THE SUICIDE RUN
the insightful story
Five Tales of the Marine Corps
Combat is the crucible that redeems countless ambivalent protagonists of autoÂbiographical and fictional war stories - from Grant to Henry Fleming, from ÂAeneas to Tim O’Brien. Readers of the literature of war are conditioned to wait for the moment when Grant’s “anticipation” becomes the lived experience in which even the most emphatic antiwar voices tend to locate their authority.
The Suicide Run is different. This volume of newly collected stories by William Styron is all anticipation. Styron refuses to imagine for his narrators here the test of combat that he himself never faced. Like Stingo in “Sophie’s Choice,” Paul Whitehurst, the narrator of “My Father’s House,” the collection’s longest story, arrives in the Pacific too late to see action in World War II. Like Styron, the narrator of “Marriott, the Marine” and the title story is recalled to active duty in 1951, but never makes it to Korea.
Paul, plagued by “survivor’s guilt,” intoxicated by his “unheroic though spellbinding escape from death,” has no similar appreciation for war’s terrible beauty. In his memoir, “Darkness Visible,” Styron called depressives “the walking wounded.”
Styron’s narrators know that even within the Marines’ “mysterious community of men,” “real fear” is something that can never be shared but must be endured in loneliness. Alcohol, sexual release and physical exhaustion provide only temporary relief for a Marine’s “pitiless anxiety.” Both “My Father’s House” and the title story’s account of a reckless car trip dramatize the extreme response of suicidal desire Styron acknowledged as “a persistent theme” in his work.
This stance yields supple characterizations of career Marines, members of a “small elite fellowship.” In some ways its most authentic member is Happy Halloran, Paul’s charismatic battalion commander. Halloran displays a plausible combination of physical toughness, insouciance, intuitive authority and hammy sentimentality, but he appeals to Paul primarily because he is “always playfully challenging the System.”
Most of Styron’s Marines are coarsened, deformed or brutalized by that system. Even the eponymous lieutenant colonel of “Marriott, the Marine,” with his fluent French and love of Flaubert, finally reveals himself bound to “the Old Corps” by sacred ties the narrator cannot share. As Styron wrote elsewhere, his loathing for war coexisted with resentment “at any easily expressed contempt” for soldiers.
Blankenship anticipates the periodic crises that violate this sense with the dutiful devotion and “tranquil, fierce patience of a communicant awaiting the moment of passion.” Except for the novella “The Long March” and the play “In the Clap Shack,” Styron’s work usually treats military culture obliquely. You could have the book here.
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