly for their “buddies”; even Sloan Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—­a book traditionally remembered for its critique of white-­collar jobs and individualism—­spends a significant amount of pages lingering on the trauma Tom Rath still felt over a close male friend who died during the war.46 But by replacing the frontiersman narrative with a narrative of camaraderie, Stern’s memoirs imply something even greater: that the camaraderie ­these soldiers felt for each other could be the foundation of a new narrative. The love and compassion between soldiers in war ­didn’t just go away, as Linderman might have implied; it could survive as a blueprint for postwar relationships. All three versions of Stern’s memoir tell the same basic tale. In early segments of the first and third versions, Stern introduced his men through their initial engagement with E ­ ngland. Stern (­under the pseudonym Tony) and his friend Jim (initially named Dick in some versions before Stern dropped the pseudonym) went on dates with w ­ omen, met c­ hildren who pestered them for choco­late, and attended a Thanksgiving sermon in which the pastor, teary eyed, informed them

62 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

that many of them w ­ ouldn’t return.47 In t­ hese early segments, Stern discussed the soldiers’ apprehension and their essential naïveté, a far cry from James Jones’s initial belief in soldiers as heroic.48 The second part of the narrative showed exactly how unheroic the soldiers ­were. Instead of describing combat, the bulk of the memoir—­including its emotional climax—­focused on the psychologically demanding retreat. Stern quickly summarized how he and his men landed on the beaches a­ fter D-­Day, how they marched through the French countryside, and how they ­were overtaken by German gun and artillery fire. “Tony,” a­ fter fainting from shock, tended to his men and collected them. He ordered them to march home, away from the e­ nemy. In this part of the memoir, Stern showed how the retreat psychologically stripped his men of their outer shell. As they ran, Tony’s men s­ topped being soldiers: they became an “undifferentiated mass” of scared men. As the com­pany retreated, “a kid” cried and bawled, complaining to Tony that “I thought we ­were supposed to go forward! I thought we w ­ ere only supposed to go forward!” Likewise, a j­ unior member of Tony’s platoon named Monk reverted to a child when faced with the German assault. He began to treat the retreat as a game or a lucid dream. At one point, Monk began to “make” grenades by packing snowballs and placing them next to his last grenade. Tony was only marginally stronger: when he spotted his buddy Jim during the march, he dropped all composure and desperately held his friend to his chest.49 Sarcastically noting how performative the category of “manhood” was, Stern wrote that soldiers “­were all kids. But their occupations made them men. . . . ​It was a l­ ittle like getting laid. . . . ​You d­ on’t use kids for jobs like butchers or undertakers or soldiers.” Manhood ­wasn’t real: it was a title given to create the illusion that ­children could ­handle psychologically traumatic events. “At least you ­don’t call them kids,” Stern continued. “ ‘If t­ hey’re big enough, t­ hey’re old enough.’ ”50 Manhood was a p­ erformance, however, that held together ­because men genuinely cared for and supported each other. Initially, Tony seemed the wrong man for the job of leading the men: in the prologue, a soldier complained that Tony was too much of a “sentimental sergeant.”51 However, Tony was able to show strength, the memoir suggested, precisely b­ ecause of his emotional connection to the soldiers around him. At one point, Tony explained to his men that his connection to them allowed him to overcome his own cowardice: “ ‘I d­ on’t know about you guys,’ he said, ‘but I’m scared stiff. . . . ​What I mean is this. I’m only complete—­I’m only me when I know that you all are all around. You guys are my life to me, see? . . . ​If one of you gets hurt, part of me gets hurt with you. If one of you gets burned, part of me gets burned. Christ, do you know what I mean? Do you see?’ He felt that he would cry if he spoke any more.”52 Stern wrote that the soldiers adored him and he returned the affection; their “experiences welded them more strongly together than if they had all been blood ­brothers.”53 Stern could act brave for ­these men, but only ­because of his affection for them.

The Big Noise • 63

Remembering the retreat ­later, Stern also recalled another incident that had impressed on him the values of gentleness and affection. As they fled the Germans, one of Stern’s youn­ger men, Rogers, broke down u­ nder the stress. Stern ­later described the man as hysterical; he “­didn’t know ­whether to cry or cuss.” To help Rogers, Stern got into the trenches with him and used his skills as an artist to teach him how to draw h ­ orses and Western landscapes. He calmed Rogers down, and in the wet, grimy dirt, they created h ­ orses together as they momentarily forgot the approaching e­ nemy.54 The incident was revelatory. In that moment he realized that all men, ­whether they ­were strong and tough like Tony Frier and Jim Sramek or sensitive like himself, ­were ­really the same ­under their bravado. “I discovered that every­one, no ­matter how much tough armor he’s created around himself, is, fundamentally, a sensitive, responsive person who needs just as much reassurance as the rest of us,” Stern explained, noting how emotionality and fear are universal traits.55 Like James Jones, Stern de­cided that traditionally masculine traits, like bravery and stoicism, w ­ ere fabrications. But, in his recognition of this fact, he came to very dif­fer­ent conclusions than Jones ever did: rather than blame society for feeding men false ideas of manliness, Stern learned that the universal need for comfort, sensitivity, and love proved all men ­were alike. Sometimes, Stern’s expressed affection for his fellow soldiers veered into the romantic and even homoerotic.56 If he loved his entire platoon, Stern saved his closest affection for his friend Jim, a man he considered so close that they ­were “two men from the same womb.”57 In one passage, which was nearly identical to an incident Stern discussed in his letters to his ­family, Tony and Dick (Stern ­stopped using this name and the character became Jim Sramek explic­itly l­ater in the draft) both danced with the same ­woman at a social.58 In Stern’s telling, they argued over her, even both tried to kiss her, and discussed who would go on a date with her the next day. But this was all done in a homoerotic context, while the men take off their clothes and lie together. Stern described the moment as such: He watched Dick undress. The blose [sic] and trousers went on a hanger. . . . ​ The ­evening had been cool. He h ­ adn’t perspired. Dick sat down on the edge of Tony’s bunk and rubbed his arm. He laughed. . . . ​He lit a cigarette and put it in Tony’s mouth, then lit another. Tony tried to blow a smoke ring. Dick lay across Tony’s chest and hiccupped. . . . ​“She liked you.” “Oh bull. She liked you.” “No. I could tell. She looked at me sad. She looked at you sexy.” “Shit” said Dick and blew smoke in Tony’s face. Dick laughed and the movement vibrated through Tony’s ribs. . . . ​Tony gripped Dick’s elbow. “If I have to be in this god-­forsaken infantry, I’m glad I’m in it with you.”59

In a similar vein, a passage much l­ ater in the memoir, a­ fter Tony spotted Jim in the chaotic mass of retreating soldiers, described how Tony “pushed his head

64 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

u­ nder [Jim’s] jacket. Jim’s breath on his forehead kept time with his own, . . . ​He lifted his hand and felt Jim’s chest. He called softly, ‘Jim. Jim. Is it you?’ and the answer came back ‘Yes.’ . . . ​They just hung on with their teeth and fingernails and ­stopped breath in a mad, tight lover’s embrace that had no love in it but only the terrible need to hang on to someone ­else.”60 While Stern was quick to defend the notion that the embrace “had no love in it,” Stern nevertheless depicted the importance of physical and emotional comfort between men. Passages like t­ hese blurred the line between manly brotherhood and erotic love, destabilizing a s­ imple notion of sexual binaries during the war. Stern’s experiences ­were not uncommon: as Allan Berube has shown, the “buddy” system— in which two soldiers would form close, sometimes romantic bonds—­allowed even men who would l­ ater identify as heterosexual to experience deep emotional and physical attachments to other men.61 While at war, buddies would eat together, sleep together, share clothes, and in some cases express physically their affection for each other; Stern ­later explained that “the choice of a buddy was as or more critical than that of a bride. You’d be living in a physical intimacy that was unlike any other.”62 Chapter 6 w ­ ill discuss in more detail how Stern’s love for his men translated to postwar Amer­i­ca. But during war the revelation that he could have close, romantic relationships with the men around him allowed Stern to identify manliness through his ability to provide for his men. And he did. All the men in Stern’s platoon made it safely to allied territory, thanks to Stern’s unceasing shepherding of the retreat, even as he desperately told himself “let me die.”63 ­These connections also reinforced the essential similarity between a “sensitive” man like himself and the “tough” Tony Frier. If e­ very man was scared and emotional on the inside, then the traits he had internalized as marking his “sensitive nature” and Jewishness ­were in fact evidence that he was no dif­fer­ent from white frontiersman heroes. When James Jones had a similar epiphany, he used that revelation to dismantle traditional ideas of manhood; by understanding the performative nature of bravery, self-­restraint, and dominance, Jones believed men could reject them altogether. For Stern, it was not that ­these traits ­weren’t useful; Stern just discovered that they sprung only from compassion. It was Stern’s love for his other men that forced him to continue to march, even though he would rather collapse, and his concern for them that ­later forced him to stay alert to ensure they returned to safety. As he reflected back upon t­ hese experiences, Stern concluded that war, by thrusting manly responsibility onto boys, could teach them to internalize ­those roles and thus help them mature to adulthood.64 Years ­later, Stern expressed his views of society by stressing the artificial nature of institutions. “It’s all a game, and you have to believe in it,” Stern explained. “If someone says, ‘It’s just a game,’ it no longer works. Society demands this belief, or it falls apart. When Alice said to the Kings, Queens, and Jacks, ‘­You’re nothing but a pack of cards,’ they c­ ouldn’t go on living, and Wonderland collapsed. We

The Big Noise • 65

have to go on solemnly believing institutions, peace, God, art . . . ​every­thing we do that we call Civilization.”65 It was the same with manliness. The difference between a man and a boy was arbitrary, and each man who cried in his trench was no dif­fer­ent from a scared child. But manhood, illusion or not, carried with it the strength to take care of ­others, to endure hardship, and to protect t­ hose you love. So, w ­ hether or not manhood was false, it was a ­performance worth believing in. By recognizing its performative nature, manhood need not exclude men like Stern. All men, regardless of race, creed, or color, ­were the same in war. “­There [was] no time to remember differences [in ­wartime] ­because every­one is so scared,” Stern reflected. “Men at the front did have something very rare. They had a wide open comradery coupled with a belief in each other and a warm-­blooded altruism that ­people elsewhere somehow missed.”66 When Stern had left for Iowa, the pictures he drew w ­ ere of his idealized Western frontier. When he returned from ­battle, his concerns ­were dif­fer­ent. Stern’s sketches ­were no longer of farms and rural Amer­i­ca: they ­were pictures of men, like Stern, who cared for each other.67

Sabra Stern’s memoirs ended as he and his men collapsed in front of American reinforcements; “Tony” is fi­nally able to sleep as the hospital takes care of him for a change. But Stern’s journey continued when Tony left the page. Stern pleaded with doctors not to amputate his blackened fin­gers; as a ­future artist, he needed ­those fin­gers to write.68 When Stern recovered, he continued to echo the values he had learned in war by taking care of his men. He contacted relatives of each man in his division to let them know ­whether their loved one was safe. He even traveled to Chicago, in person, to let Jim Sramek’s ­mother know that Jim was recovering in the hospital.69 If the war had taught Stern that ­there was a place for Jewish men in affective, compassionate masculinity, then the early years a­ fter the war w ­ ere ones in which Stern tried to understand exactly what this meant. ­A fter the war, Stern worked to make a ­career in screenwriting happen and moved to Hollywood. His first opportunity took him across the world to the newly formed country of Israel and helped him consider more deeply the relationship between Jewishness and manhood. The product of this trip was never completed. While Stern developed a story chronicling the ­independence of Israel, entitled Sabra (“a Jewish person born on Israeli soil”), Stern strug­gled to finish his first screenplay and the studio began to lose interest in the subject. Still, the surviving story outline provides a snapshot into how Stern’s experiences changed how he viewed the place of men, and Jews, in postwar Amer­i­ca. While Sabra does not linger on the close male relationships that Stern’s time in war centered on, it does try to merge Stern’s focus

66 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

FIGURES 1 AND 2  ​Two of Stewart Stern’s sketches from his time in the hospital. ­These

sketches, unlike the previous pictures he drew, do not depict cows and Western landscapes but instead show moments of male weakness and tenderness. (From the Stewart Stern Papers, held by Special Collections at the University of Iowa and reprinted with permission from Marilee Styles Stern.)

on responsibility and compassion with the American frontiersman myth. In ­doing so, Stern made a case that Jewishness was compatible with American understandings of citizenship and manhood. Though Sabra was never published, it should be considered in the context of Jewish war writing a­ fter World War II. A ­ fter the war, a slew of fictional and

The Big Noise • 67

semifictional war novels ­were produced and consumed by the American public; significantly, a disproportionate amount of ­these w ­ ere written by Jews who mostly focused on the lives of Jewish soldiers. In 1948 alone—­the year Stern visited Israel to witness its i­ndependence—­five prominent war novels by Jewish writers topped the New York Times best seller list: Irving Shaw’s Young Lions, Ira Wolfert’s An Act of Love, Merle Miller’s That Winter, Stefan Heym’s The  Crusaders, and most notably Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.70 In the postwar period, Jewish authors largely defined how Americans

68 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

understood World War II and heavi­ly influenced the themes and issues that ­were central to the American memory of World War II. ­These authors often used the manliness of their Jewish characters to make a case for full Jewish inclusion in American society. Usually, they proved this manliness by showing Jewish heroes commit especially brave acts or by using a diverse platoon setting to favorably compare Jewish soldiers to their gentile counter­parts. The most well-­known example of this platoon setup was devised by Mailer in The Naked and the Dead. Mailer featured two Jewish soldiers, Roth and Goldstein. Roth, anxious about his Jewishness and heavi­ly concerned that ­others would judge him as weak, was goaded into making a fatal jump into a chasm; Goldstein, by downplaying his cultural difference and performing bravely ­under pressure, instead gained the re­spect of his platoon.71 Importantly, by showing Goldstein’s reliability, bravery, and thankless a­ cceptance of his burdens as he si­mul­ta­neously conquered the wild, untamed Pacific islands, Mailer also grafted the traits of the stoic, civilized frontiersman onto a Jewish hero (while si­mul­ta­neously implying that Jewish difference was an obstacle to frontiersman heroism). In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish writers w ­ ere especially quick to refute depictions of Jewish victimhood, and as a result, many of ­these writers—­ Mailer included—­intentionally depicted Jewish soldiers in active, heroic positions. Unlike James Jones, who had been convinced by his s­ ervice that the war was largely meaningless, Jewish authors almost universally found the war impor­ tant. The war had personal meaning for many, and the ways in which many Jewish men found ­acceptance in the military cast the war as a positive turning point, rather than a deconstruction of their romantic notions of war.72 Like Stern, other Jewish and ethnic men found a­ cceptance during the war, in part ­because their ­service broke down the ­stereotypes their comrades had brought along with them.73 At war’s end, Jewish Americans found themselves in a dif­fer­ent position in civilian society than they had been in at the beginning. Due to the types of jobs Jewish Americans tended to have, they ­were, on average, less affected than other Americans by the Depression, and following the war ­there was a large cohort of middle-­class, white-­collar Jewish men and w ­ omen who moved to the suburbs.74 Furthermore, the racism of ­Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, caused the American polity to imagine Americanism through a more diverse lens, allowing Catholic, Italian, Greek, and Jewish Americans, in some contexts, to attain full citizenship.75 Meanwhile, a 1948 debate over ­whether Congress would accept Jewish Holocaust refugees into the United States and the ensuing antisemitic reaction still reminded the American Jewish community of the fragility of their ­acceptance.76 In this context, the founding of the nation of Israel in 1948 took on i­ mmense importance. Israel became a cultural touchstone, proving that Jewish communities could secure a homeland safe from persecution and symbolizing the promise and hope that postwar peace might bring. Zionism became a hotly

The Big Noise • 69

debated topic in the American Jewish community; discussions about the place of Jewish Americans in the United States took place in the shadow of an alternative in Israel.77 Amid this conversation, Stern visited the newly founded nation-­ state in 1948. To Stern, the issues surrounding Israel provided the raw material to discuss the idea of the frontier in a Jewish context, allowing him to view Israel through an American mythological lens. Israel, to Stern, became a symbolic example of how Jewishness was compatible with American notions of manhood. Stern’s route to Israel was circuitous and happened almost by chance. When he returned home from war, Stern tried to restart his acting c­ areer and got a small part in a Broadway play; off the strength of his p­ erformance, film producer Joe Fields offered him a job as a dialogue director for E ­ agle Productions in Hollywood. Stern was l­ ater fired from this job a­ fter rejecting an actress whom the management had a personal interest in; Stern did not catch on and instead fired her ­because she ­couldn’t act.78 Stern moved, trying carefully to avoid using his ­family’s connections to the film industry to help him. He lived for a time in a small apartment with his cousin, Arthur Loew Jr., and then rented a room from a paraplegic veteran and the man’s wife. Mostly, Stern was lonely during this time and made very few friends; he spent most of his days writing short stories by himself in his room.79 Stern’s breakthrough eventually came through his f­ amily connections. His cousin knew famous director Fred Zinnemann and showed him two of the short stories Stern had written since the war. Zinnemann was impressed and had dinner with Stern; ­there, he explained that should Norman Mailer and John Hersey, the early stars of World War II writing, be unavailable, he would like to hire Stern to travel with him to Israel as part of a proj­ect to produce a film about Israeli ­independence. Stern jumped at the chance and, ­after Mailer and Hersey declined, prepared for the trip. In November 1948, Stern and Zinnemann, a man who became his close mentor, flew to the new nation of Israel.80 Stern’s correspondence from the trip, strangely, holds ­little insight into his reactions to being in the new nation. In one instance, Stern wrote home to discuss the reverence he felt when he saw the location of the Sermon on the Mount, a decidedly gentile attraction. Other­wise, Stern’s notes on the film Sabra offer the best indication of his thoughts at the time. The script itself (that is, what was completed) is lost, along with short stories Stern wrote of key scenes; the only rec­ord of the screenplay that exists is an outline. H ­ ere, Stern told of a heroic band of Israeli homesteaders who attempted to build a settlement in the wilds of Palestine. One man, Ariyeh, led the new settlement, named Gar Naruah, or “the Garden of the Wind.” While Ariyeh lived his entire life in Palestine, another character, Gaby, arrived at Gar Naruah ­after escaping the concentration camps in ­Europe. While Gaby was first unable to cope with losing her home, the Palestinian frontier molded her and the rest of the Jewish refugees into a cohesive community. Eventually, Gaby fully embraced her Jewish heritage by marrying Ariyeh and raising a new generation on the frontier.81

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Sabra is impor­tant in that it combines the Jewish hero narrative of postwar writers with Stern’s reconstructed, compassionate masculinity, providing his audience with an example of Stern’s new man. While most of the postwar Jewish writers took Norman Mailer’s route and tried to graft the frontiersman onto the Jewish hero, Sabra instead built Jewish heroism out of duty and compassion to a man’s fellows. In d­ oing so, Stern transformed pejorative Jewish ­stereotypes into indications of Jewish manliness. Instead of being feminine ­because of their emotionality, Jewish men ­were now manly ­because of their emotional range; instead of being unpatriotic ­because of their insular Jewish communities, Jewish men ­were now manly ­because of their duty to their dependents. In Stern’s writing, Jewish men ­didn’t mimic gentile heroes; instead, ethnic weakness was turned into strength. Stern intended—­and succeeded—at telling a uniquely Jewish story. Sabra was a tale of Jewish rejuvenation: how the emasculation and humiliation caused by the Holocaust could be overcome by creating a Jewish homeland and, through it, a pan-­national Jewish identity. However, in crafting Sabra, Stern drew heavi­ly from the American genre of the Western, thus telling a Jewish story through the language of American my­thol­ogy and, in so ­doing, implying the essential compatibility between the Jewish p­ eople and American identity. Ariyeh and the members of his community w ­ ere explic­itly labeled “pioneers” by Stern’s draft; the “Arabs” who opposed the settlement ­were treated as savage natives from whom Ariyeh and the other Israelis feared constant attack. The climax of the script, in fact, was an Arab attack on the fragile settlement; the pioneers dropped their plows to find their ­rifles and fought for the defense of Gar Naruah in a lawless world. Recalling Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” Sabra’s main narrative focused on a diverse set of immigrants working together as they built Gar Naruah on the uncivilized Israeli frontier. The immigrants came from dif­fer­ent backgrounds—­some from E ­ urope, some from Amer­i­ca, some native to Israel—­ but through the ­process of building the settlement and creating civilization, the differences “between groups melt.”82 In the same way that Turner posited that cooperation in the American West created a uniquely American identity from disparate immigrants, so too did this ­process create an Israeli one.83 Though Sabra lingers on Western imagery, it’s impor­tant to note how that imagery stands in contrast to how it was normally used in frontiersman my­thol­ ogy. Stern’s Western farmers are examples not of individualism or autonomy but instead of cooperation, sensitivity, and hard work. Ariyeh was manly precisely ­because he was devoted to the colony; he was not a heroic cowboy but dressed in ­simple laborer’s clothing ­because he was proud of his role creating the settlement.84 Furthermore, rather than linger on the stoic resolve needed to face hardship, Stern’s outline often underlined moments that demonstrated how male devotion and kindness could facilitate the successful propagation of the

The Big Noise • 71

settlement. Ariyeh and his close friend Red bonded ­a fter their ­fathers ­were killed; Stern wrote that this symbolized “the birth of the new through love of earth and through love of man.” In another scene, a moment of tenderness between two bickering settlers, Jack and Zvi, showed how compassion could rebuild manhood. When Jack, who hated Zvi’s grumpy dismissal of the tunes he played on his flute, discovered that Zvi hated m ­ usic b­ ecause he had lost an arm in the war, Jack put their differences aside. Instead of fighting, Jack sat down next to Zvi and used his own right hand in place of his to play a song together. While this scene showed the ways in which the settlement could rejuvenate men damaged by the trauma of the Holocaust, it also proved that such rejuvenation and reattainment of manhood could happen through tender devotion. While Stern’s ­wartime memoir implied that male camaraderie could help a man protect and care for other men, in Sabra the responsibility Ariyeh shouldered was to the settlement itself. Ariyeh grew as a man by building the settlement; Gaby noticed his manly physique most when he plowed the fields in s­ ervice to the community. In the climactic scene, when British forces withdrew from Israel and Ariyeh’s community had to fight to protect Gar Naruah, defending the colony completed Ariyeh’s ascension to manhood. He had asked himself, at the beginning of the outline, “Who are you? Why are you ­here?” but by the end of it, as Ariyeh strug­gled to repulse the deadly Arab attack, Stern wrote that he fi­nally found the answer: “Ariyeh becomes a man through loss and privation and rises to a full comprehension of what he is ­doing.”85 By protecting the colony, alongside his f­ uture wife Gaby, Ariyeh attained manhood. Fi­nally, Sabra shows how Stern’s ideal of masculinity changed ­after the war to one that was explic­itly hetero-­domestic. Though Sabra ­imagined masculinity through responsibility to a community, duty, and inner resolve, it had no analogues to the homoerotic scenes pre­sent in Stern’s memoir. Instead, Ariyeh, according to Sabra, could not fully be a man without first marrying Gaby, starting his ­family, and ensuring the settlement would have a f­ uture generation. In some ways, this is an extrapolation from Stern’s conception of manhood as outwardly motivated and based on responsibility: a f­ amily is another entity to provide for, and certainly the love he felt for his fellow soldiers was much more acceptable in a war context than outside it. But the shift seen between the memoir and Sabra also shows a heterosexualization of male emotional affection in a postwar context.86 As w ­ ill be more fully contemplated in chapter 6, Stern believed that love felt ­toward a wife and ­family could supplant the love between men in the war by simply replacing a man’s division with a new f­ amily. While Sabra was never completed, a few years ­later Stern reused t­ hese themes for the variety show Philco ­Television Play­house. In “And Crown Thy Good” (broadcast in 1954, but originally written as “The Sod ­House” in 1951) Stern dramatized the story of his own grandparents who, in the 1880s, settled in North Dakota. In his script Stern wrote how this Jewish pioneer ­family braved the

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FIGURE 3  ​A photo­g raph from the set of And Crown Thy Good. Note that the grave in the

foreground was made of a buffalo skull and featured a Star of David on its front, depicting a unity of Jewish and frontiersman cultural symbolism. (From the Stewart Stern Papers, held by Special Collections at the University of Iowa and reprinted with permission from Marilee Styles Stern.)

hardships of the West: how they befriended Native Americans, built their ­house out of sod, and tried to stay kosher despite the necessities of the West. In this script, Stern blended his Jewish heritage with American myth, showing that the two ­were not contradictory. Like in Sabra, his frontier was not that of cowboys and the Lone Ranger but instead the frontier of the common farmer, a man who

The Big Noise • 73

built a home to take care of his wife and c­ hildren. As Stern described the teleplay, it was “a dif­fer­ent kind of Americana—­the l­ ittle Jewish pioneer who brought strudle [sic] to the Sioux.”87 In both Sabra as well as “And Crown Thy Good,” Stern ­imagined how the frontier, and the ideals of hard work and responsibility that it offered, could serve an integrationist role for Jewish men. In postwar Amer­i­ca, Jewish men could attain manhood by aspiring to the same my­thol­ogy that white Americans had available to them.

Conclusion Montgomery Clift, the famous movie star, had wanted action. He wanted heroes and drama. He thought that the fight for Israeli ­independence would provide just such a story. Clift ­imagined ­battles between Israeli soldiers and ­Middle Eastern villains and a desperate fight for freedom against adversity. He h ­ adn’t ­imagined the farmers that had caught Stern’s eye. Clift got bored with Sabra and in the end dropped it. A c­ ouple years l­ ater, Clift got his wish when Zinnemann cast him in the adaptation of James Jones’s From ­Here to Eternity. Evidently, James Jones’s story of military conflict was more Clift’s style than the Jewish farmers who had fascinated Stern.88 ­There ­were other reasons Sabra remained incomplete. Stern suspected that the studio was reluctant to produce a movie focused so particularly on Jewish experiences and wondered w ­ hether Sabra’s lukewarm portrayal of ineffectual British troops may have offended them. The biggest barrier to the film’s production, however, was Stern himself. Having never written a film script, Stern had no idea where to start. He secluded himself in a ­house in Vermont while he tried to turn his notes into a story, but he made ­little pro­gress as the days passed. He eventually wrote pieces of the script in the form of short stories; while this allowed Stern to convey the characters and events in detail satisfactory to his own vision, it also meant that the p­ rocess was slow and belabored. Stern fell far b­ ehind the deadline, and eventually the proj­ect lost steam.89 Stern never de­cided he was macho or brave like Norman Mailer or any other veterans ­after the war. In fact, his experiences cemented the fact that he was not: for the rest of his life he remembered chanting “let me die” as he escaped the Germans. However, Stern learned something more impor­tant by the time he left the hospital: that it ­didn’t ­matter. In proving he could fight and survive without frontiersman bravado or stoicism, he disproved the need for them at all. All men ­were scared, and no one was brave; what mattered was their ability to play the role even while their legs quaked beneath them. Stern’s example suggests that Jewish men played a part in creating a new ideal of manhood that would—­importantly—­allow men like Stern to participate in American society and transform s­ tereotypes long ascribed to them into strengths. While Stern was just one man, his experience shows that men like him need not

74 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

have journeyed the path Mailer and other Jewish veterans forged; instead, Stern suggests that sensitive manhood offered ethnic Americans an alternative script. Stern would have another chance to work with Zinneman in a few years; he eventually became one of the most respected screenwriters of postwar Amer­i­ca. Still, his experiences of war continued to influence how he thought about manhood, and in each of his films he continued to refine his conception of how ­wartime masculinity might translate to reconversion Amer­i­ca. He had seen how strength of ­will and a sense of duty allowed him to survive the ­Battle of the Bulge, but how would ­those traits translate to peacetime? As Stern got to work on his next film, Teresa, he wondered how a veteran might learn to be something more: a husband. Through research, interviews, and even travel to Italy, Stern investigated why some men made the transition to domesticity successfully and why some never left perpetual childhood. Stern’s journey charts the evolution of the soldier on the battlefield to the loving husband playing catch with his son.

3

The “Age of Heroes” Edward Field and Gay Authenticity in the Midst of War Over the North Sea the third engine gave out and we dropped low over the w ­ ater. The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose down a ­little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward and kept our single engine g­ oing. . . . listened as the engine ­stopped, a terrible silence, and we went down into the sea with a crash, . . . Since most of the crew ­were squeezed on my raft I had to stay in the ­water hanging on. My raft? It was their raft, they got ­there first so they would live. Twenty-­five minutes I had. Live, live, I said to myself. 75

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­ ou’ve got to live. Y ­There looked like plenty of room on the raft from where I was and I said so but they said no. When I figured the twenty-­five minutes ­were about up and I was getting numb, I said I c­ ouldn’t hold on anymore, and a ­little rat-­faced boy from Alabama, one of the gunners, got into the icy ­water in my place, and I got on the raft in his. . . . That boy who took my place in the ­water who died instead of me I ­don’t remember his name even. It was like t­ hose who survived the death camps By letting ­others go into the ovens in their place. It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live . . . I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do t­ oday, although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world, even if, when opportunity knocked, I instinctively chose survival. —­Edward Field, “World War II,” 1967

Late in World War II Edward Field faced a harrowing experience. He was a navigator, part of a mission to “dump bombs on the already smoking city” of Berlin, when flak caught his plane.1 One of the engines was hit, along with much of the fuselage; the plane started falling. The crew de­cided to make for E ­ ngland, but their only good engine used up its remaining fuel. They fell into the sea. The men radioed their last position, but their chances of rescue ­were bleak. They waited as the ­water rushed into the interior. It soaked their boots, then their thighs, then threatened to engorge them entirely.2 The men climbed onto the plane and made for two life rafts. Field and the radio operator w ­ ere out last (“did that mean we ­were least aggressive, least likely to survive?”). They stood on the wing as the two rafts drifted away from them.3 The radio operator chose the first life raft, Field the second; Field’s companion

The “Age of Heroes” • 77

drowned as he swam. The men already on Field’s raft refused to let him join them: they told him that the raft could not support another person. Refusing to die, Field clung on to the side for twenty-­five minutes, u­ ntil another man (“a ­little rat-­faced boy from Alabama”) took pity on him and switched places.4 Field got into the boat; the other man got into the w ­ ater and froze. Field lived, and he died. One of Field’s tail gunners, possibly one who had survived the same wreck, ­later told Field a personal secret: that he loved other men. It was an admission that could have happened only in the close environment created by the war, and one Field understood completely; ­whether the tail gunner was aware of it or not, Field too had been grappling with the same feelings.5 For Field and many men like him, this secret had become much more significant during World War II. The war was an awakening: one that had allowed men to explore their love for other men and to experiment with same-­sex romances. Si­mul­ta­neously the war impressed in men the value of male camaraderie; w ­ hether or not t­ hese connections ­were romantic or platonic, Field learned to find importance in the web of connections he made with other men. This moment with his tail gunner was only the starkest example of how the war, heroic or not, could bind men together through the bonds of brotherhood.6 Field’s life went on, far from the war, in Greenwich Village, where he eventually became a prominent poet. In 1962 he wrote the poetry collection Stand Up, Friend, with Me, a Lamont Prize winner that cemented his success. Even then, the war continued to have a profound effect on him. He meditated on the crash years l­ ater and in 1967 put his thoughts into a poem titled “World War II”: That boy who took my place in the w ­ ater who died instead of me I ­don’t remember his name even. It was like ­those who survived the death camps By letting o­ thers go into the ovens in their place. It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live . . . I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do t­ oday, although at that time I believed in being heroic, in saving the world, even if, when opportunity knocked, I instinctively chose survival.7

The poem is striking, not least for how it consciously rejected a view of w ­ artime as heroic; instead, it lingered on the connections made between men amid tragedy. Field’s memory focused on the men around him who ­didn’t make it; the radio operator who chose the wrong raft and the Alabaman who died in the ­water suggested the way men sacrificed for o­ thers during their ­service.8 The poem also si­mul­ta­neously hints at the complicated nature of Field’s identities during and ­after the war. Field, ­after all, chose to use the imagery of the

78 • Cowboys on the ­Wartime Frontier

Holocaust to parallel the loss of a comrade in w ­ artime, blending a touchstone of midcentury Jewish experience with his own personal tragedy. The poem, wrapping together narratives of camaraderie, Jewishness, and an examination of bravery, hints at a war experience s­ haped by at least three identities—­Field as Jewish, Field as gay, and Field as a man. Historians have shown that for Jewish men and men who would ­later identify as gay, World War II had been a turning point, one that redefined their place in American society ­after the war. As Stewart Stern’s experience demonstrated, Jewish veterans could make a case for their inclusion in postwar American life. The war also created a space where gay men w ­ ere able to understand themselves as part of a larger community and to experiment with their same-­ sex desires.9 Rather than being a site where manhood was created and proven, as men entering the military often believed, World War II was a place where men with marginalized identities ­were able to reimagine manhood to include ­people like them. A ­ fter World War II, Stern found that his Jewishness was no longer an obstacle to inclusion; likewise, Field found that the war made gay manhood a possibility. For both James Jones and Stewart Stern, World War II acted as a destabilizer, demonstrating that the stoic, brave, frontiersman they both had internalized was a fiction rather than an ideal to ascribe to. To Jones, the alternative was his “writer,” a rebel who was fully in control of himself. Stern, likewise, de­cided that manhood could not be defined by bravery b­ ecause t­ hose “brave men” he saw w ­ ere just as scared as he was. Instead, he gained strength to do his duty to ­others through the affective ties he made with other men. Field’s experiences in World War II provide an impor­tant counterpoint to Stern and Jones by demonstrating the ways ­these same themes could be interpreted more radically. Field, like Stern, was born Jewish in New York, and like Stern, he recognized that the war could be a site of male intimacy and brotherhood. As we w ­ ill see, however, Stern grappled uneasily with this epiphany and settled on a hetero-­domestic ideal, as witnessed first in Sabra and then in his ­future films. Field used the same raw material as the infrastructure for his newfound identity as a gay man. And just as Jones settled on au­then­tic male expression as a true marker of manhood, Field also came to value authenticity from his time in war. To Field, however, that authenticity was found in his proclamation of love for other men. The war threw together men from all parts of Amer­i­ca into a cauldron that, for many, could prove their manly valor. The very tools that provided Jones with a manhood compatible with his failure and Stern a manhood compatible with his Jewish heritage also offered gay men a manhood compatible with their desires. If expressing au­then­tic desires, despite what society dictated, was a key feature of manhood, as Jones had believed, then that same authenticity could be wielded as a defense of same-­sex desire. This dynamic shows just how World War II shattered older white and heterosexual systems of gender.

The “Age of Heroes” • 79

Love in W ­ artime John D’Emilio has described World War II as a “national coming-­out experience.”10 The government, far more than during World War I, had drafted men from the far reaches of the country, creating a military far more diverse than any in American history. As men entered s­ ervice and traveled far from home to training camps, they w ­ ere exposed to the full range of American life. Companies of infantrymen could be composed of southerners, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, New Yorkers, and most anyone ­else (except Black soldiers, who ­were segregated into their own units).11 Alongside this, men who felt same-­sex attractions ­were thrust together in a homosocial, close-­knit community of men, many of whom felt the same ways as they did. While barriers between racial and ethnic communities may have become more porous during the war, communities of men who loved men ­were only strengthened.12 As both a Jewish man and someone who felt same-­sex attraction to other men, Field was an unlikely candidate for manliness according to the frontiersman narrative. Gay men ­were commonly ste­reo­typed as feminine or at the very least as unfit for combat and especially susceptible to psychiatric illness.13 But despite ­these s­ tereotypes, the war’s t­ rials helped Field widen his perspective. Just as it provided broader identities for Jewish men, the war proved to gay men that their love for other men need not mean they w ­ ere incapable of acts of bravery and heroism and taught them the possibilities for close romantic relationships with other men. Unlike Stern, however, Field’s engagement with his Jewishness in the military taught him that ­acceptance meant that he had to hide his Jewishness. As he subsumed his identity, he questioned the act of passing. At the same time, Field learned to value the close emotional connections he made with other men in the war—­connections he associated with the love he felt for other men. Thus, as the war taught him to embrace his sexual identity, it also demonstrated to him that frontiersman manhood was a ­performance, something that could hide his Jewishness. Together, ­these two lessons helped Field to understand the constructed nature of the traditional masculinity he emulated while he passed, allowing him to understand his same-­sex desires as au­then­tic in a way t­ hese ­performances ­were not. Like Jones, au­then­tic men ­were real men ­because they embraced their inner desires; unlike Jones, Field acknowledged ­those desires might be for each other. Edward Field was born in June 1924, the son of Eastern ­European Jewish immigrants. When he was young, the Field f­ amily had fled the Jewish “ghetto” of the Lower East Side of New York for the suburbs of Nassau County, hoping to discard aspects of themselves that would identify them as foreign; they “had wanted to become American, so they moved to a suburb,” he explained. Field and his six siblings “grew up as Americans,” being taught from a young age that assimilation was preferable to being identified as dif­fer­ent.14 This never worked;

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Field’s Jewish background—­the mannerisms of his f­ amily, their practices—­made their attempts to pass transparent to ­those around them. Unlike Stern, who had grown up in an affluent Jewish area in New York, Field’s life in the suburbs around ­people dif­fer­ent from him made him hyperaware of his Jewish heritage. Field’s childhood was marked by constant bullying; he resigned himself to accept it. ­Because his ­family ­were “ ‘poor Jews,” Field believed that “we [had to] accept punishment; we [­were] not worth anything.”15 The presence of the German American Bund, which held weekend rallies in a field near to his ­house and in his school auditorium, only further accentuated the ways Field’s f­ amily was unwelcome. In the teens and twenties, when Field’s ­family moved, many other Jewish families w ­ ere likewise leaving the cities to escape negative associations that white, middle-­class Amer­i­ca made between Jewishness and poor immigrant communities they saw as ethnically or socially inferior. Th ­ ere w ­ ere s­ tereotypes that the poorer Jewish families in the Jewish enclaves preserved more of the cultural practices from the Old World and w ­ ere less likely to assimilate. Slummers regularly visited Jewish parts of New York to sample Yiddish establishments they associated with the sexual tourism found in nearby immigrant communities, and early theaters, which ­were often associated with moral decay, clustered around Jewish neighborhoods in New York. When turn-­of-­the-­century moral reformers worked to close t­ hese, citing the immorality of their showings, they w ­ ere often targeting Jewish-­owned businesses.16 All of t­ hese associations led many white Americans to associate Jewishness with deviance. First-­generation Jewish families, associated with ethnic areas and obscure traditions, performed ­family life in ways alien to white Amer­i­ca. F ­ athers might dictate their ­children’s marriages; bar mitzvahs and other coming-­of-­age rituals communicated difference to outsiders. Jewish ­fathers might paradoxically be too weak to be head of ­house­hold and at the same time have too much control over their ­children’s marriage prospects; Jewish w ­ omen ­were viewed as materialistic rather than nurturing.17 Warren Hoffman has argued that ­these differences in how gender and ­family ­were performed ­were so profound that mainstream imagination thought of Jewishness on the same continuum of deviance as homo­sexuality, effeminacy, or prostitution.18 In order to be accepted in mainstream Amer­i­ca, Jewish men and ­women had to constantly prove what they ­were not. This put them in a constant state of passing: passing as white, passing as Americans, passing as straight, and passing as men.19 By moving away from ­these urban enclaves, Field’s ­family was attempting to repudiate ­these ethnic associations and engage in this very act of passing; however, despite their attempts, their customs, their habits, the way they spoke (“they always spoke with foreignisms,” Field explained) all identified them as other. Even as Field grew older, he was unable to shake the associations his Jewishness brought with him. Columbia University rejected Field, which he blamed on a quota system that l­ imited Jewish admissions. Before reluctantly attending

The “Age of Heroes” • 81

NYU, he had strug­g led to find any employment at all: employers would end interviews when they discovered his ethnicity. Field remembered that employment agencies would tell employers that Field was “a very clean-­cut young man,” which caused him to lose the job: “­they’d immediately know I was a Jew b­ ecause clean-­cut was a code for circumcised,” Field explained. He eventually got work at an ad agency run by African Americans who had hired other Jewish men like himself. On the eve of the war, Field had a keen understanding of the way his ethnicity acted to make him a marginalized outsider.20 As he grew older, Field realized he was dif­fer­ent for another reason: he loved other men. He knew implicitly that no one could know this secret; despite the danger, the teenage Field explored same-­sex trysts. Once, around the age of fifteen, a man greeted Field on his paper route by lowering the win­dow of his car and asking, “You ever fool around with fellas?” Leaving his bike, Field got in the man’s car and they drove to a secluded lane to engage in kissing and petting. He continued to see this man, in similar circumstances, for about a year.21 More commonly, Field hitchhiked into New York City to go on “adventures” where he could engage in sexual activities with other men, a pattern that cemented the anonymous nature of his homo­sexuality. As easy as it was for Field to engage in erotic acts with other men, his prewar experiences ­were usually ­silent ones. While he had a few “boyfriends” as a teenager, Field was unaware that a gay world existed beyond them and the men he met in theaters or on the streets of New York.22 The context of World War II transformed both narratives. Each identity, Jewishness and gayness, carried ­stereotypes of weakness, emotionality, and unmanliness, which Field had internalized. “I w ­ asn’t a brave person,” he explained, “when I was a boy . . . ​I cried.”23 Like Stern, Field had not i­magined himself as the type of person who was suited to the military and initially felt out of place. As time went on, however, his relationship to the military changed. In basic training, Field developed a muscular physique and good looks, giving him self-­ confidence and drawing attention that he had never felt before. The way ­others around him accepted him belied the idea that he was somehow unfit ­because of his ethnicity or sexuality and helped him ignore the stigmas he had internalized. During his officer training in the Army Air Force, for instance, Field encountered a man he had known previously as a childhood bully. His rival ­didn’t recognize the new uniformed officer before him and saluted him. “For the first time,” Field explained of the incident, “he ­didn’t treat me like the l­ ittle Jew-­boy. He treated me like a man.”24 To make his transition to manhood, Field si­mul­ta­neously learned to hide his Jewish ethnicity. He d­ idn’t look Jewish, he l­ ater explained, and his last name ­didn’t reveal who he was. While he remembered seeing other Jewish men mistreated, he was never the target. To Field, “good looking” went hand in hand with being identified as non-­Jewish; his physique refuted Jewish ­stereotypes that had made him feel weak; thus, passing as manly was also an act of comporting himself as non-­Jewish. U ­ nder his guise as a gentile, Field could feel “liked” by ­those

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men around him and fashion an identity severed from the persecution he had felt as a child in Nassau County. Historians like Deborah Dash Moore and Gary Gerstle have commented on the ways the war “whitened” Jewish men and w ­ omen, a p­ rocess that helped create an argument for the full inclusion of Jewish men and ­women into American society. Field’s experience shows that this was a more complicated p­ rocess.25 For Field to be fully accepted, he closeted himself to create distance from Jewish ­stereotypes; at the same time, he had the privilege to “pass” as a gentile that many other men lacked. Stern’s Jewishness had led him to reconfigure masculinity into something that conformed with the s­ tereotypes he had internalized, but Field found that he could mask the outward parts of his Jewishness to better align to that masculine role. As he moved in one direction to conform to outward ­performances of manhood, he moved in the other as he understood his same-­sex desires. Field quickly found that in the military his love for other men was not an aberration but an asset to his success. He could easily make connections with other men through a shared sexual orientation. He remembered that his first meeting with other gay men was facilitated by a shared language: in this case, two men pretended to powder their nose when he asked what they ­were ­doing, hinting their shared interests.26 He was invited to his first gay party in the military ­after a fellow navigator, suspecting Field, intentionally assigned him to go on a mission with other gay men. At the party, eight men played show tunes in a private room, then paired off for the night. Men he met pointed him in the direction of nearby gay bars, taught him the signals he could use to approach ­others, and whispered whom he might talk freely with. Sometimes his encounters w ­ ere covert, as when he spent the night with a sergeant who was afraid Field might tell someone about their tryst; other times they ­were more overt, as when a ­colonel directly asked Field on a date. But almost immediately Field found gay relationships open and available.27 Field learned quickly that the chaplain’s assistant at any given base was gay; he could find this man whenever he was transferred to learn the topography of his new unit and of the gay spots in nearby cities.28 Field w ­ asn’t alone in this revelation. Allan Berube has chronicled the remarkable effects World War II had on gay recruits. The war offered thousands of gay men and ­women the chance to mingle with ­people who felt the same way as them, proving to many who came from remote parts of the country that they ­were not alone. Gay GIs quickly made contacts with other gay men, creating communities in the armed forces. They also found ways to fit in and fight alongside their comrades, proving to many of them that being gay was no obstacle to manliness.29 But Field’s experiences, which stressed the importance of camaraderie and authenticity in the gay world, suggest that the experience of war had more profound effects than simply teaching gay men that they could be accepted. Instead, same-­sex romance, w ­ hether it was spending the night with a strange French

The “Age of Heroes” • 83

soldier or necking in the back of a fishing boat with a fellow American, bound men together in shared camaraderie and ended up imprinting upon Field the value of male love as an expression of genuine connection.30 Si­mul­ta­neously, as Field was learning that a­ cceptance in the military required performing as something he was not, Field was also learning that the gay world legitimized his feelings for other men as an au­then­tic demonstration of himself. While training as a clerk in Oklahoma, Field’s most significant liaison was with a master sergeant, a relationship that started with physical contact on a car ­ride and led to an invitation to spend the night at a ­hotel. ­Because the master sergeant was a higher rank, he was able to move Field into his private room, allowing them to share a bunk in relative privacy. Field suspected the other men may have known about the affair but did not care so long as it was covert. No longer ­were his relationships anonymous; now they ­were part of the social connections he made with other men.31 As much as the war was an awakening, gay veterans have also reported the myriad ways t­ hese sorts of relationships could be dangerous. Men suspected of homo­sexuality could be subjected to humiliation, incarcerated, or discharged as undesirable with an infamous “blue discharge.”32 Field never faced such harsh punishments, but he was aware of them. Thus, when his relationship with the master sergeant soured—­spurred by a “butch” display of dominance when the man twisted Field’s arm in front of his men to show owner­ship—­Field found himself with few options to escape the relationship without risking t­ hese punishments. Field’s solution was to transfer out of clerical training in Oklahoma into the Army Air Force, where he eventually flew twenty-­seven bombing missions over E ­ urope as a navigator. It was as a navigator that his plane crashed into the sea, leading to the most perilous experience of his life as he clung desperately to a life raft.33 Other than this incident, Field remembered the war glowingly. “I loved every­ body,” he ­later explained. “I just loved being with the men.” The line between platonic devotion to his men and romantic love was blurred by his experience and demonstrated that his love for other men d­ idn’t just define him as a gay man; in fact, it had a profound effect on how he saw manhood in general. Furthermore, his Jewishness also made a difference: he ­later explained that being accepted despite being Jewish was a deeply meaningful part of his time in the military. Both experiences eventually convinced Field that hiding parts of himself to conform to manly ideals was inauthentic and that he could embrace his emotionality as an aspect of his feelings for other men.34 If he could perform manliness well enough to pass as a gentile, then traditional manly traits w ­ ere inauthentic, a way of fitting in rather than actually being manly. Au­then­tic manhood was instead predicated on his relationships with the men around him. In impor­tant ways, Field’s experiences closely mirror the experiences of Stewart Stern. Both men, unsure they would be able to perform bravery in w ­ artime, instead discovered close ties with other men could make up for any deficiencies

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they had. However, while Stern was careful to downplay any homosexual implications of his love for other men, Field embraced ­these implications as proof of the authenticity of ­those connections. Viewed together, the experiences of the two men show how permeable the line between camaraderie and same-­sex love was. In so ­doing, they suggest how compatible a manhood based on compassion and sensitivity was with a gay identity. Other gay veterans have also noted how the war created unique conditions in which loving, close relationships with other men w ­ ere normalized and affirmed. During basic training close contact in the barracks meant that many men shared beds, and the demanding conditions they spent together fostered a reliance on each other in ways that w ­ ere not common during peacetime. Phenomena like the buddy system further normalized relationships between men. Buddies—­sometimes called “assh-le buddies,” suggesting the homoerotic implications of the idea—­were often romantic partnerships in ­wartime in which men, even t­ hose who would l­ ater identify as heterosexual, would express deep emotional ties with another soldier.35 Field’s experience of w ­ artime was not rare; and while his reactions ­were his own, they suggested that the war offered raw materials from which many men could build an affective, compassionate manhood.

