Frankly Brutal

THE TRUMPET UNBLOWN (305 pp.)--William Hoffman--Doubleday ($3.95).

Sherman, who knew about war, said that it was hell, and Jean Paul Sartre, who doesn't know about hell, says that hell is very dreary. In this first novel, Author William Hoffman has striven to confirm both points. He has addressed himself to the honorable task of making a novel of his two-year experiences in the Army Medical Corps, European theater, and no one will doubt that he knows his war. Yet before the reader has trudged a few pages, he will hear the heavy tread of that regiment of dismounted cavalry which wears the insignia of Hemingway's Own.

The Hemingway-type hero is no Jake, no Lieut. Henry, but the saddest of fictional sad sacks, called, of all things, Tyree Shelby. Soon Hemingway-type philosophy is being fed to him. Says Shelby's drunken C.O.: "You can't escape the sonsofbitches and the only choice you got is between sonsofbitches." Does the Hemingway manner work? Paraphrasing the remark Churchill is supposed to have made to his son Randolph ("Haven't you learned yet that I put more into my speeches than brandy?"), Papa Hemingway might well remind young (30) Novelist Hoffman that more goes into a Hemingway novel than just barrack-room talk.

Shelby is 18, a volunteer just out of a Virginia military prep school, and he arrives in England, assigned to an evacuation hospital, the most foul and fouled-up outfit in the U.S. Army. He is young, brave, idealistic, but his comrades beat all that out of him until one day, in France, he goes AWOL to fight with a rifle at the front. Thereupon he discovers he is not a courageous man. Instead of accepting this as a not unusual fact, young Shelby is full of shame. Before long, he is stealing penicillin to pay a tart, and is on his way Stateside to a psychiatric hospital. Cruelty and, worst of all, a kind of shambling mindlessness mark his downfall.

Those who served in the Army Medical Corps, or who are grateful to it for treatment and help, will have their demurrers to this study of ignobility and corruption. Yet this is an important war book, not necessarily because what it says is true, but because a sincere and fairly talented writer who served in the war thinks it is.

If Novelist Hoffman has any one message, it is this: that those who fight a war, even in a just cause, must wear a burden of guilt for what war does. The theme is great, but it will not be given great treatment in this age until realistic novelists like Hoffman can distinguish between being brutally frank and frankly brutal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.