SOURCE: An afterword to The Two Worlds of William March, The University of Alabama Press, 1984, pp. 316-25.

The novelist John Gardner, discussing the mysteries of the creative processes, considered the nature and extent of bibliotherapy, explaining in the following terms what it means so far as he is concerned:

You really do ground your nightmares, you name them. When you write a story, you have to play that image, no matter how painful, over and over until you've got all the sharp details so you know exactly how to put it down on paper. By the time you've run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked every tic of your terror, it's lost its power over you. That's what bibliotherapy is all about, I guess. You take crazy people and have them write their story, better and better, and soon it's just a story on a page, or, more precisely, everybody's story on a page. It's a wonderful thing. Which isn't to say that I think writing is done for the health of the writer, though it certainly does incidentally have that effect.¹

There is, in one respect, a marked similarity between Gardner's exposition and March's own approach to his writing, in that he also used his literary work as a means of exorcising his own particular devils by putting them down on paper and displaying them for the world to see, like esoteric objects laid out in a glass exhibition case. The psychic scars which were imprinted on his mind as a result of his experiences in France during World War I were, to a large degree, exorcised through the process of writing Company K, although it seems likely that despite the detailed no-holds-barred retelling of the incident in the Private Manuel Burt section of that book, he was never able to expunge the memory of one young German soldier's face. When he first returned to America from France in 1919, it is possible that he invented his somewhat spectacular physical war wounds (the silver plate in his skull, the lungs destroyed by gas) simply because he found, as did Private Paul Waite in Company K, that people back home would not accept or take seriously the fact that a man could have been wounded psychologically just as badly as if he had lost an arm or a leg. By the time he underwent analysis with Glover in the mid-1930s, his war experiences no longer posed an overriding problem, as Glover was quick to discern. By then, the emotionally crippling nature of his childhood, stemming possibly from his relationship with his father, together with the conscious and subconscious conflict arising from the duality of his nature, manifesting itself in the two personalities of Campbell the business tycoon and March the author, had assumed a far greater importance as the fulcrum of his analysis. These new devils, once identified, had also to be exorcised. To an extent, he dealt with the landscape of his childhood in The Tallons and in the short stories set in Hodgetown and Williston. But apart from that one tantalizing glimpse of the Campbell-Gavin family at home in “Dirty Emma,” there is no other clear and identifiable portrait of his family anywhere else in his works.

In addition to providing him with this therapeutic outlet, March's writing gave him a means of escape into fantasy from the cares and problems of the day, without the danger of his losing grip on the solid reality of life. According to Alistair Cooke, March once quoted to him a remark of Salvador Dali's: “The only difference between me and a schizophrenic is that I am not a schizophrenic.” Cooke comments: “March could savor this rather horrible truth because he had the advantage here over Dali: he had been there and back. When he could let loose and tame his fantasies on paper, he remained a fairly contented social animal. When he could not, the abyss was never far away.” March needed his fantasies, in exactly the same way an underwater swimmer needs periodically to break the surface to replenish his lungs with life-giving air. In Ways of Escape, the second volume of his “autobiography,” Graham Greene, after observing that writing is “a form of therapy,” goes on to wonder “how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”² It is not without significance that March's major breakdown in 1947 followed a long period of creative sterility.

One has only to recall the portrait of Roy Newberry in the story “Upon the Dull Earth Dwelling” to appreciate the sort of mental yearning for release March must often have experienced while he was performing the more mundane or socially onerous of his duties for Waterman. Unlike Roy Newberry, whose fantasies progressed no further than impotent daydreaming. March, fortunately for us, possessed the exceptional talent—and the occasional touch of genius—which enabled him to transmute his fantasies into enduring works of art. Another part of him, surely, was very much like Bob Decker in “A Haircut in Toulouse,” in that he too would have liked the courage to break loose and pursue a more bohemian way of life. This desire was only partially satisfied when he went to live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, for he discovered, even while he was soaking up the atmosphere where the outlandish is almost considered the norm, that he was still unable to discard completely the restrictive corsets of conformity and thus continued to preserve the outward image of the orthodox business type, obviously made uneasy if he found himself in markedly unconventional surroundings. Always, as during his visits to the Bourbon House with Bolton, he would hold back, erecting an invisible wall between himself and the rest of the company, and assume the role of an interested, but wary, passive spectator.