Greece Even ­after the Allies triumphed, Field ­didn’t want the war to end. He continued to volunteer for jobs, flying ­people across ­Europe as needed. Eventually, his tour was over and he headed home, where the new ideals he had learned in war met the realities of homecoming. While Field worked through the notions of manhood he learned in w ­ artime—­those based on personal authenticity through affective, romantic ties with men—he combatted hetero-­domestic assumptions of what a man should be when he came home. Very quickly a­ fter the war ended, American society shifted. While closeness between men, even emotional intimacy, was tolerated and sometimes encouraged before and during the war, ­after veterans returned home ­there was a concerted effort to curtail ­these displays of male intimacy. Most noticeable are the depictions of men in photo­graphs during and ­after the war: poses of close physical contact between men virtually dis­appeared in personal photography ­after World War II, replaced with orderly rows of men or men showing noticeable distance between each other. In Life magazine, similarly, advertisements that showed playful men together in vari­ous states of undress w ­ ere common during w ­ artime but ­were almost entirely replaced with portrayals showing men ­either alone or in hetero-­domestic contexts. The normality of male closeness was further stigmatized by government purges of gay men suspected of having communist sympathies. In large part, this shift was predicated on a suspicion that widespread male relationships during ­wartime may have threatened heterosexual norms. The porous nature of sexuality during ­wartime may have motivated a hardening of

The “Age of Heroes” • 85

gender roles afterward. It also meant that what was empowering for men like Field during the war was now outside the pale.36 As much as this shift discouraged male intimacy, it also led to a preoccupation with strict, hetero-­domestic roles for men and w ­ omen in postwar Amer­i­ca. ­Women ­were sent home from their ­wartime jobs at factories and encouraged to marry and have ­children. They ­were also tasked with reintegrating their husbands and sons into civilized society by teaching them how to go back to work and support a ­family.37 Furthermore, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued, t­ here ­were intense social pressures for men to be married in this era: men who ­were not faced ostracism from their colleagues, could be turned down for jobs, and w ­ ere often seen as irresponsible or immature.38 Often, as Field came to understand, postwar Americans saw an implicit connection between domesticity and a ­career; work was the only way a heterosexual man could support his wife, and a wife was the only way a veteran might re­adjust to properly take on a profession. To fit in, Field would need a job. Field had fallen in love with poetry during the war and had returned home determined to make a living off it. His first exposure to the craft had been through a small paperback of Louis Untermeyer’s poems given to him by the USO, one of millions printed to give American soldiers something to read during their downtime. Poetry, he realized, could allow him to express himself.39 As he studied Untermeyer, then T. S. Eliot, then ­every poet he could get his hands on, Field began to understand poetry as a tool he could use to rebel against the requirements of postwar society. Robert Corber has noted how gay postwar writers like Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal wrote about their gayness in ways that made homo­sexuality not a signifier of minority status (as the emerging homophile movement would grapple with) but instead as a marker of opposition to the postwar “­organization man.” Th ­ ese writers understood their homo­sexuality as a rebellion that could signify the possibilities of alternate living and familial structures. Like a strand of postwar rhe­toric that frequently cast the “other-­directed” or o­ rganization man as weak, t­ hese authors took an opportunity to define gay men in opposition to this s­ tereotype and thus manly for not succumbing to domesticity. In this par­ tic­u­lar subculture, gayness did not mean effeminacy; instead, it could signify a manly opposition to mainstream, feminized society.40 If James Jones’s screeds against controlling ­women ­were meant to separate “au­then­tic” men from an inauthentic postwar society, Vidal and Williams tried to use homo­sexuality—­a rejection of the feminine—to model the same idea. The emerging gay lit­er­a­ture of postwar Amer­i­ca associated the authenticity of same-­sex love with rebellion against prevalent hetero-­domestic norms, an association that would continue to resonate with Field into the sixties. In the gay poets Field read, he found men who prided themselves on their love for other men as well as men who voiced t­ hose desires authentically. Field’s close mentor, Robert Friend, was open about his own same-­sex desires in poems published in

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the forties, during the time Field met him.41 Field was enamored with other poets as well: upon returning home, one of his first actions was to write to Dunstan Thompson—­a man whose homoerotic poetry spoke to Field—­and set up a meeting. Together, they drank at an upscale cocktail lounge on the Upper East Side, an environment that left Field feeling out of place. But even at such a site he grew familiar with the man he idolized, even (according to Field’s telling) turning down Thompson’s sexual advances. The encounter impressed upon Field that despite social standing, despite ethnicity or class, Field and Thompson shared a moment together that other­wise would not have happened but for their shared connection as rebels from postwar Amer­i­ca.42 Field was unable to live this life at first. Upon his return he moved in with his parents, and ­under their roof it became much more difficult for him to meet and socialize with other gay men. His f­ ather wanted him to continue training to go into marketing; the G.I. Bill, which required that he reenroll in the same program he had been in before, seemed to agree. While Field wanted to hone his writing, he reluctantly dragged himself back into the classroom.43 The New York University he returned to, like colleges around the country, had been transformed by the war. The G.I. Bill had drastically expanded the university system; by 1946, 6.6 million veterans had taken advantage of the educational provisions, while the universities had expected no more than 1.6 million to apply. Veterans crammed into badly overcrowded classrooms, sometimes staying in tent cities or gymnasiums b­ ecause the universities lacked space to h ­ ouse them. Professors strug­gled to teach rooms of students who w ­ ere older than they ­were used to and of a completely dif­fer­ent economic class than ­those who had come before.44 It was in this climate that Field tried to learn advertising, an alienating experience that further soured his tepid interest. He ­later remembered “the hopeless anonymity of sitting in t­ hose post-­war classes swollen by returning GIs and trying to concentrate on the drone of the professor’s voice.”45 Field had come to value personal connections. What was personal about being crammed among rows and rows of students, learning how to best sell soap to a suburban f­ amily? This was not what he had hoped for in his return to American society. Instead, Field spent increasing amounts of his ­free time—­skipping class rewarded him with a surfeit—­with the friends he made in the NYU lit­er­a­ture department. He soon became a regular fixture of their group, lunching with them in the cafeteria as they argued about “existentialism, orgone boxes, and socialism.”46 ­These friends, part of the bohemian rebellion taking place in Greenwich Village, represented to Field what his connections in ­wartime had meant then. By being true to his own nature—­discussing with them poetry and not marketing, love for other men and not jobs or c­ areers—he was part of a group. His time at NYU, however, lasted only a year. Field was unable to care about his marketing classes, and ­after two semesters his grades ­were abysmal. He dropped out before they could expel him. Still unwilling to commit to a life of drudgery, Field de­cided to delay buying a gray flannel suit by heading back to

The “Age of Heroes” • 87

­ urope and living on the thousand dollars of savings he had accrued from his E officer’s pay. He lived the year 1949 as a bohemian abroad. In France and then on a trip to Greece during the same year, Field used his poetry to begin interrogating the connections between sexual authenticity, rebellion, and manhood.47 ­There, in France and Greece, Field honed his craft as a poet and completed some of his earliest works. Some, like the poem “Greece,” i­magined the idyllic places he visited in ­Europe to be places where men ­were closer to nature and freer to express their sexual desires. Greece itself was a long-­standing touchstone for the nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century gay communities, often used in poetry and lit­er­a­ture to evoke a lost, ancient past where men could freely love each other; furthermore, Field’s descriptions of the “beautiful bodies” of the Greek men and of their pastoral landscape also evoked the homoerotic poetry from the last world war. In ­either case, he drew on existing imagery that suggested both the innocence and authenticity of same-­sex love. But t­ here was also something distinctly new in ­these poems.48 Throughout ­these poems, Field assumed sensitivity and emotionality to be ideal manly traits, and in at least one poem he discussed the ways that postwar Amer­i­ca forced returning veterans to be untrue to their natures. In all of them, Field’s words portray an ideal of manhood distant from the frontiersman: one in which authenticity and male relationships better defined men than their stoicism, bravery, or aggressiveness. Consider Field’s “Age of Heroes” (1949). The poem described a bombing run by evoking imagery of ancient heroes fighting mythological ­battles. First, the World War II soldiers drop bombs that blow up cities like the biblical Joshua blew down Jericho’s walls. Then the soldiers became Spartans, then heroes of the Trojan War, then knights searching for the holy grail, and fi­nally angels flying alongside the Virgin Mary.49 This imagery effectively set up Field and his men as inheritors of a long tradition of ancient manliness (notably, the Jewish hero Joshua joined other mythological warriors, earning a Jewish place alongside Greeks and Crusaders). However, Field’s focus was not on the martial abilities that made t­ hese men heroic but instead on the emotional bonds they felt for each other: And our Achilles grandly weeps, As he plots the wind-­vector, For Patroclus shot down for keeps By the Jet-­propelled Hector.50

Field ­imagined the connection between soldiers in the war, like the mythological ­couple, was one not just of shared ­service but also of deep, emotional love. ­Later, Field compared the aviators to “Galahad, Gawain, and Lancelot” riding together, thus evoking the manly brotherhood of the Round ­Table; ­after this, Field told how, at the peak of the bombing run, the men w ­ ere “invincible . . . ​as our loves ­behind us sing / ‘Flak at three ­o’clock’ over the intercom.” The poem

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both painted a picture of heroes flying a bombing run and showed its readers how men could be intertwined through bonds of affection.51 Another of Field’s poems from this period, “Donkeys,” entirely dispensed with the martial themes of “Age of Heroes,” instead imagining his comrades as soft, emotional creatures. The anthropomorphized donkeys Field wrote about ­were playful ­children who hated to work and sobbed when forced by their masters to carry heavy weights. He felt for ­those donkeys, with their “sweet eyes and ridicu­lous ears,” ­because “For they [we]re sensitive / And cr[ied] continually ­under their burdens.” Field speculated that the donkeys, “if they had their way . . . ​ would sit in a field of flowers / Kissing each other, and maybe / They would even invite us to join them.” Instead of idealizing strong, power­ful men, Field fell in love with the affectionate, “sensitive” donkeys.52 Fi­nally, though it does not concern masculinity per se, consider how Field narrated the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi in a poem of the same name. In the poem, (written at the same time as “Age of Heroes”), Field retold the Book of Ruth, a short tale in which a ­woman, Ruth, converted to Judaism a­ fter becoming part of Naomi’s ­family. In Jewish traditions, the story set down rules for accepting newcomers into the Jewish community, but in Field’s telling, Ruth converted b­ ecause the two ­were lovers. Despite this being abnormal, the rabbis found no reason to object: “She ate no pork / And obeyed all the sacred laws; / So, being wise, they turned it into a moral lesson / And loved her, since she was lovable.”53 The entire community blessed the u­ nion, “As Ruth and Naomi, lip to vaginal lip, / Proclaimed their love throughout the land.”54 In “Ruth and Naomi,” Field found same-­sex love in a queered Jewish past. By imagining a mythological Jewish world in which same-­sex romanticism was celebrated, he demonstrated a link between his gay identity and his Jewish identity. If mainstream American society would not accept the love Field felt for other men, then Jewishness, itself a marginalized outsider in American life, could offer a competing vision of ­acceptance. Authenticity in accepting his Jewish identity could lead to au­then­tic expression of a gay one. As we ­will see, Jewishness and gayness, for Field, could and would take on a countercultural aspect, allowing him to embrace the marginal as a more au­then­tic expression of the self. “Ruth and Naomi” hints at this development by demonstrating how ­these identities might be able to coexist in Field’s mind. ­These three poems demonstrate just how the war had affected Field’s understandings of himself. Though “Age of Heroes” ­imagined Jews as heroic ­wartime figures, the larger message his postwar poetry offered was one celebrating sensitivity and love. Joshua may have been a Jewish warrior, but Achilles was a warrior who was driven to victory by the “lovers b­ ehind” him singing their support. In Joshua, or Ruth, or even in the eyes of the sensitive donkeys, we see how aspects of Field that he had explored in ­wartime—­Field as Jewish, as gay, and as a man—­ worked together to reinforce a new heroic manhood built from his sensitivity and love for ­others. The lessons he learned from the war allowed Field to embrace

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t­ hese marginalized aspects of himself as becoming of, not detracting from, his manliness.

Conclusion Field c­ ouldn’t stay in E ­ urope forever; soon the thousand dollars he had saved from his time in the military ran dry and he was forced to come home. Back in Nassau County, he attended to real life. For the next ­decade, Field lived his life in “confusion,” trying desperately to fit into the hetero-­domestic mold his therapists told him he had to fit, while si­mul­ta­neously spending his time with other gay poets in Greenwich Village, discovering who he wanted to be. It was not u­ ntil the end of the d­ ecade that Field was able to reconcile his own same-­sex desires with the society around him. Though the war provided the raw materials for a gay manhood, it took Field far longer than the war to fi­nally construct the completed structure. Field ­wasn’t the only gay veteran to have an awakening. ­After the war, few men who felt same-­sex desires went back to the rural towns they came from. Instead, the war created a large migration as gay veterans flocked to existing gay communities in large cities. ­There, gay populations ballooned. The bars they frequented became vis­i­ble landmarks in major cities, and gay men and w ­ omen began appearing in the paperback lit­er­a­ture of the time. Communities that had once been hidden now invited attention from straight Amer­i­ca, and the witch hunt to purge suspected gay men and ­women from government positions during the mid-1950s attested to how much this increased visibility challenged the mores of the postwar era. The war was largely responsible for the influx of gay men into the cities and for the cultural context that allowed t­ hese men to find each other in the first place.55 But the ensuing crackdowns on gay men and w ­ omen had their own effects. In 1951 the first gay rights ­organization, the Mattachine Society, publicly affirmed that “thousands of homosexuals live out their lives bewildered, unhappy, alone—­ isolated from their own kind and unable to adjust to the dominant culture . . . ​ homosexual[s] are still cut off from the deep satisfactions man’s gregarious nature can achieve only when he is consciously part of a larger unified ­whole. A major purpose of the Mattachine Society is to provide [princi­ples] from which they can derive a feeling of ‘belonging.’ ” This statement, far from just focusing on rights, instead emphasized “belonging” and the personal authenticity that was lost when men had to lie about themselves to fit into “dominant culture.”56 The Mattachine Society’s main message through most of the fifties was that one’s homo­sexuality should be “unimportant” to one’s position in society: that a gay person’s be­hav­ior in private d­ idn’t make them less competent at their job than a straight person.57 While this conservative message lacked any sort of proclamation of pride, or even a concept of homosexuals as a minority group, it did state something that gay veterans already knew: gay men could perform the same

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duties that all other men could. While historians are right to suggest that the Mattachine Society was a relatively conservative o­ rganization (at least a­ fter 1953), its vision of postwar society explic­itly lay claim to the idea that a gay man, living openly about his sexuality, could perform masculine roles in the same ways as anyone ­else.58 The Mattachine Society was always very small, and its effects on society ­were ­limited. Field, for his part, never joined and was only vaguely aware of its activism. Still, the revelations Field found in w ­ artime ­were echoed by the emerging gay communities and activist movements, suggesting that the war played a more profound role in creating ­those gay communities beyond creating the conditions ­under which many men met ­others like themselves. Instead, the war may have taught other gay men, like Field, that their same-­sex desires ­were not barriers to their manliness nor reasons to deny them the dignity other veterans felt in postwar society. Field’s experience as a Jewish man magnified the ways he learned to value authenticity. Field learned that he needed to hide his Jewishness to be accepted by his comrades but was paradoxically accepted by being honest about his love for other men. Thus, his experiences suggested that the roles he played to pass as non-­Jewish ­were simply that: roles. By learning to fit in and pass as non-­Jewish, he learned he could easily perform the bravery he thought unattainable as well. Finding ­these roles relatively unimportant, Field could focus on parts of him that he found true to an au­then­tic, manly self: love for other men and the expression of emotional sensitivity. Field’s journey to gay manhood, however, was not a straight path. It took Field another ­decade of trying to conform to societal standards of hetero-­domesticity before he fully embraced gay authenticity. The next ­decade was a par­tic­u­lar difficult one for Field, and as he went in and out of therapists’ offices, took ­women on dates, and cruised the parks of New York looking for sexual partners, he drifted between his own idea of what a man should be like and what society dictated for him. Authenticity was easy to preach in a military that promoted male affective ties; it was much more difficult in a postwar Amer­i­ca obsessed with adjustment to mature, domestic gender roles. While Field was trying to make postwar Amer­i­ca compatible with the camaraderie he felt in war, James Jones was using the same concepts to live out his own notions of authenticity. Postwar Amer­i­ca, Jones believed, entrapped men and forced them into domestic relationships. And he knew that a writer had to be apart from the world if he ­were to avoid being sucked into that domestic world. And so Jones came to believe that men could avoid society altogether by withdrawing, forsaking feminine lures for true male camaraderie. As Jones worked on his masterpiece, a book about the military, authenticity, and the bonds between men, he built the Handy Writer’s Colony, a place where men could live honestly and express their au­then­tic desires unhampered by society’s expectations. Out on Jones’s new frontier, men would be men as long as they w ­ ere together.

Part 2

Coming Home

4

The Hipster, the Prophet, and the Angel Writers on the Edge of Eternity “The only way we can defeat them is to make our love conform to their conventions—­outwardly. We can keep the core of it private and clean, but if we ­don’t conform it outwardly t­ hey’ll end up by not only killing our love but us too.” “Yes,” Warden said. “And the only way we can conform it is for me to accept the customary hogwash of success so we can give it the security. Its easy for you, whose job is to ­handle the core. But I’m the only who has to do the outside conforming. I have to make the living, that the security depends on. I’m the one who’ll have to agree with them and do t­ hings their way.” “All my life, from the time my goddam ­brother became a priest, I’ve fought their beef-­eating middleclass assurance. I fought every­thing it stood for. I’ve made myself stand for every­thing they ­were against. . . . ​I’ve stood up for me Milt 93

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Warden as a man, and I’ve made a place for myself in it, by myself, where I can be myself, without brownnosing any man, and I’ve made them like it.” “And now I’m supposed to go and become an Officer, the symbol of e­ very goddam t­ hing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed to do that for you.” “­You’re the bait in the trap. They know how to work it, ­don’t think they ­don’t. What does dear m ­ other do when sonny comes home from college all full of revolt and dissatisfaction with the way the world has always been run? “They find him a sweet young t­ hing thats around handy to relieve himself on and they finagle till they got him married to her, and then sonny quiets down to his duty and lets his revolt run off and accepts the status quo.” “I’m not the bait,” Karen said. “I dont want to be the bait.” . . . “All my life I’ve had to fight for one ­thing, the one t­ hing nobody wants a man to be, to be honest. And now, to become an Officer—­Did you ever see an honest Officer? that stayed an Officer?” —James Jones, From H ­ ere to Eternity, 1951

Sometime in the fifties three students from the University of Chicago made a pilgrimage. Not two hundred miles away, or so ­they’d heard, the famous writer James Jones lived on a farm where he trained a new generation to write. Th ­ ey’d read From ­Here to Eternity, Jones’s massive war novel, recently released to critical acclaim. It had been hailed as the defining classic of World War II; even Jones’s chief competition, Norman Mailer, had sung its virtues.1 And so, ­a fter their friend David Ray had left to become a part of Jones’s Writers’ Colony, the three students de­cided to take a trek and see if the man was every­thing they i­ magined. They had prob­ably read about the colony in Life magazine and had heard of Lowney Handy, Jones’s personal “angel” who had nurtured him in the years a­ fter the war. They may have expected a docile ­mother figure, a caring voice that would

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greet them as they knocked on the door.2 They ­were certainly not expecting the loud, domineering w ­ oman who met them. As they finished walking up the long path to the four-­hundred-­acre farmland, they found Lowney waiting for them. She ushered them inside and offered them a seat. David Ray, standing inside, saw his friends coming and immediately cringed. He knew Lowney would hate the beards, glasses, and berets they ­were sporting; she thought such accessories made men look pretentious or effeminate. He was right to be concerned. Lowney Handy quickly dispensed with pleasantries and started grilling them. Why had they come? Not to see the colony, they admitted, but to see Jones. Which one of them was the ringleader? The bearded man confessed that he was. Did any of them know the real reason ­people wear glasses? They had to admit they did not. Lowney moved on (not bother­ing to answer her own question about the glasses), quizzing them on their favorite writers. “D. H. Lawrence,” one of the three offered, and Ray winced, remembering the fit Lowney had thrown when she once caught him reading “that queer,” Proust. “Your god-­damned style’s too intellectual and sissy-­like as it is,” Lowney had told Ray, snatching the book away from him.3 Now, she calmly sat back and lectured his friends about Lawrence. “D.  H. Lawrence was a queer,” Lowney told them, “and that’s why he died from T. B.—­I know why ­people get T. B.” The meeting did not last much longer. Lowney flew into a rage when they laughed at her theory about Lawrence, and she threw them out of her home before they had a chance to say anything more. As they dawdled, Lowney threw bricks, encouraging them to run. One complained that he ­couldn’t run ­because of a sore leg; Lowney’s brick quickly changed his mind. As the three scurried off, a man crept out of the trailer parked next to Lowney’s cottage. If any of the students had managed to look back as they ran, they would have seen Jones, the very person they had come to see, laughing as he watched Lowney throw another brick.4 From about 1948 u­ ntil his departure in 1957, Jones and a rotating group of male writers lived at the Handy Writers’ Colony with Lowney, engaging in a social experiment that, in part, sought to rejuvenate a masculinity that had no place to flourish in postwar Amer­i­ca. Some of ­those men ­were veterans, ­others friends or fans of Jones, ­others just disaffected young men who saw college and marriage as dead ends unbefitting their talent. The war had taught Jones that societal constructions of manhood w ­ ere wrong: they taught men to act in ways that benefitted o­ thers while stifling their own wants and desires. To be manly, men had to embrace authenticity. Jones had not immediately known what this would look like, but by the early fifties his vision was clearer. In a world in which men w ­ ere expected to s­ ettle down, get married, and fade into a daily routine, the Handy Writer’s Colony became an alternative. If men rejected de­cadent ­pleasures, lived Spartan existences, cut themselves off from w ­ omen and, most importantly, lived in camaraderie with a brotherhood

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of men, then they stood a chance at being able to write about “Truth” and question the basic values society assumed ­were immutable. Only then could they rise beyond what society desired of them and be ­free to be who they wanted to be. Only then could they be men. Jones’s colony, and the men in it, provides an insight into some of the undercurrents of postwar American society that ­were usually kept hidden, submerged ­under tranquil, conformist ­waters. Robert Corber has noted how film noir of the fifties reflected a broader discomfort with the domestic and consumerist roles postwar men w ­ ere supposed to play by presenting audiences with rebellious men who seemed opposed to the postwar consensus. Jones’s colony provides one more example of how a budding subculture ­adopted values at odds with mainstream domestic messages.5 Studying Jones and his followers helps reveal how the alienation that returning veterans had felt dovetailed seamlessly with an emerging discourse critical of how modern society had softened and emasculated American men. ­Wartime had left an unmistakable countercultural strain in American intellectual and cultural life, one that sought to redefine masculinity in opposition to dominant themes of man-­as-­husband and man-­as-­provider. The Writers’ Colony aspired to be a self-­contained world where men could define themselves as they w ­ ere, not by how society wanted them to be. With Lowney as their priest, the colony their church, and Jones’s novels their gospels, men made a pilgrimage to rural Illinois to escape postwar Amer­i­ca and instead live by the precepts Jones set. Intriguingly, as Jones crafted the colony, the values he hoped men would express inadvertently resembled ­those of Stern and Field: like them, he began to value the importance of emotional connections between men. The war, for Jones, had been a frontier away from American society where soldiers could learn to be true to themselves. The war was over. But if men could live together, could resist the temptations of modern Amer­i­ca, and could find connections with each other and through their writing, then maybe they could re-­create it.

From Anopopei to New York Jones ­wasn’t the only man to return from war angry. Families w ­ ere often taken by surprise at the level of animosity their sons and husbands held t­ oward the nation they had served. In the years 1944 to 1948, it seemed as though this was the only t­ hing p­ eople could talk about. A typical Ladies’ Home Journal or Life issue featured myriad articles on how to welcome home a damaged veteran; concerned readers could turn to multitudes of psychiatrists who had written self-­ help books if they wanted more professional advice.6 Amid this cultural unease w ­ ere deeper questions. What did this return home mean? Should men get married and s­ ettle down? W ­ omen, certainly, felt pressure to return home from the jobs they had taken in the war, and unmarried men

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­ ere viewed with no less suspicion than lingering Rosies.7 ­Were men wild and w scarred by the war, in need of feminine companionship to properly adjust?8 Should they discard the trappings of manhood they had discovered during the war—­the close male companionship, the individualism, the coarse language and stoic a­ cceptance of discomfort—­for the gray flannel suit of the corporation?9 Should they adjust at all? What had the war meant to their identities, to their values, their friendships, and their self-­worth? What would American society force them to give up about themselves, and how would they fit into this new mold? Put simply, what was a man supposed to be if not a soldier? It was into this context that the veterans’ critique emerged. During the next ten years, intellectuals and critics in American life ­were preternaturally concerned with men’s place in the newly emerging postwar society. White-­collar jobs blossomed a­ fter the war, while a housing shortage led to men leaving with their families to the newly created suburbs. Both of t­ hese shifts seemed to threaten the frontiersman ideal, making men more domestic, less able to act in­de­ pen­dently. Sociologist David Riesman’s analy­sis of this new society as “other-­ directed”—­they looked to o­ thers for guidance rather than their own inner moral compass—­seemed to add legitimacy to this worry, and further works—­such as William Whyte’s The O ­ rganization Man—­more directly criticized American society for how it subsumed men into collectives.10 While fears of communist invasion reflected a complicated new international situation, anticommunist writers often used t­ hese exact anx­i­eties to explain the danger of communism: anticommunist books and films frequently pitted an individualist, brave, loner hero against a communist “robot” that ­couldn’t think for itself or do anything but follow o­ rders.11 It was also common, in the mid-­forties, to worry that the military itself was causing soldiers to lose their individuality and i­ ndependence. The hierarchy and command structure of the military was designed to make soldiers follow ­orders and act as part of the unit; as much as the military was lauded for creating men, the nature of ­service led some Americans to paradoxically also see the military as a threat to the frontiersman. In 1945 sociologist Willard Waller warned that “the army machine annihilates the soldier’s individual ­will.” Soldiers lose their ­independence: “Accustomed to receiving and giving o­ rders, he can no longer comprehend that vast and alien civilian world . . . ​[soldiers] must learn once more to take up the burdens of personal and moral responsibility.”12 Psychiatrist George Pratt warned families that the military had required men to lose their freedom to follow their desires. This meant that on return t­ hese men would no longer know how to discipline themselves or be uncomfortable making decisions for themselves: the military had robbed them of their autonomy.13 In this context, many of the war novels of the late forties and fifties used the war as a ­metaphor for the strug­gle between self and society. To choose one

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example, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk was about many themes: maturity and the toughness required for manly leadership being the central ideas. But the most basic theme of Wouk’s work was to question the relationship between the individual and the o­ rganization: should the protagonists overthrow their cowardly and unstable captain, and thus disobey the rules and order of the navy, or should they follow their leader into likely destruction?14 Jones’s first novel, They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter, had joined this conversation by assaulting the ways American culture pushed men t­ oward assimilating and subsuming themselves to civilian demands. His second novel, From ­Here to Eternity, would address t­ hese themes even more directly by making its central conflict between the military and its hero a m ­ etaphor for w ­ hether men should follow their own desires or do what society demanded of them. But before Eternity, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead had already captured the imaginations of the American p­ eople. An instant best seller, lauded for its honesty and its raw portrayal of the war, Mailer’s novel is impor­tant b­ ecause, even before Jones became a ­house­hold name, Naked had already framed the conflict between man and society as a strug­gle to prove a man’s toughness.15 Like Jones’s, Mailer’s version of the veterans’ critique prized authenticity, and like Jones, he located that authenticity in the men who had faced war head-on. Unlike Jones’s, Mailer’s critique still drew from frontiersman ideas of competition, framing manhood as attainable only a­ fter men faced a trial that showed them their true natures. Mailer and Jones became two of the most impor­tant voices in a postwar dialogue concerning the meanings of manhood ­after war. While the two ­were very dif­fer­ent—­one a New York Jew who became a top student at Harvard, the other a dropout from rural Illinois—­Mailer and Jones acted as mirrors to each other, highlighting the shared circumstances they both faced. A brief look at what Mailer took from his ­wartime experiences helps define the contours of the veterans’ critique and establishes how critical it was to broader discussions about male ­independence in postwar Amer­i­ca. As well, once we understand Mailer, the nuances of Jones’s critique become more apparent and highlight just how radical his vision was. Unlike Jones, Mailer grew up well-­off; his parents provided him with the resources to be accepted into Harvard, where he wrote his earliest unpublished works.16 He was a star student, but his writing c­ areer was put on hold a­ fter he graduated as he prepared to enter the military. By 1944, Mailer reported to basic training; though his Harvard degree could have given him a job away from the front, Mailer, like Jones before him, wanted to see combat.17 Like Jones, he was sent to the Pacific, where he found himself in the infantry on one of the largest islands in the Philippine archipelago, Luzon. Despite his ­later reputation as a tough, macho rebel, most of the men who served with Mailer remembered him as quiet, detached, and bookish.18 In fact, he was observing. He developed character sketches from the men around him,

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each of which populated his l­ ater novel.19 The war ended, and Mailer found himself a cook in Japan during the occupation; ­there he meditated on what he had learned in war and soon reached an epiphany. War was a grueling, stressful trial that pushed men to their limits, but it also forged them. ­Those who overcame the tests faced in the savage frontier of b­ attle came back wiser, not only having overcome themselves, but with a deeper understanding of the world as it actually was. Explaining this to his editor, Mailer expressed how the men in Naked and the Dead would glimpse the true form of real­ity: “­There are g­ oing to be troubling terrifying glimpses of order in disorder, of a horror which may or may not lurk beneath the surface of t­ hings.”20 The Naked and the Dead was Mailer’s attempt to use his w ­ artime s­ ervice to depict this idea. Soldiers, through strug­gle, faced their frailties and weakness: if they overcame them, they reached a greater understanding of themselves and society.21 Though Mailer stressed the authenticity of the true man and questioned traditional notions that manhood was defined through bravery or stoicism, his framework preserved pieces of the frontiersman ideal of masculinity: like frontiersmen, Mailer’s soldiers ­were defined by their encounters with savagery and their ability to incorporate savage real­ity into a civilized self. Half the book was a philosophical debate between two officers concerning the innate goodness or badness of humanity, while the other half related the strug­g les of a com­pany of men sent on an ultimately pointless mission to the island of Anopopei.22 Fascinated with psychological explanations for weakness or bravery (as was Stewart Stern, as chapter 6 ­will discuss), Mailer used flashbacks to identify each soldier’s insecurities and weaknesses, then confronted them with a commensurate challenge on the island. In some cases, they failed, as Mailer demonstrated in the opening of the novel when a delusional soldier lost his cool and ran from his foxhole, only to be ripped apart by mortar shells.23 Other soldiers faced their own tests. Lieutenant Hearn, the com­pany commander, feared that he was actually an evil man; his fear of his inner nature made him hesitate when pushing into the unknown and eventually led to his death. Likewise, a cruel, violent, and self-­serving soldier, Croft, was at heart afraid of his own cowardice. To face his fears, he became fixated on climbing a distant mountain.24 Pushing on out of obsession, he eventually had to abandon his quest and realize his own failure: Croft “had found a limit to his hunger” and worried that he had missed “some tantalizing revelation of himself. . . . ​ Of life. Every­thing.”25 ­These t­ rials that Croft and the rest of the men endured w ­ ere the central image of the book; as they strug­g led to overcome an uncivilized frontier, their fight became a test against themselves. A typical passage related the ways the strug­gle against nature became a brutal competition: “They hated the mountain, hated it with more fervor than they could ever have hated a h ­ uman being . . . ​it seemed to mock and deceive them at ­every step, resist them with ­every malign rock. Once

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more they forgot about the ­Japanese, forgot about the patrol, almost forgot about themselves.”26 Encounters with the ­enemy w ­ ere nearly n ­ onexistent; instead, the com­pany fought against the jungle itself. They spent hours cutting a path through fo­liage and ­were chased by hornets, and one man even died not from ­Japanese gunfire but while missing a jump across a ravine.27 Mailer, like Jones, saw something unique in war that allowed men to overcome the superficialities of the society around them. For Jones, it had been the epiphany that heroism was a narrative taught to soldiers to make them fight; seeing men crying in pain and defecating on themselves made him realize that true authenticity could be found in acting out one’s own desires rather than performing stoic heroism. Likewise, Mailer realized that being outside of society, in a place where men w ­ ere confronted only by the savagery of nature, men could truly know themselves and their own inner desires. Like Theodore Roo­se­velt before him, for Mailer war was fundamentally a test. War showed men that they ­were essentially fragile; rather than testing their limits against an i­ magined trial, men needed to embrace this fragility and learn to accept the fear they felt when faced with imminent danger. Heroism was not solid ground to define oneself on; men w ­ ere not naturally brave or controlled. For Mailer, war tested a man’s ability to overcome their weakness; for Jones, it proved that bravery and control w ­ ere inauthentic, undercutting the entire assumptions of manliness. In ­either case, each man believed that understanding this truth made men au­then­tic and allowed them to understand and act on their fundamental natures.28 Regardless of their differences, for both men society became the ­enemy, e­ ither by making men too comfortable to confront ­trials or by pressuring them to accept falsehoods that repudiated their self-­k nowledge of their own fragility. Both Mailer and Jones began to believe that rebellion from societal pressures was the only way to resist emasculation in postwar Amer­i­ca.29 In the late forties, however, Mailer was very much part of the society he would ­later decry. The Naked and the Dead made Mailer a celebrity, and he spent the beginning of the next ­decade ­going to parties and hobnobbing with movie stars. He visited Paris as the first reviews of the book came in, promoted the novel in New York, then, to drum up support for a film adaptation, went to Hollywood, where he held parties with Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. His wife, Bea, soon had a ­daughter, and Mailer lived the domestic life of a husband ­until their divorce. Born an urbanite, Mailer continued to live the life of an urbanite ­after the war.30 Meanwhile, Jones was the one who ventured to the frontier. Living on the land in rural Illinois, Jones wondered if the way to preserve masculine authenticity was to separate from society altogether. Unlike Mailer’s, Jones’s experience in war led him to envision a world in which men w ­ ere f­ ree from societal pressures. In such a world, would they be sensitive or insightful? Would they be blunt truth tellers? Only on their own could men discover who they r­ eally w ­ ere.

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Lowney Handy’s Curious Colony for Writers While Mailer was achieving celebrity, Jones was rebuilding his life. Jones’s first trip home had been a contentious one; ­wartime had left scars. Traumatized, he tried to run away from the military two more times, convinced that if they sent him overseas he would die. Fi­nally, ­a fter the intervention of a military psychiatrist who labeled him “neuropsychiatric” (a broad term loosely related to the modern diagnosis of PTSD), Jones was discharged into the care of his “angel,” Lowney Handy.31 In a 1951 Life article titled “James Jones and His Angel,” Handy l­ ater recalled her first meeting with Jones: You should have seen him then, . . . ​He swaggered; he wore dark glasses; he even asked me to read his poetry aloud. He had obviously come over for a f­ ree drink. Then he saw my books. We have books everywhere in the ­house, in the living room, even in the bathrooms. Jim got out of the chair and began to take out the books. He flipped through them and plopped them back as if he ­were gulping down what they had in them. . . . ​He picked out a c­ ouple and sat down on the floor with them, and I might as well have been in the next county. I just stood t­ here and looked at him. The chip on the shoulder was gone. The poor guy. The poor lost guy.32

It was a sympathetic portrayal of broken man. It would have been familiar to Life’s readers in that it mirrored the depiction of returning veterans commonly described by a multitude of postwar publications.33 The role of ­women, ­these narratives often expressed, was to rebuild t­ hese men and offer them solace and protection. The article molded Handy into a ­mother figure to fit this image and at the same time reinforced how ­women in peacetime could participate in the re-­ creation of American manhood. However, the article was deeply misleading. While Handy did rehabilitate Jones, the two of them perverted this postwar narrative of a selfless maternal figure helping her broken son. Handy certainly cared for Jones like a ­mother: she fed him, h ­ oused him, and read his work. But she also inspired him, slept with him, and professed her love to him. Jones felt the same. Two days ­after he had met Handy, he expressed happily in his diary how they had spent the day in bed together.34 They both grew deeply dependent on each other, and ­there was frequent jealousy whenever he left her side. Despite the way they depicted themselves to the outside world, Jones and Handy’s relationship was unusual and blurred—­fitting for two individuals who wanted to imagine an Amer­i­ca outside of societal constraints. Handy herself was hardly the image of feminine demure with which Life had painted her. She was twenty years Jones’s ­senior, not a typical romantic partner of the era. Handy swore colorfully; she rarely wore a bra or a dress and often

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sunbathed in public view in only her undergarments. In her youth she once injured a state attorney by shooting him with an unloaded pistol and was known for a pronounced temper.35 She was also deeply spiritual, in a way that was l­ater associated with the Beats or the hippies of the next generation. She was a devotee of eastern religion and the occult, and she often interspersed her correspondence with quotes from occultist books and references to Taoism. Maybe most daring for the time, she was ambitious: Handy refused the tenets of domesticity, hoping to transcend societal expectations and become a writer.36 Lowney was married when she met Jones but, like the rest of her life, her marriage was eccentric. Her husband, Harry Handy, the ­owner of an oil com­pany in Indiana, spent much of his time away from home while he engaged with business. That suited both him and Lowney well. Years before, Harry had given Lowney gonorrhea; complications from this eventually led to Lowney undergoing a hysterectomy. She blamed him for cheating on her but also still valued him as a friend; as a result, the two remained close but entirely platonic. Harry, in all likelihood, knew about Jones and Lowney’s relationship and implicitly supported it. He provided both with financial assistance so they could afford to stay in the Handy ­House in Robinson. ­Later, when they started the Handy Writers’ Colony, his money provided the initial support.37 It was Lowney’s unconventionality—­her dress, her mannerisms, her complicated marital relationship—­that appealed to Jones. Jones’s suspicion of societal roles found expression in a patron like Lowney. She took care of him as he tried to grow past the trauma he had faced in war, and he took her advice as he tried to write his “war novel.” But as they lived together, an idea developed. Handy had been successful at rehabilitating Jones. If that was the case, then maybe their arrangement, living in a b­ ubble cut off from society, could help other veterans? Jones started to imagine the possibility of creating a world more like the one he had lived in the Pacific: men could be men ­there, ­free to express emotional sensitivity away from pressures to appear brave or stoic. Handy had helped Jones realize his own au­then­tic self, and she was just as critical of society as he. So why ­couldn’t they help other men? ­Couldn’t Handy be an “angel” to ­others? And so, by 1946, they started to create something more: a colony for writers, led by Handy and Jones, which could take care of outcasts and teach them to write. A close examination of the colony, however, shows that its lessons went further than prose; instead, they ­were deeply intertwined with Jones’s own ideas of what manhood could be. The rules he and Handy set up aimed to teach ­these men to separate themselves from society, to tap in to their au­then­tic desires, and to embrace a homosocial world where men could enjoy the com­pany of men. The ideal man, to Jones, had always been the writer who could critique society from a distance. In order to make writers, he’d first have to make men. ­Later countercultural rebels of the fifties shared quite a bit with Jones’s colony. The Beats, for instance, stressed rebellion from societal mores as a way to achieve true manly ­independence. Jack Kerouac’s hero in On the Road, Dean

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Moriarty (based on his real-­life friend Neal Cassady), was a man who acted only on his own desires, in the moment, a man of pure instinct rather than one burdened by societal dictates: the ideal man ­because of his au­then­tic nature. Allen Ginsberg, likewise, stressed the bond and love between men in his poetry: in Howl, he furthermore painted gay male sexuality positively, embracing love between men as an au­then­tic expression of a man’s desires.38 Similarly, Hugh Hefner’s radical philosophy, as espoused in Playboy magazine (founded in 1955), was that men could be men only when unburdened from their wives and allowed to enjoy their own desires. To Hefner, domesticity and duty w ­ ere inauthentic and real men consumed p­ leasure without fear of responsibility.39 An impor­tant point of commonality in all of ­these countercultural experiments was a disdain for ­women and even misogyny. Playboy, of course, featured many articles condemning shrewish wives who would constrict men, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road dismissed w ­ omen as a danger to the freewheeling lives he and his friends embodied. One of the reasons so many of ­these male rebellions focused on w ­ omen as dangerous was b­ ecause they w ­ ere responding to the same ­stereotypes Jones was: w ­ omen ­were seen as agents of an emasculating American society. Another reason, however, was ­because liberals of the era often associated ­women’s activism with a par­tic­u­lar strand of conservativism, prevalent in pro-­ mother ­organizations in the teens and twenties. In that era ­women’s o­ rganizations had used their authority as ­mothers to argue for their participation in the ­political sphere, but by the forties conservative groups such as the ­Daughters of the American Revolution dominated w ­ omen’s activism. Nonconformists who wanted to disassociate themselves from conservative politics often disparaged motherhood, and polemics like Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers recast ­these “moms” as selfish and cloyingly sentimental. Ironically, ­those who ­adopted t­hese critiques rarely understood just how much they relied on sexist, traditionalist depictions of femininity to signal their own nonconformity.40 Jones’s colony, however many similarities we can find, predated Playboy or mass exposure to the Beat Generation. But the colony was no less concerned with rebellion from societal norms. Jones and Handy founded it twenty miles away from Robinson, Illinois, on the site of the Handy f­ amily farmland, away from civilization. Th ­ ere, they hoped men might be able to live on the land and find themselves, unpressured by a world that would demand they marry and forget their dreams. Lowney got the blessing of her mother-­in-­law (an eighty-­year-­old ­woman known simply as Mrs. Handy), and they started construction. By 1947, a handful of other writers, mostly friends of Jones and Lowney, joined them for the summer in an informal writing camp. By 1951, Lowney, Harry, and Jones became the three founding members of the newly incorporated Handy Writers’ Colony.41 Built on the farmland, the colony was barren and small in the first years. Before they had built structures, Lowney shared a small cottage with Mrs. Handy while Jones resided in a trailer; ­there was one wash­house with toilets and

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plumbing and five or six tents for the writers to live in. In 1951, the first new building was built on the land: the five-­cell “barracks,” a Spartan building composed of five monastic rooms for the visiting writers. Inside t­ hese small rooms was ­little more than a bed, a typewriter, and a chair: just enough for the men to write without distraction, away from societal comforts. Locked in ­these rooms, colonists would spend their mornings writing or more commonly copying the writing of authors Lowney chose for them. Meanwhile, Lowney would patrol outside, making sure she heard the clicking of typewriter keys. W ­ hether coincidental or not, the barracks had the effect of re-­creating the discipline and close quarters of the military that Jones had experienced in Hawaii, Lowney serving as a warden while the men w ­ ere cut off from outside distractions.42 Besides the barracks, t­ here was a central open-­air building called the Ramada, which served as a meeting place. It consisted of a kitchen, a large picnic ­table, and a small makeshift bookshelf where Handy stored books she lent to her students. ­There, colonists would gather while Handy prepared for them ­whatever she had planned for the day. Her cooking was infamously bad; the colonists got used to eating charred meat and bland potatoes (Handy disallowed butter with them) on a regular basis.43 They joked and discussed ­whatever topics came to mind, some deeply philosophical, some crude. Handy and Jones encouraged the men to swear, fart, and talk about bodily functions freely. If men w ­ ere to ­free themselves from society, they needed to learn how to break taboos and ignore rules of politeness. The only topic they ­couldn’t discuss was their own writing. Handy believed they might corrupt each other’s ideas if they traded thoughts on their novels, and so she was the only one allowed to discuss anything the colonists wrote. Lunches w ­ ere often spent loudly in conversation, while Handy sat quietly in a corner reading drafts.44 The first colonists w ­ ere only part-­time occupants, in the summers, when it was warm enough to focus on writing. Of the first five, two ­were ­women, though they left the colony quickly. Th ­ ere is scant information about them, but Jones once explained that one quit ­because she lacked the drive to stay away from society: “The girl started singing in a nightclub in Ind., then got married, then divorced.”45 ­A fter ­these two—­though t­ here ­were occasional exceptions—­the colony was a male enterprise. ­There w ­ ere ­women who occasionally sent Handy drafts, but few of t­ hese w ­ omen ever visited the colony. A friend of Jones, Fay Carpenter, stayed with the colonists for two summers in a segregated trailer away from the rest, and Mary Ann Jones, James Jones’s wayward and troubled s­ ister, stayed at the colony when she had nowhere ­else to go ­until her tragic death in 1952.46 Of course, the elder Mrs. Handy also continued to live on the property, working diligently on her own novel.47 This seems to have been how Jones preferred it. Jones’s writing from the era consistently depicted ­women as society’s arbiters.48 Few w ­ omen had the ability to separate themselves from society, Jones thought, and thus most w ­ omen ­were unable to separate their desires from what o­ thers wanted of them. When a female

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colonist left to get married, it only proved Jones’s point. Another early colonist, Russ Meskiman, had his ­career as a writer ruined when he fell in love. Handy urged him to choose his writing over his girlfriend, Katie; when confronted with the ultimatum, Russ chose Katie.49 Jones was so disgusted by the incident that he drew up notes for a new novel (titled “The Russ Meskiman Novel”) about a brilliant writer who chooses sex and stability over his craft, leading to a life of middle-­class drudgery and his eventual demise. Th ­ ese notes eventually became his magnum opus, Some Came R ­ unning, about a writer who mistakenly married an uneducated “pig” of a ­woman and in so d­ oing traded his art for sex.50 Jones spent the time ­a fter the war trying to imagine a manhood that lay beyond frontiersman s­ tereotypes, but his metaphysics ­were not creative enough to imagine a similarly rebellious ­woman. ­Women ­were rarely agents in Jones’s works; instead, drawing on the same prevalent sexist caricatures that Hefner and the Beats would use, and Philip Wylie already had, Jones’s ­women ­were products of a world that wanted men to conform. If Jones’s thought veered into the misogynistic, it was at least matched, and reinforced, by Handy’s own sexism. John Bowers, a colonist who l­ater wrote a memoir of his time with Handy and Jones, remembered Handy to be obsessed by the prospect that ­women, all temptresses, would distract her writers away from their true paths. She disapproved of colonists having girlfriends; Bowers remembered her advising him to break off ties with his current love interest.51 “­You’ve got a hell of a book in you,” he remembered Handy telling him, “but ­you’ve got to forget the ­things of this world if ­you’re ­going to pull it out. . . . ​A ­woman is prob­ably g­ oing to get you, though. Your mind is too full of c-­nt.”52 Jones jumped in on this comment, as Bowers remembered, joking, “If they cut open [John’s] brain . . . ​, I bet a lot of l­ ittle c-­nts would spring out.”53 Handy once told Bowers about her courtship of her husband. First, Handy explained, she manipulated Harry into falling in love with her. Once she had him, she slept with him ­until she became pregnant; the abortion she forced him to finance bound him only closer to her out of guilt. She then used that very guilt to make him marry her, thereby getting what she had desired from the outset. “All w ­ omen can do this—­I ­don’t care who the guy is,” Handy warned the group, using her own deviousness as testimony against her entire sex.54 ­There is no indication Jones, Handy, or any other colonist saw the paradox at the center of the colonist’s experiment: Handy herself. Jones seemed to believe that Handy ­rose above her sex and, as a cultural rebel herself, was detached from society in a way few ­women could manage. Handy’s unconventional lifestyle might have been proof to herself that while she might be female she was in no way the feminine harpy who pulled men t­ oward society. A ­ fter all, society left her on the margins: she was seen in Robinson as a ne’er-­do-­well and a hipster, whose associations with men much youn­ger than her raised alarms concerning propriety.55 For Jones, Handy’s hysterectomy—­a nd thus her inability to be a ­mother—­further decoupled her from the biologic essentials he believed ­women

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­ ere pulled ­toward. Handy was a ­woman, but unlike other ­women she had the w freedom to be true to herself.56 Or, in a gendered ­performance that seemed to bother no one, Handy was ­free to act as a ­mother figure who could help the men around her. Despite her aspirations, Handy never had time to work on her own novel. Instead, she contented herself to be the muse and editor to a rotating cast of men who came to the colony looking for an escape from the outside world. Handy cooked for, taught, and took care of the men she surrounded herself with in ways that hardly distinguished her from other w ­ omen pressured into domesticity. In return, Handy got to be their “angel.” She was a ­mother without being that hated species, “­woman.” Despite Jones’s vision of manhood dictating that men should strive to move beyond societal assumptions, this vision still seemingly required a patriarchal foundation to be realized. Even within ­these limits, Handy and Jones espoused radical hopes for the colony. Handy’s advice to her writers reflected a spiritual dimension to this utopianism. ­A fter she had read each colonist’s draft, she delivered long typewritten comments filled with advice, admonishments, biblical and New Age quotes, and her own spiritual advice. A typical critique read, Now before you eat in the ­evening, take some time off by yourself, and run over in your mind a plan (seeing, hearing and watching) . . . ​if you give it the go-­ahead, select the t­ hings it is to work on and thus your next morning’s work ­will be set up for you. This means that you are alone . . . ​even when you are with ­people you are stilled in both mind and body. You are out of the racing, wildness of everyday living, the action that ­people call life. You have become in essence a God. In the bible it says that the “spirit, brooded on the deep.” That before God made the world he was in a state of formless, all-­wise, intelligent, Spirit. . . . ​The intelligence was ­there and saw itself as the producer as well as the spectator of all animate and inanimate ­things. and is many ­things. A writer is this . . . ​know that when man sets his hand to Create, that God finds it good and that he is given the complete store­house of all Eternity from which to use if need be. . . . And just as the immortal ideal included a portion or spark of the central fire of that which had brought of projected it into existence, just so w ­ ill e­ very character, e­ very item in your book contain a spark or gleam of yourself. Shakespeare said: “fool look in thy heart and write.” The ancient’s always taught each student: “know thyself!”57

This par­tic­u­lar critique went on for three pages. Under­lying her comments was a belief in the self-­discovery of writing: that writing allowed writers to “know thyself” and express the divine essence of their own person. The act of writing separated a man from the influences outside him and allowed him to commune with his au­then­tic desires. It was a

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sentiment that echoed Jones’s own beliefs that writers ­were the only ones equipped to see “Truth.” Handy, further than Jones, believed that writing could be a reflection of a man’s inner spiritual self and could help him attain inner enlightenment. Writing could also fix inner faults in a man’s character, by allowing him to mimic the thoughts of men who ­were more properly masculine than they ­were. Handy’s main technique was her “copying method.” As the main part of their training, she required that most writers, for at least two or three hours at the beginning of their day, copy the writing of an author Handy believed they should emulate. Physically mimicking the movements of o­ thers could erase bad habits and teach good ones, Handy believed. Central to this idea was the theory that writing was an unconscious act; drawing from her spiritual style, she believed that writers could most effectively reflect their true selves when they wrote from an instinctive level, where thought could not mediate a writer’s heartfelt intentions. The writers most commonly offered to the colonists w ­ ere known for their depictions of men and for their s­ imple, direct style of writing, a quality understood by Handy and Jones as manly ­because it eschewed flowery and poetic imagery. The most common assignments w ­ ere chapters from Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald; rarely did she assign female authors.58 Handy banned from the premises any books that did not reflect the manly heights to which she hoped her writers would aspire. One writer, David Ray, remembered her exploding when she found him reading Proust, claiming that Ray’s writing was “sissy as it is” without the influence of a homosexual writer. She avoided other foreign writers, such as Camus and Kafka, as well.59 Writing made the man, ­whether by mentally putting them in touch with their au­then­tic desires or by physically making them tough. Jones depicted his own writing as a physical trial; one journalist, in an article that also mentioned Jones’s army days and his success as a boxer, described Jones as “an agony writer—­ . . . ​ [he] sweats and re-­writes, seeking the edge. He used to try to write long hours at a stretch, but found even his tough constitution c­ ouldn’t take it.”60 Handy made each colonist follow Jones’s own schedule, as demanding as it was: they awoke at dawn, wrote ­until noon with no breakfast (food would dull the creative senses, Handy believed), and emerged from this grueling trial only ­after six hours. ­A fter writing, the men spent their time in physical recreation: sometimes they played sports or learned to dive, while on other days they built new structures or paved trails. Regardless of the activity, Handy made clear the colony was “no place for artistes.” In Life magazine’s exposé, she stressed that beards and long feminine hair w ­ ere strictly banned from the colony; a military insistence on personal grooming was required of the men who toiled u­ nder Handy.61 In their cells, cut off from society, Jones’s monks transcribed the works of ­greats before them, meditated on their own souls, and shook off the desires of

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the flesh. This last temptation was harder to ignore than the rest. Sex was a subject that divided Jones and Handy. They both agreed sex was dangerous b­ ecause it was the gateway through which w ­ omen made men dependent. Thus, Handy—­ influenced by her fascination with Eastern occultism and yoga—­believed that the colonists should separate themselves from sexual urges entirely. Sex would distract them from their real ambitions. Jones, on the other hand, disagreed, believing that complete separation from sex was at the very least unrealistic, at most unnatural.62 Handy acquiesced to Jones’s point of view through a compromise. Once a month, or whenever she was sick of them, Handy would provide the colonists with spending money and send them on a trip to the nearest large city, Terre Haute. Th ­ ere the men went on raucous bar crawls that would usually end in a trip to the red-­light district to acquire a prostitute for the night. Each man would satisfy his urges and then return the next day to continue to write the next ­great American novel.63 Men needed sex, but relationships with w ­ omen would domesticate them. Prostitution offered a solution. If sex could be made into a transaction, then neither party controlled the other; men could safely keep their distance from society.64 Thus, sex was safe as long as it was separated from emotional or affectionate connections. Bowers’s memoirs corroborate this; he remembered his encounters with prostitutes in Terre Haute to be alienating in their mechanical efficiency.65 But w ­ hether or not t­ hese encounters w ­ ere emotionally fulfilling, they also meant that ­these men could relieve themselves of biological urges without succumbing to female enticement. They could continue to search for authenticity, ­free from temptation. This was the utopia devised by Handy and Jones. Men flocked to the colony to learn how to write; when they arrived, they found themselves put to work in a larger experiment in which that writing would in turn remake them. Learning both their inner desires and what ­free expression could offer them, ­these men became part of a larger blueprint for a world f­ ree from falsity. While in the endless suburbs of gray flannel Amer­i­ca, men worked white-­collar jobs and quietly forgot their aspirations, somewhere in rural Illinois Jones was showing that ­things could be dif­fer­ent. Men d­ idn’t need to s­ ettle down a­ fter the war. They could be in tune with their own desires, rather than just listening to voices telling them what to do. Jones’s writing was another way for him to express the same ideas. From ­Here to Eternity, like Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, drew directly from Jones’s war experience. But Jones’s critique tried to reach further than Mailer’s. From ­Here to Eternity dramatized the conflict between society and authenticity, the very conflict Jones thought he had solved with the colony. Above that though, by using the novel to show what men ­were like away from society, he began to offer a model of manhood that allowed for softer men, more open to expressing their inner emotions. He hoped this model would offer an alternative to the

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frontiersman narrative but one that also protected men from subordination to the domesticity of postwar Amer­i­ca. The colony had begun the p­ rocess of building men; in From ­Here to Eternity he’d show them the finished product.

