Perhaps, the most important exchange in “1966” is the phone conversation between the brothers, Bill and James. Both are confused, young men headed down the same road, the older brother just further along; and if this story’s split narrative is meant to show two bones in the masculine psychological anatomy – one the narrative of Bill’s shore leave, the other James’ decision to join the military – than this conversation is the joint linking the two.
And, this joint is strongest when the conversation’s tension is sustained through the character’s unspoken emotions. The brothers’ awkwardness, for example, is shown through lines like, “O.K./O.K./Hey, tell mom I called, O.K.?And tell her I said hi. /O.K. /O.K…Tell her I love her. /O.K. So long.” Much of this back and forth banter seems mundane, but it works as silence between outbursts like Bill’s assertion of distaste for Honolulu’s weather: “Hey, kid, imagine this – did you ever lift the lid on a kettle full of boiling sewage? That’s what it’s like stepping out on the street in this place.” Furthermore, because the narrator rarely registers Bill’s emotions, the reader understands them through his descriptions of the weather, like when Bill warns James, “the tropics ain’t no tropical paradise […] It’s full of rot –bugs, sweat, stink, and I don’t know what all else. And most of the beautiful tropical fruit you see, it’s rotten –it’s mashed on the street.”
Yet, James ignores his older brother and decides Bill is “probably an alkie, like his father.” The revelation of the brothers’ different fathers helps to explain the distance between them, and Bill tries to overcome it when he tells James: “Well, you stay out of trouble. Learn by [my father’s] example,” but James responds, “I don’t follow none of his examples, I don’t even look at his examples.” This is important, because by ignoring lessons from both his brother and his brother’s father, James is following their footsteps, and Bill, aware of the real trauma of war, knows the tragic failure of this conversation and says it “just made him more depressed. His brother James was stupid. His brother James was going to end up in the military, too.”
After this phone conversation, Bill heads to a dive bar, and meets a civilian tanker named Kinney, and an unnamed, ex-marine, bum. Racist tirades and pitchers of beer start the conversation, and the bum goes on to describes the hats Vietnamese women would wear and how he yanked one “right off the bike, man, […] I saw one this one time where she was all bent like this, man. Her neck was snapped.” This description of a woman’s snapped neck is trumped later when the Bum tells about the time he saw a woman’s genitals mutilated. Bill doesn’t believe these stories, but the violence of war has affected him, and later and drunker, he removes his “white bucks with red rubber soles,” and pontificates his view against war, saying “I think, really, there ain’t that many different kinds of people on this earth. And that’s why I’m against war.”
Bill may have become a pacifist, but his younger brother will join him in Vietnam soon. This same night, James and friends search for a party they aren’t able to find; and, instead, parked in the middle of nowhere, they sit in the bed of James’ truck and drink warm beer. High school banter passes the time, and James deciding he prefers Rollo’s girl, Stevie, to his girl, Charlotte, drives both his friend and girl home, only to return Stevie to nowhere, this time alone. James tells Stevie his plans to join either “the Army or the Marines,” which gives him the confidence to kiss her. They kiss and she says, “I’m trying to think, Does this man kiss like the Army or like the Marines?” This exchange ignites intimacy between them, which leads Stevie to try and probe James, asking about his father, but James ignores her and tells himself, “So now she suddenly thought they should tell their worst secrets to each other.” He leaves to urinate this intimacy from his body and returns to say, “I just made up my mind: I’m joining the Army Infantry.” Determined, he claims he’s “going to get over there to Vietnam. [..] Going to fuck up a whole lot of people.” The reader knows, mainly himself.
Bill is “in agony, dealing with bare feet on the hot sand, and now on the black asphalt.” Bill has left his shoes on the beach, and the heat beneath him represents the hell that awaits. He, Kinney, and the Bum, find themselves unwittingly helping Kinney collect on a debt, and out of nowhere, Kinney shots the debtor, and Bill, surprised and confused, tries “to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than that Kinney had just shot this man in the chest.” Soon the Bum, afraid of the cursing Kinney, is hiding behind a bus, and Bill is stumbling in a post-traumatic haze; his unhappiness defying his mother’s assertion that the war “didn’t hurt [Bill], I suppose.” James, aware of his mother’s financial insecurity, promises his tired mother, “You send me the envelope every month, I’ll send you some money back inside it,” and gets her to all but agree to sign her second son away to a war that has already damaged the psyche of her first. James’ promise, a promise the reader imagines Bill made too, seems unlikely, since Bill has been “assigned to grunt work and garbage detail on the base,” and the story’s last line that “hard times are coming,” suggests a similar future for James. By the story's end, the reader knows the Vietnam War will damage both sons, and the only brother left, Burris, first shown, “peering down the barrel of a cap pistol while he pulled the trigger repeatedly,” will have to wait a few decades to prove his masculinity and join his brothers’ misery.
5 comments:
Thinks on "1966":
When I started reading "1966", my first thought was, "Ugh, I really don't want to be in this world." This was qualified by another person I'd spoken to, the difference between our reactions being that I actually fought my way through the story. If Johnson's goal was to inspire absolute dread in his readers, well, I'll have to give him the spoils. This dread itself seems to be, if anything, Johnson's anti-war message, one delivered without histrionics. The story's a microcosm of war itself: dissaffection, discomfort, false and real bravado, murder, atrocity. Meanwhile, the title points to the fact that during 1966, International Days of Protest were observed in many world cities to criticize U.S. policy in Vietnam. And if you squint real hard at the title, it could read 2006. Timely, indeed. Everything's comin' up war: fiction, fashion, language, film, art, music. Much as I despise war, I have to work hard here to appreciate the story's form versus its content.
