Part 6 (1/2)

12.

NO b.u.t.tERFLY.

While on the thirty-eighth parallel, Don tried to write ”THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.” His letters to Joe Maranto provide the first direct record of his ambition to write serious fiction. On December 29, 1953, he said, ”[the novel] is moving forward steadily. Two chapters, about 12,000 words have been written, and an addition[al] 1400-word beginning for Chapter the Third. It's hard work, especially as all I can tell about it right now is that certain portions are terribly bad.”

He read Ezra Pound, Saul Bellow, and Dylan Thomas as he made his way through these early chapters.

In January, he told Maranto he'd made corporal, and that he'd drafted a fifth chapter. ”When the sixth is done I will go back and make drastic revisions on it and the preceding chapters, which will comprise the first half of the book and run to about 36,000 words. It's a very peculiar book to date; it keeps changing its form.”

His accurate daily word count indicates Hemingway's influence on his working methods. To his parents, he wrote that his project was not a ”deeply disturbing novel of the south”-despite his admiration for Faulkner and Carson McCullers-nor was it a ”persecuted artist-type thing, or the record of somebody's miserabboble adolescence.” It was ”an unlove story, like the unbirthdays in Disney's 'Alice in Wonderland.' ”

A few months later, he told Maranto: No I am not satisfied with [the novel], not by a couple of miles, but I have seven and a half long chapters on paper now and am nearing 50,000 words and that's more words than I've ever laid end to end before in my life on one subject. I fear it is a terribly bad novel but hope to do a rewrite that will correct the most glaring faults. I haven't tried to write the thing paragraph by polished paragraph, and make each paragraph a jewel as I tried to do with the pieces for the Post. Post. I would never have gotten more than a few gilded pages on paper if I had. I would never have gotten more than a few gilded pages on paper if I had.

As it stands the thing has a million rough edges and I will never get all of them smoothed out but perhaps it's better that way.

He sounded more optimistic with his wife's parents. ”[I] am working on a major fiction project that may turn out well enough to publish,” he wrote Mr. and Mrs. Marrs in February 1954. ”I have written about 30,000 words...and so far it doesn't seem too bad.”

Writing time was hard to find. ”[W]e're short-handed and over-loaded here,” Don told Maggie's parents, ”and it's getting to the point where there is very nearly no such thing as off-duty hours....Next week I have to take our tape recorder out and record some tank noises for the Psychological Warfare people, who will then transcribe the tape on disks and in the event of a resumption of the fighting play the records over an amplifier to confuse the enemy and make him believe there are tanks where no tanks actually exist.”

On R and R in Tokyo, Don laid the novel aside. He purchased paperback copies of Camus's The Plague The Plague, Gide's Strait Is the Gate Strait Is the Gate, Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London Down and Out in Paris and London, Eisenstein's The Film Sense The Film Sense, the ”Hortense Powdermaker study of Hollywood...[and] a lot of stuff by the various Sitwell's [sic], including the Canticle of the Rose. Canticle of the Rose.” He saw the movies The Robe The Robe and and The Moon Is Blue. The Moon Is Blue.

Finally, on April 22, 1954, he announced to Maranto: ”The first draft of the novel is finished and I have launched a radical campaign of revision. It is a new attack which could conceiveably [sic] erase the major difficulties. It will in any case likely go into a third draft. Right now it's just under 50,000 words, and that's kind of slight for what I want.”

R and R gave Don a break from soldiering and writing, and at least one of his Tokyo excursions had implications for his marriage and future s.e.xual affairs. Years later, he told Helen Moore about an incident that eventually appeared in ”Visitors”: ”[In] Tokyo...[h]e was once in bed with a j.a.panese girl during a mild earthquake, and he's never forgotten the feeling of the floor falling out from underneath him, or the woman's terror. He suddenly remembers her name, Michiko. 'You no b.u.t.terfly on me?' she had asked....He was astonished to learn that 'b.u.t.terfly' meant, in the patois of the time, 'abandon.' ”

As ”Don described the experience later,” Helen says, the girl's ”skin 'turned white' with terror when the tremors began. Spending the night with [her] posed a moral dilemma for Don as well as for a fellow soldier who had made the trip with him. They discussed whether when you were married but forcibly separated like this, it was immoral to be with another woman. It was a dilemma that Don seemed not to have resolved when he told me the story a few years later.”