From H ­ ere to Eternity The literary world was abuzz in the fall of 1952. It had been seven years since the end of the war, and the country was in the midst of another one. Editors had recently been awash in World War II novels as the thousands of men who had fought in the war recorded their own specific memoirs of their time overseas. Each looked dismally similar to publishers, who had begun to reject them out of hand. And yet Jones’s first work was set to be put to print despite the odds; his publishers had even designed a massive advertising campaign to celebrate the release. They ­were not disappointed. The novel became an immediate best seller.66 David Dempsey, writing for the New York Times, said that “ ‘From ­Here to Eternity’ is the work of a major new American novelist. To anyone who reads this im­mensely long and deeply convincing story of life in the peacetime army, it w ­ ill be apparent that in James Jones an original and utterly honest talent has restored American realism to a pre-­eminent place in world lit­er­a­ture.”67 John Dos Passos, the legendary author of the USA trilogy, explained his admiration for the novel by writing that “Prewitt and Angelo and Sergeant Warden and the rest of them reach something of the greatness of figures of tragedy b­ ecause their hopeless dilemma expresses so glaringly the basic tragic dilemma of our time.” Review ­after review of the book praised it; while some readers found the prose simplistic or crude, the vast majority instead observed that the book captured the realism of war far better than most of its contemporaries. Mailer was worried. He had read a review copy and was dismayed to admit how highly he thought of it: “I think his book is one of the best of the ‘war novels,’ and in certain facets is perhaps the best.” But did this also mean that Mailer was no longer the preeminent writer of the war? Mailer’s most recent book, Barbary Shore, was widely hated by just about every­one, and it was a bad time for Mailer to realize he had competition. He wrote to Jones’s editors that he’d like to meet this up-­and-­coming writer.68 Despite the emerging rivalry, Mailer was impressed with Jones. “Jones was an avatar of energy,” Mailer ­later explained, and “the variety of his small-­town personality was not only canny and overbearing, but also as warm as your best buddy. . . . ​He made . . . ​me feel pale, establishmentarian, and much too modest by comparison.”69 They recognized a common similarity immediately, having both fought in the Pacific Theater, and Mailer found that Jones could match him drink for drink, ­woman for ­woman. During 1951 and 1952, Jones had to increasingly venture away from the colony to New York while he discussed the emerging novel with his editors. E ­ very time he was t­ here he rang up Mailer, and together they went on legendary escapades throughout the streets of New York. Away

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from ­women, in the fellowship of a veteran like himself, Jones may have felt like the au­then­tic man, f­ ree to express his desires as he felt them, that he had been chasing since the founding of the colony.70 Both Mailer and Jones performed a distinctive macho p­ erformance of manliness, laced with misogyny (Mailer ­later told a story from one of their drunken excursions in which Jones, mockingly trying to imply that real men ­wouldn’t be bound by ­women’s wishes, pointedly asked writer Vance Bourjaily ­whether he “ever cheat[ed] on [his] wife”).71 Mailer’s aggressive streak might have originated from his need to appear the soldier every­one assumed he was, while Jones’s biographer has characterized Jones’s machismo as a defense mechanism against ­people he feared ­were more educated and refined than he was.72 ­Whatever their reasons, they both self-­styled themselves as rebels against society and used macho posturing to prove it to t­ hose around them. However, u­ nder the surface the two men had starkly dif­fer­ent philosophies about how men should respond to postwar society. Mailer’s manhood was defined by toughness, forged in conflict; Jones repudiated the notion that manhood was about overcoming ­trials, instead believing that expression and true authenticity ­were the signifiers of manhood. Male spaces, apart from the rules and responsibilities of o­ thers, w ­ ere prerequisites that allowed men to be emotional and true to themselves in a way they ­couldn’t be in society. From H ­ ere to Eternity was a massive success in part b­ ecause it fit with the cultural concerns of the times. Viewed from one ­angle, the book was a direct commentary on the nature of manhood ­a fter the war, an eight-­hundred-­page behemoth arguing against the banality and emasculation of modern American life.73 But deeper than this, Eternity also delivered a total vision of what a new manhood could be like. Drawing from his life at the colony, Jones presented his readers with the almost exclusively male environment of the infantry, a place where men could act freely in the com­pany of other men. Jones’s men v­ iolated nearly ­every taboo civilian life demanded: they drank and swore, had sex with prostitutes, fraternized with gay men, and shirked their responsibilities. But they also showed the potential for emotional honesty, and some, like Private Robert Prewitt, learned to repudiate vio­lence and embrace an honest brotherhood between men. The setting Jones chose for From ­Here to Eternity—­the barracks Jones was stationed at in Hawaii on the eve of Pearl Harbor—­demonstrates just how dif­ fer­ent Jones’s priorities ­were from his con­temporary war writers. Mailer, like most of the veterans writing about the war, set The Naked and the Dead on the battlefield, creating a faux frontier in which his soldiers could test themselves against the savage wild. From ­Here to Eternity, however, lacked any depictions of combat ­until the final pages. Instead, Jones mostly discussed military discipline and how soldiers acted during their downtime. Jones’s setting created a tension between the uncivilized au­then­tic lives of the soldiers and the rules and compromises that characterized their interactions with the officer class. The infantry

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acted as a male space, but one close enough to civilization to be intruded on by ­women, civilians, and the military elite, Jones’s proxies for society. The tension in the novel was derived from how ­these soldiers, who lived au­then­tic lives while together, had to also resist the lures of respectability and attempt to preserve their inner princi­ples in the face of pressures to do what o­ thers demanded of them.74 The two protagonists of the novel w ­ ere defined by the ways that they navigated between two worlds: the world of rules and regulations—­the officer class—­ and the world of the regular “Dogface” soldiers. One, Robert Prewitt, was at odds with the captain of his com­pany, who asked Prewitt to betray his princi­ ples for ­acceptance. The other, Warden, found himself tempted to betray his values and become a member of the establishment b­ ecause of his love for a w ­ oman. The novel began by introducing Prewitt, a man defined by his stubborn idealism, who had just vowed to never compete in a boxing match a­ fter blinding a man. When his new commanding officer, Captain “Dynamite” Holmes, attempted to compel him to join the com­pany boxing team—­and thus bring prestige to Holmes’s unit—­Prewitt refused. The tension over boxing was a standin for the tension between society’s demands and masculine i­ndependence. Holmes craved the approval of his superiors and believed a good boxing team would earn him that fame. He used all his institutional powers to compel Prewitt to betray his princi­ples, but Prewitt refused to cave to the demands of o­ thers. Even when given a way out—he could transfer to the kitchen away from Holmes—­Prewitt declined, citing his values as a man: “­Every man has certain rights,” Prewitt explained, “[and] if I go in the kitchen then I’m giving up one of my rights, see?” Prewitt continued, “I hate to believe that thats the only way a man can get along. ­Because if it is, then what a man is dont mean anything at all. A man himself is nothing.”75 In retaliation, Holmes ruined Prewitt’s life. A ­ fter facing constant, degrading treatment, Prewitt was eventually sent to the stockades—­a military prison—on trumped-up charges, which led to Prewitt murdering a prison guard to avenge a dead friend. In turn, Prewitt had to hide from the military, only to be accidentally shot when he attempted to return to his unit. In the end, all Prewitt had was his authenticity, the military having taken every­thing e­ lse away from him. Eternity continuously counterposed Holmes’s world of prestige seeking with the au­then­tic, all-­male world of the infantry. The “non-­coms” of the military drank and swore, fought over perceived slights, and spoke plainly about their feelings. They valued honesty; their mirrors, the sycophantic “jock-­straps,” ­were shunned by the other men for their inauthenticity. But importantly, this ­wasn’t just a s­ imple rebellion against societal strictures. In t­ hose spaces where the non-­ coms could separate from ­others, they ­were able to be emotionally open with each other. Prewitt was a bugler: when playing to express his inner feelings (he put his “naked h ­ uman soul” on display with his bugle), his m ­ usic was so power­ful it brought other men to tears. In one chapter the soldiers sat by a fire and wrote an

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improvised blues song together that revealed the pains of being misunderstood by civilians; h ­ ere, the soldiers could express their inner doubts and worries to each other. Another scene depicted how Prewitt and Warden, drunk and despondent, lay in the ­middle of a road together and gained a moment of au­then­tic connection. Jones wrote that the two soldiers “bravely . . . ​choked back the unmanly tears of parting and sat straight as soldiers, staring proudly down the yellow ribbon from which the doom would come.”76 In the morning, once they awoke, they “had managed for a moment to touch another ­human soul and understand it.”77 Jones ­imagined that once they ­were apart from society, men could drop pretentions of stoicism and bare their soul. Warden faced his own ­battle with conformity and authenticity. Like Prewitt, Warden resented society, which “in e­ very country everywhere . . . ​holds ­every rein.”78 However, Warden’s central conflict emerged from his affair with the wife of Captain Holmes, Karen. Their romance highlighted the dangers w ­ omen posed to any man and showed how au­then­tic manhood was threatened by the lure of domestic life. Warden initially romanced her for selfish reasons: “as an expression of himself, to regain the individuality that Holmes and all the rest of them, unknowingly, had taken from him.”79 However, he fell in love and found himself increasingly tempted to abandon his princi­ples in order to be with her. Like the ­women of Jones’s early writing, Karen Holmes could not be satisfied with just love; as a ­woman, she needed respectability as well. Warden, only a sergeant, was hardly the material for a permanent relationship, and so Karen delivered an ultimatum to Warden: she would leave her husband only if Warden became an officer. But if he did, Warden would fully become a part of the establishment; he would be no better than sycophantic men like Holmes. “The only way we can defeat them is to make our love conform to their conventions—­ outwardly,” Karen pleaded to Warden, explaining that they need not practice what they preached so long as they appeared respectable. But Warden knew that the act of “conforming” to societal expectations, even superficially, was to let ­others dictate how he acted, and thus just as inauthentic as giving in entirely.80 Throughout Eternity—as in They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter—­women ­were interested in security above all ­else: sex and love became tools ­toward this end. Karen d­ idn’t enjoy sex: a­ fter her husband gave her gonorrhea, she had lost her uterus (much like Handy’s real-­life experience), and without her ability to reproduce, she felt akin to “an empty husk . . . ​the meaning of sex [was] gone.”81 Instead, Karen needed Warden to give her respectability: her love for him, or the emotional connection of sex, was not enough. Prewitt’s parallel relationship, with a prostitute named Alma, demonstrated the same dynamic. Prewitt, like “most men,” felt sex as an intense emotional connection (“at the moment of screwing [a w ­ oman], I was in love with her”). But for Alma, sex was only a path to respectability. Her plan was to use prostitution to leave Hawaii and marry a respectable man on the mainland.82 Prewitt, a lowly non-­com, c­ ouldn’t give her the security she craved, even if she did feel for him.

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Jones was too sophisticated a writer to make w ­ omen purely into villains. Karen Holmes, Alma, and the other ­women in Eternity are sympathetic characters. But Jones’s ­women are dif­fer­ent from men; their strug­gles conflicted with men’s goals. Men, in trying to preserve their authenticity, had to eternally fight with ­women, rarely resisting their lures permanently and usually succumbing to domesticity.83 While Jones’s postwar writing mostly stressed the dichotomy between men and w ­ omen, ­there w ­ ere still echoes of the racial foundations of frontiersman masculinity implicit in his writing. For instance, the contrast he made between the officers and the non-­coms was implicitly racialized. The non-­coms ­were diverse, and Jones featured Jewish, Hispanic, and Italian characters in its retinue: no similar attempt was made to diversify the officers. While the officers spoke formally, many of the infantry had distinctive accents that picked them out as ethnic. Even the term “dogface” that Jones used to refer to non-­coms originated from the Cherokee language.84 While atavistic, Jones’s use of race was complicated: rather than reify the hierarchies of frontiersman masculinity, Jones tried to flip this hierarchy by locating true, au­then­tic manhood with the ethnically diverse soldier class. In Eternity, whiteness d­ idn’t equate to manhood. In fact, it could be an obstacle to forming au­then­tic connections with other men. The existence of brotherhood between ­these ethnically distinct men also raised the possibility that Jones’s ideal of manhood could transcend race, an idea expressed in other parts of the novel. Consider the character Angelo Maggio, an Italian American and close friend to Prewitt. While in many ways an Italian American ­stereotype—he was reflexively Catholic, had a temper, and was ready to fight a man over his s­ ister’s honor—as Maggio grew he shed that status and was whitened.85 In the first act, Maggio was less mature and more prone to displays of machismo than Prewitt, but ­after an accident that sent him to the stockades, Maggio changed. Maggio endured punishment rather than submit to the sycophancy required to survive the stockades; in resisting, he showed his commitment to his own ideals. Prewitt noted how much more assured and mature he was; he was no longer a “young Italian boy,” Prewitt remarked, but now a man.86 As he became manly, however, the p­ rocess also washed away his ethnic status. Prewitt remarked that the new Maggio had a “face without nationality, now that the long wop nose was broken.”87 Paradoxically, an ethnic infantryman could attain manliness only by shedding his racial identities altogether. Jones’s postwar thinking about race was never well developed, and Maggio’s case aligns with other examples that suggest Jones believed racial identities ­were dangerous ­because they divided men. In Eternity, a discussion between Prewitt and a southern cook, Stark, suggested that Stark’s prejudice against African Americans prevented him from imagining male brotherhood, while a Jewish character named Blum prevented himself from ever connecting with other men ­because he was paranoid they held antisemitic prejudices. In ­either case, Jones suggested, both victim and oppressor needed to ignore race entirely to join together as men. Race relations at the colony reflected this blind spot. While

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t­ here ­were occasionally some Black colonists, Handy urged them to avoid discussing racism in their writing. “[You must] forget that you are a negro,” Handy told one such colonist. “You have never been discriminated against ­here.”88 To Jones and Handy, race was often a distraction from au­then­tic connection. Jones also attempted to discuss homo­sexuality, with ­limited success. Eternity walked a dangerous line: in the context of postwar Amer­i­ca, an indictment of domesticity and calls for male camaraderie could easily raise suspicions of homo­ sexuality.89 Thus, to repudiate the possibility that his vision of manhood called for homo­sexuality, Jones wrote a scene specifically contrasting his characters with effeminate, gay s­ tereotypes. Eternity discussed homo­sexuality candidly and in detail, a rarity for Jones’s time.90 Indeed, his ­lawyers advised him to remove most of the explicit references to sex between men, a decision he fought ­until the final galley prints ­were sent to the press.91 From H ­ ere to Eternity contained passages in which Angelo Maggio fraternized with gay men in Honolulu, drawing from Jones’s w ­ artime second­ hand knowledge.92 The printed novel intimates that Maggio might have sexual relationships with the gay men he met in town, but mostly leaves this up to insinuation; in dialogue cut from the final version, however, Angelo Maggio was much more explicit. “I admit it’s nothing like a w ­ oman,” Maggio told Prewitt in a deleted conversation. “But it’s something. Besides, old Hal treats me swell. He’s always good for a touch when I’m broke. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Comes in handy the ­middle of the month. . . . ​Only reason I let Hal blow me is b­ ecause I got a good ­thing ­there.”93 Deleted conversations like this one reveal how complicated Jones’s understanding of homo­sexuality was. Jones was very familiar with the practice, common in Hawaii, in which soldiers would fraternize and have sex with the local gay community in exchange for food and drinks, and he prob­ably knew and respected men who engaged in such practices.94 While Field embraced t­ hese ­wartime homosexual encounters as evidence of authenticity, Jones saw t­ hese as a curiosity. ­Later in his life, Jones would often bluntly boast of his own familiarity with sex acts between men, and though it was unlikely he had personal experience, he used his knowledge of the taboo subject to demonstrate his r­ esistance to societal norms.95 And while he never embraced the manliness inherent in homosexual connection, like Field, the compassion Jones treated Maggio with elsewhere in the novel suggested that Jones believed a man who engaged in homosexual acts could still be manly. This was not a blanket a­ cceptance, however: as Jones’s depiction of his characters Hal and Tommy shows, while homosexual acts may have been tolerated by Jones, effeminate ­performances he associated with gay men w ­ ere beyond the pale.96 ­These men ­were crude, effeminate ­stereotypes of homo­sexuality: Hal and Tommy w ­ ere “queenie,” “dear,” or a “b-­tch” to each other and relished their refined taste, and Jones’s writing all but spelled out the swish they walked with.97 They also seemed to prey on straight men like Maggio by buying drinks and

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extolling the virtues of the love-­that-­dare-­not-­speak-­its-­name. As ­these gay men whispered honeyed words, they appealed to their prey by critiquing society in a way that resembled the ­actual critique Jones’s colony made. Hal, at first, seemed a mirror to Jones: he claimed that Amer­i­ca was a matriarchal society, run by repulsive, domineering ­women, and argued that the male camaraderie of homo­sexuality and the ostracization gay men received w ­ ere the only ways to resist feminization.98 But the book quickly dismissed the idea of homo­sexuality as rebellion, or manliness. Hal may have claimed that homo­ sexuality was the only true, au­then­tic escape from a de­cadent American society, but if that w ­ ere the case, Prewitt argued, Hal and Tommy would be able to express themselves honestly. Instead, Tommy earned his keep writing trashy romance novels, not even willing to put his real name on his work.99 As the debate continued, Tommy eventually argued that he was born with same-­sex desires. But Jones unraveled this lie as well. Prewitt discovered that Tommy’s first experience with same-­sex desire was being gang-­raped by schoolboys when he was twelve. Tommy admitted that his self-­hatred led him to desire the rape.100 Horrifyingly, it soon becomes clear that this was Jones’s own explanation of homo­sexuality: gay men hated themselves so much they hid from themselves in same-­sex desire—­the very antithesis of authenticity and emotional honesty. Thus, Prewitt concluded, Its never done much for me, society. What has it given me? It aint done near as much for me as it has done for you. Look at this place, look at it. But I dont hate it like you hate it. You hate it b­ ecause you hate yourself. You aint rebelling against society, y­ ou’re rebelling against yourself. You aint rebelling against anything, y­ ou’re just rebelling.101

Enveloped in urban de­cadence, gay men pretended as though they could find the same truth inside society that men found on the ­wartime frontier. Despite their attempts, they could do nothing but playact; they could create only a perverse, empty mimicry of true male brotherhood. Up u­ ntil the midway point From ­Here to Eternity could be read as a typical narrative about the strug­gle between men and modern American society, albeit with an emphasis on male intimacy. However, the last third of the novel served to push Jones’s critique further, expressly to question the central tenets of frontiersman manhood entirely. In this segment, he introduced a character as Jones’s mouthpiece to explain what real manhood, not fake rebellion, actually consisted of. That character was the Gandhi-­like Jack Malloy, a prisoner of the stockades who was cloistered away from even the other prisoners. To meet him, men had to undergo a trial: first they had to disobey the authorities in the stockade—­and thus assert their rebellion against society—to such a degree that they ­were thrown into solitary confinement in “the pit.” Left alone, away from societal pressures, men had to face their inner truth; some men went insane while in the pit, while

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o­ thers emerged stronger. ­Those who did emerge proved they ­were fully in touch with themselves and became a new species of man fully inoculated from societal temptations.102 Prewitt underwent the test to meet Malloy, but when he met the man, he was surprised by what Malloy taught. Malloy told Prewitt to disavow toughness and machoism. Instead, he espoused Eastern occultism (likely inspired by Handy) to preach sensitivity and self-­reflection. Malloy taught Prewitt that all men w ­ ere aspects of the same divine being and that once men understood this, they would also understand the futility of vio­lence and dominance. Thus, the ­great epiphany Malloy offered Prewitt was that men ­were all intimately connected; cruelty and vio­lence stemmed only from the society that separated men from each other.103 Prewitt does not fully understand Malloy’s wisdom ­until the final pages of the novel; instead, against Malloy’s advice, he took revenge on a cruel prison warden, Fatso. Prewitt had been emasculated by watching, powerless, as Fatso murdered a friend in the stockades; Prewitt believed that killing Fatso might take away that humiliation and “may even make him into a man again.”104 But Prewitt ­didn’t realize that ideas like honor defined him against the expectations of ­others; the need for revenge was something taught to him, not an au­then­tic desire. He learned the lesson too late, only a­ fter stabbing Fatso to death outside a bar. While Fatso lay in his arms, Prewitt fi­nally realized how hollow revenge was. Fatso did not even recognize him or know why Prewitt needed to kill him; how could he possibly feel any satisfaction in what he had done? Meanwhile, Prewitt sustained serious injuries fighting Fatso. He was unable to rejoin the army without being blamed for Fatso’s death, and so his only option was to crawl to his lover Alma for help. Th ­ ere, he became an emasculated “kept man,” trapped in a domestic prison (Prewitt joked that his life story should be named From Hair to Maternity).105 Fi­nally, when the ­Japanese attacked, Prewitt tried to rejoin his unit, only to be accidentally gunned down by soldiers who mistook him for an e­ nemy combatant. Unceremoniously shot, Prewitt was forgotten by every­one except Warden, who, in the final pages, recognized Prewitt as the ideal soldier, tragically destroyed by a military that wanted him to compromise his values.106 In interviews, Jones l­ ater explained that this ending was a repudiation of violent masculinity: You see, when Prewitt kills Fatso he is carry­ing the theory of vengeance by vio­lence to its final logical end. But the t­ hing is that Fatso ­doesn’t even know why he is being killed; and when Prewitt sees that, he realizes what a fruitless ­thing he has done. Then at the end, when he does not fire on the men who are ­going to kill him, it was ­because he has accepted the ultimate logical end of passive ­resistance, which is death. . . .

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It is in an effort to prove . . . ​bravery that we fight . . . ​whereas if a man w ­ ere truly brave he w ­ ouldn’t have to be always proving it to himself. So therefore I am forced to consider bravery suspect, and ridicu­lous, and dangerous.107

Prewitt’s need for revenge came from societal scripts that told him he needed to be made “into a man again.” But the revenge brought him nothing, and in that moment he realized how meaningless this type of manliness was. When Prewitt died, he threw off his allegiance to a violent, Maileresque strug­gle. From ­Here to Eternity was an ambitious novel. Not only did Jones attempt to repudiate the machoism prevalent in so much other war writing, but he did so in a novel that sought to demonstrate that war experience itself could lead men to question the vio­lence inherent in manhood. Understood in this way, the novel is inextricable from the Handy Writers’ Colony. Both w ­ ere components of a larger proj­ect to relearn what men could be and challenge the assumptions built into postwar American views of manhood. The colony taught men to become honest and au­then­tic through their actions; Eternity sought to demonstrate a heroism founded on t­ hose goals.

Conclusion Not every­one got the message. Jones’s critique of modern manhood was subtle and easily missed. Instead, primed by the discourse of the era, readers responded to a story about men resisting conformity.108 Most reviews of the book discussed Prewitt’s quest for authenticity and his fight against authority, but they hardly, if ever, discussed Jones’s calls for nonviolence or his deconstruction of heroism. Jack Malloy or virtually any part of the ending ­were never mentioned. In ­doing so, reviewers missed Jones’s larger point repudiating not just conformity but also the frontiersman narrative that was no less societally dictated. Manhood was not simply fighting society; it was being able to express oneself freely without worrying about society. Men could not just resist conformity; they needed to opt out of society entirely. ­W hether or not his readers picked up on Jones’s critique hardly mattered: From ­Here to Eternity became a hit overnight. The success of the book made a film version almost inevitable, and director Fred Zinnemann was quickly connected to the proj­ect. Zinnemann boasted an impressive pedigree: having just produced a film about the ­trials of veterans’ readjustment (Stewart Stern’s Teresa) and a movie about men’s strug­gles to resist conformity culture (High Noon), From ­Here to Eternity may have been a logical progression. Initially, Jones was contracted as the writer of the screenplay, but he was predictably unable to compromise over the changes that needed to be made to the script.109 Eventually, frustrated with the ­process, Jones washed his hands of the proj­ect. “The book ­will stand by itself a­ fter the movie is forgotten,” Jones explained.110

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He was wrong; in many ways the film surpassed the book in American memory. Starring Montgomery Clift as Prewitt and Frank Sinatra as Angelo Maggio, the film won acclaim and caught a much wider audience than the book ever had. “ ‘From ­Here to Eternity’ stands as a shining example of truly professional moviemaking,” wrote the New York Times’ film critic.111 The year it was released, the film swept the Acad­emy Awards, winning eight dif­fer­ent categories, including Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture. However, as widely praised as the film was, the movie betrayed Jones’s message, and a story about repudiating frontiersman manhood was transformed into a fable valorizing it. Prewitt became a standard heroic figure, a model soldier who fought against a corrupt Captain Holmes. Gone was his larger quest for authenticity or the subtext about compromising his values, replaced with a hero who needed no more than to defend his honor against the indignities he was put through by Holmes and Fatso. Warden, as well, no longer strug­g led with negotiating his love for Karen and her need for respectability. He was heroic ­because he was a soldier: when the J­ apanese attacked, Warden led the charge and even fired a mounted machine gun back at them. In both Warden’s and Prewitt’s cases, their characters survived the transition but ­were molded into figures that better fit con­temporary ideas of heroism.112 From ­Here to Eternity also jettisoned the book’s more controversial ele­ments; in d­ oing so, Jones’s more specific critiques w ­ ere forgotten. Lorene (Alma) was no longer a prostitute but simply a waitress who fell deeply in love with Montgomery Clift’s Prewitt. With this change, she was no longer a commentary on how w ­ omen used sex to gain respectability; instead, Prewitt and Lorene became a typical doomed romance. Maggio no longer knew anything about the gay bars in town, and the story could no longer show the complexity of a man who associated with gay men. Th ­ ere ­were no scenes in the stockades and no Jack Malloy to preach the princi­ples of nonviolence; without Malloy, ­there could be no commentary on the meaninglessness of traditional ideas of honor and bravery. And in the end the movie condemned Captain Holmes but added a scene that made clear that he acted against the ­will of the American military, an other­wise benevolent ­organization. Society turned out to be good, while individuals w ­ ere evil; the exact opposite of what Jones tried to express.113 What was left resembled Mailer’s war much more than Jones’s. From ­Here to Eternity became a tragic romance, in which the outbreak of war tore Prewitt and Warden cruelly from their loves, Alma and Karen. The climax of the film, in which the J­ apanese attacked Pearl Harbor, became a standard action scene, in which Warden rallied troops together to heroically fight the J­ apanese, not as a group of petty, cynical soldiers but as a team of well-­trained, professional men. The implication of the movie was clear: no ­matter how badly the peacetime army may have treated a man like Prewitt, when the test came they could be depended upon to protect American freedom. Jones had written Eternity to expose

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“distortions and falseness” of societal views of heroism.114 In a final irony, Hollywood mutilated From H ­ ere to Eternity into the definitive example of that very ideal.115 In part, this is an impor­tant example of how the veterans’ critique got lost in a larger debate. The American public was responsive to anx­i­eties about male autonomy and conformity in postwar society, making the studies and fictional novels that discussed this theme best sellers. They w ­ ere less responsive to themes that directly challenged the frontiersman narrative or anything that questioned the primacy of heterosexual relationships. It’s especially telling that the film version removed the themes of male brotherhood and replaced them with a more typical romance story. In the end, though ­wartime had taught Jones to repudiate macho, hetero-­domestic manhood, American civilians ­were more interested in stories of men struggling to assert their individuality. But that ­didn’t ­matter to Jones. By the time the film was released he and Handy had their hands full as new men traveled to the colony. If most of his readers misinterpreted his message, ­there ­were still a sizable number of men who saw in Eternity an alternative to the life postwar Amer­i­ca promised them. Though some became disenchanted with Jones and Handy, for five years ­after From ­Here to Eternity was published, the colony bustled with activity as men tried to experience au­then­tic manhood far beyond the confines of American civilization. Handy was already bragging the colony had produced novels ready to be published; very soon, she explained, ­they’d be a veritable factory, spreading Jones’s gospel around the country. The best was just ahead of them. Jones had already forgotten Eternity. As the camp swelled with new recruits, Jones was working on a new masterpiece.

5

The Men Who Came ­Running James Jones and the Handy Writers’ Colony Dave had, somehow or other, in the year he’d been married, become respectable: a respectable workingman. . . . ​But when he stood beside his automatic paint machine, wearing the new glasses he had bought recently to improve his eyesight, while the shell casings set up by the ­women revolved by on their spindles tripping the automatic sprays that coated them with lacquer both inside and out and then went on the baking dryer, he could not help but feel a sense of greater strangeness still. And, whenever he stepped outside and saw again the big Federal prison buildings in the distance across the fields, he would won­der darkly how all t­ hose nameless prisoners who ­were in t­ here had come to be ­there? what had they done? just as he wondered how he himself had ever come to be h ­ ere? . . . 120

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And so h ­ ere he was: a man who had married first for sex, and second for stability and peace; and third for someone to help him with his work: and he had none of them. . . . The only recourse, the only pos­si­ble escape, in any way, seemed to be to get that damned novel back out again and try to fix it up. Hell, if only he could only sell the book, maybe she would stop. And so, in spite of the extra hours he was already working at the shell plant, and in spite of the sleep and rest it cost him, he pulled the novel down off its shelf in the closet and—in spite of Ginnie’s sneering stinging remarks about it—in desperation locked himself away in the one l­ ittle room in the ­house where he could work, and started in to revise it—­some way, some how. . . . ​Ginnie b-­tched and carped about this, too; but—­silently, doggedly, stubbornly—he stuck with it. He had to. It was his only out. He knew, of course, that the caliber of the work was not—­ could not be—up to the caliber of the work he used to turn out. But it was his only out. If he gave that up, t­ here was nothing left. God! It was a far cry from the marriage he had once envisioned for himself, wasnt it? —­James Jones, Some Came R ­ unning, 1957

By the time From ­Here to Eternity was released, James Jones had given up on it. He was busy, alongside Lowney, building the Handy Writers’ Colony. Eternity had made him rich (the movie even more than the book), and he sank all that money directly back into the colony. They built a mansion, and Jones started collecting guns, swords, toy soldiers—­any instruments of combat that suited his fancy. The colony grew and grew, and soon Lowney was turning back more applicants than she could take in.1 Gradually, imperceptibly, the colony changed. Jones never gave up his jeremiads against society, domesticity, and ­women, but the goals shifted. By the point of the colony’s collapse in 1957, Jones’s

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philosophy of nonviolence and emotional honesty got increasingly buried as he ­adopted the accoutrements of frontiersman manhood, blurring the line between his affection for a space away from society and a glorification of a machismo that he had previously condemned. A reporter from Life magazine in 1954 might have noticed the changing conditions at the colony, had he been familiar with its early years. When the man arrived, Jones took him on a tour of all his new improvements. The man marveled at “the two story living room of the bizarre, $85,000 four room bachelor palace” Jones had built. Jones, excitedly, showed him his r­ ifle collection; he made sure to take out a few and let the reporter hold them. He also gave a tour of his exercise room and did a few pull-­ups to prove his physical vitality. Jones frequently fenced, he bragged, and his guest also noticed the punching bag in the corner that Jones used for boxing practice. Jones showed off his ping-­pong t­ able, making sure the reporter knew “it ­ain’t no sissy sport,” and followed up by making sure the reporter got a photo­graph of him thrusting with one of his trea­sured knives. The centerpiece of the visit was when Jones showed off the manuscript for his next book, the follow-up to Eternity. The manuscript was a foot and a half tall, and Jones made a point to lift it, equating the muscles needed to heave it with the muscles needed to write it.2 “I could walk out of h ­ ere tomorrow and live in the gutter,” Jones explained to the guest. “I just ­wouldn’t work as well.” Yet, despite Jones protestations, this statement seemed to ring untrue. Jones had prided himself on living apart from society; was he still able to amid this luxury? His knives w ­ ere a case in point: the first short story Jones ever sold, “The Temper of Steel,” had been about a veteran both­ered by a knife collector. The collector loved the stories of heroism the knives represented; Jones’s veteran knew that knives c­ouldn’t have stories since war ­wasn’t brave or heroic. When Jones wrote it in 1946, he had been the veteran; now, in 1954, he had become the collector.3 During the fifties, t­ here ­were many ­people and groups that advocated a male rebellion from the social norms of domesticity. The Beats, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, the Mattachine Society, and even Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Be­hav­ior in the ­Human Male ­were all cultural touchstones that suggested men could break from the hetero-­domestic ideology prevalent in the time period.4 Yet none of ­these became a ­viable alternative to domesticity in their own time. Jones’s own revolt hints at why. Still embedded in American culture was an ideal of frontiersman masculinity, and though Jones (or Kerouac, or Hefner) could challenge it, it was difficult for their readers to fully adopt a dif­fer­ent blueprint. Lowney Handy found that even as the colony attracted more talent, the ideals on which it was founded seemed to erode. Even Jones began to romanticize what he had originally been skeptical of. The golden years of the Handy Writers’ Colony demonstrate the elusive nature of Jones’s critique. While Jones could teach men to rebel from societal norms on the outskirts of civilization, he ­couldn’t teach t­ hose men to do something with

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that rebellion. Instead, the Handy Writers’ Colony demonstrated the intransigence of the frontiersman. The rebellion he taught was subsumed into frontiersman ideals of individualism and self-­reliance; the men who ­were supposed to get in touch with their au­then­tic desires instead played the role of a cowboy through dif­fer­ent means. By the time Jones wrote Some Came R ­ unning, even he had realized how hard it was for men to resist the molds society had made for them.

“Freedom, Possibilities, [and] Writing the Book” The mid-­fi fties w ­ ere the height of popularity for the Handy Writers’ Colony. From ­Here to Eternity had made Jones a literary star, and Life, hoping to understand the writer better, had done a feature story on Handy and the colony, presenting her as a miracle worker. She was a muse who had perfected a system that could train anyone to become a successful writer, the magazine claimed. ­A fter the article, the colony saw a surge of interest, and between 1951 and 1957 it bustled with new colonists, to the point that Handy had begun turning away applicants. More than seventy men took part in the colony during ­those years; Handy corresponded with many more who sent her manuscripts, asking for advice.5 Some of the interest, of course, was due to Jones’s emerging celebrity status. However, the novelty of the colony ­can’t explain the sheer number of men who stayed for entire seasons, and often years, returning e­ very spring to rejoin Handy and Jones. The evidence we have is that, to many American men, Jones’s message resonated. ­Whether or not they understood the themes and nuances of From ­Here to Eternity, the image of heroism presented therein attracted men who yearned for an alternative to the domesticity they other­wise felt pressured t­ oward. One con­temporary article depicted the colonists as failures, dropouts from society who had “seen the seamy side of life, in jail cells and psychopathic wards, and on freight trains and battlefields.”6 At the very least, the stories from colonists seem to bear out the idea that t­ hose who joined w ­ ere often alienated from modern American life. David Ray, a colonist who l­ ater became disillusioned with Handy and the colony, reported initially joining out of a boredom with college. He had dropped out of the University of Chicago due to bad grades and found that his new school, the University of Arizona, offered few E ­ nglish classes. Just as “the university was r­ unning out of courses and I was r­ unning out of interest,” he found that the colony might offer him something more exciting.7 John Bowers offered a similar narrative. He left an office job in Tennessee to join the colony, citing the boring, middle-­class town he grew up in as a reason he had to prove himself to the world.8 He idolized Jones ­after reading From ­Here to Eternity and said of the book that it “made me feel like a man, and in a way had made me thereafter see every­thing in a slightly dif­fer­ent light.”9 When he got to the camp, he marveled at the minimalist atmosphere, which seemed a fresh alternative to the materialistic world he was escaping. The enthusiasm of the

FIGURES 4, 5, AND 6  ​James Jones lifting the manuscript for Some Came ­Running. Next to this

picture, Life included Jones with his r­ ifle collection, shirtlessly playing ping-­pong, and thrusting with a knife. (Photos by Art Shay.)

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writers he met also impressed him. “Boy, every­one was a real writer!” he remembered thinking. “None of t­ hose boring, narrow-­minded Republicans I was used to in my hometown.”10 He was drawn to the camp ­because it “meant Freedom, Possibilities, Writing the book,” while home meant “Marriage, Babies, Responsibilities.”11 Some of the writers also had war experience, suggesting that the ideas of the colony might have resonated with veterans beyond Jones himself. At least two of the primary participants—­Tinks Howe and Tom Chamales—­were also World War II veterans, while at least three other impor­tant members of the

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colony—­Don Sackrider, John Bowers, and Elwood Harris—­had served in ­Korea e­ ither before or in between their times in the colony.12 All five of t­ hese men returned to the colony multiple years, and most w ­ ere part of Jones’s inner circle. While the vast majority of men who ­were a part of the colony left few biographical rec­ords b­ ehind, this anecdotal evidence at least suggests that ­those most invested in the colony ­were at least somewhat likely to have served in the military. If Jones’s readjustment to postwar society led him to turn his back on domesticity, then he was not alone among veterans in searching for alternatives. In the previous chapter I discussed the ways that the colony taught men to disassociate from the society around them: Handy and Jones taught ­these men to sever connections with girlfriends and wives, taught them to live Spartan existences, and hoped ­they’d learn to discard societal rules of propriety and politeness. The effect was to create a countercultural space where Jones’s disciples felt ­free to question every­thing they had known.13 Some of the colonists had never heard a ­woman swear, much less a ­woman who so venomously attacked respectability and domesticity, before they had met Handy.14 Furthermore, Handy and Jones practiced what they preached: they lived in a relationship that to the outside world looked like an open marriage. The very intimation that men could turn their back on marriage and spend their time writing novels on a farm with other single men was, at the time, revelatory. This generation was surrounded by cultural artifacts that assumed success and ­family ­were one and the same, and yet the men who arrived at the colony w ­ ere told something dif­fer­ent.15 The colony also inculcated a shared sense of purpose and camaraderie. The men lived communally, shared all their meals, read the same books, and even developed a shared hatred of the constant enemas Handy believed would help purify them.16 In the after­noons, they sometimes played football—­Jones was the captain of the team, of course—or for one summer learned to dive off a diving board they had built over their lake. At other times, they would work together to build new structures for the camp. John Bowers remembered spending long hours constructing a brick walkway; during one summer Handy had ­grand plans of constructing a refrigerated storage cellar, a proj­ect they all worked on for weeks ­until her poor planning led to its collapse.17 In the winters, Handy would invite the permanent members to vacation to Florida (or other locations) with her and Jones, trips the group valued for the close-­knit fellowship created through the long drives and close proximity.18 The testimonials of ex-­members of the community all make clear that, as a site of rebellion and anticonformity, the colony was a success.19 For almost ten years, the Handy Writers’ Colony offered a genuine space in which men could repudiate postwar expectations. Living in a society that looked askance at men who had not married, ­here was a place in which unattached men ­were living together, unsupported by a regular income, espousing ideas their families would find shocking.

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At the same time, as the years went on, it became increasingly unclear if ­these men w ­ ere actually imbibing the values Jones and Handy hoped to impart. The colony taught ­these men to rebel against society, but that rebellion was only a small part of the veterans’ critique. Even though Jones had written From ­Here to Eternity to question the fundamental qualities of the frontiersman, the colonists did not show that they understood what the au­then­tic man would actually look like. And as time passed, Jones too showed less and less attention to that ideal. By the time the colony failed, Jones was mimicking the very type of man he had rejected.

“Sportsmen” As early as 1953, Mailer may have noticed something was wrong. On his way to Chicago with his new fiancée, Adele, Mailer set about visiting Jones’s Colony and reconnected with a friend he ­hadn’t seen since they cavorted around New York. A smartly dressed New Yorker traveling across the country with his quiet and diminutive soon-­to-be wife, Mailer was immediately out of place when surrounded by a pack of tanned, muscled men living out in a field. Jones, as he became more infatuated with the rural West, had taken to wearing cowboy boots, Stetsons, and Levi jeans, a contrast to Mailer’s own suit.20 The rest of the men at the colony, whom Mailer noticed seemed to worship Jones as a celebrity, had taken to dressing the same way. Jones enjoyed the attention he got, a king among supposed equals. One of ­those men, John Bowers, remembered Mailer as a quiet and polite man when they met, Adele good-­looking but completely ­silent; together, they presented an inverted image of the boisterous Handy and Jones. Handy took an immediate dislike of Adele and tried to make sure she covered herself up while at the colony; Handy worried a ­woman like Adele would distract the writers with her feminine charms. Mailer and Jones conversed about their shared interest in writing: they first traded manuscripts, then considered boxing each other. Boxing never happened; perhaps it was too much trou­ble to find the equipment, or perhaps their shared need to assert their martial abilities d­ idn’t require more than words. In any case, they competed on Jones’s trampoline, had pushup contests (which Jones won), and got drunk while they discussed writing. The day Mailer left, the colonists held a cookout in Mailer’s honor, while Handy insistently tried to correct a technically inaccurate ­metaphor in Naked and the Dead.21 Mailer seemed to have mixed feelings about the ­couple. He noted that “Lowney burn[ed]”; she seemed a “fanatic[] like John Brown.” Both Lowney and Jones ­were “such extraordinarily passionate ­people, that their errors as well as their successes have a kind of grotesque to them.”22 In a letter written to mutual friend William Styron, Mailer seemed to be both impressed and intimidated by Jones. “I’ve never come across anyone so intelligent and stupid, so penetrating and insensitive all in one.”

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Jones had started to believe his own cult of personality. He drank even as the rest of the colonists had to strictly refrain from alcohol; he lived in his new home even as the colonists got by without embellishment. Jones’s choice of clothes even reflected a change of perspective: always skeptical of traditional male heroes, Jones was now dressing as a Western cowboy, entranced by the frontier.23 By 1957, Jones’s tendency to valorize exactly the manhood he had sought to escape worried even Handy, who openly despaired that her proj­ect had failed. “So the cannibal proved his virility by tearing his twin ­brother limb from limb. . . . ​So ­today Hemingway and Jones have to be sportsmen,” Handy complained. “Which means that they are fighters, drinkers, fornicators . . . ​with the best of the animal type.” She thought that she had been teaching “self-­exposure,” the ability for ­these men to express their real selves, unencumbered by societal expectations. Instead, she “failed utterly . . . ​instead of bringing enlightenment to the world I have sold them into deeper and deeper slavery.”24 By 1957, it was understandable for Handy to feel despondent. Despite Handy’s claims to always be on the cusp of producing the next ­great American writer, by 1957 only a few colonists had published novels. Worse, t­ hose who did hardly reflected Jones’s greater philosophy of authenticity and camaraderie. Rebellion against society, according to Jones, should help a man tune into his au­then­tic desires and his own emotional needs. As an end in itself, rebellion was empty. However, the novels that came from the colony could not seem to make this distinction. Jerry Tschappat, ­under the pseudonym Gerald Tesch, wrote a poorly received novel, Never the Same Again, about a homosexual villain who seduced a thirteen-­year-­old boy. The book showed a dark fascination with the taboos of the era, featuring a wife-­beating drunkard, a ­woman who went mad ­after committing incest, and lurid sexual descriptions as Johnny, the thirteen-­year-­old protagonist, became s­ haped by a society that sought to victimize him. The novel uncovered the seamy side of society and demonstrated animosity ­toward gay men, but it did so without advancing some other vision of life.25 A second novel, Some Must Watch, by the young Edwin Daly met with generally favorable reviews. Predictably, it focused on the plight of a young male artist who longed to express himself in an inauthentic world, but it lacked any larger message about what men could aspire to.26 The prob­lem was that a key feature of the frontiersman was that he thought for himself, was a loner, and could resist the pressures of ­others. This was in part why David Riesman’s explanation of the other-­directed personality was so easily misunderstood as a critique of modern manhood: by describing the “other-­ directed” personality as someone who worked with ­others or took his cues from ­those around him, Riesman was inadvertently describing a man who had lost the “inner-­moral gyroscope” that made him an individual. Jones had hoped that by teaching men to detach from societal mores ­they’d grow to appreciate what they desired without just caving into the demands of o­ thers. But it was easier for his pupils to understand rebellion through the existing framework of manliness

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and see that rebellion itself as proof that they w ­ ere strong, brave, and i­ ndependent frontiersmen.27 Tom Chamales’s Never So Few demonstrates this better than any of the other novels penned by the colonists. Chamales, a Greek American writer, was a veteran of the OSS, having joined at the age of e­ ighteen. Chamales had been assigned to Burma, where he assisted the native Kachin p­ eople as they carried out guerrilla raids on J­ apanese troops.28 Chamales, like Jones, had faced an uphill ­battle ­after he left the s­ ervice. Struggling with alcoholism, Chamales was prone to getting into violent bar fights and was jailed multiple times for assaulting his wife. In the mid-­fi fties, before he married, he became part of Handy’s orbit, quickly becoming her most promising student outside of Jones.29 When Jones left the colony in mid-1957, Chamales kept good relations with both Handy and Jones and even acted as Jones’s best man during his wedding (though Jones suspected that he was ­there as a spy for Handy).30 However, Chamales’s violent streak d­ idn’t abate, and unlike Jones, who managed to fi­nally come to terms with postwar life, Chamales’s life was cut short in 1960 when, during a drunken bout, he died in a fire.31 Chamales was Lowney’s biggest success outside of Jones. He had also followed a similar path to Jones in the postwar period: he was a troubled young man, burdened with ­wartime scars, who found success through a close relationship with Handy. But more than Jones, Chamales became enamored of the frontiersman myth. Chamales’s novel, Never So Few, released in 1957, was a quasi-­fictionalized account of his experiences in Burma. The book followed Major Con Reynolds, a Lawrence of Arabia–­esque figure who fell in love with the Kachin p­ eople he worked alongside in Burma. Like Jones (and undoubtedly due to Handy’s influence), Chamales wrote in a realistic, autobiographical style, filled with extraneous conversations about eastern mysticism. Also like Jones’s characters, Con Reynolds professed a hatred of American society and sought to prove himself a man apart from it. But while Jones found himself conflicted about the vio­lence inherent in the frontiersman ideal of masculinity, Chamales embraced it. As one reviewer noted, Never So Few had an “streak of sadism” pre­sent throughout.32 Con Reynolds and his men faced horrors, brutally described, but the novel never questioned their necessity. Reviewers noted that Chamales relished his disturbing scenes of torture and war crimes that permeated the novel.33 In the end, Con Reynolds died precisely ­because he was unable to continue the fight. Even ­after sustaining a grotesque injury to his face, Reynolds tried to perform his duty but was killed when he hesitated to throw a grenade and in ­doing so tripped an ­enemy trap.34 Prewitt died when he intentionally made the choice to lay down his life rather than fight back; Reynolds died b­ ecause he “grew soft” and paid the price.35 When the book was made into an award-­winning film the year ­after it was released (like From ­Here to Eternity, it starred Frank Sinatra), Chamales defended the vio­lence as an accurate depiction of his time in war.36

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Most significantly, while Jones had (imperfectly) tried to move manhood beyond the racial distinctions inherent in frontiersman masculinity, Chamales’s conception of manhood embraced that racialized foundation. While Eternity ­imagined male camaraderie bridging the ethnic divide between men (and even took pains to pre­sent an ethnically diverse infantry), Never So Few eagerly indulged in the Victorian my­thol­ogy of the noble savage, presenting the Kachin ­people as both strong and keepers of ancient wisdom but in need of “white” American and British leadership that could help them win their i­ ndependence.37 Major Reynolds was the perfect frontier hero, a man with the civility and self-­ control of the Victorian, yet an appreciation for his colonial subjects. Even as he led the Kachin p­ eople, Reynolds espoused his knowledge of meditation, Buddhism, and other techniques he has been taught by the Kachin. Reynolds was thus, in the spirit of The Lone Ranger, a white hero who nonetheless had been imbued with the authenticity and power of the savage.38 Chamales’s Burma was a frontier, and Con Reynolds, away from civilized society, showed his mastery over it. While Handy and Jones ­were able to teach ­these men to criticize society and social mores, they ­were unable to convey to them the more positive aspects of Jones’s critique. In From ­Here to Eternity, authenticity was paired with an openness to male affection and a suspicion of traditional manly ideals such as bravery. Chamales reveled in competitive, frontiersman masculinity, the very ideal Jones had tried to reveal as hollow. While all the colonists had a­ dopted the style and anger of Jones, Jones’s ideal of au­then­tic emotional honesty eluded them. Meanwhile, as Never So Few was released, Jones was fi­nally putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus, Some Came R ­ unning. Jones had been working on it nonstop for more than six years, and the manuscript had steadily grown to two feet high and at least twenty pounds.39 The novel, written about a barely fictionalized version of the nearby town Marshall, Illinois, was to be Jones’s definitive statement on the role of men in American society. It was also his biggest failure.

Some Came ­Running Ever since From ­Here to Eternity was released, t­ here had been incessant speculation about Jones’s next novel. Jones indulged this speculation by hinting that it would be even more ambitious than Eternity—­a novel that, unlike its flawed ­predecessor, would be befitting of his skill. He worked on it diligently for years as it got larger and larger, fi­nally spanning almost twelve hundred pages, the longest novel produced by an American publisher at that point.40 The influence of Handy was palpable in the minimalist, earthy prose she championed, and the style of the novel drew from the rural epics of one of Jones’s early idols, Thomas Wolfe. Some Came R ­ unning was sprawling and ambitious. And nearly every­one who read it hated it.41

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A typical review’s title read, “A Very Long and Very Bad Novel: His Second Book Indicates That James Jones ­Hasn’t Learned the Rudiments of the Writer’s Craft.”42 Most reviewers found the plot meandering (it was), the characters unlikeable or heavy-­handed (they ­were), and much of the writing clunky (true, though this was a purposeful device on Jones’s part).43 Unlike Eternity, which was hailed as a classic, Some Came R ­ unning found only rare defenders, and though a movie adaptation was produced, it received only modest success compared to its p­ redecessor (Frank Sinatra, once again, played the lead). Some Came ­Running was a far more complicated novel than Eternity, but that complication certainly did not translate into admiration. While much of the novel’s criticism was focused on the sluggish plot and frustrating writing style, the intense dislike readers had for the main character, Dave Hirsh, suggests that r­ esistance to Some Came R ­ unning also showed the limits of Jones’s vision of American society. Prewitt, even as he defied Captain Holmes, could be seen by readers as a principled man of duty, even if they missed Jones’s more holistic points. But Dave Hirsh was a “self-­pitying sore head,”44 or a “misfit, ‘troublemaker.’ ”45 Readers ­couldn’t as easily ignore Hirsh’s repudiation of American norms, and what Jones intended as authenticity his audience may have interpreted as an immature flouting of duty. In Hirsh, Jones ­imagined a man of total freedom and autonomy. Hirsh was exactly what Jones aspired to, but a bum to anyone e­ lse. At the same time, the book also demonstrated how Jones had grown more skeptical of the possibilities for male space since he wrote Eternity. Like his first novel—­the unpublished They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter—­Some Came R ­ unning demonstrated how American society, with its stifling ideas of respectability, judged and emasculated American men. Eternity advocated separating from that society, but Some Came R ­ unning found a solution elusive. While on the surface the ideals he and Handy taught ­were intact—­women still ­were arbiters of society, and men could truly know themselves only away from the judgment of society—­ the novel also wondered ­whether rebellion could lead to anything except more rebellion. Men cut off from society w ­ ere unmoored and unmotivated—­even the male brotherhood Jones idealized seemed in the book a brief intermission before inevitable emasculation. While ­there are moments in Some Came ­Running that seem hopeful for a constructive manhood, the experimental world of the colony seemed at best a temporary escape from the inevitable. The book was an exercise in creating a fictionalized version of Marshall, Illinois, a place Jones had grown familiar with ­because of its proximity to the colony. Renaming the city Parkman, Jones used his familiarity with Marshall to create a complex, changing society, populated with characters from Jones’s life. Jones’s gambling friend Arkie became the gambler ’Bama, his u­ ncle became the businessman Frank Hirsh, and the love interest of the novel suspiciously shared Handy’s skill as a muse to writers. The protagonist, Dave Hirsh, often resembled

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Jones himself, but the novel’s working title, the “Russ Meskiman Novel,” suggested that the character was also based on another figure. Russ had been one of the first colonists, a man Jones had considered a genius. However, Jones and Meskiman had had a falling out early in the life of the colony, when Handy had asked him to trade his girlfriend for a place in the colony. When Meskiman left to be with his love, it confirmed to Jones that ­women ­were a temptation who drew men away from their calling. As a result, he began planning a novel about a genius writer who gave away his promise for domesticity and a sexual release.46 Using the setting of Parkman, Jones set up a sardonic exaggeration of Amer­ i­ca, in which all the w ­ omen ­were two-­faced, all the men outsized tough guys. In this world, men ­were always doomed to fail. If they ­were rebels from society, like Dave Hirsh, they ­were unmotivated, and uninspired. But if they pursued w ­ omen or tried to master society, as Dave’s b­ rother, Frank, tried, they w ­ ere led to their destruction and ended up u­ nder the heel of a shrewish wife. Dave Hirsh was proof enough that Jones’s hopefulness about male authenticity had diminished. Dave, like Jones, was a veteran, a respected writer, and a man deeply skeptical of societal rules. Unlike Jones, the man had ­stopped writing a­ fter the war. Unlike his literary p­ redecessor, Robert Prewitt, Dave shirked his responsibilities and drifted throughout life without princi­ples. While Prewitt chose martyrdom rather than compromise his values, Hirsh seemingly had no values outside of his own freedom. He ­couldn’t hold a regular job, was averse to respectability, and saw w ­ omen as objects to be used. Fully enlightened, he did only what he wanted, never what society pressured him into. However, repudiating Jones’s e­ arlier notion that writers could succeed only apart from society, Dave was adrift while f­ ree, and his best works of fiction w ­ ere written only when he was in love with ­women. Thus, despite being the fully autonomous man, he c­ ouldn’t help but feel drawn t­ oward society. Jones depicted this through his burgeoning romance with the intelligent and beautiful Gwen French, a scholar on the cusp of receiving a doctoral degree in lit­er­a­ture. Her dissertation claimed that writers ­were driven by their desire to possess ­women; but, in pursuing w ­ omen, writers also sowed the seeds of their own destruction. Dave Hirsh’s story serves to dramatize this paradoxical trap: while wooing Gwen French he created his most brilliant works, but he eventually became a pitiful, emasculated ­middle man­ag­er.47 The romance between Dave and Gwen was a tragic one, chiefly b­ ecause of the ways societal norms had straightjacketed Gwen—­and all w ­ omen—­just like they controlled men. Gwen refused to have sex throughout the novel; shamed by the idea, Gwen remained virginal as she lived up to the sexual standards of 1950s Amer­i­ca. But, too old to comfortably admit her inexperience to a man, she hid her secret, unable to properly become a fully-­fledged ­woman who could acknowledge her own desires. Secretly fascinated by pornography but ashamed of the ­actual act, Gwen was trapped in a cage made by respectability.48

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Jones clearly meant to use Gwen’s example to make a statement about all ­ omen. Though the introduction to the book explained that she was based upon w Emily Dickinson, a famously reclusive and unmarried ­woman, Jones’s early notes described Gwen as a combination of Peggy Carson and Laura Schwartz, the former a student he knew at the University of Hawaii, the latter Jones’s E ­ nglish professor at the same university.49 Both ­women had turned down Jones’s amorous advances at the time, and Jones based Gwen French’s reticence on theirs. (He writes in his notes: “She w ­ ill also have a typical American w ­ oman’s moralism (Laura Schwartz) about sex . . . ​She steadfastly & repeatedly refuses to let him have any (more by an unconscious instinct (Like Peg)).”)50 Thus, Gwen French was, in part, an explanation for e­ very ­woman who declined Jones’s sexual invitations: unlike Jones, who was apparently f­ ree to express his emotions and his desire for sex, ­these w ­ omen ­were seemingly too constricted by societal mores to realize their desire for Jones. Proper, healthy relationships between men and ­women ­were made impossible: society prevented ­women from properly enjoying sex and si­mul­ta­neously provided incentives for ­women to control men through societal approbation. At the same time, though, Gwen resembled Handy in ways that suggested Jones developed a more nuanced view of ­women. Gwen, despite her failure as a romantic partner, also served as a muse to Dave Hirsh. She, like Handy to Jones, provided brilliant critiques and inspiration for new works. Gwen, paradoxically, represented every­thing Jones admired and disliked in w ­ omen: she slavishly followed society’s rules and dictates, but she could also offer the support and intellectual fulfillment that Handy provided. This paradox was the central dilemma in Dave’s story: as Dave grew more obsessed with Gwen, and thus further drawn into Parkman, he also regained his brilliance as a writer. He wrote “The Confederate,” a story of a tragic and pathetic southerner who foolishly held onto outdated frontiersman ideals of honor and courage, and then began work on a “humorous war novel.” The novel could have become Dave’s masterwork.51 But, frustrated with Gwen’s continued ­resistance to sex (and thus the connection Dave craved from her), Dave settled on finding relief elsewhere. If he could get only intellectual satisfaction from Gwen, why ­couldn’t he get sexual satisfaction from another ­woman? To separate sexual urges from emotional fulfillment, Dave de­cided to have an affair with the least respectable ­woman in the town, Ginnie Moorhead. Ginnie was notorious around the town as a sexually loose, unattractive working-­class girl, whom the book variously described as “stupid,” “ugly,” “fat,” and “piggish.”52 The plan ultimately led to disaster: Gwen discovered the affair and cut all ties with Dave, driving him completely into the arms of Ginnie.53 His pursuit of Gwen invested Dave in society; his relationship with Ginnie made him subjugated to it. He had hoped that Ginnie could satisfy his physical needs and could financially support him while he wrote his novel. But Ginnie, like all ­women, was obsessed with obtaining respectability. ­A fter they married,

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she dominated him by domesticating him. Dave had to act as a middle-­class man, so that Ginnie could achieve middle-­class respectability. They entertained dinner guests and drank rarely, and Ginnie even began to refuse sex: proper ­women, ­after all, d­ idn’t enjoy it. Stuck in a meaningless, stable existence, Dave began to see Ginnie as a shrewish harpy but ­couldn’t bring himself to leave her. “He just ­couldn’t face that loneliness,” Dave thought to himself when he considered leaving Ginnie. “Was this why most marriages remained intact maybe?”54 He still worked on his novel, during nights and weekends, but he had lost the ability to create true art. When Ginnie’s ex-­husband came to town and abruptly murdered Dave, it was almost a relief; Dave was dead anyway, a genius forced to live a hollow life.55 Through Dave, Jones cynically described the dilemma modern man faced: he was unable to achieve outside of society but was equally destroyed by living in it. Dave’s older ­brother, Frank—­his polar opposite—­demonstrated how men ­couldn’t preserve their authenticity through mastering society e­ ither. Frank Hirsh was obsessed with respectability. He turned his back on his alcoholic ­father to avoid embarrassment; eventually, he also disowned Dave a­ fter he failed to domesticate him by giving him a job.56 All Frank cared for was what other ­people thought of him and cut ties with his ­family to fortify his own position. To become respectable, Frank ­imagined a man must have power; thus, Frank tried to use his position to dominate ­women. Frank craved a mistress ­because she could show that he was rich enough to take care of two ­women and power­ ful enough to make his wife accept the humiliation of being cheated on. In the novel, Frank was able to entice his secretary, Edith, into such a relationship.57 At the height of his success, Frank was even able to make Edith submit to anal sex with him, an act that demonstrated not only his dominance but also Edith’s submission. Jones’s depiction of this act would have been shocking to readers of the time. It also cemented to his readers how Frank’s lust for power led even to his sexual perversion.58 But even as he achieved the respectability he craved, Frank realized that he never actually had power. When his wife found out about Edith, she left Frank, asserting her own power. Without her, Frank was nothing more than a babbling child: he could barely clean or make lunch. He begged her to return; she agreed, ­under the condition that he cut ties with Edith and that he and Agnes never slept together again.59 As the novel closed, Frank was utterly emasculated. Without any other sexual outlets, Frank became a Peeping Tom, a pathetic figure who could gain sexual satisfaction only from “possessing” w ­ omen by sneaking a glance of them in the nude outside their win­dows.60 His wife “had taken every­thing, destroyed every­thing,” Frank lamented, noting that despite “making more money than he had ever made in his life . . . ​what did it avail him? He had not slept with a ­woman in almost a year.”61 Only able to get satisfaction by violating the privacy of strangers, Frank was forced into a deplorable condition.