There is little doubt that for all his outspokenness on the tangled subject of sex, March's makeup included a very broad streak of the puritan. As a child, it will be recalled, he had been made to feel “depraved,” or so he maintained. His letter to Richard Crowder, in which he made this statement, provides no details, but there is every likelihood that he was overreacting, as many a child will do, to normal adult admonitions, transposing his inherent puritan self-guilt into a guilt he believed had been imposed on him by others. The fact that by legend and tradition the bohemian life-style to which he aspired was notorious for its sexual permissiveness would not have helped to assuage the underlying guilt he was already experiencing when he made the decision, or had the decision made for him, that he should resign from Waterman. Shortly after his move to New Orleans, he did at long last come to terms, at least in part, with the duality of his character—and, to a lesser extent, his feeling of sexual guilt—through the writing of October Island. In that book, too, he endeavored, successfully or not, to rationalize his relationship with his father. One has the suspicion that had he lived long enough to write the story of the Campbell family—the book, according to his brother Peter, he had always wanted to write—the portrait he would have drawn of his father would have been a surprisingly affectionate and sympathetic one. It is again significant that among the not extensive collection of books March had on his shelves at 613 Dumaine Street at the time of his death was a copy of the Raven edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, bearing John Leonard's signature and the inscription “Century, Florida, 1903.”³

There was no deep sense of alienation between March and the other members of his immediate family. It was just that, as with relationships outside the family circle, he regarded ties as constricting, only very occasionally allowing himself to become intimately involved and then on no one else's terms but his own. Although he did, in the main, tend to keep his siblings at arm's length, there was still mutual love and respect. To most of his relatives, however, he was an enigma and, from time to time, very much a source of embarrassment, particularly so far as the March side of the family was concerned. The scholar Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, who knew March briefly during the early and middle Waterman years, had occasion to mention March in a lecture he gave, five months or so after the author's death. When the lecture was over, a young man came up to him, introduced himself as a cousin of March's and expressed surprise at the number of times McWilliams had seen fit to mention March's work and at the way he had praised March's literary style. The young man volunteered the information that his father had always looked upon his author-nephew as the black sheep of the family. Having made that comment, the young man did not offer any explanation as to why his father should hold such an opinion, and McWilliams did not feel inclined to probe further.⁴ That two of his aunts had been severely upset by the way they had seen themselves portrayed in one of March's books indicates that the young man's father was probably not alone in his opinion.

It could be, of course, that the two ladies concerned were merely being unduly sensitive, but it is more than likely that the portraits to which they took exception were either satirical or unsympathetic. Despite his statement that he would never write about his family while its members were alive, March undoubtedly did introduce his relatives now and then into his fiction. Peter Campbell, for instance, has suggested that their sister Margaret is in The Looking-Glass, and there is also that little vignette of the readily identifiable John Leonard and Susy Campbell in “Dirty Emma.”

As has been noted, many of the women who appear in the pages of March's fiction are the villains of the piece; it is they who bring disaster to the menfolk. In a considerable number of instances, it would be fairer to say that they do what they do without really being aware of the profound havoc they are inflicting on the lives of others. They are like dark birds of fate, strangely incapable of controlling the events they have set in motion. Ruby and Abbie in Come in at the Door and Myrtle in The Tallons are prime examples. They are not basically evil women, but the results of their actions are the same sort of results that would flow from conscious evil-doing. There is substantial evil in Mitty in Come in at the Door, inasmuch as she is willing to do almost anything to gain her own ends. She stops short of murder, however. Baptiste's death is the evil outcome of her machinations, an outcome for which she is only indirectly responsible but which, to her discredit, she savors to the full as she witnesses Baptiste's passion on the hangman's noose, forcing Chester to observe the death agonies of his erstwhile friend and tutor. The obsessive preoccupation with evil and violence that runs like a steel thread through all of March's work, reaches its ultimate expression in the portrait of the child Rhoda Penmark. Tess Crager has recalled that she and her husband were in New York shortly before the publication of The Bad Seed and were invited to have drinks with Theodore Amussen at the Rinehart office. The prepublication reviews of the book had just come in and Amussen was wildly happy about them. Mrs. Crager thought he was treating the book with far more reverence than it deserved and when he asked her if she did not see it as a powerful study of the struggle between good and evil she replied: “You do not know your author as well as I do. … He is much more fascinated by evil.”⁵