One of the most interesting details for me were Bill's shoes: white bucks with red rubber soles: a man of peace with blood on his soles (soul). And the shoes are "very clean". And at the end of the story, he loses these shoes on the beach, after having witnessed a murder. Nice touch. Subtle and not-so-subtle.
And of course, I have to comment on the bum's account of the atrocities he claims to have committed or been party to. Ugh, I crossed my legs while reading on the downtown A train, this business of desecrating women, "enemy" women, girls. Yet another instance in the NYer issue of shock and awe at women's expense, a topic I hate to belabor, but one impossible not to. As it is, women serve as great garnish for stories. Our blood salts nicely, our secretions add aroma--what else? Oh, we sometimes sweeten otherwise bitter meat. In "1966", sugar comes in the form of Stevie, Bill's brother James's interest, the girl he chooses over another. Of course they make out. Of course, she--Johnson?-- is the voice of reason. And then there's Bill's mother, the worn, the practical, the unappreciated. At least they're there, the women.
But war is man's business, so let's stay on track. I like the way Johnson shows us the cyclical nature of war through Bill's father and brothers, whose belligerence and disparate ages speak to the agelessness of war. Johnson doesn't have to write the younger brothers' forestory. We know they'll fight when they're old enough, as there'll surely be some kind of war to accomodate them. That their socio-economic choices seem limiting (though not AS limiting, considering that they're white males) damns them even further.
I enjoyed the clipped, non-sequitor dialogue between Bill and James. The abbreviations, pauses, disjointedness, and tension force readers to bring their own dialogue to the text--emotions are between and behind the lines. I even imagined James smelling Bill's alcoholic breath through the phone lines.
I won't gab about all the other stuff swirling around in my head. All I know is that after "1966" I was left feeling vacant, hopeless, as if treading on sand under burning sun, never feeling any closer to the shore. Forty-one years after 1966, nothing seems to have changed.
I didn't read 1966, btu I think the comments about it were very interesting and poignant.
Lit up, I think you make an essential point about the story. The dread and despondency it gives the reader forces one to see the pointless, destructiveness of war, but what about independent choice? Hope? Three times I read this story, and my post focused on the phone conversation between the brothers, because it was the closes I thought the story came to a possible alternative fate for the characters, besides the “hard times,” the reader knows are coming. I think stories work best when their conclusions feel both inevitable and avoidable. I found Bill and James’ phone conversation so crucial, because James could have told his brother the atrocity of war, could have prevented his brother from following his “white bucks with red rubber soles.” For me, the most tragic part of the story was that the characters’ fates seemed pre-determined, and I can put as much hope into that conversation as I want, but likely James wouldn’t have listened; plus, Stevie and James’ mother and James’ own male bravado and our society’s pervasive war culture would’ve likely sent young James to his fate no matter; not to mention America’s favorite white bearded Uncle.
I ended the post with the image of young Burris shooting himself in the face with a cap pistol to show the width of the tragedy; even un-fully formed Burris feels hell-bent on self-destruction. You are right to say there will be some conflict waiting for him, and the story makes one feel Burris will be waiting for that conflict. Besides, cap guns and G.I. Joe stick men seem like child’s play compared to the war video game industry so popular among kids (and adults) nowadays. 2006, Burris wouldn’t even have to wait for a conflict. He could sit in front of his television and fight a glorified (how many pointlessly mutilated genitals and snapped necks do those games show?) version of the war that destroyed his brothers. Why, oh why, this story makes one ask. A friend of mine once wrote that men fight war to feel something as transcendent as women’s experience of childbirth. And recently, I re-read Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms;” and the two most important occurrences of that novel are Henry’s survival and dismissal of WW1, and Catherine’s failed pregnancy, which takes her life and the life of their daughter. That novel’s tone makes either Henry’s death or Catherine’s death seem destined, as if Hemingway is juxtaposing war and childbirth, and saying life won’t allow both characters to survive. Another sacrificed woman, yet men haven’t seemed to learn. Will we ever? Better question: is there any hope that we will?
Hey. Really insightful posts. I'd been wondering about the importance of those red soled (souled) bucks, as they played such a strangely pertinent role in story. (They keep his feet safe from the melting pavement until he drunkenly leaves them behind.) Johnson is kind of a magician at describing the psychology of a drunk, having been one himself. In an interview recently he said that he writes a lot about God and religion because he finds himself surrounded by it in AA meetings. He really knows these kinds of people - the junkies and deadbeats and ruined alcoholics. It would seem to be impossible to describe Kinney and the bum the way he does in 1966 without having known people like that. I don't know of any (meaning I don't read any, I guess) other contemporary American writer who seems to have, or have had, such access to the loser underworld. Jesus Son was the 90's version of Burrough's Junkie, written while Johnson was converting from poetry to fiction, and it works as well as it does, I think, because it was poised right on the edge of death. Johnson is someone who's repeatedly peered into his own death, and seen it happen to a lot of people around him. Angels, his first novel, is probably the saddest and best novel of Greyhound bus terminal culture that exists. The plays he's written over the last 10 years, partly as a way of getting back into the world after squirreling himself away in Idaho for a while, are so realistic it's tough to read them. They're also full of hallucinatory Blakean visions. I recently heard from a friend that William Blake's paintings were a product of Blake simply copying down, or almost tracing, the visions he saw before him. Which is what I felt was going on in 1966. Who knows if this is true. It probably isn't. But there's a fever running through that story. A friend of mine read the story to me and another friend as we were driving back from Maine a week ago. Despite what I thought were a lot of sloppy and hurried passages, it was so vivid that I nearly crashed into a toll booth divider. At the end, my friend in the front seat, who'd been listening throughout and saying "jesus" now and then, was speechless. "Pretty glad that's not your life, huh?" I said. He said, "Yeah. But I feel like that IS my life."
I looking forward to reading his new book.
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