Context
Preface to The Bamboo Bed
William Eastlake
In 1989 Eastlake wrote the following preface to his 1969 novel about Vietnam, a war, said one critic, "that exactly suits his sensibility, and precisely proves his depressing point about the nature of man and the insane projects with which he is somehow compelled to occupy his brief time on earth."
I wrote this book as a result of going to Vietnam as a correspondent. I went to that war because I felt it was my responsibility as a writer to cover the most historic happening of our time. In the era of the great Civil War between our States, America had the finest writers our country ever produced—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman—yet they had little to say about the most powerful piece of history in their lifetime. A generation later, Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, and two generations later came Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling Civil War true romance, Gone With the Wind.
I miss very much that the geniuses of the Civil War time remained silent; I regret even more that my own mentors, such as John Steinbeck, in my time did not have a book about a war that divided our country and ended in defeat. I hope that this book might make a small contribution to victory—a victory over those who hang out more flags for another similar war in our time. In any time.
Vietnam was a valuable experience for America. It taught us that there are no winners and everybody loses—the vanquished and the vanquisher. The lesson has not sunk in yet, but I am confident that it will.
An objective nonfiction version of war does not make sense. Because war is chaos. War is insanity in action. Insanity manifest. Only the artist can give form to the weird happenings. I like to think that that is why Carey McWilliams, the editor of the Nation, asked me to go to Vietnam as a correspondent for them.
If you fear the unconscious, do not read this book. The Bamboo Bed is an attempt to explore the workings of the mind when it is set free. The terror of war is a liberator. All that is not said is said. All that is not permitted is permitted. The Bamboo Bed is another Mark Twain’s Letters From the Grave. Much of what Twain wrote was destroyed because it was unacceptable. Now all of what Twain wrote is permitted. We should celebrate this. The artist will make us free. I take small credit for The Bamboo Bed when it works. It worked when I listened carefully and allowed the randomness of the unsaid to be said. We should not fear the revelations of army language. Army language is not obscene; it is a futile and faint attempt to protest the obscenity of war. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace ignored, left out, the stuff of war—how soldiers talk. Their language in war is timeless and universal. Even our own Ernest Hemingway, who claimed to be "telling it truly," failed because of his attempts also to reach the Book of the Month Club. But don’t condemn Tolstoy and Hemingway. Condemn the mendacity of their time. The lies of omission in their time. War must have a stop. Listen to the soldier. Listen to the dying and the dead. War must have a stop.
In The Bamboo Bed I am attempting to accomplish what a painter attempts to see beyond what a photograph shows. All of The Bamboo Bed is based on real people, not fiction. Real incidents, not something I made up, yet it is a work of fiction as is the work of an artist who paints a picture that goes beyond what appears to be there to a two-eyed observer. The artist sees the people, sees the incident, with a third eye. A novel of the happenings of war is an attempt to organize the unorganized, to give form and meaning to chaos. An objective view of the war in Vietnam is merely a crowd of statistics. An objective account of a happening is meaningless without the third eye, without the fiction of art. No one saw what Goya, what Rembrandt, what Leonardo saw until these artists showed us the truth beyond the illusions of reality. There were thousands of accounts of whaling before Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, yet his fictional account is the only survivor. William Shakespeare’s fictional account of a man called Hamlet tells us more about universal and timeless men than any history or factual biography. In The Bamboo Bed I could have written what was recorded on a tape recorder, but I wanted to write what was trying to be said by the nurse, by the soldier, by the B-52 bombers, by Agent Orange and all the poisons of war.
When The Bamboo Bed was first published, I received a fan letter from a Vietnamese soldier who wanted to translate the book into Vietnamese. I don’t know what happened to his project, although this book has been translated into several languages. Both sides should feel a small victory if and when The Bamboo Bed makes it into the Vietnamese language. The war will have an ending. Tragedy, black humor, love, and death are comrades in arms.