Had he lived, March would undoubtedly have found himself in sympathy with some of the subsequent fashionable teachings of Dr. R. D. Laing. Laing's thesis, developed in The Politics of Experience, of human alienation created by outrageous violence and resulting in the escape into so-called madness is vividly explicated in March's very first book.⁶ The principal theme of Company K demonstrates how the collective madness of war—engendered by the vicious propaganda spewed out by political and religious leaders alike, by the rigid and frequently inhuman codes of discipline imposed by the military establishment, by the horrific, senseless slaughter on the battlefield, and by the terrible sense of isolation experienced in moments of extreme stress—reacts upon the individual soldier, driving him into insanity or an unbearable sense of guilt.

March lived during a violent and turbulent age, an age that saw two world wars and a dozen or so lesser wars, Prohibition and the rise of gangsterism, the depression, and extreme political and social unrest. Much of all this he witnessed firsthand, not only in America but also in France, Germany, and England. Although his novels and stories reflect the general tenor of the era, he rarely published—as it was fashionable to do in the 1930s and 1940s—an overt sociopolitical tract dressed up as fiction. With the possible exceptions of Company K and the short stories “Senator Upjohn” and “Personal Letter,” March did not choose to make explicit political statements in his work. This is not to say, on the other hand, that he did not write about the conditions prevailing during the years between the two world wars. Stories such as “The First Dime,” “A Snowstorm in the Alps,” “The Pattern That Gulls Weave,” “Runagate Niggers,” and “A Short History of England” are powerful, unrelenting social studies, presented entirely without authorial comment but nonetheless vibrant with anger and full of compassion for the underdog. March's overwhelming interest, after all, was not in events but in people and what made them tick—not only how they reacted to the external pressures imposed upon them but how they coped or did not cope with the interior pressures of their own natures.

March's obsession with violence was not entirely concerned with the more recognizable physical destruction. He was also fascinated by the controlled violence of the creative mind which could produce magnificent and powerful works of art, like the Soutines he hung on the walls of his home. Robert Clark remembers being particularly impressed by the Soutines: “I think Bill lived to some extent for the horror elicited by the paintings. … He delighted in telling me what he knew of the artist: which was considerable. He apparently felt a kinship with some of the artists whose works found themselves on his walls.”⁷ As March once told Clark: “No man can be really creative until he has suffered enough.”⁸

That March suffered from a series of emotional problems of varying degrees of intensity throughout much of his life cannot be denied. Only toward the end did he achieve some sort of uneasy peace within himself. His underlying attitude toward life, the uncertainties he always felt, can perhaps best be summed up in a passage from Come in at the Door. When Chester Hurry returns to the family home to bury his father, from whom he has been estranged for many years, he goes for a walk alone by the river where he had spent numerous hours as a child:

A feeling of despair, unreasoning and deep, came over him: an understanding of the cold cruelty which underlies everything and which will outlast everything that lives. These things came to him less definitely than thought, deeper than thought or reason, with the overwhelming sadness of music. He sat upright on the bank and looked again at the trees, the gray sky and the ceaseless river, as if to fix them in his mind forever. “What is it I want?” he asked over and over. … “What is it?” [CIATD, p. 338]

In one of his 1943 letters to Richard Crowder, March stated: “With the exception of one or two short stories, nothing that I have done has the faintest autobiographical connotation, a thing that may surprise you a little.”⁹ But there can be little doubt that, if not directly autobiographical, much of his material was culled from his own immediate experiences of life and his direct observations of people and events. In this respect, a large proportion of his work can perhaps be said to be emotionally autobiographical, rather than factually autobiographical: the basic situation which has been experienced in real life and the locale in which the situation existed being transposed into fictive form and intertwined with and blurred by invented detail. There is, of course, nothing in the least remarkable about this: it is a form of creative process as old as the hills and practiced in varying degrees by a great number of writers and artists. Its more obvious manifestations in the March canon appear in Company K, “The Little Wife,” and “Personal Letter,” to name but three examples.