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Jones offered one positive image of manly camaraderie: the relationship between Dave and his friend ’Bama Dillert.62 A local gambler, ’Bama was Jones’s perfect man. Widely seen as a rake and a womanizer by the residents of Parkman, ’Bama nevertheless ignored societal judgment and lived as he pleased.63 ’Bama had a wife, but he kept her closely controlled: she ran his farm and raised his ­children while he sent her money to live on, but she other­wise had no power over him.64 This ideal ­family relationship (to Jones) allowed ’Bama the ­pleasure of a ­family and a wife if he needed one, but no responsibilities except monetary support. Dave idolized ’Bama’s lifestyle. Dave and ’Bama, briefly, lived in an emotionally honest brotherhood. They traveled together, gambling and living freely; their spiritual connection gave them a preternatural ability to play poker, allowing Dave to quit his emasculating office job.65 They traveled across the country together, living by their urges rather than by the clock.66 Once they had their fill of travel, ’Bama and Dave bought a h ­ ouse together in Parkman, using it as a hangout for the rest of the disreputable men of the city.67 This h ­ ouse, in an analogue to the colony, was a place outside the purview of the judgmental eyes of civilization, where the men spent their time learning manly pursuits such as knife throwing, shooting, and gambling. The only w ­ omen in the h ­ ouse w ­ ere ­there to provide sex or to clean up. But while the ­house becomes a refuge for ’Bama and Dave, it never led to any sort of emotional honesty or self-­ realization. The men who stayed t­ here rebelled against society, but outside of the deep connection between Dave and ’Bama, none of ­these men achieve the enlightenment Prewitt found. Like the men at the colony who pursued rebellion for its own sake, the men Jones wrote about in Some Came R ­ unning never became more than just opposed to society. Furthermore, Some Came ­Running stressed how fragile this manly brotherhood actually was. ’Bama’s rebellion was temporary, and when he learned he had diabetes, all his dynamism crumbled away and he became a whining, dependent old man. Dave realized just how fleeting ’Bama’s world was when in one pathetic moment he saw ’Bama cry over his impending death.68 Meanwhile, ’Bama warned Dave against marrying Ginnie—­who would leave Dave henpecked and domesticated, ’Bama warned—­but Dave plowed on with the marriage. Dave dropped out of dropping out, ending his friendship with ’Bama and leading to his emasculated life of drudgery. Neither ’Bama nor Dave ever found a way out of the dilemma that faced modern men, suggesting how Jones had begun to worry about the possibility of a genuine alternative. Like in Eternity, society was the ­enemy of men: w ­ hether men wanted true autonomy like Dave Hirsh or dominance like Frank, w ­ omen and society would seek to control and emasculate them. But in Some Came R ­ unning, Jones also seemed to won­der if men could ultimately resist at all. Dave was able to, through his writing, express himself authentically while he pursued Gwen, but it was also his undoing. R ­ unning from society was no solution, as Dave’s

The Men Who Came ­Running • 137

meaningless existence before Parkman proved, but being a part of it was worse. In the world of Some Came R ­ unning, all men eventually had to come in from the cold, and when they did, they ­were inextricably drawn away from the authenticity and male camaraderie that was pos­si­ble only outside. Altogether, Some Came R ­ unning stands as Jones’s most complete word on what masculinity meant in postwar Amer­i­ca. They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, his first book, asked how manhood could resist the pressures of civilian Amer­ i­ca. Some Came R ­ unning gave Jones’s answer: true manhood was doomed. By 1957, Jones had become increasingly cynical about ­whether his proj­ect could work at all; Dave Hirsh’s fate reflected a belief that separation from American society ­wasn’t the answer Jones had thought it was. Jones’s own rebellion from society also ended soon a­ fter Some Came R ­ unning was published. On a trip to New York to visit his editors while the book was getting finalized, he was introduced to Gloria Masolino. An actress whose claim to fame was once being a body double for Marilyn Monroe, she immediately fell in love with the awkward man in plaid who asked her to dinner. They enjoyed a whirlwind romance, and within the month Jones had asked her to marry him. She enthusiastically agreed.69 Jones had prided himself on his ­resistance to the demands other men succumbed to. But almost instantly he proved himself to be more like Dave Hirsh than he had expected: he gave up every­thing he had worked for in the name of love. Like Dave, a­ fter ten years of living as his ideal rebellious writer, Jones left the proj­ect. He’d now s­ ettle for the domesticity he decried in so many o­ thers.

Conclusion The newly engaged Jones faced one significant prob­lem: Handy. In the rush of their romance, Jones had declined to tell his new wife about his relationship with his former angel; he w ­ asn’t sure how Gloria would react. When he had tried to explain his engagement to Handy, she pressured him into sleeping with her, and when Gloria found this out, along with the details of their relationship, she understandably felt betrayed. The engagement only barely survived.70 Jones, possibly not realizing the depths of strong emotions, de­cided to introduce Handy to Gloria, in an attempt at reconciliation. Handy had always had a hot temper; Jones must have been fooling himself if he expected her to get along with Gloria. The highlight of Gloria’s visit to the colony was when Handy, holding a bowie knife, tried to stab her, yelling at her that “the only reason Jim married you is that ­you’re the best c-­cksucker in New York,” before Jones ­stopped her from lunging at the youn­ger ­woman.71 The entire affair, along with the poor reception of Some Came R ­ unning, convinced the newlyweds that a vacation in Paris might be good choice. They ended up staying in Paris for the next fifteen years. Handy, in her letters, never called Gloria by name, instead preferring to call her “the girl” or “that gal.”72 She continued to run the colony, even as it

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dwindled a­ fter Jones left. Tom Chamales stayed close to her u­ ntil he died in 1960; a­ fter that, she found l­ ittle success. She died four years l­ ater, and the colony died with her. Harry, her ever-­dependable husband, had died the year before, leaving only Handy’s ninety-­nine-­year-­old mother-­in-­law, still typing away at her novel.73 Before they left, James and Gloria Jones saw Mailer one more time at a party. Mailer, by 1957, had under­gone a transformation himself. He had married Adele, but his child lived entirely with his parents, allowing him to forego the domesticity raising her would have required. Instead, Mailer had reinvented himself as the voice of masculine rebellion. His violent brawls ­were legendary, as was his womanizing. The same year that Jones got married, Mailer wrote a piece that went on to define him. In the controversially named essay, “The White Negro,” he claimed, “If the fate of twentieth c­ entury man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-­giving answer is . . . ​to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. . . . ​A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage.”74 Mailer had always been critical of American society, but in this essay he sounded more like Jones than Jones did. Men, when faced with totalitarian demands on their freedom, needed to “divorce oneself from society,” Mailer claimed. But while Mailer was learning from his friend, Jones was turning away from his own advice. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the two had been on the decline for years. Jones had angrily disowned Mailer in 1956 ­after he found out that Mailer and his other friends had planned to hold an intervention to “­free” him from Handy’s clutches.75 Meanwhile, Mailer had said in an interview that Jones was a “dumb, benighted, assh-le of a writer”; Jones had retorted by claiming that Mailer’s newest novel, The Deer Park, ­wasn’t very good. The change in their relationship was evident when they met at a party soon before Jones traveled to Paris. Th ­ ere, Jones’s old friend drunkenly staggered over to him, greeting him like nothing had changed since their days wandering the streets of New York. Mailer wanted to catch up and suggested dinner and a double date. Jones knew what that meant. He declined. “We must be loyal to our wives,” he told his old friend, and went to find Gloria. The two w ­ ere never close again.76 In Paris, Jones slipped into domesticity. He and Gloria bought a mansion and hired a maid, and Gloria took to redecorating as a hobby. They raised two ­children, Kaylie and Jamie, who grew up not in the rural Midwest but in the heart of France. Kaylie went on to become a successful novelist, a fact that might have surprised a youn­ger Jones who believed w ­ omen incapable of writing.77 Jones only once commented on the paradox presented by his married life in Paris, when he explained that he had once worried ­whether he could still write and achieve

The Men Who Came ­Running • 139

what he wanted with a f­ amily around him; he was relieved to find he could. It is pos­si­ble that the last years of the colony had led Jones to become skeptical that true authenticity could be taught. More likely, his alienation from Handy and his marriage to Gloria made his contempt for modernity suddenly seem childish and unrealistic.78 As he grew older in Paris, Jones the ­father may have largely buried the anger he had once felt. His c­ hildren remember their f­ ather to be a man who taught tolerance for ­others above all, who “encouraged ­free thought and diversity” as he raised them.79 They remember a man unlike the soldier who came home from Guadalcanal: a man whose ­resistance to societal pressures translated into an ­acceptance of p­ eople dif­fer­ent from himself. Jones had two more successes: the short novella The Pistol and his own “humorous war novel,” The Thin Red Line. Thin Red Line, in some circles, has come to be accepted as the definitive World War II novel. Unlike Eternity, Thin Red Line was set entirely in combat, allowing Jones to make use of the many ­stereotypes of ­wartime ­service that had developed in American ­popular culture. The setting provided Jones with the materials for a comfortable adventure novel rather than one with the ambition that defined Eternity or Some Came R ­ unning. Fittingly, the novel ­couldn’t let go of Jones’s ­earlier successes: in it, he revived Prewitt and re­united him with Warden. The two had now made it off Hawaii and all the way to Guadalcanal together. Unable to escape the characters, Jones took them out of his toy box and doomed the soldiers to refight Jones’s war even ­after their own deaths. Mailer said of the novel that it proved Jones had given up being the greatest American novelist, settling instead to be “a very good writer among other very good writers.”80 All in all, it was more than you could say for Dave Hirsh. It was ironic that Jones’s own rebellion ended right as the next generation’s began. Jones watched the revolts of the sixties with the same eyes that many men of his age did. He thought the young men protesting Vietnam w ­ ere childish, even as his old friend Mailer stormed the Pentagon at their sides. In his book about the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, The Merry Month of May, he portrayed the ­political and sexual liberation of the sixties as a naïve teenage rebellion against authority.81 Asked to go to Vietnam and report on the American war effort in the early seventies, Jones agreed; his reports from the field put him squarely in ­favor of the war effort, with no time for the faux-­moral superiority of the antiwar protestors.82 Though Jones once had believed that men must divorce themselves from society, he now seem keenly embarrassed by the American students who did just that. But this Jones ­wasn’t the same Jones who got on the wrong bus in 1943 to go AWOL, and he w ­ asn’t the same Jones who created a communitarian refuge for men to work together as rebels against domesticity. That Jones had left the military with a deep sense of alienation and created an entire cosmology to explain why American men like him could never be happy in the world they found

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themselves returning to. That Jones had ­imagined a masculinity defined by autonomy, in which men who ­were wise enough to question society’s demands might be able to come together in manly brotherhood. And though, in the end, that vision failed, for more than ten years men flocked to it, looking for the same sense of authenticity that Jones had thought he found. His solution, of course, was not the only one. As Jones was setting up camp outside of Marshall, Illinois, another veteran made his own pilgrimage to Hollywood, to see if he as well could use writing to understand what exactly he had seen during the ­Battle of the Bulge. As Stewart Stern left Germany for Los Angeles, he ruminated on the same feelings of male camaraderie and authenticity he had experienced in war. However, Stern took a dif­fer­ent path than Jones. War ­didn’t prove that men needed to divorce themselves from society; instead, ­wartime intimacy could be training to help men adjust to their new roles as husbands.

6

Waiting for Peter Pan Adulthood and How to Attain It

­F AT HER  ​Hey, Jimbo? You Awake? JIM  ​Dad? Can I ask you something? ­F AT HER  ​Sure. Shoot. JIM  ​Suppose you had to do something. You had to go someplace, and do this t­ hing

that was . . . ​you know, it was very dangerous. But it was a ­matter of honor. And you had to prove it. What would you do? ­F AT HER  ​Is this some kind of trick answer? JIM  ​No, what would you do? ­F AT HER  ​Well, I ­wouldn’t make a hasty decision. . . . ​Jim, what happened? What kind of trou­ble are you in? JIM  ​The kind I was telling you about. Now can you answer me? ­F AT HER  ​Nobody can make a snap decision. It’s one of ­those ­things that you . . . ​you ­can’t. That’s all t­ here is to it. It’s something that you . . . ​you just d­ on’t. ­We’ve got to consider all the pros and cons. JIM  ​I ­don’t have time. ­F AT HER  ​­We’ll make time! I’ll get paper and ­we’ll make a list. And then if ­we’re still stuck, w ­ e’ll get some advice! JIM  ​What can you do when you have to be a man? ­F AT HER  ​Well, now. . . . 141

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JIM  ​No you give me a direct answer! Are you ­going to keep me from ­going? ­F AT HER  ​Jim, did I ever stop you from ­doing anything?

—Stewart Stern, Rebel Without a Cause, 1954

When Stewart Stern was eight, his ­mother took him to see Peter Pan at the Civic Repertory Theatre. The theater, the creation and passion of the actress, director, and producer Eva Le Gallienne, was a beauty to behold. Upon arriving, the young Stern would have seen a tenement building transformed by three stories of Grecian columns and a classical frieze, giving the sense that the Parthenon had been transported to the ­middle of immigrant New York. Inside, Stern would have sat down in a velvet red chair and looked forward at a proscenium arch framing the stage. As the lights went down, he must have lost his breath as Le Gallienne herself flew over the stage, the first time ropes and wires had been used to stage an ­actual flying Peter.1 Stern was enraptured by the possibilities that the ­performance demonstrated: that drama could send ­people flying through the air and could create wondrous scenes of adventure, right in front of his eyes. Stern knew he wanted to be an actor from that moment on.2 But he h ­ adn’t just fallen in love with the stage; Stern had also fallen in love with the character. He begged his ­mother to sew him a Peter Pan suit and wore it as often as he could; one of his dearest memories was sitting in a tree, playing m ­ usic from Peter Pan on his pan pipes while his cousin, dressed as Wendy, listened.3 Peter Pan was a confident and brave figure—­traits Stern never claimed he had within himself, but traits he could proj­ect onto a savior who could rescue him from his hardships. In a ­later interview, Stern explained the importance of Peter Pan: It’s in so many ways my own story, Peter Pan. That somebody’s g­ oing to take me away from h ­ ere, and teach me, and somehow their courage is ­going to come in through my skin, and ­people are g­ oing to look up and seeing me d­ oing something they ­can’t do: flying over their heads. And occasionally deigning to drop down and walk on the ground and then go up again, and be safe, b­ ecause I could be out of reach of w ­ hatever I was afraid of (­whatever that was) and could walk on the clouds and pull the food out of the mouths of birds and tease mermaids and vanquish pirates.4

The story of Peter Pan resonated with Stern, and he continued to refer to it in his f­ uture writing, even writing a major scene of Rebel Without a Cause based upon his favorite pieces of the play. Key to the story, in Stern’s eyes, was how a figure like Peter could rescue him from his own insecurities, could “take [him] away from h ­ ere,” could “teach [him]” his courage. But Peter Pan, confident and heroic as he was, was also a retrograde idol. He refused to grow up; he was a boy who snubbed responsibility to spend his days playing with other boys. Played by

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Gallienne, Peter Pan was also a queered figure, a hero who was not ­really male or female, intimating at the possibilities for male intimacy in a world where gender roles ­were more immediately defined. Stern could admire the story ­because it presented a heroic figure, but he could also see in Peter Pan the deviant traits that postwar men needed to abandon as they grew up. For Stern, the young man who thought of himself as weak, emotional, and sensitive, the companionship of a confident, dashing mentor like Peter was seductive. Stern’s experiences in war taught him how relationships with men—­such as ­those with Tony Frier and Jim Sramek—­could model how manhood could spring from sensitivity, emotionality, and camaraderie with other men. Dismissing the stoicism and individualism central to the frontiersman, Stern’s experiences helped him, ­a fter the war, chart how manhood might exist beyond the frontiersman myth. Male relationships ­were fundamental to Stern and reappeared continually in his writing. His first film, Teresa, hinged on the relationship between a soldier and his sergeant; Rebel Without a Cause positively portrayed the homoerotic relationship between the confident and assured Jim Stark and his outcast, childlike friend Plato. Like Stern, millions of war veterans had experienced deep, intimate relationships with other men. For many it was the defining memory of the war. Columbia sociologist Willard Waller devoted an entire chapter of his 1944 study to the importance of male comradery to the soldiers of World War II, noting that “the comradeship in war remains the high point of [veterans’] lives.”5 But a­ fter homecoming, where did t­ hose experiences go? While some of t­ hose men joined the burgeoning gay communities active in American cities or became rebels against the domestic order, far more got married, had ­children, and lived up to hetero-­ domestic ideals. Meanwhile, the feelings they had in w ­ artime w ­ ere stigmatized. Affection between men became evidence of perversion or an inability to adapt to a breadwinner role; depictions of intimacy between men ­were increasingly absent from films, magazines, and books, where they once had been normal. Men learned to get along with ­women, while silently mourning the friends ­they’d lost.6 ­There ­were many dif­fer­ent ways to resist this path; James Jones’s colony, ­after all, was a male space designed to avoid ­those hetero-­domestic commitments. But Stern’s postwar journey demonstrates that the pull t­ oward hetero-­domesticity could be motivated, in part, by the lessons about manliness that veterans had learned in war. Stern’s screenplays show the compatibility between male sensitivity within the war and the familial imperatives of postwar American life; the popularity of the films produced from t­ hese screenplays suggests how many other Americans understood this same connection. James Jones decried domesticity as w ­ omen’s attempt to drag men down into inauthenticity; in fact, between Philip Wylie’s “momism,” the diatribes against motherhood printed in Playboy, and many other misogynistic tracts of the ­decade, 1950s Amer­i­ca was full of material that could be weaponized to depict ­women as enemies of manliness. But while Stern sometimes succumbed to ­these

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s­ tereotypes, he also came to believe that the postwar ­family was central to mature manhood, not its e­ nemy. Stern’s early screenwriting was concerned with how men might transmute their affection for other men into duty and devotion to ­women. Some malformed men never grew out of their affection for other men, while ­others used aggression and vio­lence to poorly express their au­then­tic feelings. However, some men could use their male relationships to learn the devotion and responsibility needed to be good f­ athers and husbands. While a retreat from the radical position Stern had discovered in wartime— male intimacy was now valuable only if it led to heterosexual relationships—­ there could be a place for male brotherhood in civilized society, somewhere in the queered penumbra of domestic containment.7 While Stern’s films show a domestication of the more subversive lessons veterans like himself and James Jones had learned, they also show how the veterans’ critique seeped into postwar American culture. Stern’s example suggests that this transmutation need not have fully erased the love felt between men. Through Stern, we see how postwar manhood ­didn’t just become domesticated. It became sensitive, inclusive, and—­ far beneath the surface—­queered.

“A Man Whose Occupation Was R ­ unning Away” Stern loved Jim Sramek. Stern’s w ­ artime memoir referenced holding Jim, laying his head on Jim’s body and expressing affection for Jim. Stern even fantasized about being part of “Knight in Armour [sic] romances about fighting the Nazi hordes single handedly over the gasping body of his friend [Jim].”8 Stern’s experience of war was deeply entangled with the intimate relationships he had, Jim included. To Stern, the manly strength he learned during ­wartime was a direct result of his relationships with other men; to excise one would be to make the other unintelligible. But it would be hard for postwar Amer­i­ca to understand this connection, and Stern clearly knew it. In the final version of his memoir, Stern added a digression that was absent from the drafts he wrote directly a­ fter the war: Men in the society of men, walled away from ­women and from t­ hose they loved and who loved them could not suspend the need for love or the need to be loved, so they picked partners in each other and the bonds w ­ ere often deep and complicated and sometimes passionately held. He loved Jim and the knowledge brought neither guilt nor shame b­ ecause it sprang from his needs as his appetite did, unguarded and without any sense of sneaking aberration. He avoided thinking about it or trying to define it b­ ecause what each man felt for some other was without frame of reference to anything felt before and could never be categorized. All he knew was that without it he would have gone crazy.9

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The statement was a reaffirmation of the importance of male intimacy, but written in 1951, it also serves as a barometer of how much t­ hings had changed since the war ended. ­A fter World War II, the possibilities of male affection narrowed. John Ibson has argued that the time directly ­after the war was distinguished by a uniquely prevalent fear of homo­sexuality: “communists and queers” ­were frightening bogeymen in t­ hese times, and t­ here was a par­tic­u­lar postwar hysteria in which parents worried their “sissy sons” would grow up weak.10 K. A. Cuordileone, likewise, has argued that in the par­tic­u­lar context of the Cold War anx­i­ eties about the erosion of manhood ­were prevalent, leading to a par­tic­u ­lar scrutiny of anyone who might be a candidate for homo­sexuality.11 What was once an innocent touch might now be evidence of weakness; what was once an affirmation of friendship before the war might now be proof of perversion. The mirror of ­these anx­i­eties was the way postwar American culture, government, and society stressed hetero-­domestic norms. Elaine Tyler May has argued that a system called “domestic containment”—in which the nuclear ­family was exalted as the most impor­tant goal for men and w ­ omen to attain—­was created by the uncertainty of the Cold War. Films of the era ­were filled with positive examples of marriage and child-­rearing; previously ­independent female film stars increasingly depicted themselves as ­house­wives and ­mothers. Even government tax codes, which punished dual-­earner families in ­favor of a male breadwinner and a female ­house­keeper, worked to enforce hetero-­domestic modes of living.12 Both men and ­women felt heavy pressures to conform to ­these expectations ­after the war ended, and professionals like psychiatrists enshrined marriage as the “normal” and preferable goal for mature adults.13 Given this context, Stern’s statement is particularly notable. On the one hand, the passage is one of Stern’s earliest and most complete affirmations of same-­sex love. He defended the love between men as a natu­ral and significant part of the war experience. At the same time, by denying that his love for Jim was a “sneaking aberration” or asserting that it “could not be categorized,” Stern was denying that affection between men was necessary evidence of homo­sexuality. He also made clear that love between men, though natu­ral, was a substitute, not a replacement, for the love men feel for w ­ omen, effectively funneling same-­sex desire back into hetero-­normative love. Stern could have left this unsaid in 1944, but by 1951 the United States had changed so much that such a defense felt necessary.14 By the early fifties, Stern began to use the language of psy­chol­ogy to make his experience of male intimacy compatible with the narrowed values of postwar Amer­i­ca. Soon ­after the war ended, Stern had begun meeting an analyst; once in therapy, “Every­thing seemed psychologically motivated,” Stern l­ater reflected.15 His embrace of psy­chol­ogy was typical for the time; as Carolyn Herbst Lewis has shown, the field of psy­chol­ogy enjoyed a vast r­ enaissance in American society during the 1950s.16

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­Popular psy­chol­ogy of the time commonly put male intimacy at odds with proper heterosexual development. Homo­sexuality was increasingly explained as a retreat or flight from maturity: unable to properly h ­ andle the stresses and demands of society, such as holding a job and providing for a ­family, it was widely believed that gay men turned to quick ­pleasure rather than adjust to their adult responsibilities.17 Some psychologists explained homo­sexuality through “adaptational failure,” or the idea that men who ­were unable to fulfill male responsibilities would become emasculated, and then homosexual.18 For ­those who “suffered” from homosexual urges, psychiatry stressed adjustment: t­ hese men and ­women should, in order to attain happiness in the long term, work to sublimate their desires in f­ avor of creating a “normal” heterosexual marriage. Ironically, this led to what Lauren Jae Gutterman has called the “queering” of marriage: ­because hetero-­domesticity was so highly prized, many partners had to account for the same-­sex desires of their spouses within marriage, sometimes by creating space for the exploration of t­hese desires within the confines of an ostensibly monogamous space. By containing homosexual desire and practices within the confines of an outwardly heterosexual marriage, the institution became itself a place where same-­sex desires could exist.19 Stern ­imagined a dif­fer­ent way to make hetero-­domesticity compatible with same-­sex intimacy. Psychiatrists of the time often identified homo­sexuality as an immature sexual drive that ­children outgrew as they matured to proper heterosexual adulthood; t­ hose who continued to feel attraction to the same sex suffered from an arrested development.20 Stern used this understanding to push back against the idea that male intimacy was necessarily a flight from maturity. Instead, love between men was a stage on the way to heterosexual maturity—it could teach men the duty and responsibility of manhood. Once that duty was learned, male intimacy could be displaced by the duties of hetero-­domesticity. If it was, then male intimacy was an impor­tant part of growing up; if it ­wasn’t, homo­sexuality was proof that something had gone wrong. No man could be Peter Pan forever; eventually, he’d need to marry Wendy. It was an odd foundation for Stern to build upon. Since his return from the war, Stern had lived e­ ither by himself or with other men. He left no rec­ord of romantic entanglements during the forties or fifties, instead seemingly entirely focused on his work. Though Stern experienced intense friendships with other men, such as Jim Sramek, Fred Zinnemann, and l­ater James Dean, any explic­ itly romantic connections he may have had, with ­either men or w ­ omen, have not survived in the historical rec­ord. Stern fi­nally did get married in the 1980s, when he was in his sixties, to a ballet dancer thirty years his j­unior, Marilee Styles.21 But ­until that moment, Stern’s life was seemingly one of a man married to his work, who vaunted domesticity as the ideal of manhood. In part, Stern’s fixation on male adjustment to marriage reflected an ideal he himself was unable to meet. Stern explored all ­these ideas in his first produced film, Teresa—­about a veteran learning to become a husband to his war bride. The film is impor­tant

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primarily ­because it prominently explores how Stern was thinking about the relationship between male intimacy in war and maturity a­ fter war. While much of the film’s length is spent depicting the psychological barriers that men must overcome before they can become mature, it also has a lengthy plot about the relationship between two men in w ­ artime. Teresa argues that manliness is predicated on a man’s ability to perform the role of a responsible husband. But it also ascribes a key role for male romantic partnerships, by suggesting that the intimacy men felt in war could provide a model for the strength of character needed to adjust to a hetero-­domestic role. The work on Teresa began soon a­ fter Stern’s failed venture writing Sabra. Convinced he had permanently bungled his ­career a­ fter he failed to deliver a workable script, Stern had left Hollywood uncertain about his ­future and had traveled east to M ­ aryland to work on a friend’s farm. On the way, he s­ topped to visit his ­uncle, Arthur Loew Sr., who asked him to look at a script about an Italian war bride. Stern’s analy­sis largely agreed with Loew’s own misgivings: the characters ­were archetypes, not ­people; the script told the audience what to feel but d­ idn’t demonstrate it. On the basis of this critique, Loew Sr. put Stern in charge of revising the script and sent Stern’s completed draft back to, of all p­ eople, Fred Zinnemann. Zinnemann liked his critique; the two w ­ ere collaborating once again.22 The original script, written by Alfred Hayes, was a story primarily about the war bride, but in Stern’s hands the focus drifted to her husband, the World War II veteran Philip Cass. Throughout the film, Cass strug­gled to navigate the demands of a wife and occupation a­ fter his discharge. Stern was driven to this theme both by his own experiences—­Cass was a similar age and disposition to Stern himself—­and by his fascination with psy­chol­ogy. “­There was a lot of talk at the time about post-­war adjustment and about psychoneurotic be­hav­ior ‘brought on by the war,’ ” Stern l­ ater explained.23 An exploration of Philip Cass could discuss exactly how that adjustment to homecoming could work. At the time, p­ opular and academic psychiatry was inundated with discussions about how best to treat returning veterans—­men like James Jones who seemed positively allergic to the world they found themselves in.24 Psychologists’ answers often gave primacy to the wives and m ­ others who should help men overcome their trauma and return to civilization: it was a ­woman’s job to rebuild the men who had been broken by their experiences overseas. Articles in ­women’s magazines, for instance, made the case that ­women could reteach t­ hese men how to interact in civilian life.25 Stern also repeated this theme in Teresa: Philip Cass’s prob­lems of reintegrating into society would be overcome by his wife, who could assist him in accepting the mantle of male responsibility. This was the mirror to James Jones’s own explanation of homecoming: w ­ omen ­were domesticating veterans, making them feminized and inauthentic shadows of a true man. However, in Stern’s mind—­and the minds of many American psychiatrists—it was Jones’s flight from domesticity that proved he was

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maladjusted due to the war. But why? What made a man like Jones run, while other men embraced their duties? Stern believed that the war ­wasn’t the entire explanation. “My observations,” Stern wrote, “and my knowledge of myself led me to believe . . . ​that adjustment to anything was a ­matter of individual background . . . ​and that the war was only a ready excuse for prob­lems that would have been t­ here anyway.” In other words, something in a man’s nature prevented him from adjusting and performing his manly role. Stern turned to psychiatric experts to better understand the issue. First, he went to a Veterans Administration (VA) hospital and received permission to listen to the tapes of neuropsychiatric soldiers. Case files and interviews with t­ hese men provided a blueprint for Stern. A ­ fter he had a good idea of the psychological issues facing traumatized veterans, Stern wrote a psychiatric description of Cass and sent it to a variety of psychologists with training concerning veteran readjustment.26 He asked them to pretend Cass was a real person and to evaluate why he was having trou­ble adjusting. Stern explained, “So we had several ‘group therapy’ sessions with all the psychologists using the script’s outline. I kept asking questions and probing and gradually began to find an indication of an actuality. . . . ​It had to do with the prob­lem of ­dependency and repressed anger, the question of masculine-­feminine identification.”27 ­A fter a month listening to tapes of veterans and probing Cass’s personality, a portrait of the troubled veteran began to emerge. He explained that Cass, and other neuropsychiatric soldiers, had trou­ble adjusting b­ ecause of a consuming passivity rooted in the dread of failure; ­because of ­dependency; ­because of wanting to stay young forever and avoid the prob­lems of maturity. Every­one is scared. Scared to grow up, to leave home or school. Scared of freedom. It was this fear of freedom that many vets return to the protecting arms of school ­after the war, when they found they ­hadn’t r­ eally grown up very much at all. . . . ​Who w ­ ere Philip’s f­ amily? His ­father must be passive, childlike, affording no role-­model for Philip to imitate, arresting him in eternal babyhood. His mom? The tyrant Philip creates, whose hold on him forbids him assuming manhood. . . . ​The fight of a boy to grow up, break his ­mother’s hold, and find that the hero he has been searching for is himself.28

It ­didn’t take courage to avoid domesticity, like Jones had argued; instead, avoiding domesticity was due to “consuming passivity” and a fear of freedom. Instead, it took strength to adopt a man’s duties and take care of o­ thers. Manliness lay in the ability to perform that difficult role. And if a man d­ idn’t have that strength? As Teresa would argue, male brotherhood could teach it. Much of Stern’s analy­sis echoed con­temporary critiques of conformity. His diagnosis of Cass’s fear of “maturity” reflected common psychological critiques concerned with the emasculated modern man, while his description of Cass’s “tyrant” mom draws directly from Philip Wylie’s “momism” critiques.29

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On top of t­ hose s­ tereotypes, the argument that men avoided maturity out of fear reflected prevalent ­stereotypes of homo­sexuality.30 The phrase “scared of freedom” also evoked Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, a work that posited that totalitarian governments fed off p­ eople’s innate fears of responsibility and freedom in order to gain power.31 Rather than worry about totalitarianism, Stern believed t­ hese psychological issues prevented men from maturing. Philip Cass was the archetypical man who feared responsibility, a man whose “occupation [was] r­ unning away,” as the opening narration of Teresa explained.32 Cass’s prob­lem was ­simple: he had abandoned his wife, unable to be a dutiful husband to her. As the film opened, Cass fidgeted like a child while talking to a VA psychiatrist; he explained how he was “all mixed up.” He broke down into tears a­ fter telling the psychiatrist how he ­couldn’t talk to his parents, how his f­ ather was never a role model, and how he felt “like a baby.” A ­ fter this, Cass ran from the psychiatrist who, in the original script, explained that “[Cass’s] job now” is to go through the “slow—­gradual—­ painful ­process of coming to know and accept himself.”33 This immaturity, as the film makes clear, had its roots in Cass’s overbearing ­mother and his “jellyfish” (Stern’s description from his first script) of a ­father. Though the final film curtailed the roles of Cass’s parents, in Stern’s original draft he wrote a Freudian psychodrama about the ways Cass’s ­mother infantilized him. His ­father was almost entirely absent; his ­mother was jealous of the war bride he brought home from Italy, the titular Teresa. While the filmed version leaves much of her dislike of Teresa as subtext, Stern’s initial draft gave Cass’s m ­ other a monologue that explic­itly evoked the ­popular Freudianism of Wylie’s Generation of Vipers: God, how I missed you. This place was just like a tomb, Sonny. Just like a tomb. I laid awake at nights worrying you might get mixed up with some—­some ­woman—­some ­woman over ­there.  .  .  . ​Listen, ­you’ve got time! Plenty of time! Play! Play awhile, yet. (she gets up—­comes to the bed) You’ll—­you’re home now and ­there’s nothing to rush—­nothing to worry about. Y ­ ou’re home—­you’re—­Say! Are you asleep? Are you asleep? (he d­ oesn’t move) Goodnight, baby. (she kisses him and goes out)34

A coddling “mom,” she infantilized her “baby” as she urged him to “play awhile”; Cass’s m ­ other prevented her son from maturing to prevent him ever leaving her for another w ­ oman.35 In the final film ­these roles w ­ ere largely minimized, in order to focus more on Cass’s own individual failings.36 Supplementing the parents was a cut subplot involving an affair between Cass and a mature older w ­ oman named Joyce. Stern

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explained that the affair showed that Cass was drawn to older, controlling w ­ omen, which suggested his psychological dependence on his mom. But he also felt that the audience needed to be reminded that Cass’s immaturity and dependence ­were not signs of homo­sexuality; the subplot would allow for “audience approval of him as a pos­si­ble bet for manhood.” In the final film, Stern cut passages like t­ hese, likely b­ ecause they ­were heavy-­handed. But they also show how keenly interested he was in using psychological theories to investigate the origins of failed manhood. ­These scenes stress how a controlling “mom” and a “jellyfish” f­ ather led to Cass’s flight from responsibility, and the subplot with Joyce suggests that Stern knew that his audience would associate Cass’s failings with homo­sexuality.37 By the final draft, Cass was the one who refused to move out of his m ­ other’s home, get a job, or act as a husband for Teresa. Cass was a child ­because of his own fears: maturity stressed him, and he worried about leaving his m ­ other. He stuttered, stumbled, and eventually ran from his customer when he tried to be a salesman; he complained to Teresa how he was “strangling all the time” b­ ecause of his responsibilities. He sometimes woke up at night hysterical to think that he’s married, he confided. “It’s like I’m a highschool [sic] boy again,” he complained, noting how the war w ­ asn’t able to make him grow up as he had hoped.38 The climax of the film revolved around Cass’s breakdown. While being henpecked by his ­mother, Cass had a flashback to his insecurities and failures and fled from his ­family and Teresa. The early script embellished this moment by suggesting how close he was to permanently failed manhood. In it, Cass vanished into a throng of ­people in a vice district. He ventured past the “fluff-­hair girls with roving eyes—­the ­silent sailors—­ . . . ​the prowling youths who parade their bodies in swim-­trunks—­the whores and the homos and the winos.” Unable to accept his responsibility, Cass drifted closer to adultery, homo­sexuality, and alcoholism, all while being chased by his wife, his last link to proper, heterosexual manhood.39 In the next scene, Teresa found Philip drunk and told him she was pregnant. Cass was unable to ­handle the revelation and asked apprehensively if she had made a m ­ istake. She urged him to leave his f­ amily and get a home with her, but Philip yelled back at her that he “­couldn’t leave” ­because “it’d just kill my ­mother.” Realizing she had to make his choice for him, she left him, hoping that he might eventually accept the mantle of fatherhood.40 What, according to Stern, eventually saves Cass from the fate of failed manhood? The answer was provided in the first half of the film, which told the story of Cass’s ­wartime ­service. While generally overlooked by audiences upon its release, the first half of the film, set in Italy during World War II, was in fact critical to Stern’s understanding of maturity and responsibility. In this segment, Stern had depicted the key component in Cass’s development: Cass’s relationship with his commanding officer, Dobbs. Sergeant Dobbs served a mentor-­like role for Cass, giving Cass the male role model he other­wise lacked due to his absent ­father; in fact, Cass even told his VA psychiatrist how much he wished that Dobbs was his ­father. When he met

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Dobbs, Cass was sensitive, cowardly, and unsure of his own abilities; it took Dobbs’s encouragement for him to gain the confidence to fight.41 The connection between Dobbs and Cass blurred the line between mentor/ mentee, father/son, and lover relationships. In one scene—­based upon the treatment Stern himself gave to a youn­ger recruit—­Dobbs taught Cass to fight back when provoked.42 Dobbs attacked him, trying to force him to defend himself. “­Don’t you see?” Dobbs yelled at him as he held Cass’s nose and slapped his face, “You gotta get mad at nothing! You gotta fight! You gotta kill—­even when you ­can’t see why, except I’m putting you to it—­else you’ll be dead and then y­ ou’re no use to nobody—­not even yourself. . . . ​­You’re crying! That’s fine! We all do that up ­here. ­We’re all crazy up h ­ ere—­but ­we’re h ­ ere!”43 Dobbs’s monologue is training for Cass, teaching him to show manly perseverance even when scared. In one reading, Dobbs was teaching Cass how to survive in the military; in another, he was a stern ­father figure who showed Cass the discipline he needed to toughen up. But the scene also exudes same-­sex eroticism, most evident in Stern’s blocking notes: philip springs onto him and they roll around on the bare floor—­grunting, grim, both taking punishment. philip is on top for a moment, batters at dobbs’ face cruelly with both fists. dobbs tries to grab his hands—­yells: Okay! Fine! That’s Enough! philip slows down. dobbs laughs. Save some of that for the e­ nemy, J­ unior. philip sinks onto floor besides dobbs, his head buried in his hands, exhausted. dobbs sits up. For a moment they remain ­there, breathing g­ reat gulps of air. Then dobbs reaches over and musses up philip’s hair roughly. Rough, huh? philip looks at him gratefully—­his search for a hero ended.44

Philip, “grunting,” was able to mount Dobbs, u­ ntil, spent and exhausted, he sunk onto the floor, the act finished as Dobbs affectionately rubbed his hair. The scenes between Dobbs and Cass mirrored the camaraderie that Stern had written about in his memoir of the war, especially the intimacy of Stern’s own ­wartime relationship with Jim Sramek. Importantly, this intimacy was coupled with depictions of Dobbs as a male role model. In one impor­tant scene, Cass was anxious and scared the night before a b­ attle. Cass worried to Dobbs that he ­wouldn’t have the resolve to fight the Germans when the time came. Dobbs comforted Cass, but Cass noticed Dobbs’s own anxiety. “­You’re shivering,” Cass commented. “Of course. I’m scared,” Dobbs tells him. Nevertheless, he reminded Cass that he’d be able to fight when the time came; men do their duty despite the fear they might feel.45 In the war, that male brotherhood was not enough. When ­battle came, Cass still folded. In a flight of anxiety, Cass sprinted away from his hidden position,

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calling out for the safety of Dobbs and alerting the e­ nemy. As his platoon was fired upon, Cass had a breakdown.46 Cass failed as a man, despite what Dobbs had taught him. However, if Cass was not able to mature in w ­ artime, the model of Dobbs, along with the help of Cass’s psychiatrist, helps him fi­nally make a commitment to Teresa and his son, and a commitment to hetero-­domestic manhood. Cass’s doctor helped him realize he needed to grow past his parents to fully mature; the doctor’s diagnosis prompted Cass to look for his wife and accept his duties to her. He accepted his manly responsibilities by rushing to the hospital as she gave birth to their baby. In the script, Stern described the scene: “The Man and W ­ oman kiss. They have grown up. Their baby coos.” In the script version, the film closes with a monologue by the psychiatrist: “Philip Cass is on his way. He’s beginning to accept himself a ­little now—­he’s beginning to know what it feels like to be a man.”47 Focusing on the second half of the film can obscure the importance of the first half. While the film does suggest that Cass’s prob­lems resulted from his suffocating ­mother figure and his “jellyfish” of a ­father, Cass’s eventual success owed itself to his close relationship to Dobbs. Dobbs was the f­ ather figure that Cass lacked; Dobbs also taught Cass the strength he ­later needed to accept his responsibilities to his wife. Dobbs, though deemphasized in the latter half of the film (presumably to make sure that Cass’s focus was on Teresa and properly heterosexual), was in fact key to the film’s structure. Without his relationship to Dobbs, Cass would never be able to break ­free of his ­mothers’ grip. Despite the importance of Dobbs, the film is careful to delineate between the acceptable notions of male intimacy and the unacceptable. Though the relationship has homoerotic undertones (made more obvious by the comparison to Stern’s relationship with Sramek in his memoirs), the film distanced Cass from any implication of homo­sexuality; the deleted scenes involving Joyce and Stern’s line about the “whores, homos, and winos” show that Stern was invested in the idea that homo­sexuality was a version of failed manhood. Instead, male intimacy was countenanced only b­ ecause it helped Cass mature t­oward heterosexual duties; male relationships that lead down other paths serve the opposite purpose and w ­ ere thus dangerous. In some sense, this resolves the paradox that Stern’s ­wartime love for men presented: rather than posing a potential danger to a man’s ability to produce a heterosexual ­family, ­wartime love between men could help enforce postwar heterosexuality, not threaten it. But this was a very ­limited horizon for the possibility of male affection in postwar Amer­i­ca. Male love, u­ nder this model, could only be in s­ervice to male maturity—in par­tic­u­lar, a maturity that was defined by the heterosexual f­ amily. Stern may have been unhappy with this resolution. Certainly, he was still grappling with the role of male affection in manhood when he wrote Rebel Without a Cause seven years l­ ater.48 Another reason to doubt Stern’s complete devotion to the heterosexual ­family is that despite Teresa’s ostensible commitment to hetero-­domesticity, the film

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demonstrated a profound suspicion of ­women’s effects on men. Certainly, Teresa herself helps Cass become a man by helping him accept his heterosexual responsibilities. But the depiction of his m ­ other also suggests that w ­ omen played a role in emasculating men. Much like James Jones’s fictional ­women, Stern’s Mrs. Cass demonstrated how ­women could assert power over men, making it more difficult for them to act on their own au­then­tic desires. By bifurcating ­women into ­these “good” and “bad” roles, Stern seemed to leave open Jones’s critique that ­women, and the society they represented, w ­ ere a threat to men: in Stern’s telling, only ­women who assist men rather than asserting their dominance over men could help them reach maturity. Stern’s subsequent writings also reflected this duality of female roles: for instance, in his t­ elevision play Crip (1954), Stern told a story of a disabled man kept indoors and infantilized by his m ­ other but eventually freed by a young ­woman who taught him to walk and, in the end, escape his ­mother’s grasp.49 Though Stern was committed to the idea that manliness was achieved through hetero-­domesticity, he still left open the possibility that society could be a danger to au­then­tic manhood. Again, this view of femininity reflected Philip Wylie’s widely known critique of “momism,” which had defined the discourse about gender roles in postwar Amer­i­ca.50 This was the lens through which Stern’s audience almost always related to it. In a first screening of Teresa, audience members praised the film’s “honesty” and its “realism.” They spoke highly of “scenes in which Philip was controlled by his psychosis,” the “­mother complex scene where [Philip] finds himself,” and commented that the film was “very good [viewing material] for ­mothers.” One loquacious commenter explained that “­whether you realized it or not, it is a brutal but honest indictment of the all too prevalent American ­family. . . . ​It’s a hard, frustrating fight [against this ­family]—­I know. I beat it.”51 Many critics also commented on the theme of “momism.” For instance, Louella Parsons, writing for Cosmopolitan, wrote that Patricia Collinge (as Mrs. Cass) played “one of t­ hose terrible ‘Moms,’ . . . ​with terrible accuracy.”52 Claire Gaucher called the film “outstanding” and “grimly realistic”; she described the film as “the prob­lem of ‘Mom,’ the doting m ­ other who babies her son and ruins his chances of being a responsible individual.”53 Importantly, very few reviewers commented on Philip Cass or his own journey to manliness; none of the audience reactions the studio gathered discussed Cass’s relationship to Dobbs or the importance of male friendships to maturity. And so while Stern’s story of maturity, and “momism,” may have been unsurprising to his audience, viewers w ­ ere far less likely to focus on Stern’s deeper themes of male camaraderie.54 Though mostly forgotten now, Teresa was nominated for an Acad­emy Award in 1951, an achievement that immediately proved Stern was a name in postwar cinema. ­A fter the success of Teresa, Fred Zinnemann offered Stern a permanent job working for MGM studios.55 From ­there, Stern continued to worry about the importance of adjustment and how exactly boys could grow into ­fathers.

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­Father, Husband, Friend Teresa was significant not just for its depiction of the road to maturity; it also marked a notable break from depictions of frontiersman manhood that w ­ ere other­wise prevalent in American p­ opular culture. Philip Cass, even when he fulfilled his role as a husband, w ­ asn’t the stoic, individualist hero who tamed the West or bravely faced a test of his own toughness. Cass’s manliness, throughout the film, was ­measured in part by his strength to stand up to his ­mother and accept his own responsibilities. But more fundamentally, it was defined by his ability to work with his wife. Consistently in the film Stern connected Cass’s maturation with his ability to be a companion to Teresa. When Teresa first arrived at their apartment, Philip told her what to do and where to sleep (following the preferences of his ­mother); when Cass got a job, he was unable to tell Teresa about his embarrassment and failure as a salesman. When he tried to express his feelings, he fumbled and prevaricated, unable to express himself. However, the end of the film, when Philip takes up the mantle of Teresa’s husband and the ­father to her son, he joined her in the hospital, able to fi­nally make a commitment. In order to be a man, he learned to be open with Teresa and learned that as a husband he needed to treat her as a partner. Mastery, stoicism, and competitiveness (the primary traits of the frontiersman) played no role in Philip Cass’s rehabilitation. Dobbs, likewise, modeled a masculinity that w ­ asn’t hard and stoic but thoughtful and emotional. Dobbs was able to show affection for Cass and as a ­father figure could praise Cass when he made good decisions. Importantly, Dobbs was able to admit his own fear to Cass and teach Cass to fight despite being afraid of the ­enemy. Dobbs, the prime model of an ideal man in Teresa, was also specifically not a Lone Ranger figure. He was a man who was in touch with his emotions and able to share them with ­others. What’s surprising is how unsurprising Stern’s depiction may have been to audiences of the time. Since the 1920s, the cultural ideal of marriage had subtly shifted from one that stressed male dominance to one that stressed the idea that both partners would find emotional fulfillment, personal satisfaction, and happiness within the marriage. “Companionate marriage,” a term for this newer style of marriage, was an ideal in which marriage partners saw each other less as business partners and more as friends they could rely on to provide for their emotional needs.56 Related to this was an increased focus on men’s duties as ­fathers. Robert Griswold and James Gilbert have both argued that a model of fatherhood that stressed open and warm relationships with their wives and c­ hildren became increasingly predominant, while models of patriarchal dominance w ­ ere discouraged.57 One of the best examples was the ­popular radio show and TV sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. ­Popular in the late forties and fifties, the show was about the domestic squabbles and misunderstandings common to sitcom families of the era; the most unique

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feature was that the Nelson f­ amily who starred in the show was a real f­ amily, carefully stage managed and crafted into a show by the ­father, Ozzie Nelson. What’s impor­tant about the show is that the common plots ­were often about the ways Ozzie failed at being a patriarchal man. In most episodes, his wife Harriet proves to be wiser and smarter than he is, especially when he tries to assert his dominance as head of h ­ ouse­hold. Instead, the show is tightly focused around showing that Ozzie’s outmoded ideas of male dominance are wrongheaded; most of the time, the lessons learned at the end of the episode are that Ozzie should defer more to his wife as his partner and that he should show compassion to his ­children, as opposed to acting only like their disciplinarian or boss.58 So when Teresa implicitly argued for a model of manhood more suited ­toward openness and emotional availability, Stern was drawing on an already changing tide. But, importantly, Stern’s motivation for elevating t­ hese traits, as shown through the character of Dobbs, drew from his war experience. Thus, Stern’s example suggests how the emotionality fostered between soldiers in ­wartime was compatible with the new emotion demands of ­fathers. True, postwar Americans had become suspicious of same-­sex emotionality; in parallel, men had also been convinced that their efforts should be spent in the home as “companionate” husbands and ­fathers. Finding themselves unable to practice the lessons they learned in war with other men, it was still pos­si­ble to live that model in the postwar ­house­hold. Furthermore, as established in chapter 2, this emotional and companionate ideal of manhood was particularly compatible with the ethnic s­ tereotypes men like Stern had imbibed before the war. Stern’s embrace of sensitive manhood owed itself, at least partly, to Jewish ­stereotypes that had demeaned Jewish men as overly emotional and unsuited to bravery.59 Stern’s w ­ artime embrace of this model was a rejection of the racially defined frontiersman manhood and instead a transformation of internalized Jewish s­ tereotypes into manly traits. To some extent, the success of t­ hese models a­ fter the war can be read as a success for more inclusive models of manhood that allowed ethnic men to take their place as part of the American polity. This ethnic origin for sensitive masculinity was still pre­sent in Stern’s screenplay for Teresa. Stern claimed to have based the Casses on an Irish Catholic ­family he knew; his first draft was criticized by the original writer, Alfred Hayes, b­ ecause the dialogue of the Cass ­family sounded too Jewish. Hearing this critique, Stern changed the dialogue and setting to be more generically American, but the setting—of a poor American f­ amily living in a tiny apartment in downtown New York—­still had hints of the ­family’s ethnic origins. Beyond this, the entire story—­the domineering ­mother, the “jellyfish” of a husband, and the anxious, neurotic son—­fed off of con­temporary Jewish ­stereotypes. As Cass escaped his ­family, he also escaped the ethnic enclaves of his childhood and learned to break ­free of the ­stereotypes that defined him and his ­family.

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Audiences, however, did not view the movie as an “ethnic” story; instead, the audience reactions collected by the studio found that viewers ­were remarkably enthusiastic about finding themselves in the story. Likewise, the same audiences saw Cass’s strug­gles against his ­mothers’ dominance as natu­ral and his relationship with Teresa realistic. Clearly, a depiction of manhood especially suited ­toward ethnic Americans was also, by the early fifties, palatable to a wider population. It would be claiming too much to argue that veterans with experiences like Stern’s caused a reevaluation of manliness along emotional and domestic lines; certainly, James Jones’s writings show that ­those same impulses t­ oward male camaraderie in w ­ artime could be weaponized against the postwar f­ amily. But the way that Stern translated his experiences into Teresa, together with a positive audience response to the film’s depiction of the strug­gles of manhood, does suggest that the war created a population of veterans receptive to this depiction of manliness. Certainly, Stern did not invent the ideal of the sensitive f­ ather. But it is likely that soldiers like him saw something impor­tant in a man defined by his sensitivity to his wife and c­ hildren. As Stern kept working in Hollywood, he continued to explore this idea. In his next film, Rebel Without a Cause, Stern fully focused on the importance of sensitive manhood, making the argument that sensitive manhood was inextricable from maturity and a man’s role as a husband.