The incident stayed with him. In 1979, he reviewed the Dutch war film Soldier of Orange Soldier of Orange for for The New Yorker The New Yorker. In describing the movie's skill at depicting sudden horror, he wrote, ”The transformation of everyday reality into unprecedented ghastliness is like being in bed in an earthquake, the bed falling beneath you.”

On R and R, Don abandoned his khaki field uniform for a more comfortable cotton poplin s.h.i.+rt and an olive-drab tie, an M-1950 garrison cap, softly c.o.c.ked above his right ear, and the army's new ”Mickey Mouse” boots (so called because they resembled Mickey's big feet). The boots were rubber-lined inside, which helped in the soggy hills, though they were too hot for town.

Don's favorite spot in Tokyo was the Imperial Hotel-he admired it ”more than any other building.” Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1916, the hotel was demolished in 1968, despite worldwide pleas for its preservation-the owners said it had become expensive to repair.

When commissioned, the hotel was meant to symbolize j.a.pan's relations.h.i.+p to the West as well as to announce the emergence of j.a.pan as a modern nation. Wright planned a thoroughly up-to-date building that managed to respect the ”worthy tradition” of j.a.panese aesthetics. He followed the ”principle of flexibility instead of rigidity”-a far cry from the ”luxury hotel” Don had seen in Seoul, which forced its ”artiness” onto a landscape of poverty and ruin.

Don spent hours wandering the Imperial's halls, delighted by their unpredictable curves, admiring-with his father's eye-the way Wright had designed the floors to be supported by centered joists, like a waiter balancing a tray on his fingertips, so earth tremors wouldn't yank down the walls.

”There were little terraces and little courts [in the building], infinitely narrow pa.s.sages suddenly opening into large two or three-storey s.p.a.ces....And there were many different levels,” wrote the critic Peter Blake. Famously, the Imperial had survived the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (as well as the bombings of 1945)-another reason Don liked to spend time there. He admired the walls' low center of gravity, wide at the base, thin at the top, with small windows in the first two stories and more abundant s.p.a.cings on the third.

Like Don's father, in the best of his work, Wright made the most of minimal units, marrying practicality and pleasure. To travel over eight thousand miles from home, and to see these familiar principles at work, rea.s.sured Don, and convinced him of the wisdom of modern design.

At the same time, he saw how unique the Imperial was. Most of Tokyo's modern buildings were top-heavy-foolish in a quake-p.r.o.ne region, further examples of ”arty” designers forcing their will on a place, rather than learning from it. Don was beginning to see the flaws in modernist zeal.

At dusk, the Imperial's lovely Oya stone (an easily carved lava) caught light from the reflecting pool out front. Don walked past the water and headed for the Tennessee Tea Room or the Roppongi district's bars, with their wide-open doors, loud music, and drooping banners declaring you must be drinking here to remain inside. He went in search of jazz.

American jazz had been popular in j.a.pan starting in the 1920s; it was banned from the airwaves during the rabid nationalism of World War II, and began to make a comeback in the fifties. Still, American performers rarely appeared in Tokyo. The 293rd Army Band played at service clubs near the Roppongi district and in Hibiya Hall, frequented by Gen. Mark Clark. Don may have caught the band there, but he would have preferred a less regimented sound. It's possible he saw the trumpeter Webster Young and the pianist Hampton Hawes, both of whom served in the military in Asia.

