G.I. Wounded

By Frank Trippett

WHISTLE by James Jones

Delacorte; 457 pages; $10.95

When James Jones died last year he was trying desperately to finish Whistle, his final installment of a trilogy begun with From Here to Eternity and extended through The Thin Red Line. Whistle, Jones wrote, would "say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us." Measured against that aspiration, the book proves that Jones either had nothing more to say about war's meaning or else was silenced before his mission could be completed.

The novel chronicles the postcombat experiences of four World War II infantrymen: Mart Winch, John Strange, Bobby Prell and Marion Landers. All noncoms from the same outfit, three of them wounded, the fourth ill with the same kind of congestive heart condition that killed Jones, they ship home from the Pacific to a military hospital close by Luxor, a fictional Southern city on the Mississippi. There "the days passed with a swift inexorability that was the essence of a tragedy in a drama." And there the four muddle through a sequence of implausibly pathetic fates. The rushed, bumpy narrative seems less a novel than an outline. One situation is "pretty dire." An approaching party promises to be a "rousing debacle." Two of the soldiers get in a fight with "about seven Navy personnel, to be exact."

In one pivotal episode, the protagonists conspire to reverse a surgical decision to amputate Prell's shattered legs. Such a quixotic effort is at least possible; but in Whistle the men not only succeed, they then win approval from the hospital brass. Jones has come a long, sad way since his days as the noncom's Homer.

Mostly the heroes suffer familiar postcombat nightmares, get drunk and chase women whose habits and vernacular are not from the Deep South of the 1940s but from porn magazines of today. Luxor itself remains as dimensionless as its women, evoking the Memphis that was its model only in the names--Peabody and Claridge--stuck on its hotels.

The book's mechanical sex might be dismissed except for a hint that Jones intended to connect that copulation with some theory of war. His only attempt to say anything unfamiliar about combat comes in a rumination assigned to Landers. Brooding over how he and his fellow soldiers, so close in battle, have split apart in Luxor, Landers reflects: "It was funny but in each case it was a woman who had pulled them away. Females. ... Had split the common male interest. C-- had broken the centripetal intensity of the hermetic force which sealed them together in so incestuous a way. Their combat. C vs combat . . . Landers decided he had discovered quite by accident the basic prevailing equation of the universe."

What that cosmic arithmetic might add up to is as unanswerable as the question of what Whistle might have become if Jones had lived on. It is certainly less than the "finished work" it is labeled by Jones' friend, Writer Willie Morris (North Toward Home), who assembled the manuscript. It is easy to pass over Morris' soft appraisal. What is less forgivable, even granted the spirit of eulogy, is the publisher's decision to proclaim Whistle the author's "masterpiece." This devaluation of Jones' best work may have been meant as a bugle salute to the departed soldier. It seems, instead, a tinhorn bleat for customers.

--Frank Trippett

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