“What Do You Have to Do to Be a Man?” Peter Pan was a telling choice of hero for Stern. A perpetual child, Pan’s defining feature was that he escaped the adult world in ­favor of a perpetual youth in a childhood fantasy. Paired with the boys who followed him around Never-­Never Land, Peter Pan staged endless ­battles alongside his companions, confident that the storytelling logic of his world made him invincible. But Stern was careful to note that Pan was not wish-­fulfillment. As Stern explained, “the tragedy in Peter Pan is not that Wendy can no longer fly, but that Peter still can.”60 While Wendy could eventually become a ­woman, the tragic figure Peter Pan was never able to grow up. This resonated for Stern, who placed so much importance on the ability for boys to mature into men. While Stern worked upon his new script for Rebel Without a Cause, Peter Pan’s story was close to his mind. He modeled the main character, Jim Stark, on Peter Pan, since “Peter Pan [was] basically a story of juvenile delinquency told in Victorian terms.”61 In writing a story like this, Stern was echoing the themes of maturity pre­sent in Teresa. But Stern’s new plot went further. While Teresa was concerned with adjustment and responsibility, Rebel was most concerned with a repudiation of destructive, violent, and competitive masculinity. Teresa showed how men could mature to accept their duties as husbands; Rebel wanted

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to show that the most mature men could both accept ­those responsibilities and embrace sensitivity and tempered self-­control. Stern’s route to Rebel Without a Cause was circuitous. ­A fter Teresa, he worked with Fred Zinnemann on Benjy, which won an Acad­emy Award for Best Documentary. The film was a fictionalized look at a real polio clinic and told the fictional story of a young boy, Benjy. Stern’s script continued to explore ideas of maturity: the central tension of the story was w ­ hether Benjy would accept an experimental treatment for polio that would allow him to walk again. While the treatment would cure his disability, it would also make him “normal” and thus subject to all the roles and responsibilities that come with being a regular boy.62 Would Benjy embrace the consequences of the surgery, or would he rather have the safety of forever being dependent? ­A fter Benjy, Zinnemann and Stern went their separate ways. Zinnemann began working on an adaption of the recent best seller, From ­Here to Eternity, with its author, James Jones. The movie Zinnemann produced hardly resembled Jones’s novel but nevertheless won an Acad­emy Award as a war film about the bravery and heroism of two soldiers who recognize their duties to their lovers and their country. Meanwhile, Stern tried to succeed as a com­pany man. He became a part of MGM Studios in 1952, but his time t­ here was a disaster. The studio culture required writers to be proactive, cutthroat, and entrepreneurial. Stern was not prepared for this. On his first day, he was given an empty office with the name of its previous inhabitant, James Grant, still written on the door. Stern sat down in the office and waited for someone to come to him, but, day a­ fter day, he was alone. For the better part of a year, to fill the time, Stern wrote scripts that nobody saw, on topics that interested him personally but w ­ ere not suited to any director’s interests. ­A fter a year and a half of frustration, Stern quit, believing he had been used and wasted by MGM.63 ­A fter Stern angrily quit MGM, he moved to New York and wrote a few ­television scripts. While working on an unsuccessful screenplay about the UN, he was approached at a party by the director, Nicholas Ray. Ray had been struggling to adapt a book called Rebel Without a Cause by the psychologist Dr. Robert Lindner, a nonfiction case study of a disturbed, mentally unstable youth. The title of the study gave the film its name, but despite a revolving door of writers and actors, no one could write a film about the prob­lems of juvenile delinquency that satisfied Ray’s hopes. He hoped Stern would be able to help, given his work humanizing Philip and Teresa Cass in Teresa. Stern listened carefully and agreed.64 Juvenile delinquency was a subject on the minds of many in the early fifties. ­Popular media of the era was preoccupied with stories of youth vio­lence, giving Americans the sense that gang activity, drug use, and general antisocial be­hav­ ior had skyrocketed ­after the end of World War II. More broadly, “teen­agers” (a

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term in­ven­ted by Life magazine in 1944) seemed to have their own culture, their own lifestyle, and their own pastimes that their parents could not understand. This new generation of ­children seemed out of control in ways that their forbearers had trou­ble explaining, leading to anx­i­eties about ­whether the next generation would properly mature into adults.65 This fear of juvenile delinquency was deeply intertwined with pervading cultural discussions of postwar masculinity; this is prob­ably why it interested Stern. Dr. Robert Lindner had elsewhere conflated the two anx­i­eties by arguing that juvenile delinquency was caused by the “effeminization of youth.”66 Prewar frontiersman manhood stressed self-­control; ­these criminal ­children seemed to belie this trait. Other experts argued that affluence could be blamed. Teen­agers had it too easy—­they never learned deference to authority and thus committed crimes out of boredom. ­Others blamed new forms of mass media: the vio­lence in crime comics, for instance, desensitized teen­agers and led them to criminal be­hav­ior. Most common was a belief that, somehow, the parents of ­these teen­agers had failed them. Weak or absent ­fathers left teen­agers without a male role model and thus a way to learn proper manly comportment, while overprotective “moms” infantilized their c­ hildren. W ­ hatever the cause, t­ here was a pervasive fear that manhood was in crisis and that youth culture was a symptom of a larger disease.67 James Jones would likely have had a grudging admiration for the juvenile rebels: he may have seen them as necessary defectors from an effeminizing society, trying to find authenticity in a society that sought to domesticate them. Norman Mailer celebrated t­ hese rebels, believing that they w ­ ere the only way to keep intact the authenticity and individualism of w ­ artime masculinity.68 But to Stern, who believed in adjustment and maturity, the juvenile delinquent posed a more impor­tant prob­lem: why ­were young men (and w ­ omen) failing to adapt to their roles? The initial script failed to explain what caused juvenile rebellion, so Stern rejected it and started mostly from scratch. Stern was convinced that poor parenting was to blame for juvenile delinquency, but he was unsure of exactly why. While he kept most of the characters and the story outline intact, he rejected the tone and the way the characters ­were written. The script he’d been given was dominated by “macho” situations and unrelatable ­stereotypes. It seemed to valorize the bullies who had beaten up Stern in high school; its characters ­were unsympathetic. Stern’s disgust with t­ hese scenes eventually led him to his main thesis: parents ­were failing to teach ­children how to express sensitivity and love and without a clear model t­ hose teen­agers resorted to vio­lence. “Macho” displays ­were not ­because juvenile delinquents ­were inherently violent. Instead, they happened ­because t­hese kids, unable to express love for each other, connected through the only method they knew: destructive masculinity.69 Stern started his research by posing as a social worker at a juvenile hall in Los Angeles: his ruse allowed him to interview a variety of troubled teen­agers held

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t­ here. In his notes from one interview, Stern reported that one anxious, insecure young man heard the voice of Abraham Lincoln. Stern concluded that this was a manifestation of the youth’s need for a ­father figure. “In his wild search for a ­father image,” Stern explained of the teenager, “he transfers almost immediately to anyone who shows compassion. And I feel that the lingering glances and the added pressure of the handshake are at once a hopeful recognition of sympathy and an admission that he desires love.”70 Stern i­ magined that troubled teen­agers w ­ ere dealing with psychological issues similar to ­those that he had written into Philip Cass.71 Rebel Without a Cause would be about the strug­gle of a boy trying to be a man, stuck in an environment in which he lacks any models of manliness. But it would also be about the necessity of male emotionality in achieving maturity, how relationships with ­others could teach sensitivity and kindness. As Stern l­ater explained, Rebel Without a Cause was “about tenderness, intimacy, it was an attempt to widen the permission to love when men w ­ ere supposed to be one way with each other.”72 With this in mind, Stern started to sketch his subjects. His research file for the film was filled with endless pages of character notes on each of the four main characters: Jim, the rebellious protagonist; Judy, the ­woman who searches for fatherly approval; Plato, the psychopathic and troubled boy whose parents abandoned him; and Buzz, the leader of the gang of juvenile delinquents. Within ­these character notes, Stern sketched out complete psychoanalytic evaluations of even minor characters, filling out association tests, Rorschach test results, primary diagnoses, and a host of other evaluations. Coming to a complete psychological picture of each character, Stern zeroed in on the par­tic­u ­lar ­family background that made each character delinquent. In his notes, for instance, he wrote that Plato’s Rorschach responses indicated that he craved male affection and so attached to Jim Stark.73 This attention to psychological detail—­his notes, his fictional Rorschach tests, his interviews with troubled kids—­demonstrated how Stern valued fiction ­because he thought it could help him reveal truth. As he did when writing Teresa, Stern interviewed psychologists and read reports on veterans to gather data on con­temporary prob­lems. Stern hoped that, by d­ oing his research, he would be able to rise above the urge to preach moral lessons about delinquency and instead pre­sent a scientifically proven account of what caused delinquency. At the same time, Stern’s reliance on the psy­chol­ogy of the day virtually guaranteed that the results he’d see from his research would echo the prevailing trends in psychological theory: that ­mothers w ­ ere overbearing, that ­fathers w ­ ere ­nonexistent, that juvenile delinquents w ­ ere maladjusted b­ ecause of their lack of models. Rebel, as a result, ended up as a film pulled in two directions. On the one hand, the film places the blame on the ste­reo­typically flawed parents; on the other, Stern tried to say something profound about manhood and gentleness. The film, which took place entirely in the span of twenty-­four hours, followed the main protagonist, Jim Stark (played by James Dean), over the course of his

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first day at his new school. He befriended the unpop­u­lar Plato (Sal Mineo) and fell for a delinquent girl named Judy (Natalie Wood). He also made enemies with the local gang led by Buzz. They slashed his tires to goad him into a knife fight, an event that escalated tensions u­ ntil Jim and Buzz competed in a dangerous “chickie run,” a race t­ oward a cliff that leads to Buzz’s death. L ­ ater, the rest of the gang pursued Jim to an old, abandoned ­house. Instead of finding Jim, they ­were pulled into a shootout with the psychotic Plato, who feared that Jim, like his ­father, had abandoned him. Jim and Judy chased a­ fter Plato to the planetarium, to protect him, and Jim managed to convince Plato to turn himself in to the cops. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding led the police to shoot him as he exited, leaving Plato dead on the ground as Jim mourned his death. In the end, Jim, his parents, and the entire community all come together and recognize how they failed c­ hildren like Plato.74 Stern used the beginning of the film to introduce the psychological prob­lems plaguing the three main delinquents. As the movie opened, the police picked up Jim Stark, who was found drunk lying in the street, Judy, who was soliciting sex to strangers, and Plato, who had shot a puppy for reasons he ­couldn’t fully explain.75 As they talked to the police, the reasons for their maladjustment became clear. Judy offered sex to strangers b­ ecause her f­ ather refused to give her affection or approval: she told the police officer that he hated her and called her a tramp. Jim’s parents squabbled but failed to discipline him, showing that he lacked parental models of correct conduct. Plato, the most troubled of the three, lacked parents altogether. Plato, furthermore, demonstrated how a lack of affection and love prevented boys from becoming men; when a boy like Plato was abandoned by his parents, he clung to anyone around him, much like the troubled boy Stern had interviewed. Thus, when befriended by Jim, Plato developed an immediate attachment. Jim, he ­imagined, was the ­father he’d never had. He told Judy that Jim is his best friend, though he’d only known him for a day, and told her that “maybe next time ­he’ll take me hunting or fishing.”76 ­Later, when they escape to Plato’s abandoned mansion, Plato created a mock f­ amily out of Judy and Jim. He fell asleep peacefully, watched over by his new parents (who themselves playacted that the mansion was their adult home) but was distraught upon awakening to find that once again his parents had abandoned him. The abandonment drove Plato into hysterics; when Jim tried to comfort him, he shouted, “You left me again, ­father!”77 Throughout the film, t­ here ­were hints that Plato’s need for affection had led him to homo­sexuality. Instead of a pin-up girl in his locker, for instance, he had a photo of the movie star Alan Ladd. The relationship between him and Jim also has homosexual overtones: at one point in the film, Plato suggestively invited Jim to stay at his ­house overnight. However, Stern was never fully willing to characterize Plato as gay. Instead, Stern compared relationships between men in the film to the “fierce emotional possessiveness” he had experienced in war, and like

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in his memoir five years e­ arlier, Stern always stressed the loving connections of such relationships while denying any intimation of homo­sexuality. To Stern, Plato w ­ asn’t homosexual ­unless his male relationships precluded him from maturing and becoming a heterosexual adult. As long as Plato still had the potential to grow up, the relationship could still be an example of how two men could support each other through mutual love.78 In fact, Stern understood many of the male relationships in the film through his ­wartime s­ ervice. The teenage gang that clashed with Jim Stark was consciously modeled a­ fter the romantic relationships between soldiers in the World War II military. Th ­ ese men, unable to get beyond “bullshit macho defens[iveness],” expressed their feelings for each other through competition and vio­lence. But ­under that was a “pure drive for affection.”79 Stern explained the relationship between the gang and ­wartime experiences as such: The affection in gang be­hav­ior has to be hidden inside a dif­fer­ent vocabulary, both spoken and unspoken, inside gestures and words which desensitized every­thing and made every­thing brutal. . . . ​I ­don’t know what other experiences of World War II w ­ ere, but for us it was deliberate and conscious. . . . ​ You’d be living in a kind of physical intimacy which was unlike any other. . . . ​ Men w ­ ere having the experience of never having been so close to other men, and ­there was something of that love operating within the structure of the teenage gang whose members had left home, where ­there w ­ asn’t much love, to fight each other in the streets.80

Stern’s favorite scene of the film—­a conversation between Jim Stark and the gang leader, Buzz, right before the ill-­fated “chickie run”—­demonstrated this very paradox: that the gang members, unable to express male affection, instead performed a destructive, violent manhood. Sizing up Jim before the race, Buzz explained to him, “I like you. ­You’re a good guy.” Jim balked at this seemingly bizarre statement of affection. “Then why are we ­doing this?” he asked, questioning the premise of the entire exercise. Buzz, aware of the macho farce but unable to supplant it with anything ­else, just replied to Jim, “Well, ­we’ve got to do something, right?”81 Buzz died ­because he could not see an alternative to this vio­lence; left without a male role model who would allow him to express his emotions, he and the other boys had to engage in self-­harm. Instead of caring for another man, Buzz’s machismo brought him to its inevitable conclusion. But what of Jim Stark, Stern’s key protagonist? Jim strug­gled with the question of how to be a man, torn between emulating the immature and violent gang or his weak and feminized ­father. Jim resisted engaging in the gang’s vio­lence, but he lacked the strength of character to avoid macho posturing; as a result, he felt a pull to prove that he i­sn’t a coward throughout the film. Jim’s f­ ather had failed him: Jim’s f­ ather was a spineless, henpecked nobody, nearly the same as

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Philip Cass’s f­ ather. He was affable and easily swayed by stronger personalities. Jim craved strength from his f­ ather: he wished his f­ ather would just, once, “sock it to his m ­ other, just so s­ he’d stop picking on him.” In one key scene, the f­ ather was dressed in a pink apron, demonstrating his meta­phorical loss of masculinity. Jim, disgusted at this, picked him up, literally by the apron strings, to ask him to act like a real man.82 ­There’s a sense in this film that Stern was critiquing masculinity from both sides. Jim’s ­father was a failed man ­because he lacked the strength of convictions required by a real man: he could never have performed the bravery needed to face ­wartime as Stern had. But Judy’s f­ ather presented the opposite prob­lem: so emotionally closed off was he that his d­ aughter found male approval elsewhere. In both cases, the sins of the f­ ather lead their c­ hildren to badly adjust to adulthood; in Jim’s case, Jim had to strug­gle to be a man b­ ecause he lacked any male role models who could teach him. For instance, in one crucial scene, Jim asked his f­ ather for advice on w ­ hether he should engage in the chickie run. Desperately hoping his f­ ather might give him any guidance, he asked a ­simple question: “What do you have to do to be a man?” “Suppose you had to do something,” Jim continued. “You had to go someplace, and do this ­thing that was . . . ​you know, it was very dangerous. But it was am ­ atter of honor. . . . ​What would you do?”83 Jim’s ­father prevaricated; he presented vague platitudes and clichés. “You ­can’t make a hasty decision,” his ­father hedged, offering instead to write up a pros and cons list. Frustrated, Jim left for the chickie run, knowing that his f­ ather w ­ ouldn’t give him direction.84 ­Later, his f­ ather once again failed to model any manly be­hav­ ior. Jim wanted to talk to the police; his ­father told him to act like nothing happened. “You d­ on’t need to get involved,” his f­ ather urged, “­there ­were lots of kids t­ here.” “It m ­ atters to me that I do the right t­ hing,” Jim explained. In the climax of the scene, Jim nearly strangled his dad, demanding he take a stand.85 Instead of learning mature, sensitive manly traits from a role model, Jim imbibed the self-­destructive models of the gang and tried to prove his bravery through courting vio­lence. But ­after the chickie run, despite the lack of role models, Jim transformed, and learned responsibility. He tried to tell the police about Buzz’s death; he no longer saw the point in proving himself by fighting. By the climax of the movie, Jim had learned to be a man. In an echo of the lessons learned by Philip Cass, once Jim de­cided that manhood was defined not by proving oneself but by standing for moral princi­ples, he was also able to embrace hetero-­domesticity. In the scenes that followed his attempt to tell the police, Jim, Judy, and Plato all hid in an abandoned mansion, where Jim and Judy playacted as newlyweds. As the three walked through the mansion, they started to create their own ­family to make up for the ones they lacked. Judy got the affection of a man, while Plato got the role model he craved. Jim became the man of Stern’s dreams, one founded on sensitivity and not machismo. In the words of Judy, a man was someone “who can be gentle and

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sweet, like [Jim is], and someone who d­ oesn’t run away when you want them, like being Plato’s friend when nobody ­else liked him. That’s being strong.”86 Why was Jim fi­nally able to grow up? His friendship with Plato. By protecting Plato from the taunts of the other teen­agers, Jim learned the duty that was fundamental to Stern’s ideal of manhood. Stern l­ ater explained, “[Jim and Judy] adopt a child, the character Sal Mineo played. Jim becomes the ideal ­father, the brave man who can stand off the pirates [from Peter Pan], the police and the rival gang. All nobleness.” It was his connection with Plato that allowed Jim to learn the manhood he had been denied by the world around him. And when Plato was shot and killed, it was Jim who grieved. Stern found comfort in his male friends during his time in war; he reflected that by showing how Jim’s courage and sensitivity came from his friend Plato. Stern’s ­presentation of manhood in Rebel goes beyond what he tried to demonstrate in Teresa. The close male intimacy Stern found in ­wartime was much more explored h ­ ere and used specifically as a counterpoint to the frontiersman: as the gang members demonstrated, the competitive and violent aspects of frontiersman manhood ­were inauthentic expressions of the emotion that men ­were trained not to express to each other. Only by being able to express t­ hose au­then­tic feelings to o­ thers could a man truly adjust and grow up, and only then could he become a proper husband to a wife. Hetero-­domesticity ­wasn’t just founded upon adjustment and maturity, like Teresa stressed. Hetero-­domesticity was attainable only when a man learned to embrace his emotional and sensitive self.

Conclusion None of this, ultimately, mattered; Stern’s nuanced critique was overlooked. On the bright side, the film was an instant classic. Bosley Crowther, for the New York Times, wrote, “It is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture of modern teen­-­agers. . . . ​Like ‘Blackboard Jungle’ before it, it is a picture to make the hair stand on end.”87 However, most critics focused on the film’s indictment of parents, mostly ignoring Stern’s larger discussion of what manhood could mean. A Time magazine reviewer wrote, “The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental,” while Jack Moffitt for the Hollywood Reporter declared, “To blame parents for the sole responsibility for [juvenile delinquency] is to resort to a ­convenient cliché.”88 To Stern, it seemed as if the film was destined to be misunderstood. Watching it upon release, he realized that his characterization of the parents had been cartoonish and exaggerated; he was aghast to see that Nicholas Ray’s direction had magnified, not mitigated, that m ­ istake.89 Worse, viewers had missed his central message. Once, in 1956, he met a man on a cross-­country flight who vocally hated the film. The man was a Boy Scout leader, and he claimed that all his kids had been out of control since the release of the film. At their schools, knife fights had become frequent, he told Stern; he simply ­couldn’t condone a movie

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that portrayed such vio­lence. Stern was horrified. Stern ­later explained, “That was exactly the opposite of what our purpose had been—­and Jimmy’s purpose too—we wanted to show that vio­lence and leather boots and all that stuff ­didn’t make a man.”90 But w ­ hatever Stern’s wishes, James Dean’s legacy became associated with the vio­lence and rebellion of the juvenile delinquent, not the tenderness that made Stark a f­ ather to Plato and husband to Judy. Audiences w ­ ere fascinated with the rebellion of youth; they ­were less interested in Stern’s psychological theories of how that rebellion could come to an end. James Dean died a month before the film was released, an event that shook Stern deeply. During the filming, Stern and Dean had developed an intense and deeply felt friendship. When Jim Stark mooed in the planetarium scene in Rebel, it was an in-­joke between Dean and Stern, referencing a game they played when they first met.91 When Dean refused to show up for filming, worried that the film ­wouldn’t be a success, Stern was the only one he’d let comfort him.92 For Stern’s part, he, to some degree, associated his friendship with Dean with the one between Plato and Jim Stark in the film; ­after all, Stern ­later said that while Stark, played by Dean, was “the person I wish I’d been,” Plato was “the me I always tried to leave b­ ehind but never could.”93 ­Because of his close connection to Dean, he refused to be pre­sent during the filming of Rebel as was normally his practice. Stern worried that he would be too biased t­ oward his friend to objectively know what was best for the film.94 He agreed to write The James Dean Story, a documentary on the life of Dean, in order to correct the calcifying belief that Dean had been a symbol of violent, rebellious manhood. The documentary was a maudlin affair that nearly all the critics hated, but it was nevertheless a moving tribute from Stern to his lost friend. Maybe the most memorable line from Stern’s ninety-­minute eulogy was this: “[Dean] believed that the cry of the world is for tenderness between ­human beings—­and he felt that to be tender requires more courage of a man than to be violent. Men are brave enough for war, but not brave enough for love. That’s what Jimmy thought.” At least one biographer doubted that this is ­really a summation of James Dean. W ­ hether or not it was a fair eulogy, it summed up Jim Stark, the man Stern had ­imagined James Dean to be, and it summed up the ideal that he hoped Dean had demonstrated to the world.95 Stern’s quest to reimagine manhood is remarkable in many ways. Not only did he repudiate the same competitive masculinity that James Jones had decried as “false illusions,” but he also came to the same conclusion as Jones: brotherhood between men could act as an alternative to this false masculinity. But Stern took this revelation in a dif­fer­ent direction from Jones. Embracing psychological theories of maturity, Stern understood manhood to be a quality that allowed men to use tenderness and responsibility to fulfill their societal duties to o­ thers. Manhood was not a license to escape from society altogether. Stern’s films continued to question the structure of modern manhood. In The Rack, Stern told the story of a POW on trial for giving military secrets to the

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Koreans. Stern was fascinated by the idea that some men held out through torture, while some gave in. ­Under what conditions did a man fi­nally crack and give up his responsibility to his country? How much must a man resist to do his duty to ­others? In his next film, The Ugly Americans, Stern interrogated the foundations of colonialism, questioning what right Americans had to topple, or help, distant regimes. In a cynical twist, during the final speech of the film where his protagonist urged Americans to think about the consequences of the vio­lence they unleashed in other parts of the world, the climax of the speech was cut short as the film showed a viewer at home change the channel to watch a Western.96 Clearly, Stern thought, Americans would rather be comforted by the frontiersman narrative than question it. By the seventies, Stern s­ topped writing altogether. Writing had always been difficult for him, and he was increasingly wracked with anxiety attacks as he worried that his next film w ­ ouldn’t be able to live up to his standard. Eventually, he found himself completely unable to produce, and his ­career abruptly ended. Stern moved to Seattle, where he took care of rescued cows u­ ntil his death in 2015. ­There, the boy who had spent his days drawing pictures of farm animals fi­nally got to live out that dream of life on the range.97 Stern’s journey had started the moment he realized he was capable of survival even in terrible conditions. Freudian psy­chol­ogy had become his ally: it had given him an ­organizing princi­ple to explain what he had seen in the war. It also helped him understand what a man’s roles w ­ ere a­ fter war and gave him a blueprint ­toward the proper way for men to adjust to peacetime Amer­i­ca. But while psychological explanations comforted Stern, o­ thers w ­ ere not so lucky. The male romance that Stern had valued so highly in war became a dangerous liability for so many other men who had no choice in whom they loved. The psychological theories that taught Stern how male intimacy could be valuable also led other men to abandon it as quickly as pos­si­ble. Stern had conceded that male intimacy ­wasn’t a mature practice, which implied that men who still loved men ­were not ­really men at all. Edward Field was one of ­those men plagued by the pop-­Freudianism of the fifties. He had loved men during war, just like Stern; but when he came home, he found almost no way to integrate that love with his new peacetime life. His ­father wanted him to get a job, to find a girlfriend, to grow up into a model of responsibility, and Field was distressed to find that, no m ­ atter what he tried, he could not. Field had found comfort and confidence in war, but the same currents that swept Stern in one direction tried in vain to pull Field the same direction. Field saw psychologists, hoping that they might be able to cure him of his same-­ sex desires, and when they c­ ouldn’t, he fell into a deep depression. The model Stern prescribed for all men felt impossible for men like Field to attain. While James Jones and Stewart Stern reinvented manhood around close male brotherhood, neither took this to its furthest conclusion: the embrace of same-­ sex desire as the end goal of manhood. Edward Field learned the same lessons

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from war as ­these men, but in his hands that lesson became a call for gay authenticity. As Field fought with his numerous psychologists, went to gay bars, and fell in love with other men, he gradually rejected the roles Freud ordained for him, crafting a manhood that took male love as its central foundation. He may no longer have flown planes over Germany, but that was no reason why he ­couldn’t imagine himself a man.

7

The Continuing Adventures of Icarus Edward Field’s Life in the Postwar Closet Only the feathers floating around the hat Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore The confusing aspects of the case, And the witnesses ran off to a gang war. So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply “Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus Had swum away, coming at last to the city Where he rented a h ­ ouse and tended the garden. “That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called him, Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit, Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings 167

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Nor that t­ hose sad, defeated eyes had once Compelled the sun. And had he told them They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare. No, he could not disturb their neat front yards; Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible ­mistake: What was he d­ oing aging in a suburb? Can the genius of the hero fall To the middling stature of the merely talented? And nightly Icarus probes his wound And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn, Constructs small wings and tries to fly To the lighting fixture on the ceiling: Fails e­ very time and hates himself for trying. He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically, And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero; But now ­rides commuter trains, Serves on vari­ous committees, And wishes he had drowned. —­Edward Field, “Icarus,” ca. 1949

Sometime, maybe 1954 or 1955, Edward Field awoke from a vivid dream. He immediately reached for his phone to call his analyst. He explained the details of the dream to the sleepy man on the other line: He remembered his ­father standing in front of him, and he remembered grasping a knife as he looked ­toward the man. He was holding the long, two-­pronged knife, one prong facing t­ oward his f­ ather, the other back into his own heart, as if to strike. He described to the analyst how he clutched the knife, plunged it forward into his f­ ather’s chest, and felt the second prong penetrate his own heart, killing them both at once.1 His analyst was delighted. “Meet with me at once,” he instructed Field. Field heartily agreed. He was relieved; ever since he had returned from Paris (itself a

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flight from readjustment into civilian life), he had been drifting, unable to succeed. Depression and a lack of income had driven him to move in with his parents in Nassau County, away from all his friends and confidantes who nightly traversed the bohemian world of New York’s West Village. He ­hadn’t known exactly why he was depressed, but his analyst—­drawing from his understandings of Freud—­had already figured out the root of Field’s prob­lems: he was homosexual. Only by abandoning the directionless life of a homosexual man would he be able to take upon himself the responsibilities implicit in manhood and be truly happy. “The oedipal situation in your ­family, you had somehow not gone through it, killing your ­father, symbolically,” Field ­later explained, “I had never done that so of course, ­every time I had loved a man meant that I wanted to kill him . . . ​ and if I kissed a man in a dream it meant that I was repressing my feelings to murder him.” Of course he believed this (“if you w ­ ere intelligent, you ­were a Marxist; if you w ­ ere intelligent, you w ­ ere a Freudian”), and so when he committed his imaginary murder-­suicide, Field hoped that maybe he had fi­nally resolved ­those issues.2 Feeling better than he had in a long time, Field caught the train into town. Sitting down in his group therapy session, he waited with anticipation while each member of the circle discussed their recent dilemmas. Once it was his turn, he dramatically stood up and asked to read a poem. The poem, “Stand Up, Friend, with Me,” is now lost, but Field l­ater remembered it as a call for self-­respect, a meta­phoric urging to “stand up” against criticisms of how he lived. His listeners believed it was a call for toleration of his right to love men, though Field was sure they misunderstood; they should have been worried about the poem’s Marxism, he ­later joked. But what mattered was that it was a crystal moment in which he no longer let ­others define who he should be. He ­later wrote that “a fist in my chest opened / I could breathe freely again.” He was fi­nally at ease. He l­ater wrote a poem about the incident, titled “Journey.” He ended the poem by writing: And at the end of that ­ride he stood up and got off the train: And through the street and in all the places he lived in l­ ater on He walked, himself, a man among men, With such radiance that every­one looked up and wondered.3

The moment had allowed Field to imagine he was “a man among men.” Field knew he could move on with his life. He had resolved his oedipal crisis. He could fi­nally be straight. ­Whether most Americans knew it or not, a revolution was taking place. The Second World War had been an awakening for many men and w ­ omen who felt same-­sex attractions. Following it, ­these men and ­women flocked to large cities where they might find o­ thers like themselves. While gay men moved to urban

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centers and discovered old and new bars, homophile ­organizations formed and questioned the disease model of homosexual desire, forming a new community of proud homosexuals in the ­process. Artists, most visibly the Beats, experimented with gay eroticism, and in 1956 Allen Ginsberg’s Howl survived an obscenity case and became a symbol of the new visibility of homo­sexuality.4 Field was caught in the m ­ iddle of this social revolution. One foot in the emerging culture of dissent, and another steeped in the pressures to fit into postwar hetero-­domesticity, Field was pulled in both directions as he tried to reconcile the openness and authenticity of his ­wartime years with the mores of postwar life. Field had learned through his ­wartime experiences that affectionate, even erotic relationships with other men could lead to h ­ uman connections that he found himself other­wise lacking. In contrast, pressures from f­ amily, therapy, and society taught Field that if he rejected the responsibilities of domesticity he would face only unhappiness. The veterans’ critique, as we have seen, could make an argument for e­ ither side of this divide. To James Jones, new masculine imperatives ­toward emotionality and authenticity could be pursued only through rebellion; thus, a real man could be defined only by a pursuit of his own desires and a refusal to be tied down by societal norms. Stewart Stern, conversely, de­cided that authenticity and sensitivity w ­ ere valuable for how they allowed men to adjust to their roles as husbands and ­fathers. Regardless, in ­either case, the veterans’ critique allowed for a widened scope of male actions, by stressing a man’s need to be au­then­tic: to pursue his own inner desires, to Jones, or be able to express one’s emotions freely, to Stern. It was this focus on authenticity, implicit in the veterans’ critique, which helped Field come to embrace his homo­sexuality as not just part of who he was but also evidence of manliness itself. Field, eventually, de­cided that a submersion of any parts of his identity, Jewish or gay, was a betrayal of the inner au­then­ tic self he had discovered through w ­ artime camaraderie. Using gayness to identify with the marginalized in society, Field—­unevenly, haphazardly—­ adopted a pride in rebellion, one that put him at odds with mainstream society’s demands. In ­doing so, he carved out a space for himself in postwar society that allowed for a fuller range of expression. Of course, this was not a direct journey. Stewart Stern had found solace in the Freudian psy­chol­ogy of the era ­because it helped him make his ­wartime experiences compatible with postwar values. But Field spent most of the fifties tortured by that same framework. Finding the culture dominated by a pervasive domesticity, Field was pressured into adjusting to his role as a heterosexual man, even in contradiction to his own personal happiness. ­Until he learned to recast manhood through rebellion, Field experienced a g­ reat deal of anxiety trying to fit into ­these definitions, despite always coming up short.5 Examining Field’s journey makes clear how both the changing postwar landscape and the veterans’ critique provided tools that men like Field used to build

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a gay manhood. In d­ oing so, they planted the seeds for the activism that emerged less than two d­ ecades l­ater. Thousands of men w ­ ere, like Field, caught in the midst of an American society in transition, and like Field they felt pulled in two directions by the scripts they w ­ ere given and what they had learned in war. While Field was unique in that he was able to find encouragement in the countercultural space of Greenwich Village, examining how he was able to embrace rebellious masculinity helps us understand the available scripts other returning gay veterans might have been able to access. The veterans’ critique w ­ asn’t just a path for straight men to confront the frontiersman assumptions that had straightjacketed them: it was also a tool that gay men could use to change the terms of the debate. It’s impor­tant to also recognize the close similarities between Field’s yearnings for authenticity and closeness and ­those of James Jones and Stewart Stern. The same forces that had helped write From ­Here to Eternity and Rebel Without a Cause functioned differently in Field’s context, but at heart the reconceptualization of manhood he argued for was the same as what Jones and Stern had championed. Field found a way to take both Jones’s i­ndependent authenticity and Stern’s brotherly camaraderie to their furthest conclusions. Men in war loved other men, Stern had confided; Field would show how that need not end ­after the guns s­ topped firing.6

Confusion The Second World War had caused upheaval throughout American society. It sent w ­ omen to factories, reworked the entire economy, and brought a steady stream of changed, wounded, and traumatized men back home. When the war ended, the loudest voices in Amer­i­ca called for a reconstruction of prewar values; in practice, this meant constructing a society that rejected the male and female be­hav­iors that had been modified in w ­ artime. Male same-­sex intimacy became rare in advertisements and pictures a­ fter the war, and depictions of ­independent working w ­ omen dis­appeared from films and movies. Instead, men ­were encouraged to be ­fathers and breadwinners, while w ­ omen ­were pressured into child-­rearing.7 And yet despite the cultural forces attempting to turn back the tide, male intimacy could and did flourish ­after the war. Finding a wealth of pictures, diaries, and letters from men who persisted in seeking out male partners a­ fter World War II, John Ibson has concluded that, despite the cultural repression gay men faced postwar society, ­there ­were a bevy of gay men who managed to construct queer relationships or queer identities u­ nder this repressive atmosphere. Some of ­these men ­were able to construct long-­lasting relationships that resembled heterosexual ­couples; some married but integrated their lovers into their marriage; ­others, he found, lived as single men but nevertheless continued to search for intimate encounters with men. The throughline through most of the experiences

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Ibson cata­logued was a pervasive loneliness and a bravery required to live in opposition to the pressures t­ hese men felt.8 Ibson termed his subjects “men without maps” ­because gay men ­were given virtually no cultural scripts for their relationships in postwar Amer­i­ca; instead, they had to create their own romantic ideals from scratch.9 However, this is not quite accurate. Ibson admitted that the Second World War was “as queer a space as Greenwich Village” to some men, even a queer “domestic setting”; as Field’s time in the military demonstrated, soldiers could indeed learn how to meet and how to relate to other gay men within the military during this era.10 Most of Ibson’s “men without maps” w ­ ere, in fact, veterans of World War II and carried with them experiences of same-­sex friendship and intimacy from the war. Stretching this ­metaphor further, it is clear from examples like Field that though ­these men found themselves exploring uncharted territories in postwar Amer­i­ca, they w ­ eren’t completely bereft of maps. The same intimacy of World War II w ­ asn’t completely gone; it could be used, as Field did, to construct an ideal of gay manhood absent from the prewar years; the experiences of war could also be a counterpoint to pervasive postwar hetero-­domestic norms. So while t­ hese men may have lacked maps, they ­weren’t on their own. Instead, experiences of ­wartime offered raw material that could be fashioned into ­resistance. Psychiatric experts, newly emboldened by their roles in screening recruits during the war, w ­ ere some of the most obvious evangelists of the stifling heterosexual norms men like Field faced. In a Cold War context, psychiatrists often connected promoting heterosexuality with protecting the American way of life from the degrading effects of international communism; many physicians ­imagined “normal” sexuality as a bulwark to strengthen the embattled American f­ amily. According to this model, a man who was unable to provide for his ­family might, as a result, suffer from impotence, while homosexual urges might be symptomatic of a man’s feelings of emasculation by ­women. Some experts argued that homo­sexuality could be caused by an inability to adapt to proper male roles; if a man failed to provide for a ­family, for instance, it might convince him unconsciously that he w ­ asn’t a man at all and cause him to seek out love from other men.11 This was the advice Field found himself navigating upon his homecoming. Since his return from ­Europe in 1949, Field had moved back in with his parents. Far away from his friends in Greenwich Village and NYU, the male bonds that he had found so impor­tant in w ­ artime w ­ ere gone, leaving Field isolated. “The confusion was coming home,” Field ­later explained.12 Isolated from his w ­ artime connections and unable to fit in, Field searched for scripts that could help him integrate into a society that asked him to be what he was not. To solve his depression, throughout the ­decade Field saw a whirlwind of analysts. Field was told the same t­ hing from each: he was unhappy ­because he was homosexual, and his homo­sexuality indicated an incomplete maturation to adulthood. The style of therapy he participated in—­communal, group

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therapy—­served to reinforce this diagnosis, as the patients themselves w ­ ere tasked with reinforcing this reading of homo­sexuality and holding each other accountable. As a rule, if someone had same-­sex desires, the goal was to divest them of ­these urges: only then could they move on from their chronic unhappiness and adjust to society. Throughout Field’s time in t­ hese therapy groups, he saw many men who, like him, wished to be cured of their homosexual urges. Sometimes, the therapy seemingly worked: Field remembered a young man who left the group happily heterosexual. Field ­later joked that he had last heard the man had become a ballet dancer.13 Lauren Jae Gutterman, writing about ­women who experienced same-­sex desires in the fifties, found that t­ hese w ­ omen overwhelmingly felt pushed by societal standards to achieve “normality”—­that is, to have a heterosexual marriage with ­children. She noted how in this period “normality was defined less by an inner essence than by one’s life choices”; that is, same-­sex desires ­were not obstacles to achieving normality b­ ecause normality was a p­ erformance of par­tic­u­lar social roles. Desires w ­ ere less representative of adjustment than actions. Postwar ­women ­were pressured to take on more of the burdens of adjustment than men, but both men and ­women ­were taught they needed to achieve “normal” social roles, and both w ­ ere taught that sacrificing personal happiness to achieve t­ hese goals was expected.14 Like Gutterman’s subjects, Field and his therapists understood homo­sexuality primarily through the social p­ erformance of masculinity, seeing physical expressions of same-­sex desires as symptoms of a larger maladjustment. In other words, passing as straight was to be straight.15 Thus, Field had to adopt proper male be­hav­iors. First, he had to get a proper job. Though Field could live a Spartan existence on his own through his poetry, it was not a regular source of income; he could never support a girlfriend, much less a f­ amily, on such an income. Once Field found a real job, the rest would fall like dominoes. Given the ability to afford a better apartment, he’d then have the space to entertain a girlfriend; once he had a girlfriend, he’d be able to move ­toward marriage and a ­family. If he could get on his feet t­ oward proper manhood, the freedom of homo­sexuality would no longer be necessary.16 As in the war, Field was once again faced with a dilemma: to gain privileges and “fit in” with society, he had to lie about part of his identity. For most of the fifties, he tried to do just that. Field spent the d­ ecade moving from job to job as he tried to follow his analyst’s advice. But though he was able to bounce between ­these temporary jobs, Field could never take the plunge into the permanent profession he was supposed to have. In one case, he worked as an advertisement man­ag­er for a Gimbel’s department store, but on the day the store wanted to promote him, Field instead walked away from the job. “I d­ idn’t want to do it,” he explained, “I ­didn’t want that for my life.” Though he tried to follow his group’s recommendations, when it came time to succeed at their vision of manhood, he ­couldn’t go through with it.17

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One of Field’s early poems, “Icarus,” suggests the difficulties men like Field faced as they tried to “adjust” to hetero-­domesticity: . . . ​“That nice Mr. Hicks,” the neighbors called him, Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit, Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings Nor that t­ hose sad, defeated eyes had once Compelled the sun. And had he told them They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare. No, he could not disturb their neat front yards; Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible m ­ istake: What was he d­ oing aging in a suburb? Can the genius of the hero fall To the middling stature of the merely talented? And nightly Icarus probes his wound And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn, Constructs small wings and tries to fly To the lighting fixture on the ceiling: Fails e­ very time and hates himself for trying. He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically, And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero; But now ­rides commuter trains, Serves on vari­ous committees, And wishes he had drowned.18

The poem depicted settling into domesticity as a fundamentally inauthentic act: Icarus, a hero in another context, died a slow death by living a life where he had to pretend to be something he was not. By tending a garden and wearing the “grey respectable suit,” the “genius” Icarus could no longer “compel[] the sun.”19 He lost something. Icarus’s punishment for embracing postwar society’s ideals was that he faded away unhappily in suburbia. It is easy to read this as commentary on the prob­lems veterans faced as they returned home from the war. James Jones, of course, is one colorful example of a dissatisfied Icarus, but he was among many more men who felt dissatisfaction and frustration in civilian society. Icarus seems to be a veteran like them: he hides hands once “used to command large wings,” he has war wounds, he “had acted heroically,” and yet now he tried in­effec­tively to re­adjust to postwar Amer­i­ca. The nightmare, for Field, was living in a world Icarus’s skills ­were unsuited for: Icarus wilted while “rid[ing] commuter trains,” and “serving on vari­ous committees.” While Icarus survived a­ fter the war, he felt out of place and alienated from what he found valuable.20

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Beneath this reading, the poem also suggested the pain of the marginalized outsider trying to pass in postwar society. Assume Icarus was Jewish. When Jewish families moved out of ethnic enclaves into the suburbs, it both allowed them to cast off old s­ tereotypes and also disconnected them from older communities and their past, a feeling Icarus seems to share as he consulted his books and felt as though he had made a m ­ istake living a suburban life. Alternatively, imagine that Icarus found meaning in the ­wartime love he felt for other men (did the “eyes that once compelled the sun” once also gaze into a male lover’s eyes?). Just as easily, the poem could echo the loneliness of a man forced to ignore his inner feelings for other men. In an interview, Field gave evidence to support this last reading. He explained that the poem was about Stephen Spender, a fellow poet who Field believed had “sold-­out” for a comfortable living. Spender’s earliest poetry prominently dealt with gay themes, but when Field met the man a­ fter the war, he found Spender living in a ­house with a child and a wife. As Field tells the story, ­there was something incongruous to Field about Spender reaching to put his hand on Field’s knee, while at the same time his wife and ­children chattered in the next room. The ­whole episode convinced Field that this embrace of domesticity was inauthentic, a way for Spender to deny who he was.21 However it is read, Field’s poem captured the feeling of an outsider forced to conform to the world outside them. Valorizing the marginal, the poem questions ­whether fitting into society should be the end goal of a man returning from war. Field contended that men like Spender ­were emasculated by giving up rebellion for the stability of modern society ­because they gave up sexual honesty and artistic expression. It was a sentiment James Jones would have enthusiastically shared with Field. However, it was also a princi­ple that Field tortured himself over during the fifties. When he ran to ­Europe a­ fter the war, it was easy for him to see any sort of adjustment to postwar values as a betrayal. But when Field returned home and found himself acutely alienated and depressed, resisting adjustment was more difficult to negotiate.

Adjustment, or the Lack Thereof Adjustment was a difficult goal to meet. The resounding dissatisfaction of frustrated and bored ­house­wives, captured by Betty Friedan a ­decade ­later in The Feminine Mystique, only hints at how many ­people ended up unhappy as they tried to live up to postwar ideals.22 But for gay and Jewish men leaving the war, the conflicting lessons they learned from war and the pressures they faced at home led to an especially difficult homecoming. Gay veterans ­were in danger of losing every­thing by seeking out the camaraderie they felt in war; they had to fight pervasive messages telling them that they w ­ ere immature or unfit men for what they felt.

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The experiences of homecoming ­were, of course, varied. In researching his subjects, John Ibson found that returning gay veterans often faced difficulty adjusting to civilian life. Photographer Minor White, for instance, lived a life of “quiet desperation” and loneliness a­ fter the war, though he still made sexual contacts with men throughout the fifties. Ibson argues that by the sixties “cultural conditioning” had led him to blame his sadness on his homo­sexuality, rather than question the roles society wanted him to perform. Another subject of Ibson’s, Ambrose Edens, left almost no rec­ords except for photo­graph a­ lbums and a collection of baseball autographs. Upon researching the man, Ibson painted a portrait of a profoundly lonely man, one who never acted upon his desires for male companionship. Instead, Eden worked at Texas Christian University for years, fostering friendly relationships with adolescents in the community and with students but never finding companionship. In many of the portraits Ibson paints, including ­these, ­there is a sense that gay veterans found adjustment to hetero-­ domestic norms impossible, leaving them on their own throughout the fifties.23 Field, despite feeling this guilt and loneliness throughout the fifties, did eventually rise above the social pressures to “adjust” and allowed himself to take pride in his sexuality. In part, this was b­ ecause, unlike many other men, what he had learned about male intimacy in ­wartime was magnified and supported by the alternative scripts he was able to find in the gay world he became a part of. World War II had taught men like Field to value authenticity and to prize male intimacy as an expression of that ideal; the changing culture of the 1950s could help some of ­these men perform ­those ideals in spite of the headwinds they faced. To better understand the difficulties Field faced, it is worth studying three of his contemporaries, at least in passing: Fritz Peters, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Ha­ra. Th ­ ere are three reasons I focus on t­ hese three men. First, all three of them had a relevantly similar homecoming to Field: all of them aspired to be writers or poets, all of them spent time in Greenwich Village a­ fter the war, and all had some relationship to the emerging gay community. Second, each of t­ hese men had a personal connection to Field: Peters wrote an impor­tant gay novel, Finistere, a book that Field read in this period and that left such an impression on him that he l­ater did his own archival work to learn about Peters’s life. Koch and O’Ha­ra, on the other hand, ­were both part of the New York School of poets, which Field was connected to for many years, and O’Ha­ra and Field ­were romantically connected for over a year. Fi­nally, I discuss t­ hese three b­ ecause they all offered maps or models for other gay men to resist hetero-­domestic imperatives in the culture. Together, all three show not only how difficult it was for a gay veteran to come home but also some of the paths to survival. Consider the life of Fritz Peters. Though what we know about Peters is fragmentary—­almost all is due to the amateur historical detective work done by Field much l­ ater in life—­Peters’s experience ­after w ­ artime left him a strong compulsion to abandon his love for other men and try to fit into the mainstream of

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American society. In order to do so, it appears he spent his time impotently trying to construct a model of homosexual love that was compatible with postwar manhood, demonstrating just how difficult it was to embrace au­then­tic gay desire alongside hetero-­domestic norms. Peters lived most of his early life ­under the tutelage of his lesbian aunt, a devotee of the ­Russian mystic Gurdjieff, even moving to France for much of his childhood as his aunt set up an institute to promote Gurdjieff’s ideas.24 The circumstances surrounding Peters’s entrance into the American infantry are unknown, as are the exact effects this experience may have had on him. Surely, he would have been aware of the possibility for same-­sex liaisons within the army and may even have taken part in them. But he was likely conflicted by t­ hese feelings, and rather than embrace them, Peters had an affair during the war with Annie Lou Stavely, another devotee of Gurdjieff. He took part in the ­Battle of the Bulge, which proved to be a traumatic experience, as it had been for Stewart Stern. ­A fter the ­battle, Peters was committed to a VA hospital to treat his psychological torment.25 On his return home, Peters was driven to find ­acceptance despite his same-­ sex attractions. His first novel, The World Next Door, reflected deep ambivalence about his own sexuality and was likely partially autobiographical. The story, about a homosexual veteran admitted into an insane asylum, was sordid and dark; it mostly focused on the cruelty attendants showed the patients. But it also explained that the veteran was haunted by his homosexual encounters, which he fi­nally abandoned ­because “it ­didn’t last . . . ​it just ­wasn’t right somehow.” The implication was that the man, ­after being treated in the hospital, chose to abstain from homosexual acts, a decision Peters may have also tried to make.26 During the fifties, Peters was married at least twice; he had two c­ hildren from ­these marriages, though they had a strained relationship with a ­father who was often absent.27 Another gay writer, Samuel Steward, remembered a sexual encounter with Peters in 1952, when Peters seemed to be living in Greenwich Village. Steward’s impression was that Peters was conflicted about the encounter; Steward reported that, a­ fter engaging in oral sex, Peters cried and insisted he w ­ asn’t ­really gay.28 Though fragmented, the portrait of Peters that emerges is one of a man who, like Field, tried and failed to escape gay life for domesticity. In 1951, a year before his encounter with Steward, Peters released Finistere, one of the canonical works of postwar gay fiction. “Gay pulps,” published cheaply in ways that often flew u­ nder the radar of censors in 1950s Amer­i­ca, w ­ ere incredibly impor­tant to the emerging gay communities of the era, in that they w ­ ere often the only place where one could encounter a depiction of gay ­people, much less same-­sex romance or sexuality. Though t­ hese pulps w ­ ere often poorly written, engaged in s­ tereotypes, and almost always ended with the death of gay characters, as a requirement of publication (readers most often ignored ­those final chapters), they w ­ ere vociferously consumed, traded back and forth, and prized by men looking for any depictions of themselves in fiction.29

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If Peters had difficulty reconciling his same-­sex love with the demands of postwar society, ironically Finistere taught a generation of men like Field how to do exactly that. Well known in gay circles for its recognition of same-­sex love, the book—­which was also likely partially autobiographical—­concerned a young boy, Matthew, who traveled to Paris with his aunt. Matthew, an insecure youth, took comfort in a friendship with another boy and had his first sexual encounter when they began to masturbate together. As the book progressed, Matthew had an affair with a French man twice his age named Michel. However, when Matthew’s ­family found out about his love for Michel, they ­were horrified and Matthew was disgraced. The final chapter, in a trope common to gay pulps of the fifties, found Matthew realizing that his homo­sexuality had doomed him to pain. The book ended as he committed suicide by drowning in the sea.30 The novel depicted both Matthew and Michel involved in a loving relationship—­importantly, a relationship ruined not b­ ecause of the self-­ destructive nature of same-­sex love, as con­temporary s­ tereotypes would assume, but ­because of the disapproval of ­those around them. Homo­sexuality itself was not wrong in Finistere; it brought ruin only ­because of societal stigma. The novel also inverted the common ­stereotype that homo­sexuality was a flight from adulthood by instead depicting Matthew’s romance as a coming-­of-­age story. The book charted Matthew’s growth from an awkward, sensitive child into a self-­ confident and responsible partner once he entered into a relationship with Michel. “­There was a real change in [Matthew],” a character remarked. “He was older, he had acquired a mysterious maturity that d­ idn’t make complete sense. . . . ​ The kid had gone and got himself a girl someplace, that was it!”31 Of course, this explanation was only half right. Field was ­later vocal about Finistere’s importance when he was coming to terms with his sexuality. But the clues we have of Peters’s life suggest a man who was even more conflicted about his same-­sex desires than Field. Peters felt the same awakening in ­wartime that Field did; he felt the same hetero-­domestic pressures a­ fter the war. Like Field, he tried to live as a straight man to fit into this world. Finistere, through one lens, may have been his attempt to synthesize gay love with the pervasive domesticity of postwar culture, and his notion of a gay love that fostered domesticity and maturity bears more than a passing resemblance to Stewart Stern’s own attempts to make close male romance consistent with hetero-­domesticity. Though ­there ­were some brief sightings of Peters in gay nightlife during the sixties, which suggest he did eventually come to terms with his love for other men, the Peters of the fifties demonstrated how adjustment was an ideal that gay veterans beyond Field felt drawn ­toward. Field came to terms with his love for other men more quickly than Peters, in part ­because of how enmeshed he was in countercultural communities. If books like Finistere provided him one counternarrative, his friends in Greenwich Village, especially the poets of the New York School, taught him another way to live authentically with his own desires. Members of the New York School formed a

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surrealist avant-­garde movement who used their poetry and their personal lives to carve out a rebellious counterculture, not unlike the Beats, in New York City.32 The leading voices of the movement had backgrounds similar to Field’s: of the four central figures of the New York School—­James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Ha­ra—­three w ­ ere veterans and three w ­ ere gay (Ashbery never fought and Koch identified as straight).33 Like Field, all of them, even Koch, delved into the gay, bohemian world of Greenwich Village.34 The New York School as a ­whole was defined by an approach to poetry that was playful, willfully improvised, and purposefully resistant to interpretation. Inspired by the Dadaist and Surrealist movements alongside the French avant-­ garde movements that ­were influencing painting at the time, ­these poets often combined strange juxtapositions of nouns and verbs with stream-­of-­conscious observations, sometimes taken from the landscape around the poet or the snatches of conversation overheard while writing.35 Michael Davidson, in his study of manliness in Cold War fiction, has argued that this very playfulness, especially in the work of Frank O’Ha­ra, was a way of defining a particularly rebellious and countercultural strain of manliness, defined by its relationship to the mainstream. By appropriating lower-­class ­popular culture or discussing subjects usually considered unfit for poetry, the New York School challenged American authorities who associated consumer culture with effeminacy; by flouting academic norms in their poetry, they cast doubt on the strength of “rationality” and the weakness of emotionalism and spontaneity. The act of rebelling against mainstream standards in American society, Davidson claims, also helped the New York School (and Field) assert their individuality and manly strength to resist conformity.36 Field spent time in this circle and is often associated with the school, not least ­because he was romantically entangled with O’Ha­ra in 1955 and 1956. However, Field was always uncomfortable with this association, in large part ­because he felt that they still craved societal approval of their antics and styles. He l­ ater disowned them, arguing that they “allied [themselves] with the rich, the snobbish, and fash­ion­able.”37 The poets of the New York School seemed too comfortable with celebrity, too interested in esoteric artistic movements, too accepting of societal rules.38 Still, the plain style of Field’s early poetry and his often quotidian subjects bear an obvious debt to the styles the New York School was pioneering, even if Field eventually found O’Ha­ra and the rest insufficiently au­then­tic. He also learned from them how to resist the cultural imperatives imposed on him to marry and get a job. Consider, for instance, the example of Kenneth Koch, a man whom Field knew at least in passing during his time in the Village. Koch, a Jewish poet like Field, fought as an infantryman in the Philippines during World War II. Like James Jones, who had a similar s­ ervice rec­ord, Koch never discussed war as a maker of heroes.39 Instead, Koch ­later joked that he survived the war only b­ ecause he never figured out how to use a r­ ifle; when he fi­nally put pen to

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paper about World War II, in 2002, his memory of the war dwelled on his helplessness. “It was a time of general confusion / Of being a body hurled at a wall. / I ­didn’t do much fighting. I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole,” he wrote. “I’m glad you ended. I’m glad I d­ idn’t die. Or lose my mind.”40 Koch rarely wrote about his experiences as a Jewish man, possibly suggesting that he faced the same pressure to assimilate during w ­ artime that Field felt. However, Koch reveled in the countercultural scene of New York. He was straight, but by adopting the accoutrements of the outsider, Koch was able to fashion an alternative au­then­tic identity. Koch’s friends in the literary scene w ­ ere gay, and he embraced gay culture and styles to more closely identify with them (his friend Larry Rivers once joked that Koch’s mannerisms w ­ ere “as gay as the rest”).41 Koch’s poetry also reflected rebellious intents: like that of the rest of the New York School, Koch’s poetry was improvised at a time where careful redrafting was the orthodoxy, funny and playful when poems should have been serious, and experimental with stylistic ele­ments other poets saw as paramount.42 Koch might have been an example of how a poet could live an alternative to the domestic life other­wise demanded of him. But his friend, O’Ha­ra, demonstrated more directly how a gay man might use rebellion to transform his same-­ sex desires and his emotionality into strength. O’Ha­ra, originally from Mas­sa­chu­setts, served in the navy during the war, fighting in the South Pacific. ­A fter returning home, O’Ha­ra used the G.I. Bill to attend Harvard, then received a master’s degree at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before moving to New York in 1951. He quickly became part of the Village scene and was well known for his passion, spontaneity, and alcoholism.43 As he became one of the leading poets of the era, his style became inward looking and confessional. He embraced improvisational techniques ­because of their ability to demonstrate emotional honesty and authenticity. He also, si­mul­ta­neously, plunged into same-­sex relationships, refusing to show shame or ambivalence about his love for other men.44 O’Ha­ra openly discussed his voracious sexual appetite in his poetry. In a 1954 poem titled simply “Homo­sexuality,” O’Ha­ra described surveying men’s urinals before a sexual encounter, opening the poem with the suggestive line, “So ­we’re taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / Our mouths shut?”45 Homo­sexuality was equated with honesty: the act of having sex with a man was to “tak[e] off his mask.” Both Koch and O’Ha­ra showed signs that they valued the same male brotherhood that Field had found in the war and that they found authenticity through the relationships they made in countercultural Greenwich Village. Most importantly, both men, in order to make their ­wartime values compatible with postwar society, embraced the idea of rebellion as a manly trait. During his time in Greenwich Village, Field dated O’Ha­ra for about a year and a half, on and off and between his bouts with trying to live as a straight man. Field l­ ater wrote that at a time when Field himself was “a mess” and wracked with guilt over his lifestyle, O’Ha­ra showed no sign of the neuroticism and anx­i­eties

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that Field associated with other gay men. O’Ha­ra was happy as who he was and au­then­tic in a way Field was fighting to achieve. O’Ha­ra modeled for him a man whose self-­confidence and identity stemmed from his rebellion against sexual norms. O’Ha­ra urged Field to do the same and embrace his same-­sex desires to become a “unified person.”46 To Field, who saw himself as “fractured” by his attempts to be straight and also live in the gay community, O’Ha­ra’s a­ cceptance of his same-­sex love allowed him an authenticity Field strug­g led to achieve. “When you are unified, I felt, you ­don’t question your poems, you just write them. ­Because they are you.” Field l­ ater wrote, “You write what you are. And what Frank wrote was entirely him.” Peters, Koch, and O’Ha­ra, certainly, are unique cases. But all of them help show the discursive scripts available to returning veterans like Field. Peters, for instance, faced the same dilemmas as Field when he returned from the war. He tried to balance his love for men with the domestic responsibilities of postwar Amer­i­ca but strug­gled with the inherent paradox. To solve it, Peters attempted to find cultural space to change its meanings and create a manly gay identity through domesticity. His journey, on its own, is helpful to illuminate just how pervasive hetero-­domestic pressures w ­ ere; but his solution is also valuable ­because of the message he made available to other gay men struggling with adjustment. Pulps like Finistere presented men like Field with a clear message: male intimacy was not unmanly, nor was it incompatible with domesticity. On the other hand, the New York School found a dif­fer­ent model available for manhood: not the domestic husband but the rebel. Greenwich Village provided the means to find a community that supported men who sought to avoid roles as f­ athers or husbands and fostered male relationships similar to ­those Field (or Stern, or Jones) had found in the war. By embracing the spirit of the postwar rebel, men like Koch and O’Ha­ra accentuated their marginalized identities and positioned themselves against the inauthenticity surrounding them. In e­ ither direction—­gay domesticity or gay rebellion—­lay the contours for gay pride. And h ­ ere was Field, stuck in the m ­ iddle.