That March fulfilled his early promise there can be no argument. Why then—and the question must be posed—is it that he has not received the ultimate recognition he so richly deserves? The failure of March's art for many of his readers lies in the fact that the style does not communicate the content. March employs a fine, workmanlike prose style, very seldom indulging in verbal pyrotechnics of any description. Consequently, the emotion and the turmoil that is the basis of all his work is so completely submerged beneath the veneer of this almost prosaic literary style that the superficial, unwary reader can perhaps be forgiven for frequently missing the point the author is making. In fact, for all his measured, often dry, and sometimes uninspired prose style, March is one of the most exciting of modern writers. He was not an innovator like Sherwood Anderson or Gertrude Stein, a stylist like Ernest Hemingway, or an experimentalist like William Faulkner, but his work provides startling, often terrifying insights into human nature, plumbing depths of the human psyche remaining totally unexplored by most other writers.

Those of his readers perceptive enough to realize and appreciate his full purpose often find themselves repelled by his subject matter and do not wish to identify, even by proxy through the printed page, with his characters. He is by no means a cozy or reassuring writer to live with. His is the voice of a rational man who possesses an uncomfortable insight into the human mind, who understands human nature to such a degree that he is capable of relating the most horrifying events and behavior patterns in quiet, even tones and with the unhurried and meticulous detail of professorial exposition.

Wally Dennis, the young aspiring novelist in James Jones's Some Came Running, poses the question: “I wonder if a guy could really write a book about people as they really are and still make it interesting enough to read?”¹⁰ March's characters are certainly, in the general sense, ordinary enough. They display no Faulknerian grotesqueries or excessively flamboyant modes of behavior to keep the fantasy of fiction at one remove from the reality of life. Indeed, it is this very ordinariness of March's characters which is so disturbing, making their psychological troubles and their private hells seem frighteningly identifiable with the reader's own secret experiences of life, forcing him against his will to realize certain undeniable truths about himself he would have preferred to evade.

In this respect, March is the realistic writer par excellence, a master not only in his realistic depiction of the external nature of things but also in his realistic examination of the inner life of man—his emotions, his desires, his fears, his guilts, even his fantasies. As Alistair Cooke has expressed it:

His art is so direct, so patently engaging, and its symbols so familiar, that the reader unwittingly recognizes his own world and gladly becomes part of it, until the line between it and the swarming pit of the unconscious is seen to be disturbingly thin. Not many people are grateful for being asked to sink themselves in a mess of human tragedy where but for the grace of God or the comforts of Mammon go they. The audience for tragedy, when its subjects are contemporary, is greatly overestimated.” [WMO, p. ix]

What he observed of his fellowmen, what he discovered buried deep in their souls and in his own soul, March committed fearlessly to paper. He held no brief for those readers whom he equated with the rich and ostensibly public-spirited Mrs. Steiner in Company K, who is willing to entertain soldiers wounded in action, provided she does not have to endure the unpleasantness of coming face to face with anything “really revolting or gruesome” (CK, p. 198). March unflinchingly shows his readers the worst of life when he is convinced that this is what has to be shown, not allowing them to avert their gaze for even an instant from all the ugliness and cruelty and rending heartache that is the human condition as he so often saw it. He felt it no concern of his if, in writing truthfully about these things, he upset his readers' sensibilities. It is an unfortunate result of this ruthlessly truthful, if somewhat subjective, aspect of his art, that many readers were driven away from his books.