A pair of j.a.panese jazz drummers drew rave notices in Tokyo at the time, and Don would have found them. Oguchi Daihachi, who had been a POW in China in the forties, returned to his home in Nagoya after the war, and decided to pursue a music career. He learned about taiko drumming, an ancient j.a.panese art, featuring large ba.s.s drums and hypnotic rhythms. Building on this tradition, he added small drums to the taiko core, and scored jazz-based multirhythmic pieces to create a new style of music. At the same moment, in and around Tokyo kissas kissas (cafes), the drummer Joji Kawaguchi and his Big Four band were making a name for themselves by taking current pop tunes and jazzing them up with long, percussioncentered improvs. (cafes), the drummer Joji Kawaguchi and his Big Four band were making a name for themselves by taking current pop tunes and jazzing them up with long, percussioncentered improvs.

In ”The King of Jazz” (1978), Don honored the players he listened to in Tokyo. In the story, a trombone player named Hideo Yamaguchi challenges the top ”bone man,” Hokie Mokie, for the t.i.tle ”King of Jazz.” ”Tell me, is the Tennessee Tea Room still the top jazz place in Tokyo?” Hokie asks Hideo. ”No,” Hideo replies, ”the top jazz place in Tokyo is the Square Box now.”

The story's t.i.tle comes from a 1930 movie, The King of Jazz The King of Jazz, directed by John Murray Anderson and featuring the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, whose most popular tune was ”j.a.panese Sandman.”

After a night of music and drink, Don might have walked to the Hardy Barracks in central Tokyo, a large American military installation with an NCO club, ten-cent movies, a swimming pool, a library, and-most important-cots to crash in. The compound was constructed around a white stone building with trim rectangular windows; just outside its gates, laundry, grocery, and tailor shops vied for the GIs' dollars. Several blocks to the west, the s.h.i.+njuku neighborhood, with its tiny bars, overpriced liquor, and available girls, beckoned. It's likely that s.h.i.+njuku is where Don met ”Michiko.” The area was known among American soldiers for its ”love hotels.” s.h.i.+njuku stank of cigarettes, sugar, and burning stovetop oils. The streets were sticky with spilled drinks and greasy food wrappers. The neighborhood had come to life in the mid-twenties because it was one of the few areas of Tokyo to survive, intact, the Kanto earthquake. It ”only concerned [itself] with customers' yen,” says Leonard Anderson, a Korean vet. In bed there, a boy could fall and fall.

Don's grandfather, Mr. Bart, died while Don was overseas, a sadness he never overcame. In a tent on the side of a grimy hill, or in a noisy Tokyo kissa kissa, he recalled the saddles on the walls of his grandfather's ranch, the creaking windmills, and the creek. He remembered the lumberman's tools, their faint metallic smells; baseball; the odor of pine; the joy on the old man's face when he spotted Don and Pat Goeters in front of the Reforma Hotel in the heart of Mexico City. Don recalled the world he had known, and he knew he could not now return to it, not to the way it had been.

As Don's tour of duty neared its end, he wondered what to do with himself. His wife had been awarded a teaching a.s.sistants.h.i.+p in the French department at Rice. She would need at least two more years to finish her degree. If he returned to the Houston Post Houston Post, he would work nights and he and Maggie would rarely see each other. On the other hand, ”for better or worse,” he wrote to Joe Maranto, he could not ”imagine anything” other than being a journalist, since he could not live off ”literature.” The sloppy work of the wire-service reporters he had met-their lack of investigative ac.u.men, their parroting of military press releases-disenchanted him, but he liked the access to celebrities and dignitaries that journalism provided him. His friend Sutchai Thangpew had made him curious about Thailand. The U.S. Military Advisory Group was expanding its operations there; Hanoi was about to fall, and America planned to double its Southeast Asia advisory contingent. For a while, Don flirted with the idea of applying for duty in Thailand, to cover ”straight news,” but he never followed up on it. His hope of joining the Tokyo staff of Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes was thwarted by a grumpy first lieutenant, who refused to let him leave the Second Division. Then Don's tour was up. was thwarted by a grumpy first lieutenant, who refused to let him leave the Second Division. Then Don's tour was up.