Standing Up The New York School’s embrace of difference and marginalization reveals an impor­tant paradox at the center of postwar society. While mainstream culture idealized hetero-­domestic norms, many Americans ­were fascinated with the idea of the outsider.47 As much as American society pressured men and ­women to conform to par­tic­u­lar types of familial roles, American culture was also filled with examples of cultural heroes who bucked t­ hese conformist tendencies in the name of individualism or moral character. Often—as in Norman Mailer’s racist ode to savage, sexual, and anticonformist African American culture, “The White Negro”—­this fascination with rebellion was an appropriation of minority cultural styles. Nonwhite groups ­were seemingly more au­then­tic ­because they

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resisted the conformist culture of the age, and so white rebels could adopt that authenticity by mimicking minority styles. This was how rebellions like the New York School or the Beats could exist; by cloaking themselves in the mantle of nonconformity, they w ­ ere able to both resist the values of mainstream society and suggest that their opposition was strong and manly. What made this discursive trick especially power­ful was that it created a space for marginalized communities to assert their own manliness without acquiescing to white, heterosexual norms. If outsiders ­were heroic and manly ­because of their supposed authenticity, then that implicitly suggested that gay, Black, and Jewish men, by virtue of standing apart from the mainstream, ­were au­then­tic and thus capable of the manliness found in rebel heroes. Furthermore, if authenticity was increasingly prized by mainstream society, then the concept could be flipped to valorize be­hav­iors outside the norm. Jack Kerouac and Hugh Hefner, for instance, ­were both able to make their irresponsibility a signature part of their claim to manliness by positioning it against the conformity of domestic American life.48 What Field and the New York School show is how that language of rebellion could be used by minorities themselves to resist “adjustment” to middle-­class, hetero-­domestic norms. By claiming the au­then­tic, manly virtues of the outsider, minority men could find a space for themselves. Field only gradually embraced this strategy. Instead, by the mid-­fi fties, t­ here ­were two Edward Fields who existed, uneasily, parallel to each other. One Field went to therapy regularly and tried his best to imperfectly pass as a straight man. This Field worked odd jobs in the city, took ­women on dates, and tried to find success so he could eventually support a f­ amily. At the same time, an alternative Field delved further into the gay world in New York, a world that si­mul­ta­neously blurred with the world of bohemian nonconformists. This Field abandoned a degree in marketing and began to publish his poems in literary journals—­ sometimes, as he became established, alongside names like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.49 He spent an increasing amount of time in the com­pany of the bohemian poets and writers he met at NYU, joining in as he met Marxists of all stripes who argued about “existentialism, orgone boxes, and socialism.”50 The bohemian literary culture of New York was far more fulfilling for Field than what he could find as a marketing major, and he was soon accepted as a regular member of their circles. He met many writers in training: his close friend Alfred Chester, a gay poet and novelist who once claimed to have slept with Susan Sontag and who ­later succumbed to ­mental illness; George Broadfield, a flamboyantly gay Black writer who had connections to scholars such as Alain Locke; the young, not-­yet-­well-­known gay Village poets James Merrill and Howard Moss; and many o­ thers. They might talk at the NYU cafeteria, but just as often they would mingle at literary parties or meet at gay bars such as MacDougal’s Tavern. This bohemian world was a tightknit one in which members eschewed traditional lifestyles and experimented with many dif­fer­ent types of sexuality and relationships. For Field-­as-­rebel, it was perfect.51

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Since the turn of the ­century, Greenwich Village had been a site where bohemian radicals could meld p­ olitical radicalism, literary aspirations, and sexual experimentation. Throughout the twenties, while rebels such as Max Eastman and Floyd Dell experimented with ­free love and sexual liberalism, gay men and ­women frequented establishments like Eve’s Hangout and the Black Rabbit.52 By the time Field entered this world, the literary communities he mingled with ­were intertwined with the gay communities, and both groups freely entertained at the same parties.53 Field’s choice of poetry as his life’s calling was already subversive in a society that identified manhood with regular work and responsibility; it was natu­ral to Field that sexual subversion might be found in such circles. The radicals of Greenwich Village ­were often proud of their same-­sex desires and proud of the marginalization their sexual orientation brought them. Alfred Chester, for instance, was open about the close relationships he had with youn­ ger writers, while Field’s acquaintance Paul Bowles would openly brag about the beautiful boys he met during his overseas trips to Morocco. While Field strug­gled to find authenticity in American society, he found brotherhood in ­these men around him, and they taught him that openness about sexuality could itself be au­then­tic. In his friends, Field saw examples of how love between men could exist—­nay, be a sign of strength—­amid the heterosexual standards surrounding him. In addition to frequenting MacDougal’s and other gay bars with his friends, Field also began to cruise parks and other areas in New York to find same-­sex encounters. “Bars ­were sociable,” Field remembered, “cruising was for sex.” He would travel “dark parks, dark alleys,” and even once traveled down Forty-­Second Street kissing men in the doorways in safety thanks to a thick fog.54 He ­wasn’t alone. The war had acted as a catalyst to the already-­coalescing gay subcultures in major U.S. cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Gay communities had exploded due to the way the war had funneled newly awakened gay veterans into urban communities.55 Newcomers, like Field, quickly learned the gay geography of the city: the bars and clubs that catered to gay men, the bathrooms and darkened theaters safest for ­those who wanted to have anonymous sexual encounters, and the parks where one could sit down on a bench with another man and proposition him for sexual acts.56 Part of his time, Field frolicked with his friends in Greenwich Village; during other moments, he attended therapy for his depression. In therapy, he tried to do w ­ hatever he could to strip himself from the Village scene, get a job and a wife, and become the man his therapist wanted him to be. Th ­ ese two worlds blurred in unexpected ways. Field tried to date w ­ omen; sometimes he was successful. Yet, he never gave up cruising or other forms of anonymous sex while he was dating ­women. In fact, Field would sometimes take his dates to the gay bars he frequented. While ­these ­women ­were often fascinated with the gay subculture he showed them, t­ hese actions demonstrated the difficulty Field had in conforming to heterosexual norms. Field “followed the rules to some

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extent,” but his queer life on the margins still showed through his attempts at heterosexuality.57 The way Field remembered Variety Photoplays, a small, grungy, theater (a “jerk-­off ­house” in Field’s words), starkly juxtaposes the inauthenticity Field felt while passing as straight with au­then­tic expressions of same-­sex sexuality. Variety Photoplays was a movie theater found in the seedier neighborhoods of New York, a gathering place for men of all types to engage in sexual contact with other men ­free from the prying eyes of society. Field would venture to “VP” whenever he ended up too depressed from therapy to go job hunting; instead, in the darkened aisles that smelled of “stale bodies,” of “the bums and their b­ ottles,” and of the nearby toilet, Field could sit down and “wank [with] innumerable men of all ages, nationalities, colors, and sizes.” The anonymity was a leveling one, and ­there, in the balcony and “fondling” another man in the standing room, Field met homeless men, men with families, Italian immigrants, and well-­off businessmen. Many of ­these men he met never identified their sexuality as anything but sinful urges, and Field i­ magined that ­these men w ­ ere “in flight . . . ​from the heavy domestic scene at home.” Together, t­ hese lost souls could find a connection through their “furtive” (“furtiveness was part of sex in ­those years”) sexual acts. While Field tried, at his therapy group’s behest, to trade ­these moments for a girlfriend and a job, he si­mul­ta­neously brought other men to orgasm.58 For Field, the “freedom” of the theater proved to be an “aphrodisiac.” A ­ fter sitting down next to a man, Field sometimes wondered what the man’s “ ‘outside’ life was like, the job and ­family that occupied him completely.” Like Field, the man was escaping, and together they could embrace same-­sex desire as they ­couldn’t outside the darkened room. Homo­sexuality could allow Field to mingle with other men who could pass as straight for only so long before they longed for an au­then­tic connection with another man.59 VP, and the gay bars Field frequented (usually located in poor red-­light districts), also brought him more closely in contact with ethnic immigrant communities, allowing him to si­mul­ta­neously assert his ethnic identity as he asserted his homo­sexuality. Located at Third Ave­nue and ­Fourteenth Street, VP was just north of the old turn-­of-­the-­century Jewish districts, a location that was still a primarily poor and immigrant district. While Field was practicing a form of slumming by invading this district, he was visiting the very spaces that had, prewar, painted immigrants as incompatible with American domestic values. At the turn of the c­ entury, Victorian reformers argued that Jewish-­owned theaters in t­ hese districts would threaten the institution of the ­family; at midcentury, Field returned to such a theater to prove exactly that.60 Field certainly w ­ asn’t reclaiming a Jewish identity with ­these visits; but by associating in lower-­class ethnic districts, he was using his identities as gay and Jewish to distance himself from middle-­class, white American culture. Other men at VP had to go home a­ fter the film was done, but Field, an outsider to their

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world, could be true to his inner desires in a way that the rest of society could not be. In that way, homo­sexuality allowed Field an authenticity denied ­those who chose assimilation or conformity; and in a roundabout way, it allowed him to rejoin an ethnic community his parents had tried to escape forty years e­ arlier. By the end of the fifties, in large part b­ ecause of his connections with the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, Field was less likely to compartmentalize his life and had begun to articulate a version of manhood that used rebellion to make space for same-­sex emotionality and love. By the time he released his first poetry collection, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, in 1962, Field was able to imagine that his status as a gay man and the rebellion that came with it was an asset, one that proved his authenticity and paradoxically proved his ability to adjust to society by standing outside it.

Poetry as Rebellion As the d­ ecade wore on, Field increasingly broke with the prescriptions of his therapists and spent more time with the Greenwich Village scene. It is pos­si­ble to see this shift in the way Field remembered his summer at Yaddo, a prestigious writers’ colony, in the mid-­fi fties.61 Yaddo, was, and still is, a writers’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, where promising new poets could apply for a residency to write in the com­pany of more experienced peers. Yaddo was similar to Lowney Handy’s less successful venture, and, as at her colony, days at Yaddo w ­ ere carefully structured to help aspiring artists write. Breakfast buffet was served in the morning before the men and w ­ omen at Yaddo would discuss their writing. ­A fter that, they left for cabins in the woods where they would attempt to work and w ­ ere provided with lunch pails so that they ­weren’t distracted by hunger. The e­ venings ­were spent with singing, love affairs, drag parties, and sometimes cruising.62 While at Yaddo, Field found himself repulsed by the machismo displayed by the straight men t­ here, leading him to be suspicious about the benefits of mimicking them. According to Field, t­ here ­were two types of writers at Yaddo: the flits and the rocks. The flits, like himself, ­were “sensitive boys who hung around the library” and w ­ ere often gay, while the rocks w ­ ere tough, often homophobic devotees of James Jones and Hemingway.63 ­These men, obsessed with Jones’s embrace of the frontier and with competitive manhood (though, as we saw, his ­actual proj­ect was far more complicated than this simplification), wore cowboy boots and flannel shirts, trying to adopt a frontiersman aesthetic based upon their own understandings of manhood. To Field, their antics seemed inauthentic, more a ­performance acted to impress ­women than a real identity. Instead, Field c­ ouldn’t help but note that a­ fter sleeping with the rocks, the w ­ omen at Yaddo ­were always more interested in socializing with the flits. He ­later connected it to the cult of Hemingway: Hemingway, Field explained, “was an infection, r­ eally, of the American culture. . . . ​The macho t­ hing was already t­ here,

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but he gave it a name: Hemingway.” Hemingway (and Jones) ­were part of a school that, to Field, was a dead end.64 Likewise, Field’s poetry, eventually collected in his 1962 Lamont prize winner, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, shows his slow transformation. Field’s poetry throughout the fifties reflected a playful, rebellious style, and he a­ dopted many of the traits—­including the plain, confessional language and fascination with pop culture—­common to O’Ha­ra and the New York School. But though he emulated O’Ha­ra’s style, Field’s poems demonstrate a slower path to an a­ cceptance of his love for other men. Analyzed chronologically, Field’s poems show a gradual movement ­toward pride in himself, pride in rebellion, and a greater ­acceptance of himself as part of a marginalized community. First, consider Field’s “therapy” poems, written as he went through psychoanalysis in the ­middle of the ­decade. Th ­ ese poems often dwelled on his failure to fit traditionally male characteristics. In “Unwanted,” Field i­magined standing next to a wanted poster of himself in a post office and being unrecognized as the outlaw he desperately wanted to be. He wished someone would find his fingerprints on a dead body and realize that he was the murderer, but he admitted that he looks nothing like the pictures on the wall. Instead, he gave a description of himself: Description: Male, or reasonably so White, but not lily-­white and usually deep-­red Thirty-­fivish, and looks it lately Five-­feet-­nine and one-­hundred-­thirty pounds: no physique Black hair g­ oing gray, hairline receding fast What used to be curly, now fuzzy Brown eyes starey u­ nder beetling brow Mole on chin, prob­ably w ­ ill become a wen It is perfectly obvious that he was not ­popular at school No good at baseball, and wet his bed. His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-­for-­nothing, Jewboy, Fieldinsky, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy. Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name Responds to love, d­ on’t call him or he ­will come.65

Instead of a Western outlaw, Field was a failure: he had no physique; he blushed (his deep-­red face); he was only “reasonably” male; he was a sissy. Field’s most unforgivable sin seems to have been his sensitivity: he “respond[ed] to love” and was desperate for ­those feelings to be reciprocated. Therapy had taught Field that the emotional openness he valued was unmanly, and it left him dwelling on his own failure to match t­ hese ideals. Furthermore, he continues to imagine that his Jewish traits point out his lack of manhood. By drawing attention to nicknames like “Jewboy” and “Fieldinsky,” and intermingling ste­reo­typically Jewish

The Continuing Adventures of Icarus • 187

traits like curly hair with effeminate characteristics, Field demonstrated the degree to which his Jewishness still held him back from admittance as a man. At the same time, this poem suggests the ways true manhood itself was a ­performance: by standing next to the poster of the outlaw, Field i­ magined that, should he just look or act a certain way, he’d be able to fool onlookers. Field’s failures w ­ ere not that he, intrinsically, was unmanly but that he was insufficient at passing for manly. Just a few years l­ ater, Field’s poems seemed dismissive of the idea that anyone should have to perform to fit into society. In “Poem for My Left Hand,” for instance, Field discussed his homo­sexuality as a disability, but not one that he should apologize for. In the poem, Field i­ magined that a cancer in his left hand had led him to amputate it, leaving him “deformed” and forced to reor­ga­nize his life. In truth, he had been “obviously crippled . . . ​for as long as I can remember”; that is, his homo­sexuality had marked him out as dif­fer­ent and somehow wrong; now, at least, his absent hand could take attention away from his other disability. However, despite this equating of homo­sexuality and physical disability, Field defended his right to be as he was, explaining, “Some ­people are wrong / Who say it’s me that’s wrong, my nature needs changing. / Our nature is god’s vari­ous w ­ ill / And each oddity precious for the evolving animal kingdom.” Rather than accepting the idea that his nature left him disabled, the poem asserted that ­people who fell outside the norm ­were as natu­ral as anyone e­ lse.66 In other poems, such as “Snowfish,” Field was positively unapologetic. The poem was ostensibly about the titular snowfish, an animal who bucked the norm by swimming through snowdrifts. However, the snowfish was in fact a nonconformist who should be celebrated. In a singsong style, Field wrote that the snowfish “does not seem to fit the rules / That work for ­those who swim in schools” and “though g­ reat numbers of him fall / the snowfish w ­ on’t conform at all.”67 Yet, despite his difference, Field writes, “all we can say of him is this / he must be accepted as he is / you must allow him to exist / He might be something you have missed.” The defenses of homo­sexuality and rebellion in “Snowfish” are both self-­ evident and demonstrate how, by the end of the ­decade, Field was uninterested in trying to conform to a conventional model of manhood. Its nursery rhyme quality heightens its strength by suggesting that the lesson is s­ imple and obvious, graspable by a child. Field’s other poems from the end of the ­decade likewise allied him with outsiders. Around the same time, Field wrote “Ode to Fidel Castro,” a poem that argued rebellion might be the only way to make genuine connections with ­others. In this poem—­which first asserted Field’s allegiance to rebels by hailing Fidel Castro as a camp hero—­Field remembered a trip to Harlem. ­There, he realized he was between two worlds: his “whiteness would surprise [him]” when he saw himself in a reflection, even though “being a Jew I’m not exactly white.” Still, the fact that he was white enough to pass allowed him to have “escaped ghettos”

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and gave him ­acceptance that African Americans could not have. He wondered if t­ here might be a way to reconcile with the Black community and join them as an outsider. He ­imagined that “perhaps the only t­ hing to do is to look upon each other. . . . ​Come black man let us jerk off together / Like boys do to get to know each other.” Field equated Blackness with outsider status and wanted to identify with that Blackness as a way to repudiate the pressures he faced from mainstream society—­ not unlike Norman Mailer, and not without some of the same unfortunate racial s­ tereotypes that appropriated Blackness as a symbol of rebellion. At the same time, “Castro” suggested that the male camaraderie of the gay world could help bridge the divide between Field and the African American community. Field’s homo­sexuality made him part of the marginalized in Amer­i­ca, and he ­imagined that, just like African Americans, this difference made him stand apart from that society. Through sex, he might try to repudiate his whiteness and make connections with other rebels. By the end of the fifties, Field was fully embracing his own alternative. Openness about his sexuality and a pride in the rebellion that went along with it ­were the foundations of a manhood far easier for Field to achieve than the hetero-­ domestic dictates of society. Like James Jones and Stewart Stern, Field’s war and postwar experiences had inculcated in him values very dif­fer­ent from t­ hose associated with manhood in prewar Amer­i­ca. Unlike Jones and Stern, Field forged ­those experiences into a pride at his own desires and used them to assert his right to re­spect against a society deeply critical of homo­sexuality.

Conclusion Field’s trajectory through the fifties demonstrates the complex relationship between the emerging discourse of rebellion in middle-­class Amer­i­ca and the ways that discourse could act against dominant cultural narratives concerning minorities. While societal pressures led t­ hese men t­ oward hetero-­domesticity, the society of the fifties also offered other models that gay veterans like Field could take advantage of. By embracing their outsiderness, gay and minority men could invert middle-­class Amer­i­ca’s fascination with working-­class and nonwhite ­others; asserting the authenticity that the outsider was depicted with, a gay man like Field could argue instead that white hetero-­domesticity was inauthentic, conformist, and unmanly. Field’s journey also narratively completes the parallel journeys that James Jones and Stewart Stern had taken through the fifties. James Jones’s obsession with rebellion and authenticity reflected con­temporary societal fascinations, but Field’s embrace of the same ideas shows just how close Jones’s colony was to Field’s valorization of same-­sex love. Likewise, Stewart Stern’s journey led him to translate his love for men into hetero-­domesticity; Field showed how compatible Stern’s experiences in war ­were with rejecting ­those domestic concerns altogether.

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In all, Field provides a missing link: all the obsessions and anx­i­eties that veterans like Jones and Stern brought home from the war w ­ ere in fact also the same concepts that helped seed the gay rights moment of postwar Amer­i­ca. That is not to say that Field completely abandoned the domestic values of the fifties; instead, like Stern, he transformed them to make them compatible with the rebellion he cultivated. In 1958, Field fi­nally broke with his therapist, who had tried to get Field to drop poetry for prose; prose was a more regular source of income, his therapist claimed, and manlier as a result. His next therapist, of a youn­ger generation, no longer hewed to a Freudian orthodoxy and believed that commitment was more impor­tant than heterosexuality. She approved when Field, by the end of the ­decade, fell in love with a fellow writer, Neil Derrick. They moved in together, and gradually Field closed the door on heterosexuality by legitimizing his relationship through homosexual domesticity.68 Knowingly or not, Field and Derrick joined a growing group of gay men and ­women who argued that despite what psychiatrists suggested, gay men could “adjust” to modern society in their own way. Through same-­sex marriage, gay men w ­ ere able to merge the two countervailing parts of postwar culture; rebellion and conformity coexisted in a Greenwich Village condominium.69 Except for a few years in the seventies, Field and Derrick have not been apart. The Village has changed drastically: gone are the bohemian radicals, priced out by the rising costs; Variety Photoplays was closed in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.70 Field and Derrick are some of the very last stragglers from a dif­fer­ent time, a reminder of a dif­fer­ent world. But e­ very once in a while the two worlds overlap. Such a moment happened a few years ­after Stonewall, during one of the very first gay pride parades in the Village. ­There, as a new generation marched for a very dif­fer­ent understanding of gay identity, an old friend of Field’s carried a sign. Among all the calls for gay liberation and all the signs urging men and ­women to come out, one sign just repeated the title of Field’s first collection: “Stand Up, Friend, with Me!” Field was happy to hear about the incident. ­A fter all t­ hose years, someone still understood what he had meant.71

​Conclusion A Nation of Gray Flannel Men Tom remembered the sergeant who had given him basic training, a hollow-­cheeked man with a flat voice, who had taught him back in the year 1942. The recruits had laughed when he said, ‘Any of you never seen a r­ ifle before?’ All sergeants in all generations talk the same, and all recruits laugh at the same jokes. “All right. This is a ­rifle, and h ­ ere in my other hand I’m holding a bayonet. Any of you never seen a bayonet before?” This time, no laughter. The recruits, standing in a circle around the sergeant, had shuffled n ­ ervously. “Now you take this bayonet and you fit it onto the barrel of your r­ ifle like this. Shove it down u­ ntil it clicks. Stand back a ­little. I’m ­going to run through this once for you now, and then you try it. ­There are three basic motions in the use of a bayonet. You stick it in like this, you pull it out, using your foot or knee to shove the e­ nemy away, and then you bring the stock of your r­ ifle down hard on his head like this, all in one smooth motion. . . .” 191

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It is necessary to forget all that and every­thing it led to, Tom thought; it is necessary to forget it now as it was to learn it in the first place. They ­ought to begin wars with a course in basic training and end them with a course in basic forgetting. The trick is to learn to believe that it’s a disconnected world, a lunatic world, where what is true now was not true then; where Thou Shalt Not Kill and the fact that one has killed a g­ reat many men mean nothing, absolutely nothing, for now it is the time to raise legitimate c­ hildren, and make money, and dress properly, and be kind to one’s wife, and admire one’s boss, and learn not to worry, and think of oneself as what? That makes no difference, he thought—­I’m just a man in a gray flannel suit. I must keep my suit neatly pressed like anyone ­else, for I am a very respectable young man. . . . ​I ­will have guts—­I’m not the type to start crying now. —Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1955

Sloan Wilson looked into the mirror and inspected his blue suit. It was 1947: The war had ended, his first child had been born—­his wife was pregnant with a second—­and he had an interview at Time magazine. He ­didn’t think much of them or what they published, but they paid well, far better than what he got as a small-­town journalist. When he talked to Time’s writers, they hated the magazine too. They complained that Time told them to rewrite their articles constantly, told them to write to a ­house style, told them to defer their opinions to the whims of the editor. Wilson wondered if t­ hese writers even knew what it was like to work for a boss: they seemed more like failed novelists, chafing at their lack of ­independence, than employees. Still, Wilson was uneasy at the prospect of subjecting his own writing to the same oversight.1 He tugged at the shoulders of his suit; it looked dif­fer­ent now that he had cut off the golden stripes that had previously designated his rank. His wife had told him he needed a new suit for his interview, but Wilson had balked at the advice. His old navy uniform, with a few alterations, had to be good enough. When he met the writers from Time, one pulled him aside and gave him the same advice: “Time is one place where it ­doesn’t pay to look poor,” he was told.2 Yet, stubbornly,

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Wilson refused to take the suit off. Maybe, as he remembered the event ­later, it was an early example of resisting conformity. Maybe, at the time, he felt he w ­ asn’t ready to abandon his naval ­service. Regardless, when he shook the hand of Time magazine’s Mr. Fixx, the man made no comment on his attire. When they sat down, Fixx asked Wilson why he wanted to work for the magazine. Wilson’s mind flashed back to his ex­pec­ tant wife, the small h ­ ouse they lived in, the meager salary he was already making as a reporter, the job plating silver he’d have to take if this one ­didn’t work out. “I want to write,” he lied, trying to hide his financial worries from his interviewer. “I think that the training h ­ ere might do me good.” He congenially answered the rest of the interviewer’s questions, ­until the man gave him a test. “Let’s see how you write,” the man asked Wilson. “I want to see what kind of autobiographical sketch you can write for me in an hour.”3 Wilson felt indignant at the request. Surely biographical information was invasive and unnecessary? Should he invent a story about how much he, in his childhood, had adored Time magazine, had read it aloud by the fire? Or should he tell the truth and risk losing the job?4 He debated both sides. On the one hand, it insulted him to manufacture passionate origins for a job like Time. His biography was his own; he ­didn’t want ­others dissecting it. On the other hand, he needed the money and Time was a good opportunity. The clock ticked away while he debated. ­A fter a few minutes, he de­cided that he ­couldn’t cow to their expectations: he stubbornly crumpled up what he had written and instead delivered a ­simple page bereft of anything but the most superficial description and one final sentence. “I w ­ ill be glad to answer any questions which seem relevant,” he wrote, “but ­after considerable thought, I have de­cided that I do not wish to attempt an autobiography as part of an application for a job.” Taken aback by his honesty, Time hired him on the spot.5 At least that’s how Wilson fictionalized the encounter when he included it in his novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, eight years l­ ater. In real­ity, Wilson needed the money: he spent the fifty minutes diligently explaining his childhood, his time in the navy, his dream of becoming a writer, and his excitement for Time magazine. He was hired and the next day came to work in a neatly pressed gray flannel suit. Wilson, a veteran of the navy, l­ ater became a h ­ ouse­hold name. He was famous for coining the phrase “gray flannel suit,” a term that evoked the idea of a man without his own identity, subsumed by the corporate world and unable to think for himself. Alongside other social critics, like the veteran William Whyte, Wilson’s “conformity critique” argued that modern society had emasculated men, that men had no options except to listen to ­others for guidance. In an era in which ­there was widespread fear that World War II had irrevocably changed American life, Wilson’s warning seemed especially worrisome. The veterans’ critique that I’ve explored in the previous chapters, as exemplified in the works of James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field, never became

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the dominant script for masculinity in the postwar United States. Instead, the widespread debates about manhood eventually settled on a critique most closely modeled by the work of Wilson. The conformity critique, to be clear, had much in common with the complaints made by James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field. Like ­these three, writers who expounded the conformity critique ­were led by a deep-­seated feeling that modern American men w ­ ere inauthentic. American society had created men who worked for the needs of o­ thers (their com­pany, their wife, the “team”) rather than themselves; as Whyte described them, “they [­didn’t] just work for the o­ rganization; they belong[ed] to it as well.”6 They worried that “gray flannel men” ­were a modern social prob­lem. When James Dean, in Rebel, pulled his f­ ather up by the apron strings and stared him down for his weakness and ambivalence, audiences nodded along to the idea that juvenile delinquency was caused by ­these wishy-­washy, henpecked, men. However, as the conformity critique became dominant, it overpowered some of the nuances that defined the proj­ects of Jones, Stern, Field, and o­ thers like them. Central to the message of Jones was that bravery was a construction, made to force men into inauthentic scripts. Likewise, Stern believed that authenticity meant gentleness, emotionality, and an acknowl­edgment that bravery was a ­performance. None of this was implied by the conformity critique. If modern society made men inauthentic, the solution was ­either to reinvigorate that individualism in some way (Whyte implied this, while p­ opular film noir writers practically made it an ethos) or to recede away from the emasculating workplace into the home (as Wilson himself seemed to advocate).7 By focusing on the prob­lems of conformity, Americans could express their dissatisfaction with modernity without si­mul­ta­neously questioning the more fundamental tenets of men’s role in society.8 By ignoring the central concerns of the veterans’ critique, the possibilities for change withered. Male tenderness and romanticism w ­ ere fit into a heterosexual mold; the prob­lems facing American men became centered on the white-­collar office, a setting dominated by white men, and a setting that erased the unease felt by ethnic Americans. And while many veterans may have continued to yearn for the male connections they made during the war, for the touch of a buddy or for the camaraderie of the barracks, they had only a discursive script criticizing conformity through which to express this discontent. American men knew something was wrong, but disentangled from their war experience, it w ­ asn’t clear exactly what. Still, the veterans’ critique is impor­tant. First, by studying its contours, we better understand how radical a moment World War II was. The war unleashed a flurry of discussion over what makes a man, and though some of this discourse was eventually subsumed into a critique of men’s autonomy, understanding the more radical under­pinnings of the conformity critique helps us comprehend not only its widespread appeal but also the complicated alternative masculinities hiding u­ nder its umbrella.

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It’s also impor­tant ­because of how t­ hese ideas reemerged, a generation l­ater. If postwar Americans forgot how to rethink manhood, their c­ hildren, harshly critical of the Vietnam War and searching for their own alternatives to the white-­ collar lives their f­ athers lived, rediscovered this lost dissent. Searching for their own path t­ oward au­then­tic action in a bureaucratic, stifling society, some found a model in World War II veterans like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. In ­these authors, the New Left found sardonic and satirical styles that did not suit the winds of the fifties but fit perfectly the irreverent attitudes of the next ­decade. They also found voices that questioned the nature of war as heroic, wondered ­whether male authenticity could be preserved amid societal constraints, and opened the door to a softer, more emotional masculinity. Their critiques w ­ ere not identical to Jones’s, Stern’s, and Field’s, but the overriding concerns that animated them had much in common with t­ hese men. As a new generation constructed their own criticisms of their gray flannel f­ athers, t­ hose very same f­ athers helped them voice their concerns in a new context.

Other Directed, Inner Doubts While Wilson’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit became synonymous with anx­i­ eties concerning masculinity in postwar Amer­i­ca, Wilson was not the first person to give words to this fear. Instead, writers of all stripes ­were sounding the alarm that something was wrong with American men. Writers like Jones, Stern, and Field w ­ ere part of this call, but more common w ­ ere authors who argued that American society was sapping men of their i­ ndependence and individualism, thus making frontiersman masculinity a ­thing of the past. While the veterans’ critique made the claim that men needed to learn to freely express their desires and dismiss traits like bravery, an adjacent “conformity critique” made clear that modern society had emasculated men. As ­these analyses of American manhood became more widespread, the “conformity critique” became the primary structure through which the veterans’ critique was viewed. The first critiques of conformist men appeared soon ­after the end of World War II, spurred by the difficulties veterans had with their homecomings. Columbia sociologist Willard Waller, for instance, argued that the conformity of the military would prove an obstacle to the reintegration of returning soldiers. The veterans, used to their regimented lives, would be unable to make decisions for themselves and instead look for leaders to tell them what to do. In the worst-­ case scenario, he i­ magined dissatisfied veterans would be susceptible to a fascist ideology; lacking individualism, t­ hese men would latch onto strong personalities. Like the analyses made by Jones and Stern, the initial versions of the conformity critique ­were steeped in the perils of reconversion and the worry that the men who returned w ­ ere no longer suited to civilian life.9 Soon, however, the conformity critique got decoupled from World War II and became a more general analy­sis of modern American culture. Though it was

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aty­pi­cal for the genre—­a ­sociological academic study, and one that avoided polemics completely—­the most well-­known of t­hese works was The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman. First released in 1951, but a best seller when the abridged version was released in 1953, the book seemed to confirm the unease left in American life ­after the end of the war. Its argument, in a nutshell, was that the American character was changing from a society that rewarded ambition and individualism into one that rewarded cooperation. In the context of a country already anxious about the changes the war had wrought, Riesman’s study became understood as a warning that the frontiersman was an endangered species. In more detail, The Lonely Crowd argued that in the nineteenth c­ entury Americans ­were fundamentally “inner-­directed”: they ­were individualistic and driven by their own ambitions and sense of right or wrong. However, in an increasingly bureaucratized modern world, the “other-­directed” personality was beginning to emerge. Other-­directed ­people looked to ­others for approval and guidance; they learned to value skills such as the ability to “get along” with their fellow workers, to read the needs of ­others, and to put the group above themselves. Riesman claimed that in the new postwar society ­those men with ­these skills ­were favored and rewarded, while t­ hose who still clung to inner-­directed patterns ­were discouraged.10 Riesman’s analy­sis, though ostensibly gender-­neutral, was coded in ways that made his audience imagine he was talking exclusively about men. Most of the interviews he conducted for his study ­were with men, and the situations he described ­were overwhelmingly about male-­dominated white-­collar jobs. While he meant to describe universal personality types, his audience quickly recognized the traits associated with other-­direction—­getting along with ­others, cooperation, interpersonal skills—as feminine ones, and t­ hose with inner-­direction—­ individuality, ambition, inner moral drive—to mimic ­those they associated with the frontiersman.11 Fi­nally, t­ hese personality types resembled existing racial ­stereotypes and had the side effect of effeminizing nonwhite groups. Riesman himself, for instance, vocally expressed his concern that assimilationist Jews in postwar Amer­i­ca ­were doubly “other-­directed” b­ ecause their Jewish communities put additional pressures on them to conform to the dictates of the Jewish community.12 While Riesman always claimed he never meant to condemn other-­direction, his audience saw his study as evidence that manhood was imperiled. If modern society was making men other-­directed, then was modernity effeminizing?13 ­Popular culture in the 1950s often commented on this idea. For instance, anticommunist lit­er­a­ture and films of the period often associated communists with other-­directed traits. Communists w ­ ere described as “superhuman robots” who ­were unable to think for themselves or w ­ ere trapped in the “red straitjacket” that made their desires identical to the Communist Party’s. Louis Budenz, an early

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defector from the American Communist Party (CPUSA), described in his memoir, This Is My Story, how communists ­were completely beholden to the needs and desires of ­those above them. He remembered how the head of the CPUSA, Earl Browder, constantly changed his opinions based on what superiors told him to believe and how every­one working at the Daily Worker became ­adept at reading subtle Soviet signals of policy changes and altering their own ideas to match.14 Films of the period also often reflected anx­i­eties about the feminization of American men, creating a context in which American audiences w ­ ere primed to understand the current crisis through the lens of “other-­direction.” Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the 1952 film he directed between his work on Stern’s Teresa and Jones’s From ­Here to Eternity, is prob­ably the best example of Hollywood’s engagement with the conformity critique. Partially a commentary on the con­temporary anticommunist witch hunt in Hollywood, the film was also a condemnation of conformist aspects in modern American society. In the film, the main character, Marshal ­Will Kane (Gary Cooper), was confronted by the villainous Miller gang, who vowed to kill him and take over the town at noon. As his shootout with them neared, Kane tried to deputize a few men and stand together against the aggressors, but each townsperson backed down and abandoned him, leaving him alone to protect a town that refused to support him. The townspeople, he found, would rather get along with the villains than challenge them and stand up for themselves. The film, in putting the “strength and courage, daring and resourcefulness” of the cowboy hero of ages past against the conformity of the modern age, found modernity lacking.15 Riesman was not a veteran: an eminent sociologist, he worked in at the Sperry Gyroscope com­pany during the war as a “contract termination man­ag­er.” Th ­ ere, his employer produced amoral gyroscopes for American bombers overseas.16 However, the two other most prominent writers on conformity, Wilson and Whyte, did serve. Though they both had very dif­fer­ent experiences of war than Jones, both inherited the same suspicions of society that ran through Jones’s work. However, their critiques, by focusing on the effects of society upon modern man, reconciled postwar Amer­i­ca with manhood not by reinventing it. Instead, they tried to explain how individualism could still be preserved without questioning the place of men in American society. Like Jones, Whyte had been at the very forefront of the war. They had both fought at Guadalcanal, Jones as one of the infantry reinforcements, Whyte as an intelligence officer for the marines. In his brief memoirs of Guadalcanal, Whyte l­ater discussed how individual expertise won the day: it was his own knowledge about maps and geography that gave them the upper hand during his time t­ here, for instance. He ­imagined success came from men like his hero, “Ramrod” Taylor, a man who showed initiative and who “st[u]ck his neck out,” as Whyte put it.17 Whyte left the war certain that individuals, taking risks and

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using their own strengths to make decisions and choose the right strategy, w ­ ere fundamental to how b­ attles ­were won. ­A fter the b­ attle, Whyte taught for the military before getting a job as a writer for Fortune magazine. He immediately became interested in what men w ­ ere ­doing a­ fter the war: a­ fter hearing only praise for Yale’s graduating class of 1949, he began to interview them to find out what made them so special. But in t­ hese interviews, Whyte began to feel uneasy. As he explained l­ ater, he found this class to be exactly the opposite of what he thought men should be. “­Seniors . . . ​­were rejecting the old Protestant, entrepreneurial ethic,” he wrote, “­these young p­ eople ­weren’t seeking excitement, or challenge. They wanted a safe haven. They wanted to work for AT&T and General Electric, for heaven’s sake!”18 Whyte’s interviews with the Yale class of 1949 began the research that became his most famous work, The O ­ rganization Man, released in 1956. Whyte studied the new postwar workplace culture and its effect on the personalities of the men who worked t­ here. While Riesman had been reticent to cast value judgments, Whyte confidently condemned the drift he saw t­ oward collectivism. His study primarily analyzed a “major shift in Amer­i­ca ideology” found in the ­middle man­ ag­ers and “­junior executives” who had multiplied at American corporations. ­These “­organization men” ­were men who not only worked for the “­organization” but “belong to it as well.” According to Whyte, American society now revolved around men who strove to belong to big o­ rganizations rather than t­ hose who had the ambition to achieve for themselves. Th ­ ese ­people rarely became anything of note, Whyte explained, but despite their mediocrity, “they [we]re the dominant members of our society. . . . ​It is their values which ­will set the American temper.”19 Whyte’s argument was that modern corporations had begun to reward men who worked together and got along with o­ thers, while punishing t­ hose who stood out. In the nineteenth ­century, Americans ­were characterized by the “Protestant ethic”: “the thought that pursuit of individual salvation through hard work, thrift, and competitive strug­gle” led to success. This ethic promoted drive and competition in men and was necessary for the success of nineteenth-­century frontiersman entrepreneurs. However, by the twentieth c­ entury, the Protestant ethic had been supplanted by the “social ethic,” which promoted security and the ability to get along with o­ thers. Corporations would delegate responsibilities to teams, burden individuals with oversight, and use scientific methods to break down work into interconnected tasks. The o­ rganization men who thrived in this atmosphere felt more comfortable working in groups than by themselves, as Americans had in the past.20 The new ­organizations in American society discouraged leadership. Whyte argued that ­organizations would prevent innovative or original thinking. Instead, often their goal was to “eliminate the leader altogether.”21 The o­ rganization men devoted every­thing to the job, subsuming themselves and their own desires to

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the demands of the com­pany. “Work then, is dominant,” Whyte wrote. “Every­ thing e­ lse is subordinate and the executive is unable to compartmentalize his life.” He could not have friends or f­ amily obligations that conflicted with his work, Whyte contended. Moreover, t­ hese men did not see this as a prob­lem ­because their entire identities ­were defined by their work. He quoted one com­ pany president who explained that t­ here was no such t­ hing as working too hard: overwork was “simply work that you ­don’t like.”22 Through Whyte’s descriptions, a portrait of an emasculated man emerged. The Protestant ethic suspiciously resembled the individualism and ambition of the frontiersman; the social ethic seemed a betrayal of that same individualism. Unlike the men Whyte had known in the war, the men of postwar Amer­ i­ca had lost that inner drive and instead became part of a larger collective, in ­service to the needs of the greater ­organization. Stern’s reenvisioned manhood did acknowledge the place of outward duty, but this seemed to go further. Instead of being responsible for o­ thers, the ­organization man seemed to have no identity outside of them. Importantly, Whyte argued that this change was a result of the social upheaval of the postwar period. Whyte never mentioned the war as a cause of this upheaval, but it casts a long shadow over this entire section of his analy­sis. During the fifties, he argued, Americans w ­ ere incredibly mobile: new communities sprang up as quickly as old ones ­were flooded with new mi­grants. This mobility—­implied to be a result of veterans returning from overseas—­led to an unmoored population separated from the families and communities that had sustained them and their identities for generations. The new suburbs lacked history and ­were composed of nuclear families, not extended generations: the families that moved to ­these suburbs had few friends, few connections, and no preexisting support systems. Cleaved from their communities, the men who found themselves in the suburbs felt an intense need to belong. They joined anything they could find: professional clubs, PTAs, neighborhood improvement socie­ties, and, most importantly, large businesses. They searched for meaning, which they readily found in the arms of their workplace. In such a state, men would never stand up for themselves against their newfound community.23 The ­Organization Man still stands as one of the most influential and insightful pieces of social analy­sis of its generation. Whyte made his conclusions ­after poring through numerous interviews over the course of half a d­ ecade.24 But regardless of his insight, Whyte’s findings had the effect of defining the con­ temporary debate over conformity around certain key assumptions. Most impor­tant to note is that Whyte’s goal was to analyze the shift ­toward the social ethic; he provided only a brief examination of how to combat it. The ­Organization Man ­didn’t call for a reimagining of men’s place: it advocated for business practices that would allow individualism to coexist with modernity.25 The prob­lem of the o­ rganization man need not be solved by a full-­scale withdrawal from

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society, as Jones had contended, but rather by giving white-­collar men more leeway in their daily work. Traditional frontiersman masculinity could be preserved without questioning the foundations society rested upon. Whyte’s analy­sis also moved the plight of modern manhood away from the war and into the office. For Jones, Stern, and Field, the war was integral in making them realize the implicit contradictions in frontiersman masculinity. But in locating the cause of male emasculation not in homecoming but in modern society, Whyte also separated his crisis in manhood from war. This allowed him to call for a return to the idealized (but often fictional) individualism of yesteryear. It also meant that this individualism need not be coupled with the male affection that had characterized Jones’s, Stern’s, and Field’s re­imagined ideas of manhood. In addition, by moving the prob­lem of modern manhood to the suburbs and the workplace, Whyte’s analy­sis unintentionally whitewashed the ­organization man. Rather than conceptualizing male discontent through a universalist blueprint, Whyte’s characterization of the prob­lems facing men made it a unique prob­lem facing the suburban m ­ iddle class. African American men, for instance, disproportionately worked blue-­collar jobs and ­were kept out of the suburbs. If they felt a discontent with American manhood, Whyte’s model could not explain it. While Jones was by no means unproblematic when he discussed race, his idea—­that society was effeminizing and that men could preserve their authenticity only by withdrawing from it—­was one that could (in theory) apply equally to the discontent that African Americans, Jewish men, and even gay men felt. But their strug­gles to fit into postwar American society w ­ ere now separate from ­those of the ­organization men; ­whatever opportunities for cross-­racial or cross-­ class understandings between men ­were lost in the consolidation of postwar manhood. By the mid-­fifties, the preoccupation with the conformity critique meant that prob­lems of manhood w ­ ere disconnected from the trou­bles of coming home. Separate from the strug­gles of World War II, postwar Amer­i­ca fretted over how to imbue individualism back into an increasingly bureaucratic society around them. But without the lessons from the war, ­there ­were few answers, no ways to question the larger prob­lems with masculinity that World War II had put into focus for many veterans. Minority men ­were left out in the cold; white men ­were told to get over the trauma of war, don a gray flannel suit, and go to work. That was, at least, the impression given to Wilson. A veteran of the navy, Wilson came home to his high school sweetheart Elise, with the hopes of settling down and becoming a writer. Real­ity intruded upon this domestic wish, as he drifted from job to job, getting paid small amounts for piecemeal journalism while he tried to make ends meet. He grew increasingly concerned as he had first one, then two, and fi­nally three ­children, all of whom had to be supported on the same meager paycheck. Taking a job at Time meant he was paid more, but he

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felt like the assignment they put him on—­writing articles for Time’s in-­house publication—­was unfulfilling and undemanding. Eventually, he found himself in charge of a proj­ect for which he traveled around the country to write a report on the state of public schooling. He found the proj­ect vague and the prob­lems he wrote about superficial, and he suspected his job might have been meaningless busywork to serve a PR function for Time. Upset and alienated, Wilson eventually wrote about his experiences in his novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.26 The book became a sensation. Overnight, Gray Flannel Suit became a best seller; it was quickly made into a film starring Gregory Peck, to favorable reviews.27 Both the book and the film became widely praised for their commentary on the conformity of modern Amer­i­ca. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, wrote, “[Wilson’s] dialogue could have been piped from any of thousands of offices or living rooms in ­those areas. . . . ​His audience should be extensive, since Tom Raths are widespread in ­today’s society.”28 But the novel was significant not just for its ubiquity but also b­ ecause of how Wilson approached the prob­lems that Riesman and Whyte had framed. Rather than try to construct a manhood apart from society like Jones and Field—or try to integrate responsibility and male tenderness into society like Stern—­Wilson’s solution was to retreat from an emasculating workplace into the domestic sphere. Only by forgetting the traumas of war and fully embracing heterosexual domesticity could men fully integrate into postwar society and in ­doing so rebuild themselves as men. Wilson’s time during World War II was markedly dif­fer­ent from that of any of the other veterans heretofore discussed. Being born into a wealthy ­family had given him a love of yachting from a young age. His knowledge of sailing, along with the high grades he had received at Yale, allowed him to immediately become a naval officer, and he spent the war protecting weather stations in the Arctic. Unlike Jones, Stern, Field, and Whyte, Wilson saw no combat: instead, he spent his time in the navy negotiating the bureaucracy of military hierarchy. His first assignment, as a second officer on the Nogak, put him in direct conflict with a captain who resented Wilson’s privileged advancement to an officer. His captain was convinced Wilson was incompetent; a­ fter a severe dressing down, the captain ordered him confined to quarters u­ ntil they arrived on shore so he could be relieved.29 Despite his anger at this treatment, Wilson grit his teeth and did as he was ordered without complaint. He stayed confined to his quarters for twelve days, ­until his captain released him, impressed with Wilson’s ability to accept punishment gracefully. From that point, the captain gained a re­spect for him, and Wilson, over time, took more responsibilities from the man, eventually gaining the man’s blessing and command of his own ship.30 Wilson’s war experience was deeply affecting for him. Even thirty years l­ ater, in a memoir, he wrote that “the war, which filled only four of my fifty-­five years, threatened to usurp my w ­ hole remembrance.”31 But the military, he learned, was

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a danger to individualism; instead, he was successful only b­ ecause he had the self-­ control and humility required to get along with his superiors. He viewed this lesson with suspicion and, ­after the war, blamed the military for the perceived tendency of his generation to give up their individuality to the group. As he wrote in his memoir, The war left them, I think, with a lust for security, permanence, even luxury and prestige, though they w ­ ere supposed to be bad words. . . . ​Many of ­these men flocked to big corporations. Th ­ ere their military experiences served them well. If big companies of that day insisted on a kind of uniform-­of-­the-­day, be it gray flannel or blue pin stripe, the e­ ager veterans donned it cheerfully. The structure of large corporations, with chains of command, assistants and assistants to assistants, was not unlike the armed forces. Many of the men in gray flannel suits progressed fast in business life. It took them some time to learn that corporate endeavor is unlike a war in at least one impor­tant re­spect: t­ here is no g­ reat cause, no titanic strug­gle between good and evil, nothing but a scramble for the buck.32

The war, to Wilson, seemed to be the reason so many men in the fifties felt comfortable as part of large o­ rganizations. Like Jones, interacting with military rules and regulations had made Wilson critical of social structures that threatened men’s autonomy. Did men who ­were unable to create meaning for themselves join ­organizations so someone ­else would give them direction? If they did, Wilson thought it was a m ­ istake. Just like his contemporaries Jones and Field, Wilson argued that office jobs made men hollow. But if the workplace was “nothing but a scramble for the buck,” how might men find meaning without a war? Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, set out, in part, to argue that ­family life could provide that meaning. Written in 1955, the novel was about the travails of a war veteran named Tom Rath, an everyman who found that his life a­ fter w ­ artime was far from the rosy world he had ­imagined. He had only a small salary and lived in a cramped, run-­down ­house that was far too small for their young child. In order to better take care of his f­ amily, he ventured into the corporate world, where he quickly found that his success depended on his ability to submerge his own feelings and get along with his boss. In the end, Rath realized the only way to find authenticity in modern society was not to give himself over to the corporation but to focus his energies t­ oward his wife and c­ hildren.33 The alternative, Wilson argued, was to be an empty, corporate man like Rath’s boss, Ralph Hopkins. Hopkins was a perfect depiction of Whyte’s “­organization man”: his entire focus in life was the com­pany, to the detriment of his badly neglected wife and c­ hildren. He was personable, but soft: he was prone to agree with o­ thers, never forceful, never assertive, and adverse to conflict. He rarely said what he meant but instead couched every­thing in praise.34 He even treated his

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wayward d­ aughter “as a business prob­lem” ­because the idea of a personal life was foreign to him.35 Tom Rath eventually realized that if he r­ eally wanted to succeed at his job, he would eventually have to become as hollow as his boss. The strug­gle to assert himself and yet be successful in the com­pany became the central conflict in the novel: would Rath sell out to get along with o­ thers, or would he preserve his own authenticity by refusing the banal tasks he was given? In the end, Tom Rath de­cided he could not be just a “gray-­flannel man,” and he told his boss just as much. “I’m not the type of man who can get all wrapped up in a job,” Tom explained. “I c­ an’t get myself convinced that my work is the most impor­tant ­thing in the world. I’ve been through one war. Maybe another one’s coming. If one is, I want to be able to look back and figure I spent the time between wars with my ­family, the way it should have been spent.”36 Unlike Whyte, Wilson integrated the war into his novel, by contrasting Rath’s war trauma with the banality of his current prob­lems. In the novel, Rath experienced flashbacks to his time as a paratrooper, haunted by killing seventeen men, including his best friend. As Rath dealt with this memory, Wilson implied that the dramatic tragedies of the war made it difficult for him to care about his ­family and his job—­that the war must be overcome and forgotten before he can fully embrace hetero-­domesticity.37 Once Rath learned to trust his wife, open up to her, and explain his trauma, however, he could fi­nally forget the war and move on. The secret to adjustment was domesticity, not dwelling on the experiences that had scarred him. Forgetting, however, ­didn’t work for Wilson as it had for Rath. His relationship with his wife had been strained since the end of the war and the success of Gray Flannel Suit only made it more fraught. As Wilson traveled around the country, he found himself confronted with opportunities to meet ­women who thought the world of him, and despite his misgivings, he engaged in affairs as his wife grew more distant. His marriage ended in divorce, a real-­life example of how negotiating the tensions of domesticity in postwar Amer­i­ca may have been more complicated than simply devoting oneself to ­family.38

John Wayne Syndrome What both Whyte’s and Wilson’s critiques have in common is that neither of them questioned the fundamental characteristics that had defined frontiersman masculinity. Frontiersmen ­were competitive, brave, and individualists; “gray flannel men” w ­ ere cooperative, ­couldn’t stand up to their wives or bosses, and ­were most comfortable deferring to o­ thers. If Wilson and Whyte decried the ­organization man as a sign that the American character was weakening, then its opposite was implicitly the ideal they espoused. This was precisely why they had such an imprint on American life. The conformity critique captured an impor­tant truth—­that men who returned from the

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war w ­ ere frustrated by civilian life—­and then married it to a declension narrative. The story went like this: The reason veterans faced frustration on their return was b­ ecause w ­ omen and the workplace no longer let them act as individualist frontiersmen; true manhood was d­ ying out b­ ecause of modern society. To save Amer­i­ca—­especially from the ultimate ­organization man, the communist operative—­A mericans needed to fight back against modernity and harken back to their frontier past. The works of Stern and Jones ­didn’t fully fit this narrative. Both criticized modern society, but instead of arguing for a return to the frontiersman, they both hoped to supplant it with something new that more closely matched their experiences in war. Authenticity and sensitivity ­were key components of their new manhood, having been traits they found especially meaningful during their time overseas; neither of t­ hese traits was pre­sent in the conformity critique. And while their ideas may have resonated with other dissatisfied veterans, not all Americans anxious about modernity w ­ ere veterans; not all Americans who fought in the war wanted to abandon the central tenets of masculinity as they knew them. And so, rather than face the harder task of completely reevaluating masculine virtues in light of modern warfare, Americans instead embraced a narrative of lost grace. In previous chapters, we saw that Jones’s and Stern’s work was frequently misunderstood by their audiences in ways that better fit their works into this framework of loss. From ­Here to Eternity, for instance, could be interpreted as a film about an individualist loner coerced into fighting the conformist authorities of modern society. Jones’s heroes, Prewitt and Warden, fought against the demands of o­ thers and tried to carve out a niche where their individuality and ­independence w ­ ere preserved, only to, of course, fail in the end. All well and good, to an audience already suspicious that frontiersman masculinity was u­ nder threat. But when Jones’s novel questioned the value of honor or suggested men should resist the temptations of married life, his audience ignored it.39 By the time Eternity was made into a movie, the message had completely flipped. The movie was successful precisely b­ ecause it valorized the frontiersman, not b­ ecause it questioned the essential nature of heroism. By focusing masculinity on maturity and duty to ­others, Stern’s ideal was superficially compatible with the dominant ideal of the frontiersman. Jim Stark, the titular Rebel, could be seen as a typical individualist hero, if one paid attention only to the knife fights and reckless driving. Furthermore, Stern’s screenplays w ­ ere full of con­temporary arguments blaming ­women for emasculating men; characters like Mrs. Cass and Jim Stark’s weak-­kneed, apron-­wearing f­ ather seem to exemplify t­ hese characteristics. To an audience already primed to understand “other-­direction” and already suspicious of “momism,” Stern’s films ­were easily readable as critiques of how modern society emasculated men. His films dealt directly with themes concerning the loss of male ­independence and ­will, feeding them directly into the narrative that modernity was endangering the frontiersman.