For all that, it must not be forgotten that while, inescapably, most of his work is devoted to an exploration of the darker areas of human behavior, this exploration is sometimes conducted with more than a glimmer of wicked humor. He is, indeed, when he wishes to be, a master of black comedy, although he tends perhaps to be a little too adept at thrusting home the knife and twisting it, in what must seem, if one did not know him better, an almost apologetic fashion, in the vitals of his unsuspecting reader. Humor does not predominate in March's work. On the other hand, he does not particularly set out to preach, nor does he set himself up as the authorial paragon with the unquestionable right to condemn. He is too aware of his own human frailty. Possessing a very deep understanding of the pressures which drive people into patterns of extreme aberrational behavior, he can consequently sympathize with and even identify with the outcasts of society. His authorial attitude is rather: “This, reader, is the way it is. Nothing will change it. All one can do is endeavor to understand. And, above all, feel compassion.” He can deride and despise the social do-gooders among his characters, like Sister Joe Cotton and Mr. Hubert Palmiller of the Reedyville Vice Society, not so much because of what they do but because never, never do they show any sense of compassion for their victims. But the grief of such people in times of family tragedy evokes his compassion in exactly the same way as does, for example, the character of Ella in the short story “Tune the Old Cow Died To.” The concept of retribution, divine or otherwise, was not, one suspects, one he would likely have admired, although he accepted its moral and legal justification.

That his work is full of compassion and tenderness, understanding and tolerance, often tends to be overlooked by those who prefer to criticize him for the pessimistic and, for many, unedifying content of his novels and short stories. In many ways, he was an author in advance of his time. Had he been writing now, his books surely would have received a different reception from the one they received in the 1930s and 1940s, for it is a sad fact that the cruel, unthinking, and unnecessary violence of our times has laid its hand, in one way or another, on all of us and is taken more for granted as an ingredient of life than it was even during the turbulent two decades from 1919 to 1939. The general permissiveness of our present age would also have made the sexual content of his work more readily acceptable, enabling him to treat such matters in a franker manner than he was ever allowed.

It is, of course, in many respects, a pointless exercise to attempt a prediction as to how his work would have developed, or in what direction it would have gone, had he survived that second heart attack. One can, however, speculate that he would have been urged by his publishers to follow up the success of The Bad Seed with a similar work, but it is unlikely that he would have agreed to be “type cast” in this fashion. He would surely have had a momentous contribution to make to the recent spate of novels about the paranormal and the supernatural. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds of probability that he would have spearheaded the genre. We may have been given another masterpiece on the order of The Turn of the Screw. It would have been of great interest to see how he would have developed his gifts as a novelist. The indications are that he was already moving away from the somewhat sprawling and diffuse narratives of the past and concentrating on the shorter and more tightly structured form he had successfully achieved for the first time in The Bad Seed.

Even more important, he may have been given the time to complete his grand design of one hundred short stories and to publish the projected collection Century Mark. He was essentially a short-story writer and it is not too great a claim to make that in that genre his talent was more than once touched with genius. The best of his novels, Company K and The Looking-Glass, are each really no more than a series of related short stories welded into an integrated structure. In the less successful Come in at the Door, the structure remains incomplete and the relationship between the narratives is fractured by the somewhat baffling introduction of the Whisperer episodes. The Tallons, perhaps the least successful of the longer works, gains little from its transition and elaboration from the novella “The Unploughed Patch,” the shorter work being far less labored and far more vital in its telling. The same criticism that nothing has been gained in the transition from shorter to longer work may possibly also be leveled at October Island, except that here the novel cannot be faulted for being in any manner labored or lacking in vitality.¹¹

The cruel irony of his death, coming at the moment it did, deprived him of the immense satisfaction of the worldwide recognition he would have enjoyed following the success of The Bad Seed. Now March has been almost forgotten. His reputation, however, if little known at present, remains established and secure. Those of us who know, love, and admire his work live in the belief that one day March will be recognized as one of the most remarkable, talented, and shamefully neglected writers that America has produced in this or in any other century.

Notes

1. John Gardner, “The Art of Fiction LXXIII,” Paris Review 75 (1979): 65.

2. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (London: Bodley Head, 1980), p. 9.

3. This information is taken from a list Going transcribed from notes made by him on a visit to Mrs. Patty Campbell Maxwell's home two or three years after March's death and was kindly made available to RSS on March 31, 1977.

4. McWilliams to RSS, Nov. 5, 1976.

5. Crager to Hamblen, March 5, 1971.

6. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience & The Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 11-12.

7. Clark to RSS, Nov. 17, 1976.

8. Clark to RSS, May 28, 1976.

9. March to Crowder, Nov. 24, 1943, DePauw Archives.

10. James Jones, Some Came Running (New York: Scribner's, 1957), p. 639.

11. See also the comments of Going in “Some in Addition,” pp. 88-89.