When you buy books in a group it’s usually for one or two specific titles, but among the ones you don’t recognize will sometimes be a surprise. We snagged a few paperbacks, and Dennis Murphy’s novel The Sergeant was in there, an author and title unknown to us. But we liked the cover, which Robert McGinnis painted for Crest’s 1960 edition of the 1958 novel, and it strikes us as one of those pieces that nudges up against fine art. If you imagine the text gone the painting seems museum quality to us. But about Murphy’s quality we had no ideas. We opened the book just to glance at the first page and got totally sucked in within two paragraphs. The opening sequence is a remembrance of battle, within which are the details of how Master Sergeant Albert Calllan became a decorated war hero. This is part of what Murphy relates:
[The Germans] were all hit but one who broke feeble and ran and the sergeant came on like a bull, dropping the empty gun, mad to touch one alive. And then he reached out and had the German’s neck, running alongside him with the head and neck tucked under his armpit, and they galloped together like crazed animals until finally he twisted and they fell into the leaves and as he choked the man the smell of leaves and grass came back strong again, with all the pain and joy he felt bunched into the crook of his arm as it labored and choked and labored and choked.
Murphy can really write. A chapter or so in we stopped reading to look the guy up. Apparently he was tabbed to be a new Hemingway, or a new thing all his own. His talent was mighty, which becomes clear when he takes The Sergeant the direction he does, but it was his only novel, published when he was twenty-five. He wrote three screenplays, including the adaptation of his own book, which became a 1968 film with Rod Steiger in the lead. But while Murphy didn’t blossom into a literary leading light, he didn’t suffer financially. His family was well-to-do (his doctor grandfather actually delivered John Steinbeck, who became a close family friend). He also knew Hunter S. Thompson well. So he lived a literary life, even if he didn’t produce much work.
In The Sergeant, which is set years after that vivid scene of killing in the forest, Murphy’s titular character is middle aged, performing maintenance with the U.S. Army’s 61st Petroleum Supply in France. He becomes attracted to a private first class named Swanson. The young soldier has no sexual interest in Sergeant Callan—he has a French girlfriend named Solange. But Callan offers for Swanson to work under him as a company clerk. He’s insistent, making the offer multiple times: Sergeant Callan took a long drink from his can. He set it on the ground, staring at the boy. “You coming to work for me?” The question hung in the night, like the expected beat of a drum, straining, sounding, then rolling soft through the air. He was enveloped, trapped, caught in a rhythm outside himself.
Well, they do work together, and from there the two become wrapped in an interpersonal drama that tortures them both. As you doubtless know, books of this type are almost always tragedies. In our opinion that doesn’t owe so much to sexual preference as to sex itself. It’s pretty hard to find an American novel where sex or sexual desire doesn’t have negative consequences. We’ve observed this constantly over our years of reading and consider it to be a revealing quirk about American culture, an embedded puritan streak to which authors succumb. Some have argued that it’s actually a broadly Western syndrome. That could be, but we mostly read American fiction. The point is The Sergeant doesn’t foreshadow a happy ending. Unrequited love—or maybe obsession is a better label—rarely does. But Murphy’s skill makes it a marvel to read.
He stood at the wooden bar eating his sandwich, listening with pleasure to the voices from the card room. He was all alone. Then the door behind him opened and a cold rush of wind swept through the room. There was no mirror along the bar but somehow he did not need it. He sipped once more from the beer and when he set it down all the pleasure was gone and he knew at that moment that no pleasure could ever last while this could still happen—while his heart was helpless against this quick and fearful tightening. He did not turn around. There were three footsteps and the man was beside him. “You’ve been following me,” said the boy, hoarsely, almost in a whisper.