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Of course, we know that Stern had never meant this reading to be the primary lens through which his films w ­ ere viewed. When o­ thers misunderstood Rebel to be advocating that men embrace vio­lence to escape the emasculation of society, Stern was horrified. Teresa should have been about maturing into a husband; Rebel should have been about a boy learning the sensitivity and kindness to be a proper partner. Stern wanted his films to question the ideal of bravery and suggest that men could be au­then­tic by showing tenderness and affection. Audiences rarely paid attention to t­ hese lessons. It’s not clear that Field’s poetry was misinterpreted in the same way, but his reach was smaller. He prob­ably never had illusions that his epiphanies about manhood would ever reach but a niche audience. In the repressively homophobic fifties, any intimation that male friendship could have erotic implications, and even that it could supplant the responsibilities of heterosexual adulthood, was far beyond the pale. While his poetry could delineate a rebellious gay male love, this was a critique that could never reach much further than bohemian doors. Voices like Jones, Stern, and Field became harder to find in mainstream culture as the ­decade wore on. Instead, critiques like Whyte’s became further repeated in books and films.40 In fact, war movies continued to bend around the ideal of the frontiersman, offering audiences individualist heroes facing insurmountable odds. In their memoirs, veterans of the Vietnam War frequently related how much the films of their childhood taught them unrealistic frontiersman roles that ill-­suited their wars as much as Jones’s. Tobey Herzog, terming this “John Wayne Syndrome,” has argued that movies like 1967’s The Green Berets taught f­ uture soldiers that heroism was defined by individualist men taking on the ­enemy with their own strength and courage, to the point that it became common parlance during Vietnam to turn “John Wayne” into a verb to describe particularly macho actions. Not prepared by their society for the ­actual experience of combat (just as Jones had felt, twenty years before), ­these men instead ­were left questioning the moral certitude of warfare, the possibility of bravery, and even the nature of heroism. They came home, often traumatized, trying to understand their own roles as men.41 But the veterans’ critique h ­ adn’t completely dis­appeared. Instead, the next generation continued to explore the ideas World War II veterans had attempted to convey. As the Vietnam War created an ­organized counterculture, this new group of dissidents found themselves questioning the heroism of the war that was now happening in front of them. The men of this generation, experimenting with new ways of understanding manhood based not upon martial prowess, looked for discursive foundations for a gentler manhood. They found it, readily available, from the previous generation. As they began to read books by Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, two veterans of the previous war, they found, ready and waiting, an alternative ideal of masculinity ready to be weaponized.

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The New Left Flies with Yossarian Nine years ­after Jones became the preeminent World War II writer with his masterpiece From ­Here to Eternity, Heller usurped him. Catch-22, a novel about the absurdities of bureaucracy and the inhumanity of war, was released in 1961, to a ready audience of young college students who had already begun to bristle at the regulated world of their parents. By the latter half of the sixties, the book took on added significance in the light of growing r­ esistance to the Vietnam War. Heller, intentionally or not, had become the voice of a generation. This was an odd role for someone whose life experiences, as a bombardier in Italy during World War II, defined him as a product of World War II. If Jones and Stern lost their cultural relevance by the mid-­sixties, their contemporaries Vonnegut and Heller found unexpected influence as a new generation reached adulthood. Antiwar activists, trying to reconcile their pacifism with ideals of manhood, strained to find models of heroism critical of war; the veterans’ critique, as espoused by Heller and Vonnegut, was one such model. Heller’s Catch-22 echoed the antisociety themes of From ­Here to Eternity, while still preserving themes of male tenderness and camaraderie. Vonnegut, likewise, presented a war empty of romance and an unheroic protagonist battered and infantilized by ­wartime. The irreverent, comic tone of their novels had an obvious appeal to a counterculture ready to question every­thing; beyond that, this fiction questioned any connection between ­wartime and manhood, instead presenting a model of men as sensitive, emotional, and au­then­tic. Smuggled in through t­ hese authors, the veterans’ critique became an alternate model for masculinity in a completely new context. Besides Vonnegut and Heller, the last veteran writer to hold cultural relevance as the fifties closed was Jones’s perennial friend, rival, and mirror, Norman Mailer. Mailer had had a difficult time of the fifties. A ­ fter the i­ mmense success of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer wrote a string of critical flops, first Barbary Shore in 1951, then The Deer Park in 1955. Mailer’s critics seemed to have concluded that Mailer, no longer writing about his own personal experiences, was out of his ele­ ment. Mailer may have felt the same way; by the sixties, his ­career had transformed into one inspired by the “new journalism” of the era, a genre defined by a fictionalized approach to real events, f­ ree from the objectivity—­and the stodgy voice—of traditional journalism.42 Mailer had also spent the latter half of the fifties reinventing himself as an ur-­countercultural rebel. He professed his reverence for the “hipster,” the only men in Amer­i­ca who had the strength to endure and oppose the banal, emasculating conformity of the era. Mailer rethought his macho, competitive masculinity as a trait of the cultural rebel and stressed that any opposition to dominant trends was itself manly.43 Mailer’s rebellious masculinity, alongside his erratic antics, made him a hero to the emerging New Left, and in the fall of 1967, he was invited to take part in the antiwar March on the Pentagon. Mailer found a

Conclusion • 207

ready audience of dissidents, ­eager to hear him declaim modern Amer­i­ca and the pretensions of conformity culture. Mailer proved to them that one could be against vio­lence and still manly, against the war and still heroic. Alongside a new generation, Mailer was arrested at the protest, an incident that further proved his credentials to the antiwar movement.44 Despite his reception by the antiwar protestors, however, Mailer felt uncomfortable with this new generation. He worried that their opposition was just blind anger against authority, not a product of their quest for authenticity or their thirst for an alternative society.45 He wrote as much in The Armies of the Night about the protestors he’d met, with both admiration and apprehension: The new generation . . . ​had no re­spect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was ­going to happen next; that was what was good about it. Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority—­the authority was the manifest of evil to this generation. It was the authority who had covered the land with t­ hose suburbs where they stifled as c­ hildren while watching the adventures of the West on t­ elevision; . . . ​The authority had operated on their brain with commercials, and washed their brain with packaged education, packaged politics.46

Even as Mailer attributed their anger to the sins that had made his generation so discontent—­the domestic suburbia and the lies presented as heroism through the frontier narrative—­his tone betrays an uneasiness with their fervor. They ­were ­children, lied to all their lives, now lashing out at ­whatever they ­were given. As he watched t­ hese young p­ eople chant and occupy the Washington Mall, he cooled on the way the movement had evolved. Mailer no longer saw himself in his own vision of the macho hipster. Mailer provided one script for antiwar masculinity, an ideal that married hypermachoism, competitiveness, and martyrdom with rebellion. But he was not the only model available. While the student movement marched with Mailer, the same c­ hildren read his con­temporary, Heller. If Mailer had been an ill-­ matched spokesman, Heller was a positively strange choice. By the end of the fifties Heller, a staid, happily married writer who had taught ­English for two years at Pennsylvania State, resembled the authority the counterculture hated more than one of their heroes.47 Yet his first novel, Catch-22, transformed him into an icon, celebrated for his absurdist response to the stifling inhumanity of modern bureaucracy. Heller had been a bombardier during World War II who flew dozens of missions over Italy. At first he was excited by the romanticism of combat, but that gave way to a profound fear of death. While on a bombing run over Avignon, his plane encountered heavy flak, piercing the gunner’s leg. Heller was left to console the man, who cried out about how cold he was. Three other planes went

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down that day, and Heller became obsessed with the idea that his could have crashed as well. He developed a fierce aversion to flying and became convinced that the German forces ­were firing with the intention to kill him, personally.48 Heller was discharged from the military a disturbed man, a viewpoint that may have influenced how he thought about ­wartime for years to come.49 Upon his return home, Heller published a number of short stories. In one piece, “I ­Don’t Love You Anymore,” Heller discussed the trou­bles veterans faced coming home by writing about a ­house­hold drama between a veteran and his wife, whom he displayed increasingly hostile reactions to. As they bickered, the veteran realized that he had returned from the war a changed man, one who no longer had anything in common with his wife. “I ­Don’t Love You Anymore” became his first published work; the alienation of returning veterans was a particularly relevant topic at the time, and both Heller and Jones got their start by presenting their takes on the strug­gles men like them faced.50 Unlike Jones, it took Heller a ­decade to turn his ­wartime trauma into a novel. Instead, he got married to a prewar paramour, Shirley Held, and together they made do in New York off his short stories. In 1955, he graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in ­English, joining the faculty of Penn State’s ­English department for two years before quitting the job out of boredom. He had read Mailer’s Naked and the Dead and Jones’s From ­Here to Eternity when they ­were released; Heller de­cided that “­there was nothing I could add to war lit­er­a­ture that was not in From H ­ ere to Eternity and had not been produced before by Norman Mailer.”51 But by the end of the d­ ecade, inspired by his reading of Kafka and Celine, and by the ways writers like Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac had changed the focus of American writing, a new idea for a war novel began to unfold in Heller’s mind.52 Using absurdity and humor to underline the true horror of war, Heller’s Catch-22 offered a view unpre­ce­dented in World War II fiction: one in which failure is heroic, bravery a sign of insanity. What Jones once wrote as tragedy, Heller had written again as farce. Catch22 was, in many ways, an indictment of the very same forces that Jones had set his sights on. In From H ­ ere to Eternity, the military stood in for a bureaucratic, dehumanizing society that threatened the authenticity of principled men. Jones’s heroes resisted the demands of the military even as they gave up every­thing, including their lives.53 Likewise, Heller’s Yossarian was a sane man trapped in an insane military bureaucracy. The men in charge w ­ ere all amoral and obsessed with prestige—­they ­were so infatuated with their own well-­being that they created rules and regulations that benefitted themselves but threatened regular soldiers like Yossarian. C ­ olonel Cathcart, for instance, put his own men in danger by making them fly endless bombing missions; he believed their “heroic” acts would create good press. Worst of all was Milo Minderbinder, a mess officer who engaged in increasingly immoral business ventures in order to make a profit. At his height, Milo made a deal with the German military, agreeing to pay his own men to bomb their own airfield and making a massive profit at the same time.

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Yossarian was caught in the ­middle of their machinations, desperately trying to survive the ambitions of other men.54 Yossarian, in a typically paradoxical style, was a hero who lacked nearly all the positive characteristics associated with heroism. Yossarian had no princi­ples; he showed no bravery. He stood up only for himself, and his only goal was to survive. The book followed his antics as he tried to avoid flying on bombing runs, ­whether that meant faking an illness or manipulating tactical maps. Yossarian was cowardly, irresponsible, and insubordinate, but he was also the only man in the squadron whom the novel treated sympathetically.55 This was b­ ecause, despite his irresponsibility, Yossarian saw the world for the insanity it was. While Milo, Cathcart, or any of the other men in the outfit ­were focused on their own irrelevant obsessions, Yossarian was the only man who understood the true horror of war. He was also the only one who was honest enough with himself to openly express his fear of death; flipping heroic scripts, Heller depicted anyone who ­didn’t fear death as foolish and Yossarian as wise. Like in Jones’s work, it was not competitive machismo that made a man in Heller’s war; it was the ability to see the war freed from illusions of bravery or heroism. In an echo of Jones, Yossarian’s ability to see war as it truly was originated from a horrifying event he experienced while on a bombing mission: Yossarian watched a young man named Snowden, too young and naïve to fully understand the reasons, die in front of him. Yossarian’s faults ­weren’t ­because he was selfish; he was traumatized. Yossarian’s disgust for authority stemmed from his realization that warfare was nothing but horror. Yossarian came to the same realizations that Jones did: if heroism was fake, then bravery was suspect.56 Yossarian’s tender care of the ­dying Snowden also underscored the entire novel by showing how male camaraderie served as the only genuine, h ­ uman moment Yossarian experienced during the war. Surrounded by unfeeling and callous men, Yossarian found himself taking care of a man who continually mumbled how cold he was. Yossarian’s drive to protect the man showed a deep reservoir of sensitivity and emotion, one that counterbalanced his refusal of duty or honor. That emotionalism was also why he was scarred by the event. While Yossarian’s war might have been composed almost entirely of fake pretensions, the relationship between two lonely men was real and the emotion between them valuable. Yossarian, by caring, was dangerous; by resisting authority, he questioned its legitimacy. Thus, at the climax of the novel, he was forced to make a choice. His superiors told him that they would send him home, ­free him from his obligations, with one condition: he had to “like [them].”57 What they meant was that Yossarian had to give in; he had to agree that their rules and regulations made sense, agree that he was a war hero, agree to have parades in his honor, and agree to pretend that he approved of the job the military command ­were ­doing. In effect, Yossarian would have to compromise his own authenticity, or die in

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combat. In the end, Heller provided him an escape that avoided ­either option, unwilling to go to the lengths that Jones did and have his character die for his princi­ples. But the idea was the same: should a man resist conformity, even at the cost of his own life? Catch-22 was a sensation when it was published in 1961. It quickly became a best seller and immediately found its way onto college syllabi across the country. Jones and Mailer both professed their love for the book, and as time went by Catch-22 found its audience in young college students. By the end of the sixties, Catch-22 had become a canonical book for the antiwar left, Heller a celebrity for students who opposed Vietnam.58 Catch-22’s war, with its cast of powerless soldiers caught in a bureaucratic nightmare for a meaningless cause, seemed to capture exactly what antiwar protestors found so horrific about Vietnam. Somehow, Heller’s war had created the language to talk about the next. It would be arguing too much to say that audiences read Catch-22 ­because of its ideas of manhood and authenticity. In large part the book became p­ opular ­because it was clever and irreverent and b­ ecause of its antiwar message. Regardless, alongside ­these themes, Heller offered an image of manhood at odds with previous portrayals of soldiers. Yossarian ­wasn’t tough, stoic, brave, or responsible, but he was true to himself and did care deeply about the lives of o­ thers. ­These traits, ­whether or not they ­were the main attraction of Heller’s writing, ­were also central to the heroes of the antiwar movement. When Tom Hayden of SDS (Students for a Demo­cratic Society) wrote that “the dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics,” he was complaining about the same authority Yossarian faced. When his generation “Fe[lt] the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life” and “yearn[ed] to believe t­ here is an alternative to the pre­sent, that something can be done to change circumstances,” they sought to challenge the entire edifice of American society, just as Yossarian had done.59 It is also worth noting how Heller, a Jewish man, offered a w ­ artime hero who was explic­itly nonwhite, someone who was both of M ­ iddle Eastern descent and, as Leah Garrett has argued, coded as Jewish throughout the book. Despite Yossarian’s inversion of heroic norms, Heller, by echoing Stern’s and Field’s embrace of male sensitivity, reflected a model of manhood that once again was inclusive enough to account for minority men. Though Yossarian’s race was largely unexplored in Catch-22, Heller’s inclusion of the man, combined with his throwback to Stern’s notions of manliness through sensitivity show how the more racially inclusive aspects of the veterans’ critique still shown through a d­ ecade ­later.60 Meanwhile, Stern’s insight into the fragility of male roles took on a wider significance ­under the deft hands of Vonnegut. The black sheep of his Indiana ­family, Vonnegut had nearly failed out of college before he joined the infantry. He had ­stopped g­ oing to his classes; his ­brother was a scientific genius, and Kurt had been forced by his ­father to follow the same path into a degree that bored him. When he joined the infantry, he continued to feel out of place. He felt

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apprehensive about the coming trial, but cautiously optimistic that he was ­doing a noble ­thing. Like Stern, he too was sent to the front at the ­Battle of the Bulge, which traumatized him and defined much of the rest of his life.61 The B ­ attle of the Bulge was where their stories diverged. Three divisions w ­ ere ambushed during this German attack during the winter of 1943; Stern was in the one division that made it to safety, while Vonnegut’s was captured by the German forces. Stern’s war experience was, for him, defined by his ability to survive the harsh conditions of the retreat and taught him that adherence to duty and manhood w ­ ere linked. Vonnegut, however, found himself confronted with his own failure. He l­ater downplayed his heroism. “[Heller] was a hero and I was a f-­ck-up,” Vonnegut ­later told an interviewer, explaining the difference in tone between their antiwar novels. “Heller had a very in­ter­est­ing war. I was wandering around with my thumb up my ass wondering what was g­ oing on.”62 Vonnegut spent the next months in a POW camp, surrounded by men like him. ­There he witnessed one man mentally collapse; he ­couldn’t ­handle what had happened and regressed to a child, trading his food for candy ­until he passed away. Another man, a schoolteacher, was executed by his German captors ­a fter stealing a teapot. Both men ­were ­later fictionalized as tragic figures in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-­Five.63 Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing, a nightmarish experience that took him over twenty years to put to words. In the meantime, he became a gray flannel man himself, working at General Electric in publicity, typing bland text about new products and inviting inventors to tour their facilities. He hated the work; he found it meaningless and superficial. When his f­ ather sent a letter to GE asking for a picture of Kurt’s ­brother showing off a new invention, Kurt sent a bombastic, angry letter back to the man, out of boredom. “We have a lot more to do than piddle around with penny-­ante requests like yours,” he joked, signing the letter “Guy Fawkes.”64 In 1952, frustrated with the alienation he felt in the bureaucratic world of GE, he quit to become a full-­time writer.65 Vonnegut’s early writings reflected this anger at bureaucracy, mirroring the intellectual disdain for gray flannel ­organization men pre­sent in ­popular culture. His first novel, Player Piano, was written as a satirical attack upon an increasingly mechanized, rule-­oriented world. Released in 1952, it focused on a scientist who had found a way to mechanize his own job, obsoleting himself. As more jobs became mechanized and ­humans became increasingly irrelevant, p­ eople began to feel alienated by a society designed to serve them. By the end of the novel, the ­people revolted and tried to take back a dehumanized world from the machines. A far more fantastical take on the ­organization man than Wilson or Whyte would write about a few years ­later, it nevertheless captured the same anxiety, expressed by other veterans, that modern society had taken dignity and self-­ sufficiency away from men, emasculating them in the p­ rocess.66 Player Piano sold terribly, as did his next four novels, and Vonnegut spent the fifties and the sixties in obscurity.67 But in 1969 Vonnegut released his masterpiece.

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Slaughterhouse-­Five, the only one of Vonnegut’s novels to take a careful look at war, was a fictionalized, personal account of Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war. Superficially, the novel resembled a sci-fi adventure story. Its protagonist, Billy Pilgrim—­who was based upon the young man Vonnegut saw die in the camps—­ had “become unstuck in time.”68 This meant that instead of experiencing his life continuously, like regular p­ eople, Pilgrim was thrown up and down his timeline, experiencing moments of his life out of order and out of context. Thus, Pilgrim—­and the reader—­experienced his time as a prisoner of war in Dresden, his life as an ophthalmologist ­a fter the war, his time recovering from a plane crash, his abduction by aliens, and his romance with a pornographic starlet while in an alien zoo, all si­mul­ta­neously as he jumped forward and back from each moment. The most outlandish parts of the story, in which he discussed philosophy with the aliens, revealed that ­free ­will was an illusion and that death was no more than an unfavorable arrangement of someone’s atoms. Th ­ ese messages gave Pilgrim comfort while he experienced the death and cruelty of the war.69 However, on a deeper level, it becomes clear that t­ hese science fiction ele­ments ­were not real. Instead, they w ­ ere inventions of the deeply traumatized Billy Pilgrim, who in­ven­ted an alien abduction out of material he read in a pulp sci-fi novel and whose sensation of being “unstuck in time” was likely his experience of war flashbacks.70 The aliens he in­ven­ted taught him two lessons to help him deal with the horror he saw in war: their belief that every­thing was preordained helped him believe that he ­couldn’t have avoided the terrible experience of Dresden, while the aliens’ teaching that ­people existed at all times taught Billy that living was no worse or better than being dead. In Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut painted a portrait of a hero dif­fer­ent from almost any other discussed previously. Billy Pilgrim was not a figure with any sort of agency; he was constantly acted on by ­others, ­whether the aliens who abducted him and put him into a zoo or the German soldiers who subjected him and the men around him to constant humiliation and deprivation. As a prisoner, Pilgrim reverted to a child, unable to understand what was happening to him or that his life was in danger; he owed his life to another man, a traditionally manly man who died in the railcar on the way to the POW camp. Even ­after the war, Pilgrim seemed to fall into every­thing: he married a w ­ oman he hated b­ ecause it seemed inevitable, he started his c­ areer in ophthalmology on his father-­in-­law’s recommendation, and he even knew the plane crash that badly injured him would happen but endured it nevertheless.71 Unlike the autonomous frontiersman, Pilgrim simply endured life without having a say in his destiny. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-­Five, which functioned as a metafictional introduction by Vonnegut himself, the author explained that he made a promise to write a novel that never valorized war. “You’ll pretend you w ­ ere men instead of babies,” a ­woman named Mary accused him. “And you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne . . . ​and the war w ­ ill look just

Conclusion • 213

wonderful, so w ­ e’ll have a lot more of them. And t­ hey’ll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.”72 Vonnegut, in response, subtitled the book The ­Children’s Crusade, ­after a medieval incident in which ­children, told that they ­were ­going to fight to regain the Holy Land, w ­ ere instead sent into slavery in far-­off lands. Likewise, the soldiers in his narrative, Billy Pilgrim most of all, ­were all ­children, cast into horror that they could neither imagine nor affect. The ­Battle of the Bulge had also convinced Stern that the soldiers he knew “­were all kids” sent into horror; like Vonnegut, Stern recognized how fragile manhood ­really was.73 Though he experienced war quite differently than Stern or Jones, Vonnegut learned lessons that w ­ ere quite similar: bravery was meaningless, men nothing but scared c­ hildren u­ nder their performed bravado. For Vonnegut, it d­ idn’t ­matter how men faced their capture: some died, some lived, and w ­ hether they cried and fell apart or faced it with courage meant ­little at the end of the day. If some sort of manly values existed, they d­ idn’t change anything, one way or another. Jones suggested that the freedom of being in the com­pany of men could offer men the meaning they had thought to find in the false promises of bravery; Stern had believed that while men, deep down, w ­ ere as much c­ hildren as Vonnegut’s Pilgrim, they could find strength through duty and their affection for o­ thers. But Vonnegut offered no answer to this prob­lem. Instead, Vonnegut’s war writing repudiated any notion of heroism or manliness, providing instead a protagonist who must simply endure ­whatever life brings him. It took twenty years for Vonnegut to write about Dresden b­ ecause it was a story without heroes; to Vonnegut, it was a “­children’s crusade,” just like all wars. From the end of the war u­ ntil the closing years of the sixties, Vonnegut had been ignored. But, seemingly overnight, just like Heller, Vonnegut was ­adopted by the youth culture of the sixties. Soon, Vonnegut found his door constantly assaulted by the excited rapping of young men and ­women fresh out of college; he had inadvertently become their idol. Before he knew it, Vonnegut was making the rounds of college campuses, now an antiwar hero to the next generation. The New Left ­adopted him as inspiration: for instance, when James Simon Kunen wrote his first-­person account of the student takeover of Columbia University, he wrote it in an intentionally Vonnegutian voice.74 Todd Gitlin, a member of SDS, talked of Vonnegut as one of the main authors that “young freaks and radicals” read in the late sixties.75 ­Whether Vonnegut had meant to or not, he had achieved relevance in a new context. Heller resonated with a youth movement that wanted to find heroism in refusing to fight; Vonnegut’s novels reflected the youth culture’s suspicions that war could ever be heroic. Using the works of ­these authors, the student movement recast the veterans’ critique of manhood as an antiwar message, using the suspicions of manhood implicit in that critique to ­counter the idea that protestors of war w ­ ere in any way effeminate or cowardly. By transforming the discussion

214 • When Cowboys Come Home

around manhood into one about questioning authority, seeking authenticity, and acknowledging the horrors of vio­lence, protestors of the sixties had an alternative script to draw from, one that transformed draft dodging into a heroic act. To be clear, the antiwar movement had its own prob­lems with excessive machismo. By 1968, the movement was provoking conflicts with the establishment, artificially creating standoffs with which they could prove their own bravery.76 But the men of the New Left saw their strug­gles through the lens of authenticity and increasingly valued men who listened to their own moral voice, not ­those of the surrounding society. They valued intimate meetings between close confidants, believing that democracy, fundamentally, had to be personal; many of the counterculture believed that bureaucracy had stunted men’s ability to express love or to cooperate with a fraternity of close friends.77 And at least some of them increasingly believed that authenticity was inextricable from sexual honesty: Carl Wittman, an ex-­member of SDS who became one of the most impor­tant voices in the gay liberation movement, famously wrote that only by embracing same-­sex love could a man be “­free enough to shed the roles [he’s] picked up from the institutions that imprison [him].”78 Though imperfectly embraced, members of the New Left understood that prowess on the battlefield ­didn’t make a man; ­there w ­ ere more possibilities for men than dreamt by lone rangers. The veterans’ critique, thus, had a longer life than Jones, Stern, or Field might have ­imagined. None of their attempts to reframe manhood ­were, in their day, successful. But by the next ­decade, the seeds that they had planted had grown in ways none of them could have predicted. Suspicions of society had become attacks on authority; their quest for authenticity had become a movement for meaning. While each had tried to create male spaces where men could be emotionally ­free, the next generation explored the possibilities of emotional manhood. By the time this new movement happened, Jones had grown old and distrustful of rebellion; Stern, never a ­father, was disconnected from the youth movement; and Field championed their rebellion even as he knew he was too old to enjoy the changes they sought. Nevertheless, they each witnessed a transformation in male roles. Manhood changed, and they had played a part.

Acknowl­edgments ­ ere are innumerable p­ eople who helped shape what this proj­ect has become, Th and I am deeply indebted to all of them. My largest debt of gratitude goes to Dr. David Steigerwald and Dr. Daniel Winunwe Rivers for their unwavering support of this proj­ect from start to finish. Daniel Rivers taught me nearly every­ thing I know about LGBT history, while my discussions with David Steigerwald concerning the nuances and eccentricities of the intellectual climate of Amer­ i­ca in the 1950s largely ­shaped this proj­ect from start to finish. As well, thanks are due to my editor, Kimberly Guinta, who has believed in this proj­ect despite ­every setback and hurdle it has faced. I would also like to thank every­one who has read parts of this manuscript as I was developing it, including Margaret Solic, Adrienne Winans, Leticia Wiggins, Delia Fernandez, Delano Lopez, and Bart Elmore. Thank you to Nicole Freeman, for more support and friendship than is pos­si­ble to quantify, and to Scott Ward, who read multiple drafted chapters of this proj­ect with his skeptical eye and kept me honest whenever I veered too far from my evidence. In addition, thanks are in order to the archivists of the Beinecke Library for allowing me to look through their substantial collection of James Jones’s papers. As well, thanks to Thomas J. Wood at the University of Illinois, Springfield. Thanks to Jon Ward for his generosity in allowing me to view his excellent documentary on Stewart Stern. Thanks to Timothy Murray, who helped me find materials I never would have found on my own, and who was kind enough to put me in contact with Edward Field. Fi­nally, thanks to Kathryn Hodson and all the staff at the University of Iowa. I am also indebted to Edward Field himself, who so graciously agreed to talk with me about his life. Also thanks to Rajiv Ramdat; without his passion for LGBT history, I never would have discovered the writing of Edward Field myself. I also thank Marilee Stiles Stern for her enthusiasm for my proj­ect. 215

216 • Acknowl­edgments

Fi­nally, a thank you to my wife, Marianna, whom I love deeply. Not only have you given me innumerable amounts of support as I have completed this manuscript, but your help editing, critiquing, and suggesting revisions was not only thorough but extraordinarily useful. I could not have made it to the finish line without you. Thank you as well to Roger and Shelley George. You have given me more opportunities than I have had any right to and have never backed down from believing in me. The book in front of me would not have existed ­were it not for what you have given me.

Notes Note: Profanity in quotations was not censored in the original sources.

Preface 1 The following is a recounting of f­ amily stories, which ­were told to me on many dif­fer­ent occasions. 2 Willard Waller, “The Veterans’ Attitudes,” Annals of the American Acad­emy of ­Political and Social Science 238, no. 1 (1945): 174–179. 3 George K. Pratt, Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment (New York: Whittlesey ­House, 1944), 126. 4 William Wyler, dir., The Best Years of Our Lives (Samuel Goldwyn, 1947); Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955); Nunally Johnson, dir., The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (20th ­Century Fox, 1956). 5 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), esp. 42–67; Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 1–48. 6 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 97–166. 7 See James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), for more examples of how masculinity was contested in the 1950s. 8 William Darby, Necessary American Fictions (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University P ­ opular Press, 1987) analyzes the themes of many of the novels written by t­ hese authors, especially Jones, Mailer, and Wouk. 9 Paul Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 141. 10 Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992); Angela K. Smith, “Chicken or Hawk? Heroism, Masculinity and Vio­lence in Vietnam War Narratives,” in Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth ­Century, ed. Angela K. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 174–194. 217

218 • Notes to Pages xii–7

11 Fussell, ­Great War, 293–335; Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109–136. 12 Gilbert, Men in the M ­ iddle, 15–33; Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 97–166. 13 Kathleen Belew has argued that the war had an effect in forming the white supremacist militia movement of the seventies and eighties, but this movement was much more closely connected with frontiersman narratives than with a rethinking of manliness. Bruce Schulman has also noted a transition away from machoistic manhood in the seventies, but he links that change to the feminist and gay rights movements. See Belew, Bring the War Home (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 19–31; Schulman, The Seventies (Boston: De Capo, 2001), 176–180. 14 Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth ­Century (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), 220–237. 15 Gilbert, Men in the M ­ iddle, 8.

Introduction Epigraphs: James Jones, Diary, April 13, 1943, James Jones Collection at Beinecke, Yale, series I, box 26, folder 318; Stewart Stern, “Bulge!,” Stewart Stern Collection at the University of Iowa, box 5, folder 4; Edward Field, “World War II,” in Variety Photoplays (New York: Grove, 1967), 61–65. 1 As quoted in Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 192. 2 MacShane, 192. 3 MacShane, 15. 4 MacShane, 193. 5 Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake, draft, September 3, 1996, Kurt Vonnegut Collection at Indiana University Bloomington, box 27, page 22. 6 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bells Tolls (1940; London: Vintage, 2005). 7 Gerald Linderman, The World Within War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. 16–20, 63–90. 8 For theories concerning “hegemonic” and “subordinate” masculinities, see Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 9 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 20–23. 10 Rotundo, 222–227, 232–246, 248–249. Also see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca: A Cultural History (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1996), 81–156. 11 The term “passionate manhood” comes from Rotundo, American Manhood. 12 See especially Bederman’s discussions of G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Tarzan in Manliness and Civilization. 13 Consider the contours of the frontier myth as demonstrated in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 14 Slotkin, 512–520. 15 David Miller, dir., Flying Tigers (Republic Pictures, 1942). 16 Larry Swindell, The Last American Hero: A Biography of Gary Cooper (New York: Doubleday, 1980).

Notes to Pages 7–12  •  219

17 Howard Hawks, dir., Sergeant York (Warner ­Brothers, 1941). 18 John Dunning, On the Air: An Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 404–409. 19 Dunning, 405. 20 “Jane’s Jewels,” The Lone Ranger, July 30, 1945, WXYZ; “Blast and Double Blast,” The Lone Ranger, February 27, 1942, WXYZ; “Jim Kalar,” The Lone Ranger, May 10, 1944, WXYZ. 21 “Vulture’s Nest,” The Lone Ranger, February 23, 1942, WXYZ; “­Temple of the Sun,” The Lone Ranger, March 31, 1943, WXYZ. 22 For a discussion of the use of Native Americans in American culture, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 1–9, 95–127. 23 Melville Jacoby, “Life’s Reports: MacArthur’s Men: Bataan War Produces a Crop of Fabulous Fighters,” Life, March 16, 1942, 14. 24 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 318–320. 25 “Philippine Epic,” Life, April 13, 1942, 25–34, 35. 26 James Tobin, Ernie Pyle’s War: Amer­i­ca’s Eyewitness to World War II (New York: ­Free Press, 1997), 1–26. 27 Ernie Pyle, “My Personal Hero,” in Tobin, Ernie’s Pyle’s War, 266–268. 28 Pyle, 266–268. 29 Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca, 198–200; Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991), 33–52, 83–90; Alice Kessler-­Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: W ­ omen, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 64–69; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth C ­ entury (New York: Verso, 1997). 30 Paul Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. 141–142; Jeffery Walsh, American War Lit­er­a­ture, 1914 to Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), esp. 32, 45–46, 50–52, 60–62, 112. 31 Walsh, American War Lit­er­a­ture, 8–40. 32 Fussell, ­Great War, 293–335; Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109–136. 33 Das, Touch and Intimacy, 109–136. 34 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 99–130. 35 See, for instance, Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 205–258; Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11–98, for other ethnic Americans a­ fter World War I. 36 William Whyte, The O ­ rganization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 37 Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 34–80. 38 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 97–166. 39 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1993), 42–68. 40 Robert Corber, Homo­sexuality in Cold War Amer­i­ca: ­Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 21–78.

220 • Notes to Pages 12–25

41 Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 42 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 108–128. 43 James Gilbert and Barbara Ehrenreich, in par­tic­u­lar, capture this multiplicity of male voices quite well, and Gilbert argues that the fifties was a unique period when a single narrative of manhood broke down. See Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men. 44 John Ibson, The Mourning ­After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), xiv–­x viii, 143–184. 45 Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Lit­er­a­ture on W ­ omen’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” ­Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–239; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 46 For a discussion of Jewish ­stereotypes before the war, see Paul Breines, Tough Jews: ­Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 47 Gilbert, Men in the M ­ iddle, 34–61; Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 97–166. 48 Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 226–298; Cuordileone, Manhood and American ­Political Culture, 97–164. 49 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men; May, Homeward Bound; Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ibson, Mourning ­After. 50 Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African-­American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 51 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Dif­fer­ent Color: E ­ uropean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 91–135; Debra Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1  Never a Second­hand Man Epigraph: James Jones, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, draft, James Jones Collection at Beinecke, Yale, series I, box 22, folder 224, pages 322–323. 1 James Jones, letter to Wingfield, March 6, 1951, JJ Collection, series II, box 37, folder 569. 2 Nelson W. Aldrich Jr, “The Art of Fiction XXIII: James Jones,” Paris Review, Autumn–­Winter 1958–1959, 50–51. 3 Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 289–290. 4 See, for instance, Thomas Childers’s Soldier from the War Returning (Boston: Mari­ner Books, 2009) for three poignant portraits of returning veterans. 5 See Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-­American and Philippine-­American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 1–42; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 178–196.

Notes to Pages 25–30  •  221

6 For instance, see Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bells Tolls (1940; London: Vintage, 2005); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), esp. 313–346; Howard Hawks, dir., Sergeant York (Warner ­Brothers, 1941). 7 James Jones, “The Temper of Steel,” in The Way It Is and Every­thing E ­ lse (proofing copy), JJ Collection, box 33, folder 464, 13–22, 13. This book was eventually published as The Ice Cream Headache and Other Stories (1965; New York: Open Road Media, 2011); Paul Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 120. 8 Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 18–20. 9 James Jones, letter to Suzanne Rollins, July 8, 1957, JJ Collection, series II, box 37, folder 551. 10 “Filipino ‘Joe’ Packs a Wallop,” Life, April 13, 1942, 35. 11 Chap. 2 of David Stannard’s Honor Killing provides a good overview of the cultural meanings of Hawaii in the 1930s. See Stannard, Honor Killing: Race, Rape, and Clarence Darrow’s Spectacular Last Case (New York: Penguin, 2005), esp. 19–32. Also see Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Toronto: ­Free Press, 1992). 12 Stannard, Honor Killing, 24–25. 13 Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 96. 14 Bailey and Farber, 26. 15 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 16 Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 190–192. 17 Bailey and Farber, 192–198. 18 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 19 Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 36, 100–106. 20 Bailey and Farber, 36. 21 James Jones, From ­Here to Eternity (1951; McHenry, IL: Delta, 1998). 22 James Jones, 1939, letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 513. 23 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 24 James Jones, letter to Jeff Jones, August 26 [no year], JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 25 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 26 Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 95–132. 27 James Jones, letter to Jeff Jones, June 25, 1940, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 514. 28 Jones, letter to Jeff Jones. 29 Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, esp. 432, 612–616. 30 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 31 James Jones, Diary, October 23, 1942, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318, James Jones, Diary, November 18, 1942, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 32 Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, 250. 33 Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place, 199–209. 34 MacShane, Into Eternity, 45–46. 35 Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, 90–94. 36 Jones, 92–94. 37 Undated newspaper clipping attached to a letter sent by Lowney Handy to James Jones, July 3, 1951, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 507. 38 James Jones, Diary, December 7, 1941, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318.

222 • Notes to Pages 30–39

39 James Jones, WWII (New York: Ballantine Books), 7–8. 40 Fussell, ­Great War, 140–141; Gerald Linderman, The World Within War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3–11; Tobey Herzog, Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), 60–90. 41 James Jones, Diary, December 7, 1941, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 42 James Jones, letter to Jeff, May 22, 1940, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 514. 43 James Jones, letter to Jeff Jones, July 25, 1940, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 514. 44 Jones, letter to Jeff Jones. 45 Neither of t­ hese pieces is dated, but both are likely from his time before deployment. 46 James Jones, “December 7th, 1941,” JJ Collection, series I, box 31, folder 410. 47 James Jones, “December 7th, 1941”; James Jones, “The Making of a Man,” JJ Collection, series I, box 31, folder 371. 48 MacShane, Into Eternity, 50–52. 49 James Jones, Early Diary, September 5, 1941, JJ Collection, box 26, folder 317. 50 James Jones, Diary, November 29, 1942, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 51 Jones, Diary, November 29, 1942. 52 James Jones, Diary, February 1943, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 53 Jones, Diary, February 1943. 54 Jones, WWII, 88. 55 MacShane, Into Eternity, 54–56. 56 James Jones, The Thin Red Line (1963; New York: Random ­House, 1999), 171–172. 57 John Dower, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 58 MacShane, Into Eternity, 54–56. 59 James Jones, letter to Wingfield, March 6, 1951, JJ Collection, series II, box 37, folder 569. 60 MacShane, Into Eternity, 58–59. 61 MacShane. 62 Thomas Childers, Soldier from the War Returning (Boston: Mari­ner Books, 2009), 145; Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 159–160. 63 MacShane, Into Eternity, 59–61. 64 James Jones, Diary, April 13, 1943, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 65 Jones. 66 Jones. 67 Waller, Veteran Comes Back, 13. 68 Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Lit­er­a­ture on W ­ omen’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” ­Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–239. 69 George K. Pratt, Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment (New York: Whittlesey ­House, 1944), 123–126. 70 Pratt, Soldier to Civilian, 126. 71 Pratt, 127–129. 72 Pratt, 181. 73 Rebecca Jo Planet, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 97–102. 74 James Jones, “Dec 4,” letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 75 MacShane, Into Eternity, 63–64. 76 MacShane, 73–77. 77 James Jones, “Dec 4,” letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512. 78 James Jones, “Thursday the 5th,” letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512.

Notes to Pages 39–48  •  223

79 Jones. 80 James Jones, “Second­hand Man,” in The Way It Is and Every­thing E ­ lse (proofing copy), JJ Collection, box 33, folder 464, 63–88; James Jones, “None Sing So Wildly,” in The Way It Is and Every­thing E ­ lse (proofing copy), JJ Collection, box 33, folder 464, 89–134. 81 James Jones, letter to Margaret Carson, December 4, 1948, JJ Collection, series II, box 34, folder 484. 82 James Jones, letter to Margaret Carson, November 9, 1947, JJ Collection, series II, box 34, folder 484. 83 Anthony Rotundo has coined this type of twentieth-­century masculinity the “existential hero” for how it espouses a break and retreat from w ­ omen and society. See Rotundo, American Manhood, 286–287. 84 Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope”; Pratt, Soldier to Civilian, 126. 85 Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942; New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996). 86 James Jones, “Second­-­hand Man,” JJ Collection, series I, box 33, folder 451, 12. 87 James Jones, letter to Edward Weeks, January 24, 1948, JJ Collection, box 34, folder 476. 88 A. B. C. Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel,” Life, May 7, 1951, 142–157, 142–143. 89 Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel,” 143–144. 90 See Lowney Handy’s correspondence with Captain Eugene Mailloux, Handy Writers Colony Collection, at the University of Illinois, Springfield, box 6, folder 10. 91 The following chapter discusses their relationship in more detail. 92 James Jones, “The Temper of Steel,” in The Way It Is and Every­thing E ­ lse (proofing copy), JJ Collection, box 33, folder 464, 13–22, 13. 93 Jones, “Temper of Steel,” 16. 94 Jones, 20. 95 Jones, 22. 96 James Jones, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, draft, 33–36, 99–104, 122, 132. 97 James Jones, “Synopsis,” JJ Collection, series I, box 22, folder 218. 98 William Wyler, dir., The Best Years of Our Lives (Samuel Goldwyn, 1947); Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope.” 99 Jones, They ­Shall Inherit the Laughter, 671. 100 Jones, 133–134. 101 Jones. See, for instance, a discussion of momism on 152, Johnny quoting from the book on 202, and a passage about how the library had censored the book on 585. 102 Jones, 165–167. 103 Jones, 498–500. 104 Jones, 228–229, underline original. 105 Jones, 602. 106 Jones, 43–47, 123, 145–146. 107 Jones, 254–255. 108 Jones, 563. 109 Jones, 163. 110 Jones, 759–769. 111 Jones, 785. 112 Jones, 775. 113 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 97–111; James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 34–61.

224 • Notes to Pages 48–57

114 Gilbert, Men in the M ­ iddle, 34–80. 115 Maxwell Aley, letter to James Jones, August 5, 1945. JJ Collection, series II, box 34, folder 476. Also see MacShane, Into Eternity, 78–83. 116 MacShane, 292. 117 For instance, Pratt, Soldier to Civilian. 118 James Jones, undated letter to Jeff Jones, JJ Collection, series II, box 35, folder 512.

Chapter 2  The Big Noise Epigraph: Stewart Stern, “Notes of an Infantryman,” Stewart Stern Collection at the University of Iowa, box 5. 1 This narrative is primarily drawn from Stewart Stern’s unpublished memoirs. See “War on West Harrison Street,” SS Collection, box 5, pages 1–5. 2 Stern, “War on West Harrison Street,” 24. 3 As quoted in Jon Ward, dir., ­Going through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern (electronic copy, unreleased, from the author’s personal collection). 4 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 5 Stewart Stern, “Bulge!,” SS Collection, box 5, page 4, 21–22. 6 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison Street,” SS Collection, box 5, page 78. 7 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 8 Gerald Linderman, The World Within War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 263–299; John Ibson, The Mourning ­After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7–15. 9 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 10 See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), esp. 60–71, for a discussion of how Jews ­were considered to be psychically feminine and prone to hysteria. Also see Debra Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 26–27, 32–35; Paul Breines, Tough Jews: ­Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), esp. 9–18. 11 Moore, GI Jews, 35. Also see Hoffman, Passing Game, and Riv-­Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon, 1999). 12 Gilman, Jew’s Body, 60–71; Moore, GI Jews, 28–32; Hoffman, Passing Game, 9–18. 13 Moore, GI Jews, 1–21, 26–27. 14 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 15 Ward; Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 16 Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 205–215, 222–249. 17 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 18 Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 19 Stewart Stern, Letter 5, April 21, 1943, SS Collection, box 2. 20 See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth ­Century (New York: Verso, 1997), and Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991).

Notes to Pages 57–62  •  225

21 See the introduction. 22 Moore, GI Jews, 56–58, 62–64. 23 Henry Dreyfuss, letter to Stewart Stern, February 6, 1941, SS Collection, box 2. 24 Ward, ­Going through Splat; also see Stern’s early correspondence in the Stewart Stern Collection, box 2. 25 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” Writers Guild of Amer­i­ca Newsletter, September 1970, SS Collection, box 2; Ward, ­Going through Splat. 26 Moore, GI Jews, 57–69. 27 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 28 Moore, GI Jews, 66–67. 29 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 30 Emanuel Stern, letter to Stewart Stern, April 6, 1942, SS Collection, box 2. 31 Stewart Stern, “Letter from a Soldier,” Design 46, no. 1 (September 1944): 28–29. 32 Paul Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Jeffery Walsh, American War Lit­er­a­ture, 1914 to Vietnam (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982). 33 Ward, ­Going through Splat; Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 34 Emmanuel Stern, letter to Stewart Stern, April 6, 1942, SS Collection, box 2; Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 35 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” Writers Guild of Amer­i­ca Newsletter, September 1970, SS Collection, box 2. 36 William Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause: A Conversation with Stewart Stern,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Fall 1999), http://­hdl​.­handle​.­net​/­2027​/­spo​.­act2080​ .­0038​.­414. 37 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, esp., 17, 46, 69. 38 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” Writers Guild of Amer­i­ca Newsletter, September 1970, SS Collection, box 2. 39 Moore, GI Jews, 54, 118–138. 40 This narrative is recounted in the first and third drafts of Stern’s memoirs and his letters home while stationed in Britain. See Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, box 5; Stewart Stern, “Notes of an Infantryman,” SS Collection, box 5; and Stewart Stern, letter to “Mom and Dad and F ­ amily,” October 31, 1944, SS Collection, box 5; and Stewart Stern, letter to “Mom, Dad, Marge, et al.,” November 17, 1944, SS Collection, box 5. 41 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 42 David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American ­People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 739–742; also see Ward, ­Going through Splat, for an overview of the 106th’s part in the b­ attle. 43 Ward, ­Going through Splat; Stern uses similar words to describe the war in Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, 24. 44 Untitled American film interview with Stewart Stern, SS Collection, box 2. 45 Linderman, World Within War, 263–299; Fussell, ­Great War, 293–335. 46 Allan Berube, Coming Out ­Under Fire (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1990), 38–39; Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955). 47 Stern writes at the beginning of “Bulge!” that he’s using the name Tony just so he ­wouldn’t have to constantly repeat using “I.” See Stewart Stern, “Bulge!,” SS Collection, box 5, 3. 48 Stewart Stern, “Notes from an Infantryman,” SS Collection, box 5, 1–25. 49 Stern, “Notes from an Infantryman,” 41–42.

226 • Notes to Pages 62–70

50 Both quotes are from Stewart Stern, “Bulge!,” SS Collection, box 5, 4. 51 Stern, i. 52 Stern, 35. 53 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, box 5, 45. 54 Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 55 Baer. 56 Paul Fussell has noted how common this was in memoirs of World War I, but he thought it was absent from recollections of World War II. Allan Berube, however, has found large amounts of evidence of homoerotic connections in World War II. Fussell, ­Great War, 293–335; Berube, Coming Out. 57 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, box 5, 36–37. 58 For a description of the events and how they in real­ity did happen to Stern and Jim Sramek, see Stewart Stern, letter to “Folks,” November 5, 1944, in “War Scrapbook,” SS Collection, box 5. 59 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” in the SS Collection, box 5, 95–101, pages 17–18. 60 Stern, “War on West Harrison,” 69. 61 Berube, Coming Out, 186–191. 62 As quoted in Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 109. 63 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison Street,” SS Collection, box 5, page 78; “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” Writers Guild of Amer­i­ca Newsletter, September 1970, SS Collection, box 2. 64 Stern explains this role of war in Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 65 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” 3. 66 Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, box 5, 45. 67 Stewart Stern, “War Scrapbook,” SS Collection, box 5. 68 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 69 Ward; Stewart Stern, “War on West Harrison,” SS Collection, box 5. 70 Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 3–4. 71 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Picador, 1948), Garrett, Young Lions, chap. 1. 72 Garrett, Young Lions, esp. 1–21, 77–131. 73 Moore, GI Jews, esp. chaps. 6, 7, and 8. 74 Diner, Jews of the United States, 229–231, 283–293. 75 Moore, GI Jews, 1–21, 248–264. Also see Garrett, Young Lions, esp. chap. 1; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth ­Century (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), 246–256; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Dif­fer­ent Color: E ­ uropean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 5. 76 Garrett, Young Lions, 45–47. 77 Diner, Jews of the United States, 227–228. 78 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern,” Writers Guild of Amer­i­ca Newsletter, September 1970, SS Collection, box 2. 79 “Council Profiles—­Stewart Stern.” 80 Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, in the Stewart Stern Collection at the University of Iowa, box 2. 81 Stewart Stern, “Sabra—­Summarized Continuity Outline,” SS Collection, box 12. 82 Stern.

Notes to Pages 70–80  •  227

83 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 31–60. 84 Stern, “Sabra—­Summarized Continuity Outline,” SS Collection, box 12. 85 Stern. 86 See Ibson, Mourning ­After, esp. chaps. 1 and 5. 87 Stewart Stern, “And Crown Thy Good Original Typescript and Research,” 1951, SS Collection, box 7; Stewart Stern, “And Crown Thy Good,” screenplay, May 16, 1954, SS Collection, box 7. 88 Kent Brown, The Screenwriter as Collaborator: The C ­ areer of Stewart Stern (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 41–43; Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 89 Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954SS Collection, box 2; Stewart Stern, letter to Fred Zinnemann, January 10, 1949, SS Collection, box 2.