Meanwhile, he reported to Maranto that the ”current novel is better than anything I've ever done but not finished and I can't get a typewriter after hours to nurse it on here and so will have to wait until I get home. I don't think I'll want to publish it when it's finished, but I do want to finish it and see how it comes out. It's been tremendously good exercise and has taught me much.”

When he did get back to Houston, he refused to show the ma.n.u.script to any of his friends. It has never surfaced. His remark that it was an ”unlove story” like the ”unbirthdays” in Disney's Alice in Wonderland Alice in Wonderland suggests its unconventional nature. When Don suggests its unconventional nature. When Don did did publish a novel, publish a novel, Snow White Snow White, over ten years later, it, too, echoed Disney.

As the Second Division prepared to s.h.i.+p out, the Indianhead Indianhead planned a farewell edition. Don wrote a story for it, describing life in the trenches for the Thirty-eighth Regiment as the cease-fire took hold. He interviewed soldiers who had been there that day, and reported: planned a farewell edition. Don wrote a story for it, describing life in the trenches for the Thirty-eighth Regiment as the cease-fire took hold. He interviewed soldiers who had been there that day, and reported: At 2200 hours, men of the division were told, the ceasefire was to go into effect.After that time, they were instructed not to fire unless attacked.The Communists opposite the 38th Regt's sector wanted to slug it out until the final bell. Round after round came into the 38th trenches. The fire was returned.At 2154 hours, regiment ordered all shooting stopped.At 2200, despite many warnings, men dashed from their bunks, shed their flak jackets, and stood in little groups on the edge of a no-man's land that was suddenly safe.On the opposite side of the line, the Chinese poured out of their bunkers and caves by the hundreds. They waved and shouted unintelligible English words and phrases. Many wore peculiar dead-white garments. Many sat out in the open and began to eat.Men got the feeling that something, or a part of something, was finished.

Despite the boxing imagery and the repet.i.tion, Hemingway this wasn't. Not only was the report a final piece for the Indianhead Indianhead, it was Don's last, halfhearted attempt to be Papa (or else it's a parody). His own novel may have dissatisfied him, but it signaled the direction he was commited to, away away from strict realism-as did his layout for the paper's last issue. from strict realism-as did his layout for the paper's last issue.

He outranked his young editor, and put the man through the ”most nerve shattering experience he ever had” by ”jumping design”-providing sixteen pages of staggered headlines, articles beginning above and below the fold, photographs arranged asymmetrically: all, now, standard newspaper design, but radical at the time, especially in military culture. It ”shook up the printers” who thought ”in terms of straight newspaper makeup,” ”scared [every-body] to death,” and convinced them that Don had ”gone ape.” He wasn't even supposed to produce the issue, but he took over by pulling rank and ”browbeating the poor devil [his editor] to the point of madness.”

His determination sprang from an earlier episode, when a lieutenant who objected to a story Don had written asked him to change the piece. Don refused, until the man gave him a direct order. Don's implacability-and his frustrations-with the Indianhead Indianhead presage the conflicts he would face in just a few years as editor of the University of Houston's presage the conflicts he would face in just a few years as editor of the University of Houston's Forum. Forum.

Any ”rumors of new newspaper or mag ventures [in Houston] that sound remunerative?” Don asked Joe Maranto. Maranto said no, and admitted he was getting tired of the low pay and odd hours of newspaper writing. He considered jumping to an ad agency. This horrified Don. ”Your present lick is no good,” Don wrote back, ”but at least it's better than the cess pool.” Advertising is ”DISASTER,” he insisted. Then he quoted the Duke Ellington song, saying, ”DO NOTHING TILL YOU HEAR FROM ME.”

”I am still dreaming this old dream...of starting a weekly mag a la Harold Ross,” he wrote Maranto, or of founding something like the Allied Arts Review Allied Arts Review, ”but sans any quality of hope; it can only be created in despair.”