Monday, February 07, 2022

A salute to those books that taught me humor, satire, and the absurdity of being human

All this book-banning makes me think of all of those books I read that might meet disapproval now from the GOP Know Nothings. 

When I was in the fourth grade, my father told me I could read any book in his library. I tackled the war books, first, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle and Up Front by Bill Mauldin, which included his Willie and Joe cartoons. He had some boys' adventure books from his childhood, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe. But I was more interested in the WWII books, as my father had been a radioman with an infantry unit in France, Belgium, and Germany. They seemed like boys' adventures to me. I read all of the Life magazines that my grandparents had saved for my dad while he was overseas. I watched war movies with my dad, as did my younger brother. We played war with our friends. 

None of my teachers ever assigned books on 21st century wars. They reached into the heroic past. The Revolutionary War had spawned books such as Johnny Tremayne and tales of Paul Revere and George Washington. The Civil War was acceptable reading as we all grew up knowing that the Yankees were the good guys and the Rebs the bad guys. This was way before we moved to the South and heard the term War of Northern Aggression. So many of the books I read as an English major and later were by writers of the American South. Their Southern Gothic tales owed their existence to the region's tortured history which included the Civil War, whatever you want to call it.

Now in my 70s, I look back on my reading as nostalgic. I also know more about the workings of the world. War can be heroic. It's also nasty, brutish, and final. Soldiers carry their experiences into old age, if they make it that far. There are brilliant antiwar books told from the warrior's POV. And books by observers, such as Red Badge of Courage and Dispatches, Michael Herr's wild book about life among the grunts in Vietnam (Herr got writing credits for Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket). 

Just about every book I ever read could be fodder for the book banners. My non-authorized reading at my Catholic high school included three oft-banned novels that influenced me more than anything I read in class: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. They are now considered classics and are read in some high school classrooms when Know Nothings are not disappearing books like Dunbar. They were telling me a truth that I barely knew at 18, that the world is a strange and terrifying place. 

Humor, satire, and sci-fi are great vehicles for getting at the truth. I passed Catch-22 along to my Class of '69 pals and we laughed at the absurdities. The dead man in Yossarian's tent. Major Major Major's name. Orr's pastime of ditching his bomber into the ocean to practice for his escape from war. Hilarious. We only felt a small tremor of the earthquake beneath. We could have watched the absurdity of televised military reports from Vietnam. Body count, Vietnamization, destroy the village in order to save it. It was all right there in front of us but we didn't know. 

Reading good books gave us a bit of a head start on adulthood. Still, you have to live it to really know. You can be an absurdist and still be an engaged human. You can love satire but also fall in love. Humor makes the ride fun even when it's challenging. 

I'd have none of that without the reading.

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