Chapter 3  The “Age of Heroes” Epigraph: Edward Field, “World War II,” in Variety Photoplays (New York: Grove, 1967), 61–65. 1 Edward Field, “World War II,” in Variety Photoplays (New York: Grove, 1967), 61–65. 2 This narrative is derived from Field’s poem “World War II,” which is his retelling of the incident. 3 Field, “World War II,” 62. 4 Field, 64. 5 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 6 Allan Berube, Coming Out ­Under Fire (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1990). Also see Nan Alamilla-­Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Margot Canaday, The Straight State (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2009); Paul Jackson, One of the Boys: Homo­sexuality in the Military during World War II (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2005). 7 Field, “World War II,” 64. 8 Field. 9 Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Berube, Coming Out. 10 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 24. 11 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Picador, 1948); Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), chap. 1. 12 Berube, Coming Out, 1–7. 13 Berube, 12–18. 14 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 15 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 16 Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31–37; Lary May, Screening Out the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 43–59, 116–118. For a

228 • Notes to Pages 80–85

discussion of Jewish spaces in New York, see Debra Dash Moore et al., Jewish New York (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 77–100. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 71–77, discusses the proximity of Jewish immigrant communities to homosexual communities. 17 Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 45–90; Riv-­Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon, 1999), 21–87. 18 Hoffman, Passing Game, esp. 4–12, 90–105. 19 Hoffman, 9–18, 45–66; Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 222–224. 20 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 21 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 22 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 23 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 24 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 25 Moore, GI Jew; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth ­Century (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2001), 220–222, 246–256; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Dif­fer­ent Color: E ­ uropean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 178–199. 26 Edward Field, “Gay in the Army,” Edward Field Collection at the University of Delaware, box 3, folder 78. 27 Field. 28 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 29 Berube, Coming Out, 67–127. 30 Field, “Gay in the Army.” 31 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 32 Berube, Coming Out, 139–141, 234–235; Canaday, Straight State, 145–154. 33 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 34 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 35 Berube, Coming Out, 34–42, 188. ­These relationships have a superficial similarity to other homoerotic relationships between men in World War I; however, in that war they w ­ ere understood through Victorian constructions that normalized romantic attachments between boys. See Paul Fussell, The G ­ reat War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 293–335; Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109–136. 36 John Ibson, “Masculinity u­ nder Fire: Life’s ­Presentation of Camaraderie and Homoeroticism before, during, and a­ fter the Second World War,” in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 179–200; John Ibson, The Mourning ­After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1–40; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 37 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 62–88; Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Lit­er­a­ture on ­Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” ­Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–239. 38 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983), 14–28.

Notes to Pages 85–95  •  229

39 Kenneth Davis, Two Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of Amer­i­ca (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984). 40 Robert Corber, Homo­sexuality in Cold War Amer­i­ca: ­Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 4–5, 135–139. Also see James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. chaps. 1 and 2; K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and the American ­Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), chap. 3. 41 Interview with author, January 4, 2016; Edward Field, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 3–6. 42 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 1–6. 43 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 44 Michael D. Gambone, The Greatest Generation Comes Home (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 66–69. 45 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 18. 46 Field, 6–15; Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 47 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 48 The connection between Greek myth and gay culture is understudied, but Alastair Blanshard, Sex, Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2010), is a good start. Also see Fussell, ­Great War, 293–335; Edward Field, Stand Up, Friend, with Me (New York: Grove, 1963), 18–19. 49 Edward Field, “Age of Heroes,” Western Review 15, no. 1 (1950): 254–256. While “Age of Heroes” was published in 1950, it was prob­ably written with the bulk of Field’s early poetry, in 1949, while in Greece. 50 Field. 51 Field. This poem and the sentiments b­ ehind it echo a language used l­ ater by the early gay liberation groups in the early 1970s. See Stephan L. Cohen, The Gay Liberation Movement in New York (New York: Routledge, 2008), 51–52, and Rita Mae Brown, “Sappho’s Reply,” in The Hand That Cradles the Rock (New York: New York University Press, 1974). 52 Edward Field, “Donkeys,” in Stand Up, 14–15. 53 Edward Field, “Ruth and Naomi,” in Stand Up, 21. 54 Field. 55 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 31–39, Berube, Coming Out, 228–254, 270–279. 56 “Mattachine Society, Statement of Purpose,” in The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 39–41. 57 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 79. 58 D’Emilio, 75–91.

Chapter 4  The Hipster, the Prophet, and the Angel Epigraph: James Jones, From ­Here to Eternity (McHenry, IL: Delta, 1951), 616–617. All quotes of From ­Here to Eternity and Some Came ­Running are presented largely without apostrophes, as James Jones had chosen to write during this period of his life. 1 Borroughs Mitchell, letter to James Jones, January 3, 1951, James Jones Collection at Beinecke, Yale, series II, box 36, folder 539. 2 See A. B. C. Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel,” Life, May 7, 1951, 142–157. 3 David Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” Chicago Magazine, September 1956, 22–27, 26.

230 • Notes to Pages 95–99

4 This entire narrative is drawn from David Ray’s memories of the colony, in his article “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony.” 5 Robert Corber, Homo­sexuality in Cold War Amer­i­ca: ­Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 21–78. 6 See, for instance, George K. Pratt, Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment (New York: Whittlesey H ­ ouse, 1944), and Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Lit­er­a­ture on ­Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” ­Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–239. 7 Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983), 14–28; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See Joanne Meyero­witz, ed., Not June Cleaver: W ­ omen and Gender in Postwar Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1994), for a partial reconsideration of t­ hese findings. 8 Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope.” For films depicting w ­ omen as the healers of veterans, see Fred Zinnemann, dir., Teresa, screenplay by Stewart Stern (MGM, 1951); William Wyler, dir., The Best Years of Our Lives (Samuel Goldwyn, 1947). Also see Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14–41. 9 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca: A Cultural History (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1996), 222–236; James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10 For economic shifts, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption (New York: Vintage, 2003), esp. chaps. 3 and 5; for cultural anx­i­eties, see K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 97–166. 11 Aaron George, “Gray Flannel Suit or Red Strait Jacket? Anticommunism and the ­Organization Man in Postwar Fiction and Film,” Journal of P ­ opular Culture 49, no. 6 (December 18, 2016): 1320–1340. 12 Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 19, 25. 13 Pratt, Soldier to Civilian, 46, 118–119. 14 Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (New York: Doubleday, 1951). 15 For instance, in the Modern Library’s list of the greatest twentieth-­century novels in the ­English language, The Naked and the Dead ranked fifty-­first, From ­Here to Eternity sixty-­second. The only World War II novels to score higher than them on the list w ­ ere Catch-22 and Slaughter­house Five, both novels that w ­ ere released a ­decade ­later. See “100 Best Novels,” http://­w ww​.­modernlibrary​.­com​/­top​-­100​/­100​ -­best​-­novels​/­. 16 J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 36–55. 17 Lennon, 56–59, 66. 18 Lennon, 64–65. 19 Lennon, 75–76. Also see Charles McGrath, “Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Dies at 84,” New York Times, November 10, 2007, and Kevin Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That ­Shaped the Sixties (New York: Norton, 2015). 20 As quoted in Lennon, Norman Mailer, 89. 21 Lennon, 74, 92. 22 Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Picador, 1948). 23 Mailer, 36–38.

Notes to Pages 99–104  •  231

24 Mailer, 699. 25 Mailer, 701, 709. 26 Mailer, 699. 27 Mailer, 468–471, 666, 700. 28 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), defines how manliness in the nineteenth c­ entury was understood. Also see Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-­American and Philippine-­American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 29 Christopher Lasch discusses Mailer’s societal rebellion in The New Radicalism in Amer­i­ca (New York: Knopf, 1965), 334–349. Also see Kevin Schultz’s Buckley and Mailer for a careful discussion of Mailer’s development as a radical opposed to the “liberal establishment.” 30 Lennon, Norman Mailer, 98–126. 31 See Lowney Handy’s correspondence with Captain Eugene Mailloux, Handy Writers Colony Collection, at the University of Illinois, Springfield, box 6, folder 10. 32 Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel,” 142–157, 144–147. 33 Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope.” 34 Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 76–77. 35 George Hendrick, Helen Howe, and Don Sackrider, James Jones and the Handy Writers’ Colony (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 40. The gun still had gunpowder in it and even without a bullet made a substantial explosion. 36 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, 6–18. 37 Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel”; MacShane, Into Eternity, esp. 73–78. Also see the extensive correspondence between Lowney Handy, Harry Handy, and James Jones at the Handy Writers Colony Collection, University of Illinois, Springfield. 38 John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 177–181; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 52–67; Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 1999); Allen Ginsberg, Howl & Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1959). 39 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 42–51; Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 71–77. 40 Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 3. 41 Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel”; “Handy Writers Chronology,” HWC Collection. 42 This description comes from Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 66–70, Lowney Handy, “Description of Handy Colony,” November 7, 1952, HWC Collection, box 1, folder 6, and David Ray’s description in “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 22–27. 43 John Bowers, The Colony (1971; New York: Greenpoint, 2014), 182–184. 44 MacShane, Into Eternity, 116–117. 45 James Jones, letter to Mitch, May 6, 1948, HWC Collection, box 5, folder 2. 46 MacShane, Into Eternity, 126–128. 47 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 71. 48 See, for instance, the central dilemma between Karen Holmes and Warden in From ­Here to Eternity, described ­later in this chapter.

232 • Notes to Pages 105–110

49 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 56–57. 50 See Jones’s notes for the “Russ Meskiman Novel,” JJ Collection, series I, box 28, folder 325. 51 Bowers, Colony, 105–106. In Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 30–46, Don Sackrider remembered how his association with Lowney forced him to break up with his girlfriend, Nita. 52 Bowers, Colony, 100. 53 Bowers, 100–101. 54 Bowers, 58. David Ray, who was even more critical of Lowney, offers stories that are no less sensational this one. Hendrick et al. provide a more sympathetic account of Lowney but regardless corroborate her beliefs about w ­ omen. See Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 25–27, and Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, esp. 137–139. 55 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 44. 56 See, for instance, James Jones, letter to Lowney Handy, January 26, 1949, HWC Collection, box 3, folder 8. ­Here, Jones wrote to Lowney that unlike Karen Holmes, his character in From ­Here to Eternity who also had a hysterectomy for similar reasons, they can achieve happiness. H ­ ere, he implies that her hysterectomy makes her unique among w ­ omen. 57 Lowney Handy, letter to Tom, January 13, 1955, HWC Collection, box 7, folder 46. 58 ­Because ­these readings ­were assigned on an individual level, ­there is some disagreement about what was assigned. ­These authors tended to always be mentioned, but Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider add Dashiell Hammett and John Steinbeck, along with a few female authors, such as Nancy Hale and Tess Slesinger. MacShane mentions Katherine Anne Porter in addition to ­these male authors. John Bowers’s memoir remembers Lowney assigning only male authors, and David Ray’s “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony” mentions ­these male authors and Tess Slesinger. See Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 50–51; MacShane, Into Eternity, 118; Bowers, Colony, 28–30; Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 24–27. 59 Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 24–25. 60 John Keasler, “Life of a Best Selling Author,” St. Louis Post-­Dispatch, HWC Collection, box 64, folder 13. 61 Whipple, “James Jones and His Angel,” 152. 62 Their letters back and forth between 1948 and 1950 in part focus on their dif­fer­ent sexual urges. See the HWC Collection, box 3, folder 8. Also see MacShane, Into Eternity, 88–90. 63 Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 24. Bowers, in Colony, describes one of t­ hese adventures at 42–46 and elsewhere in his memoir. 64 Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 25. 65 Bowers complained about the transactional nature of t­ hese encounters in Colony, for instance 204–206. 66 MacShane, Into Eternity, 104–107. 67 David Dempsey, “From ­Here to Eternity,” New York Times, February 25, 1951, HWC Collection, box 64, folder 13. 68 Borroughs Mitchell, letter to James Jones, January 3, 1951, JJ Collection, series II, box 36, folder 539. 69 As quoted in Lennon, Norman Mailer, 138. 70 MacShane, Into Eternity, 121–122. 71 As quoted in Lennon, Norman Mailer, 138. 72 MacShane, Into Eternity, 117.

Notes to Pages 110–115  •  233

73 The best historical works on conformity culture are Cuordileone, Manhood and American ­Political Culture and Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle, esp. 34–80. Also see Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, and Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 236–268. 74 William Darby has likewise interpreted Eternity as a commentary about society and nonconformity. See William Darby, Necessary American Fictions (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University ­Popular Press, 1987), 345–363. 75 James Jones, From ­Here to Eternity (1951; McHenry, IL: Delta, 1998), 207–208. 76 Jones, 476. 77 Jones, 478, 479. 78 Jones, 616. 79 Jones, 107. 80 Jones, 612–616. 81 Jones, 329. 82 Jones, 638. 83 For one example, see James Jones, letter to Margaret Carson, December 4, 1948, JJ Collection, series II, box 34, folder 484. 84 Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, 498–499. 85 Jones, 201. 86 Jones, 415, 540–541. 87 Jones, 540. 88 As quoted in MacShane, Into Eternity, 143. 89 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14–41; John Ibson, The Mourning ­After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 1–40, 143–184. 90 D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, 129–134. 91 Allison Flood, “Censored Gay Sex Scenes in From ­Here to Eternity Revealed,” Guardian, November 13, 2009, http://­w ww​.­theguardian​.­com​/­books​/­2009​/­nov​/­13​ /­censored​-­gay​-­sex​-­scenes​-­here​-­eternity. 92 Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: The Alchemy of Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Toronto: ­Free Press, 1992), 37. 93 Flood, “Censored Gay Sex Scenes.” 94 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 65–97. Interestingly, the real Joseph Angelo Maggio sued Jones for using his name and for making it seem that all he did was “get drunk and run around with girls.”1 It’s an odd complaint, given that Maggio, unlike most other characters, was never seen with ­women. It’s likely that the real Maggio’s complaint was over the implications of homo­sexuality. Maggio’s complaint shows how l­ ittle consensus t­ here was between soldiers about the meanings of same-­sex acts. See newspaper clipping, n.d., HWC Collection, box 66, folder 2. 95 MacShane, Into Eternity, 131. 96 Jones’s focus on the p­ erformance of roles rather than the ­actual homosexual acts harkens back to an e­ arlier understanding of sexuality from the turn of the c­ entury, as documented in Chauncey, Gay New York. 97 Sentences like “ ‘Suit yourself, Queenie.’ He turned on his heel and went up the step,” describe them with feminine body language, for instance. Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, 382. 98 Jones, 371–374.

234 • Notes to Pages 115–123

99 The idea that gay artists w ­ ere superficial or inauthentic was widely believed by psychiatrists of the era. See Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 54–57. 100 Jones, From ­Here to Eternity, 385–387. 101 Jones, 388. 102 Jones, 551–555. 103 Jones, 652–656. 104 Jones, 652. 105 Jones, 684. 106 Jones, 773–790. 107 Nelson W. Aldrich Jr, “The Art of Fiction XXIII: James Jones,” Paris Review, Autumn–­Winter 1958–1959, 50–51. 108 For a sample of con­temporary reviews, see John W. Aldridge, “Speaking of Books,” New York Times, September 2, 1951, 117; David Dempsey, “From ­Here to Eternity,” New York Times, February 25, 1951, HWC Collection, box 64, folder 13; Robert P. Jordan, “It Makes You Sick, But Proud,” Washington Post, February 25, 1951, B7; Ernest Jones, “Minority Report,” The Nation, March 17, 1951, 254–255; Harold C. Gardiner, “Damned Is the Missing Word,” Amer­i­ca, March 10, 1951, 672–674; Leslie Fiedler, “James Jones’ Dead End Young Werther: The Bum as American Cultural Hero,” Commentary, January 1, 1951, 252–256. 109 MacShane, Into Eternity, 128–130. 110 See the correspondence between Harry Cohn and James Jones in the James Jones Collection at Beinecke, series II. Also see MacShane, Into Eternity, 128–130, Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 71–72. 111 A. W., “From H ­ ere to Eternity Bows at Capitol with Huge Cast, Starring Five Roles,” New York Times, August 6, 1953, http://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­movie​/­review​ ?­res​=9­ 905E5DE153EE53BBC4E53DFBE668388649EDE. 112 Fred Zinneman, dir., From ­Here to Eternity (Columbia, 1953). 113 Zinneman. 114 James Jones, Diary, April 13, 1943, JJ Collection, series I, box 26, folder 318. 115 Zinnemann, From ­Here to Eternity.

Chapter 5  The Men Who Came ­Running Epigraph: James Jones, Some Came ­Running (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 1202–1212. 1 William Leonard, “Lowney Handy’s Colony Turning Out Novels,” Boston Sunday Herald, August 4, 1957. 2 “The Good Life and Jim Jones,” Life, February 11, 1957, 83–86. 3 James Jones, “The Temper of Steel,” in The Way It Is and Every­thing E ­ lse (proofing copy), JJ Collection, box 33, folder 464, 13–22, 13. 4 James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 61–80 and 81–105; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983) esp. 42–68; John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 57–93. 5 Leonard, “Lowney Handy’s Colony Turning Out Novels,” 6 Leonard.

Notes to Pages 123–131  •  235

7 David Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” Chicago Magazine, September 1956, 22–27, 22–23. 8 John Bowers, The Colony (1971; New York: Greenpoint, 2014), 15. 9 Bowers, 18. 10 Bowers, 16. 11 Bowers, 77. 12 George Hendrick, Helen Howe, and Don Sackrider, James Jones and the Handy Writers’ Colony (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 56. 13 Frank MacShane, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 116–117. 14 Bowers, Colony, 27. 15 See Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, for both the cultural pressures t­ oward domesticity and rebellions like the Beats who challenged ­these social norms. Also see Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 16 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 65–82; Bowers, Colony, 36, 198. 17 Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony,” 23–24; Bowers, Colony, 168–174, 186–188. 18 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 47–48. 19 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, 65–83; Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony”; Bowers, Colony. 20 MacShane, Into Eternity, 117, Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, inserts. 21 Bowers, Colony, 174–186. 22 Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 157. 23 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, inserts; Ray, “Mrs. Handy’s Curious Colony.” 24 Lowney Handy, letter to Ned, February 21, 1957, HWC Collection, box 3, folder 31. 25 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 104–106; Gerald Tesch, Never the Same Again (New York: Pyramid Books, 1958); “Never the Same Again,” Kirkus Reviews, https://­w ww​.­k irkusreviews​.­com​/­book​-­reviews​/­a​/­gerald​-­tesch​/­never​-­the​ -­same​-­again​-­2​/­. 26 Edwin Daly, Some Must Watch (New York: Scribner’s, 1956); “Some Must Watch,” Kirkus Reviews, https://­w ww​.­k irkusreviews​.­com​/­book​-­reviews​/­a​/­edwin​-­daly​/­some​ -­must​-­watch​-­3​/­. 27 Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle, 47–49. 28 “Author Sells First Novel to Movies for $300,000,” Miami Herald, January 24, 1957, HWC Collection, box 66, folder 7. 29 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 106–108, 123; MacShane, Into Eternity, 159. 30 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 113. 31 “Personality Parade,” Chicago Herald American, n.d., HWC Collection, box 66, folder 7. 32 Orville Prescott, “Book of the Times,” New York Times, March 27, 1957. 33 Prescott. 34 Tom T. Chamales, Never So Few (New York: Scribner’s, 1957), 602–624. 35 Chamales, 626–627. 36 Dick Williams, “Chamales Defends Movie’s Substance,” Mirror News (Los Angeles), June 7, 1960. 37 Chamales, Never So Few, 22–25.

236 • Notes to Pages 131–138

38 See the early passages of Chamales, esp. 1–26. 39 Arthur Shay, “James Jones Off on a Spree,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1977, 3. 40 J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 157. 41 MacShane, Into Eternity, 161–163. 42 Theodore M. O’Leary, “A Very Long and Very Bad Novel: His Second Book Indicates That James Jones H ­ asn’t Learned the Rudiments of the Writer’s Craft,” Kansas City Star, January 18, 1958, 6. 43 See, for instance, J. H. D., “From Eternity to H ­ ere,” Gambit, ca. 1958, HWC Collection, box 72, folder 5, or “Life Is a Four Letter Word,” Time Magazine, January 13, 1958, 96. 44 “Life Is a Four Letter Word,” 96. 45 “James Jones’ Huge Novel Explores H ­ uman Anguish and Ambiguity in a Midwest City,” Herald Tribune Book Review, January 12, 1958, 2–3. 46 “Russ Meskiman Novel,” JJ Collection, series I, box 28, folder 325. 47 James Jones, Some Came ­Running (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 122–128. 48 Jones, 305–315. 49 Jones, preface. 50 James Jones, “The Russ Meskiman Novel,” JJ Collection, series I, box 28, folder 325. 51 Jones, Some Came ­Running, 258, 532–535. 52 Jones, 182, 189, 422, 694. 53 Jones, 694, 825. 54 Jones, 1212. 55 Jones, 1202–1212, 1234–1235. 56 Jones, 132–136. 57 Jones, 208–209, 1046, 591, 1046. 58 Jones, 879–883. 59 Jones, 1128–1135, 1198. 60 Jones, 1138–1139. 61 Jones, 1198. 62 “ ’Bama” is short for Alabama, and based off Jones’s real-­life gambler friend named “Arkie.” 63 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 95–102; Jones, Some Came ­Running, 190–200. 64 Jones, Some Came ­Running, 777–796. 65 Jones, 491–493. 66 Jones, 507–535. 67 Jones, 888–890. 68 Jones, 947–961. 69 MacShane, Into Eternity, 150–155. 70 MacShane, 152–156. 71 MacShane, 155–157. 72 See Lowney’s post-1957 letters in HWC Collection, box 3, folder 31. 73 Hendrick, Howe, and Sackrider, James Jones, 120–136. 74 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966), 337–358, 339–340. 75 MacShane, Into Eternity, 146–147. 76 MacShane, 171–172. 77 For instance, see her memoir about her childhood and her ­father, Kaylie Jones, Lies My ­Mother Never Told Me (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).

Notes to Pages 139–145  •  237

78 Nelson Aldrich Jr., “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review, Autumn–­Winter 1958–1959, 37–41. 79 From personal correspondence with Kaylie Jones (email, February 9, 2021). 80 MacShane, Into Eternity, 208. 81 MacShane, 145–148. 82 MacShane, 165–168.

Chapter 6  Waiting for Peter Pan Epigraph: Nicolas Ray, dir., screenplay by Stewart Stern, Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955). 1 Helen Sheehy, Eva Le Gallienne: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1996), 146, 184–187. 2 As quoted in Jon Ward, dir., ­Going through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern (unreleased, from the author’s personal collection, 2005). 3 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 4 Ward. 5 Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 42. 6 John Ibson, “Masculinity u­ nder Fire: Life’s ­Presentation of Camaraderie and Homoeroticism Before, During, and ­A fter the Second World War,” in Looking at Life Magazine, ed. Erika Doss (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 179–200; also see Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983), 14–28; John Ibson, The Mourning A ­ fter: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 143–184. 7 Lauren Jae Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire within Marriage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 21–48. 8 Stewart Stern, “Notes from an Infantryman,” Stewart Stern Collection at the University of Iowa, box 5, 40. 9 Stern, 11. 10 Ibson, Mourning ­After, 160–165; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), esp. 31. 11 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 67–96. 12 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Susan Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Lit­er­a­ture on W ­ omen’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” ­Women’s Studies 5 (1978): 223–239; and Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption (New York: Vintage, 2003), esp. 132–150; Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate M ­ atters: A History of Sexuality in Amer­i­ca, 2nd ed. (1988; New York: Harper & Row, 1997), esp. 239–300 for a discussion of “sexual liberalism.” 13 Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Prescriptions for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife, 21–48. 14 Ibson, Mourning ­After, xiv–­x viii, 143–184.

238 • Notes to Pages 145–153

15 William Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause: A Conversation with Stewart Stern,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Fall 1999), http://­hdl​.­handle​.­net​/­2027​/­spo​.­act2080​ .­0038​.­414. 16 Lewis, Prescriptions for Heterosexuality, 1–36; Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15–52. 17 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14–41. 18 Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 148–150. 19 Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife, 12–15. 20 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14–41; David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carol & Graf, 2006), 221–230. 21 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 22 Kent Brown, The Screenwriter as Collaborator: The C ­ areer of Stewart Stern (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 43–46. 23 As quoted in Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 44. 24 Waller, Veteran Comes Back, 13; George K. Pratt, Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment (New York: Whittlesey H ­ ouse, 1944). 25 For instance, see Pratt, Soldier to Civilian; Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope.” 26 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 46. 27 Brown, 46. 28 Stewart Stern, “My First Screenplay,” draft of an article for the New York Sunday Times, SS Collection, box 17. 29 Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, chap. 3; Plant, Mom. Also see James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942; New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996). 30 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 20–22. 31 Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture; Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941; New York: Holt, 1995). 32 Fred Zinnemann, dir., Teresa, screenplay by Stewart Stern (MGM, 1951). 33 This line was deleted for the final version of the film, likely for being too unsubtle. See Stewart Stern, “Teresa,” first draft typescript of screenplay, SS Collection, box 16. 34 Stern, 97. 35 Plant, Mom; Lewis, Prescriptions for Heterosexuality. 36 Compare Stern, “Teresa” first draft, with the final film. 37 See Stern, “Teresa” first draft. For a discussion of Joyce, see Stern’s correspondence with Arthur Loew Sr, esp. Stewart Stern, letter to Arthur Loew Sr, September 14, 1949, and letter to Arthur Loew Sr, October 30, 1949, in the SS Collection, box 16. 38 Stern, “Teresa” first draft, 116. 39 Stern, 140. 40 Zinnemann, Teresa. 41 Zinnemann. 42 He explains this in Ward, ­Going through Splat. 43 Zinnemann, Teresa. 44 Stern, “Teresa” first draft. 45 Zinnemann, Teresa. 46 Zinnemann. 47 Stern, “Teresa” first draft, 170–172, capitalization original. 48 Stewart Stern, “Notes from an Infantryman,” SS Collection, box 5, 11. 49 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 79–80. 50 For the historical context of the “momism” critique, see Plant, Mom, esp. chap. 1.

Notes to Pages 153–161  •  239

51 Howard Strickling, “First Preview—­First Report, 257 Cards, ‘Teresa,’ ” November 30, 1950, SS Collection, box 16. 52 Louella Parsons, “Cosmopolitan’s Movie Citations,” as found in newspaper clippings of Teresa reviews, SS Collection, box 17. 53 Claire Gaucher, “Movie Story Reviews,” as found in newspaper clippings of Teresa reviews, SS Collection, box 17. 54 See the other reviews collected by Stern, SS Collection, box 17, as well as Kent Brown’s summary of reviews in Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 59–60. 55 Letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 56 Freedman and D’Emilio, Intimate ­Matters, 265–270. 57 See, for instance, Michael Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca: A Cultural History (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1996), 222–236; May, Homeward Bound; and Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle. As well, for cultural and economic prescriptions of domesticity, see Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, esp. 132–150, and Lewis, Prescriptions for Heterosexuality. 58 Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle, 135–163. 59 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991), esp. 60–71; Debra Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 26–27, 32–35; and Warren Hoffman, The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), esp. 9–18. 60 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 105. 61 Brown, 105. Also, in ­Going through Splat!, Stern explains, “Jimmy is Peter, Wendy is Sally, Plato is all the lost boys.” See Ward, ­Going through Splat. 62 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 66–67; Ward, ­Going through Splat. 63 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 71–77. Stern recounts the entire incident, angrily, in Stewart Stern, letter to Dore Schary, August 17, 1954, SS Collection, box 2. 64 Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 65 For an overview of the juvenile delinquency scare, see James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: Amer­i­ca’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For the way this tied into fears of new media, see David Hadju, The Ten-­Cent Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 66 Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 152–166. 67 Cuordileone. 68 See, for instance, Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966). 69 Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 70 Stewart Stern, “Interview with the Boy,” in Rebel Without a Cause Workbook, SS Collection, box 11. 71 Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 72 As quoted in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, dirs., The Celluloid Closet (Sony Picture Classics, 1996). 73 Stewart Stern, “Character Notes,” in Rebel Without a Cause Workbook, SS Collection, box 11. 74 Nicolas Ray, dir., Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955). 75 Ray. 76 Ray. 77 Ray. 78 N. P. Thompson, “­Going Through Splat (or Not) with Stewart Stern,” Slant Magazine, July 6, 2006, http://­w ww​.­slantmagazine​.­com​/­house​/­article​/­going​ -­through​-­splat​-­or​-­not​-­with​-­stewart​-­stern.

240 • Notes to Pages 161–170

79 As quoted in Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 110. 80 Russo, Celluloid Closet, 109. 81 Stern, Rebel Without a Cause. 82 Stern. 83 Stern. 84 Stern. 85 Stern. 86 Stern. 87 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen: Delinquency; ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ Has Debut at Astor,” New York Times, October 27, 1955, http://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­movie​/­review​ ?­res​=9­ F02E0DB1F3AEF34BC4F51DFB667838E649EDE#h[]. 88 “The New Pictures,” Time, November 28, 1955, 104; Jack Moffitt, “ ’Rebel Without a Cause,’ Real Money Attraction,” Hollywood Reporter, October 21, 1955, 3. For a more in-­depth review of the critical reception of the film, see Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 107–110. 89 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 110–111. 90 Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 91 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 92 David Dalton, James Dean: The Mutant King (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1983), 232–233. 93 William Baer, “On Rebel Without a Cause.” 94 Baer. 95 Brown, Screenwriter as Collaborator, 133–136; Dalton, James Dean, 324–326. 96 Ward, ­Going through Splat. 97 Ward.

Chapter 7  The Continuing Adventures of Icarus Epigraph: Edward Field, “Icarus,” in Stand Up, Friend, with Me (New York: Grove, 1963), 20. This poem had previously been published in magazines as early as 1950 and, according to my interviews with Mr. Field, was written during his trip to Greece in 1949. 1 ­These details, including what follows, come directly from discussions Mr. Field graciously agreed to have with me in January 2016. Some of ­these events are also mentioned in his memoirs, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 2 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 3 Field, “Journey,” in Stand Up, Friend, with Me (New York: Grove, 1963), 45. In an interview, Field explained that this poem was about the aforementioned incident. 4 See John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 129–148, 178–182. Also see Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Communities (New York: Routledge, 1997); James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. chap. 5; David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For how this relates specifically to ­women, see Lilian Fadermen, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-­Century Amer­i­ca (London: Penguin, 1992); Marcia M. Gallo,

Notes to Pages 170–177  •  241

Dif­fer­ent D ­ aughters: A History of the D ­ aughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carol and Graff, 2006); Nan Alamilla-­Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 5 For discussions of masculinity in postwar Amer­i­ca, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca: A Cultural History (New York: F ­ ree Press, 1996); Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983); and K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2005). For discussions of domesticity, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), and Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 6 See Stewart Stern, “Notes from an Infantryman,” SS Collection, box 5, 40. 7 May, Homeward Bound, 9, 62–66, 72–88; Kimmel, Manhood in Amer­i­ca, 222–236; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 14–41; also see Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle; John Ibson, The Mourning ­After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), esp. chap. 1. 8 John Ibson, Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation Before Stonewall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 9 Ibson, 2–3. 10 Ibson, 13, 14. 11 Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Prescriptions for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 15–30, 84–85. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005), 148–150. Also see Ronald Bayer, Homo­sexuality and American Psychiatry (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1981). 12 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 13 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 14 Lauren Jae Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire within Marriage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), chap. 1, 46–47, 171–175. May, Homeward Bound, chap. 8. 15 Also see Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 148–150. 16 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 17 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 18 Edward Field, “Icarus,” in Stand Up, 20. 19 A term Field used over six years before Sloan Wilson would make it synonymous with conformity and emasculation. 20 See, for instance, George Pratt’s con­temporary study of the readjustment of veterans in Soldier to Civilian: Prob­lems of Readjustment (New York: Whittlesey H ­ ouse, 1944). 21 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. Also see Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 34–35. 22 May, Homeward Bound, esp. chap. 8; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963). 23 Ibson, Men without Maps, 66–69, 94–117. 24 Edward Field, “Son of Gurdjieff: In Search of Fritz Peters,” appendix to Fritz Peters, Finistere (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006), 337–338. 25 Field, “Son of Gurdjieff,” 339–342. 26 As quoted in Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 191–193.

242 • Notes to Pages 177–184

27 Field, 202–205. 28 Field, 197–198. 29 See Michael Bronski’s introduction to the Arsenal Pulp Press edition of Finistere, 12–15. 30 Peters, Finistere. 31 Peters, 255. 32 For more information on the New York School of Poets, see Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, eds., The Scenes of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 2001); William Watkin, In the P ­ rocess of Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001); Geoff Ward, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets (London: Palgrave, 1993); and David Lehman, The Last Avant-­Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Anchor, 1999). 33 Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 40–64. 34 Lehman, 40–64. 35 Lehman, 79–80. 36 Michael Davidson, Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chap. 2. 37 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 81. 38 Field, 77, 80–81. 39 Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 40–46, 203–242. 40 Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf, 2007), 603. 41 Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 44. 42 Lehman, 79–80. 43 See Brad Gooch, City Poet (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 44 Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 164–202. 45 As quoted in Lehman, Last Avant-­Garde, 44. 46 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 79. 47 Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 48 Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men. 49 For instance, see The Outsider, ed. Jon Edgar Webb (vol. 1, no. 2, Summer 1962), to see Edward Field published alongside prominent Beat poets. 50 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 6–15; Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 51 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 7–15. 52 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 230–241. 53 This is Field’s recollection, from interviews with the author, January 4, 2016, and January 8, 2016. 54 Interview with author, January 4, 2016. 55 For examples of how World War II expanded gay communities in urban areas, see, for instance, Beemyn, Creating a Place; Alamilla-­Boyd, Wide Open Town; Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 2004). 56 Chauncey, Gay New York; Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 231–276. 57 Interview with author, January 8, 2016.

Notes to Pages 184–196  •  243

58 Bruce Eliot (pseudonym for Edward Field), “Variety Photoplays, a Memoir,” Edward Field Collection at the University of Delaware libraries, box 4, folder 109. 59 Eliot. 60 Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 43–59; Eliot, “Variety Photoplays.” 61 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 62 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 51–53. 63 Field, 48. 64 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 65 Field, Stand Up, 53. 66 Field, 40. 67 Field, 57–58. 68 Interview with author, January 8, 2016. 69 Stephen Vider, “Lesbian and Gay Marriage and Romantic Adjustment in the 1950s and 1960s United States,” Gender & History 29, no. 3 (November 2017): 693–715. 70 Eliot, “Variety Photoplays.” 71 Field, Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, 182.

Conclusion Epigraph: Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), 108–109. 1 This narrative is drawn from Wilson’s memoirs in Sloan Wilson, What S­ hall We Wear to the Party? (New York: Arbor H ­ ouse, 1975), 15–22. 2 Wilson, What S­ hall We Wear to the Party?, 20. 3 Wilson, 22. 4 Wilson, 22. 5 Taken from his fictionalized account of the job interview in Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), 17. 6 William Whyte, The O ­ rganization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 3–4. 7 Whyte, 396–404; Robert Corber, Homo­sexuality in Cold War Amer­i­ca: ­Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 27–28; Wilson, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 277. 8 The two best historical works on conformity culture are K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005) and James Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 34–80. As well, Barbara Ehrenreich details the more general feelings of male discontent in the 1950s in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1983), and Rebecca Jo Plant discusses the related critique of momism in Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 9 Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944), 10–18, 19–23. 10 Gilbert, Men in the ­Middle, 34–61; Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 236–268.

244 • Notes to Pages 196–207

11 Gilbert, Men in the M ­ iddle, 34–61. 12 Susan Glenn, “The Vogue of Jewish Self-­Hatred in Post–­World War II Amer­i­ca,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 12, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2006): 95–136, esp. 115–116. 13 McClay, Masterless, 226–244. 14 Aaron George, “Gray Flannel Suit or Red Strait Jacket? Anticommunism and the ­Organization Man in Postwar Fiction and Film,” Journal of P ­ opular Culture 49, no. 6 (December 18, 2016): 1320–1340. 15 Fred Zinnemann, dir., High Noon (Republic Pictures, 1952). Peter Biskind gives one of the best analyses of the film: Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing (New York: Henry Holt, 1983), 44–50, 51–100. 16 McClay, Masterless, 239. 17 William H. Whyte, A Time of War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 19. 18 Whyte, 106. 19 Whyte, ­Organization Man, 3–4. 20 Whyte, 4–7. 21 Whyte, 54, emphasis original. 22 Whyte, 146–147. 23 Whyte, 267–311. 24 For its importance as a work of social commentary, see the introduction to the 2002 edition by Joseph Nocera, “Forward,” in The O ­ rganization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), vii–­x vi. 25 Whyte, ­Organization Man, 392–404. 26 Wilson, What S­ hall We Wear to the Party?, 151–188. 27 Wilson, 215–216. 28 E. W. Foell, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 1955, 7. 29 Wilson, What S­ hall We Wear to the Party?, 42–83. 30 Wilson, 83–100. 31 Wilson, 10. 32 Wilson, 11. 33 Wilson, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. 34 Wilson, 130–131. 35 Wilson, 217, 229–231. 36 Wilson, 277. 37 Wilson, 77, 106, 128–130, 155–159. 38 Wilson, What S­ hall We Wear to the Party?, 262–268. 39 As the reception of Some Came ­Running demonstrates, as shown in chapter 5. 40 Cuordileone, Manhood and American P ­ olitical Culture, 97–166. 41 Tobey Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost (London: Routledge, 1992), 16–30. 42 Charles McGrath, “Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Dies at 84,” New York Times, November 10, 2007. 43 McGrath, “Norman Mailer”; Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966). 44 As chronicled in Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968; New York: Plume, 1994). Also see Kevin Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That ­Shaped the Sixties (New York: Norton, 2015), 187–200. 45 Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 188–189. 46 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 86–87.

Notes to Pages 207–214  •  245

47 Tracy Daugherty, Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 138–152. 48 Daugherty, 87–88. 49 Daugherty, 66–95. 50 Daugherty, 103–104, 123. 51 As quoted in Daugherty, 150. 52 Daugherty, 197–99. 53 See the discussion of From ­Here to Eternity in chapter 4. 54 Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). Milo’s bombing of their own base is mentioned on 105; see 192–193, 323–326 for discussions of Cathcart. 55 Heller, Catch-22. 56 Heller. Yossarian’s experience of watching Snowden die closely mirrored Heller’s own traumatic experiences in war. See Daugherty, Just One Catch, 87–88. 57 Heller, Catch-22, 420–426. 58 Daugherty, Just One Catch, 224–241. 59 Tom Hayden, “The Port Huron Statement,” in James Miller, Democracy in the Streets (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 329–374, 330. 60 Leah Garrett, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), chap. 5. 61 Charles J. Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut—­A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 50–78. 62 Monica Sufaro, “Rapping with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” Kurt Vonnegut Collection at Indiana University Bloomington, box 21. 63 Shields, And So It Goes, 50–78; John Reinan, “Unknown Soldier,” Rochester ­Democrat and Chronicle, May 3, 1995, sec. C, KV Collection, box 21. 64 Guy Fawkes, pseudonym for Kurt Vonnegut, “To Alex Vonnegut,” November 28, 1947, Donald Farber Collection at Indiana University, Bloomington, box 1. 65 Shields, And So It Goes, 95–103. 66 Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952; New York: Dial Press, 2006). 67 Shields, And So It Goes, 122–123, 162–163, 173, 180–181, 186–187. 68 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-­Five (1968; McHenry, IL: Delta, 1999), 29. 69 Vonnegut. 70 He reads the novel on 128, where Vonnegut also gives one of his biggest clues to the imaginary nature of the alien abduction. See Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-­Five, 128. 71 Vonnegut. See, esp., 38–54, 108–109, 148–150, 272–275. 72 Vonnegut, 18. 73 Stewart Stern, “Bulge!,” SS Collection, box 5, 4. 74 Shields, And So It Goes, 258–262. 75 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 243. 76 Gitlin, Sixties, esp. 287–290, 316–318. 77 Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Chris­tian­ity, and the New Left in Amer­i­ca (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1–20, 247–252; James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 75–78, 146–150. 78 Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” in Coming Out Fighting: A ­Century of Essential Writing on Gay and Lesbian Liberation, ed. Chris Bull (Broomfield, CO: Nation Books, 2001), 67–79, 70.

Index African Americans, 12, 16–17, 81, 113–114, 181, 187–188, 200 Appalachia, 7 Bataan, 9 Bederman, Gail, 5–6 Beemer, Brett, 7–8 Berube, Allan, 64, 82 Best Years of Our Lives, The, xi, 43 Bowers, John, 105, 108, 123–128 Bowles, Paul, 183 Burns, John Horne, 13 Carson, Margaret (Peggy Carson), 28, 39, 134 Casey, Scoops. See Ogure, Tsuneko Chamales, Tom, 126, 130–131, 138 Chaplin, Charles, 56 Chauncey, George, 11 Childers, Thomas, 35 China, 7 civilization: James Jones and, 39, 103, 111, 122, 136; and the nineteenth ­century, 5–6, 9, 10; psy­chol­ogy, 147; Stewart Stern on, 64–65, 70; and whiteness, 5–6, 48, 57 Clift, Montgomery, 73, 118 Cooper, Gary, 6, 7; High Noon, 7, 197; Sergeant York, 7, 24 Corber, Robert, 85, 96 Cuordileone, K. A., 145

Daly, Edwin, 129 Davidson, Michael, 179 Dean, James, 146, 164 Deloria, Phillip, 8 D’Emilio, John, 79 Dempsey, David, 109 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 16, 85 Ellison, Ralph, 17 Fairbanks, Douglass, 56 Faulkner, William, 107 Field, Edward: authenticity, xv, 78–79, 83, 170–171, 175–176, 182–185, 187–188; comparisons to other writers, 4, 13–15, 17, 78, 96, 114, 171, 185, 193–195, 201, 205; and Dunstan Thompson, 86; early life, 79–81; and Frank O’Ha­ra, 180–181; and Fritz Peters, 176, 178; gay manhood, 78–79, 82–83, 85–86, 90, 170–172; in Greece, 84, 87–89; homo­sexuality, 76–77, 81–83, 88, 169, 182–185, 188; “Icarus” (poem), 167–168, 174–175; and Jewishness, 78–81, 90, 186–187; l­ ater years, 189; manliness, xiv, 81, 169; and the New York School, 178–179; passing, 79–80, 81–82, 90, 173; poetry of, 87–88, 90, 169, 184, 186–188; and psy­chol­ogy, 165, 168–170, 172–173, 183–184, 189; and readjustment, 171–172, 174–175; relationships with soldiers, 79, 82–83; Stand Up, Friend, With Me, 77,

247

248 • Index

Field, Edward (cont.) 186, 190; and Variety Photoplays, 184–185; ­a fter World War II, 84, 86–87, 89, 172–174, 182–183; during World War II, 76–77, 81–84; “World War II” (poem), 2, 75–77; at Yaddo, 185–186 Filipinos, 26 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 107 Friedan, Betty, 16, 175 Friend, Robert, 85–86 Frier, Tony, 59, 63, 64, 143 From H ­ ere to Eternity (film), 117–119 Fromm, Erich, 149 frontier, the, 6–7, 9, 25–26, 56–57, 70–73, 131, 204 Fussell, Paul, xii, 61 Garrett, Leah, 210 gay communities: Greece, 87; and World War I, 11; ­a fter World War II, 171–172, 182–183; and World War II, 77, 79, 82–83, 89, 114. See also Greenwich Village; homophile movement George, Arlene, ix George, Leonard, ix–­x, xv Gerstle, Gary, 82 Gilbert, James, xiii, 154 Gilman, Sander, 55 ­Great Depression, The, 10 Greenwich Village: and Edward Field, 77, 86, 95, 171–172, 183–185, 189; as gay community, 176, 177, 179–181; history of, 183 Griswold, Robert, 154 Gutterman, Lauren Jae, 173 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 12 Hall, G. Stanley, 6 Handy, Harry, 41–42, 102, 105 Handy, Lowney: characters based on, 44, 112, 132, 134; and David Ray, 94–96; and the Handy Writers’ Colony, 102–108, 113–114, 119, 122–123, 127, 129, 138; and Jones, 41–42, 101, 102, 105–106, 127, 129, 137; life, 41–42, 101–102, 137–138; and Norman Mailer, 128; on sex, 107–108; on spirituality, 106–107; on ­women, 105 Handy Writers’ Colony: conception, 49–50, 102–103; daily life, 94–95, 103–108, 113–114, 119, 121–123, 127–128, 132–133, 138; and Yaddo, 185

Hawaii, 22–23, 25–30, 114 Hayes, Alfred, 147, 155 Hefner, Hugh: and manliness xi, 182; Playboy, 12, 24, 103, 105, 122, 143 Heller, Joseph: life, 16, 207–208; Catch-22, 206, 208–209, 210; Vonnegut on, 211 Hemingway, Ernest, 2–3, 107, 185–186 Hersey, John, 69 Herzog, Tobey, xii, 205 hetero-­domesticity: definition of, 16; and Field, 84–85, 90, 170, 172–176, 188; as normative standard, xiv, 11, 13, 119, 122, 143, 181–182, 194, 203; and Fritz Peters, 177–178; and Stern, 71, 78, 144–147, 152–153, 162–163 Hoffman, Warren, 55, 80 Holocaust, 68, 70, 71, 77–78 homophile movement, 85, 89–90, 170 Ibson, John, 13, 16, 145, 171–172, 176 Israel, 65, 67–71, 73 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 17 Jacoby, Melville, 9 ­Japanese Americans, 26, 29–30 ­Japanese military, 7, 9, 26, 30, 32–34, 42–43, 100, 118 Jewish Americans: antisemitism, 57, 59, 79–81, 113, 186–187; Book of Ruth, 88; and manliness, 14, 55, 61, 65–66, 68–74, 78, 81–82, 87, 90; s­ tereotypes of, 54–56, 79–80, 155, 196; and whiteness, 17, 56, 57, 64, 82; a­ fter World War II, 68–69, 78; and World War II, 55, 58, 60, 68, 79, 82; before World War II, 80–81, 184; writers and World War II, 66–68, 77–78, 179–180, 210. See also Field, Edward; Stern, Stewart John Birch Society, x Jones, Gloria (nee Masolino), 137–138 Jones, James: on authenticity, 1, 23–24, 38–41, 45–46, 48–49, 100, 107, 111–113, 115–117, 128–130, 132–133, 136; comparison with Edward Field, 78, 170, 188–189; comparison with Stewart Stern, 55, 63, 64, 143–144, 156, 164; early life, 25–26; From H ­ ere to Eternity, xv, 2, 27, 28–30, 49, 73, 93–94, 98, 108–117, 208; and the Handy Writers’ Colony, 95–96, 103–105, 107–108, 121–123, 127–129; on Hawaii, 26;

Index • 249

and Hemingway, 2–3, 185; on homo­ sexuality, 114–115; imitators of, 185; l­ ater years, 138–140; and Norman Mailer, 109–110, 128–129, 138; on readjustment, 37–38, 43–45, 48, 147–148; and Robinson, Illinois, 22, 41, 43; at Schofield Barracks, 22, 25, 30–32; Some Came ­Running, 105, 120–121, 131–137; “The Temper of Steel,” 42–43; The Thin Red Line, 33–34, 139; They S­ hall Inherit the Laughter, 21–23, 40, 43–47, 49, 98; and the veterans’ critique, xiv, 14–15, 194, 204; on w ­ artime heroism, 31–36; Whistle, 49; on w ­ omen, 23–24, 27–29, 39–40, 43–45, 104–106, 112–113, 133–135; a­ fter World War II, 16, 41–42, 49–50; during World War II, 22–25, 28–34, 35–36 Jones, Jeff, 26–28, 31, 38 Jones, Mary Ann, 104 Kerouac, Jack, 12, 102–103, 182, 208 Killens, John Oliver, 17 Kinsey, Alfred, 122 Koch, Kenneth, 176, 179–181 Lewis, Carol Herbst, 145–146 Life (magazine), 9, 26, 84, 96, 101, 107, 122, 158 Linderman, Gerald, 61 Lindner, Robert, 48, 157–158 Loew Sr., Arthur, 56, 69, 147 Lonely Crowd, The, 12, 15, 48, 97, 129–130, 196 Lone Ranger, The (character), 8–9, 10, 57 Lone Ranger, The (radio show), 7–8, 131 MacArthur, Douglas, 26 Maggio, Angelo (real person), 33, 233n94 Mailer, Norman: and the counterculture, 206–207; and Jones, 94, 98, 109–110, 138; on Jones and Handy, 128, 138; life of, 98–99, 100; The Naked and the Dead, 67, 68, 98–100, 128–129, 208; and rebellion, 12, 16, 138, 158; “The White Negro,” 138, 181; on World War I, 25 manliness: and bravery, 23–25, 32, 36, 38–39, 61–62; compassionate manhood, 54, 59, 61–63, 65, 70–71, 74, 143; frontiersman masculinity, xii, 6, 8–15, 23–28, 32, 54–55, 56, 58–59, 61, 71–73, 82, 97, 109, 113, 154,

158, 163, 165, 185, 195–196, 199–200, 203–207, 212; and the Handy Writers’ Colony, 102, 129–130; and rebellion, 39–41, 45–47, 129–132, 136–138, 164, 170, 181–182, 188–189; sensitivity and manhood, xii–­xiv, 14–15, 25, 53, 54–55, 63–64, 70, 84, 87–88, 90, 102, 116, 143, 155–159, 162–163, 185, 186, 204–206, 209–210. See also Field, Edward; Jones, James; Stern, Stewart May, Elaine Tyler, 145 Miller, Merle, 67 momism, 12, 40, 44, 103, 143, 148–150, 153, 158, 204 Moore, Debra Dash, 17, 55, 82 Native Americans, 6, 8–9, 40, 72–73 Nelson, Ozzie, 12, 154–155 neuropsychiatric. See posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) New Left, 195, 206–207, 210, 213–214 New York School, 179–181 Ogure, Tsuneko, 29–30 O’Ha­ra, Frank, 176, 179, 180–181, 186 Passos, John Dos, 107, 109 Pearl Harbor, ix, 2, 30–32, 36, 110, 118 Perkins, Maxwell, 49 Peters, Fritz, 176–178, 181 posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), xii, 37–38, 101, 148–149 post–­World War II Amer­i­ca: “crisis of masculinity,” 12–13, 48–49, 85, 118–119, 158, 195–203; and G.I. Bill, 86, 180; homecoming of World War II veterans, x–­xii, 10–11, 13, 23–24, 35–36, 43, 49, 96–97, 147–150, 175–176, 195; homophobia, 13, 84–85, 145, 155, 171–172; juvenile delinquency, 157–159; and psy­chol­ogy, 145–146, 172–173. See also gay communities; Jewish Americans Pratt, George, xi, 37–38, 97 prostitution, 27, 108, 112 Pyle, Ernie, 9 Ray, David, 94–95, 107, 123 Riesman, David, 16, 24, 48, 129, 197. See also Lonely Crowd, The Roo­se­velt, Theodore, 5, 6, 10, 25, 32, 100

250 • Index

savagery, 5–9, 13, 23, 25–26, 70, 99–100, 110, 131, 181–182 Scribner’s, 2, 3 Shaw, Irving, 67 society: definition of, 15–16; James Jones on, 21, 24, 39–40, 43, 47, 93–94, 100, 104–105, 111; Norman Mailer on, 138; Stewart Stern on, 63, 64–65. See also Lonely Crowd, The; Whyte, William: The ­Organization Man Spender, Stephen, 175 Sramek, Jim, 52, 59, 61, 63–64, 143, 144, 151 Stern, Stewart: And Crown Thy Good (& The Sod ­House), 71–73; Benjy, 157; comparison with Edward Field, 13–15, 78, 83–84, 165–166, 170, 188–189; early life, 55–57; and Jewishness, 17, 65–66, 69–73, 78; ­later years, 165; on male-­male relationships, 54, 59–60, 63–64, 143–146, 150–151, 160–161; on manliness, xiv, 4, 58–59, 62–63, 65, 69–73, 143–148, 150–151, 161–162, 204; with MGM, 157; Notes of an Infantryman (& Bulge! & War on West Harrison), 1, 52–54, 61–64; on Peter Pan, 142–143, 156; on psy­chol­ogy, 145–150, 158–159; Rebel Without a Cause, xv, 141–142, 143, 156–163; Sabra, 65–66, 69–71, 73; Teresa, 74, 143, 146–156; The Ugly Americans, 164–165; ­a fter World War II, 69, 73–74; and World War II, 52–61, 57–65, 146

of, xiii, 4–5, 97–98; and Field, 170–171; and Heller and Vonnegut, 206, 210, 213–214; and Jones, 98, 128; significance of, 203–205, 214; and Stern, 144 Vidal, Gore, 13, 85 Vietnam War, xii, 31, 139, 205–206 Vonnegut, Kurt: life, 3, 16, 210–211; Slaughterhouse-­Five, 206, 212–213

Tillich, Paul, 48 Tschappat, Jerry (Gerald Tesch), 129 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 70

Waller, Willard, xi, 35, 36, 97, 143, 195 Washington, Mary Helen, 16 Wayne, John: as example of manhood, 6–7; Flying Tigers, 6–7; “John Wayne Syndrome,” 205, 212; Rio Grande, 7 Whyte, William: life, 197–198; The ­Organization Man, xi, 12, 15, 48, 97, 194, 198–200 Williams, John A., 17 Williams, Tennessee, 85 Wilson, Sloan: life, 192–193, 200–203; The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, xi, 61, 191–193, 195, 202–203 Wolfe, Tom, 107 Wolfert, Ira, 67 World War I, xii, xiii, 7, 11, 25, 31, 61 World War II: B ­ attle of Guadalcanal, 2–3, 22, 32–34, 139, 197; B ­ attle of the Bulge, xiv, 52–53, 60–61, 211, 213; D-­Day, 60, 62; male-­male relationships, 54, 61, 64, 77, 82–84, 143–145; war reporting, 9, 10, 25–26. See also Field, Edward; Jones, James; Stern, Stewart Wouk, Herman, xi–­xii, 98 Wylie, Philip, 40, 103, 105, 143, 148. See also momism

Untermeyer, Louis, 85

X, Malcolm, 17

veterans’ critique, the: comparisons between writers, xiv, 15, 170, 193–194; and the conformity critique, 193–195; definition

Zinnemann, Fred, 69, 73, 117, 147, 153, 157, 197 Zukor, Adolf, 55–56

About the Author is an assistant professor of American history at Tarleton University in Stephenville, Texas. He received his PhD in American history from Ohio State University in 2017 with a specialty in the history of the 1950s in Amer­i­ca, the history of sexuality in Amer­i­ca, and American intellectual history. Previously, he has written about the constructions of f­ amily found in anticommunist discourse in postwar Amer­i­ca. Currently, he teaches undergraduates about the LGBT rights movement, the birth of modern American society a­ fter World War II, and the origins of the current American ­political crisis. A ARON GEORGE