The Broken Place

By Michael Shaara

Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Michael Shaara’s first novel, The Broken Place, is the triumphant story of Tom McClain—Korean War hero, wounded veteran, professional boxer, college student, and sufferer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Upon McClain's return to the U.S., he heads to his college campus in Vermont, to try to pick up the pieces of the life he'd left behind before he went into the army. But while he's glad to reunite with his old friend, fellow med-student, drinking companion and raconteur Charlie Ravenal, he's not sure he wants to stay in school. He's restless, and not even a date with blonde, petite Lise Hoffman—the prettiest girl on the campus who is infatuated with him—can shake him out of his funk. A trip to the Holy Land with his army buddy Tony Wilson ends in disaster in Afghanistan. McClain comes to the realization that he's a fighter...it's all he knows how to do. So he decides to do the only thing he's comfortable with, and climbs back into the ring. It's there that McClain at last feels at home. And his boxing career is on the rise—until the night he kills a man in the ring, a man he didn't know, a man he had no beef with. McClain will fight no more, but it will take the love of a good woman and his best friend to save him...from himself.

With a brand new introduction by the author's son, New York Times bestselling author Jeff Shaara.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Antenna Books
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623061029

Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara (1928-88) was an American writer of science, sports and historical fiction. He served in the Korean War, was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University. The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975.

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Praise for THE BROKEN PLACE

In this well-written first novel Michael Shaara has taken an ordinary rather trite theme—a prizefighter kills another man in the ring—and turned it into a moving allegory of man’s search for belief in an unbelieving world. Tom McClain is a Korean War hero who miraculously escapes death on patrol. Returning to civilian life, he renounces college in order to see the world with a buddy, Tony Wilson. They get as far as the Himalayas when Tony becomes delirious and dies. Death continues to follow McClain when he returns home to become a professional prizefighter. He is known as the finisher, a carry-over from his college days. McClain has a great future ahead of him, but he is a strange, philosophical young man. I got this one problem, he tells his friend Charley Ravenal. I just can’t stop believing... In all this world there are no signs and no miracles and nobody watching over and nobody caring. But I believe anyway. If there is such a thing as a born writer, Michael Shaara is certainly that. Although owing a good deal to Hemingway (no doubt he is still young), he has a natural rhythm that is unmistakable. He will probably have to curb a tendency to attempt too much (war, love, travel, boxing) too glibly. Nevertheless, he was written an impressive first novel.

—Library Journal

Tom McClain is Camus’ Absurd Man—aware of the world and of the conflicts he endures in it, suffering from his existential outlook and seeking for the answer, from the battlefields of Korea to a mountain retreat in Vermont. Believing that man was made for use in this world, he feels the pressure all the time, but is also caught up in the role he must play as a born boxer, a natural fighter. In this first novel Mr. Shaara follows McClain from the Korean War in which he has nearly died, back to an attempt at a pre-med course in college, through a love affair, and, most shattering of all, through his experiences when he returns to the ring and then goes on a jaunt to the Middle East with an old Army buddy. Mr. Shaara does a fine, convincing job of writing about war, about boxing and in depicting Tom McClain’s feelings of frustration and emptiness, his desperate search for a meaning in life.

—Publishers Weekly

"The author spars like Hemingway through much of this first novel about a soldier-prizefighter who kills a man in the ring. It’s probably inevitable. Writers are mostly violent people who act gentle. When a writer is a gentle person who acts violent, as Michael Shaara seems to be, Hemingway is one of the few guides available.

"Tom McClain, Mr. Shaara’s fighter, dreams of college beauty Lise Hoffman as Gary Cooper once dreamed of Ingrid Bergman. He takes off after the Korean War for a pilgrimage with an English war buddy across Asia, only to watch his buddy die of meningitis on a Himalayan back road. McClain is strong and silent, lives in a cabin on a mountainside, hunts in the early morning. It’s still good coinage, whatever the original mint.

Yet the best of The Broken Place" suffers from no such deprivation. When Mr. Shaara writes at ringside he writes as well as anyone around. He makes McClain an outstanding fighter, intelligent and deadly; he shows us how that kind of fighter fights, then shows us why McClain comes on slowly in the ring, letting the other man make the points in the early rounds, studying his punches, learning his style and his mistakes. Ready to close in, he is controlled at first, reading out the information he has collected—on line in real time, as the computer people say. Then he sees red and wants to kill, a special sort of violence available to only a few in these restrained modern times.

"McClain’s is a rare sickness, and more rarely still does someone write it truly. Mr. Shaara generates fits of murderous rate at least as well as Hubert Selby Jr., and somewhat better than Truman Capote. Having done so, he seems ready to explain McClain’s violence away. But answers proliferate in his search for them, and we get so many that none is conclusive.

"McClain’s father is an angry, hunking Scotsman gone on drink, a man who might have bred into his son more violence than he can handle. Besides the father, we get McClain’s war experience, which climaxes when he feels sure he is going to die, until they shovel him out of a pile of North Korean corpses. The fear obsesses him during a long hospitalization: then we have his tour of Asia, the tragic experience of his buddy, his impossible worship of Lisa, his autistic hunting excursion. Mr. Shaara piles up these reasons for his killer drive because he knows it’s that complex. He’s right. We are all that resilient; we require that much provocation before we are capable of killing. It takes a brutalized childhood and much more to make McClain a killer, and even then he has the innate decency to go temporarily insane when he fully realizes he has killed.

"For all its early sparring, The Broken Place doesn’t pull its final punches. Michael Shaara, one novel in, comes on at least as a middleweight."


—Richard Rhodes, The New York Times Book Review

"Michael Shaara’s The Broken Place is a remarkable first novel, the kind that troubles the mind and sticks with you for a good time.

"It’s not an unusual theme: a man’s lonely search to find himself and his God; but it is handled in a particularly sensitive manner that makes the novel a moving experience.

"There’s something of every man in Tom McClain’s make-up, and perhaps that is why Shaara’s creation gains such deep character identification with the reader.

"The story is simple. McClain is almost killed in an act of stupid heroism during the Korean War. He returns to a small college campus where he meets the woman of his life, but he must run from her too, because he is not a whole man yet. A trip to Palestine and India ends in disaster, like so much else in his life. When he returns, he resumed a career as a boxer, and it is here in the ring that he finally comes to terms with his world.

"Death and the possibility of death hangs heavy over the work from beginning to end. Yet it is not a gloomy work. There is an inner glow that dispels it although you can’t forget that death is there.

The title reveals a great deal about what Shaara is trying to say and the manner in which he goes about it. It comes from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms . Hemingway said, The world breaks everyone and after many are strong at the broken places."

"Many traces of the Hemingway manner and style can be found in Shaara’s writing. But it does not distract from the story or the mood. Perhaps it serves to enhance the theme and make it more accessible to the reader.

"The allusions to Hemingway have meaning. The spare style of writing makes it possible to read the entire work in an evening. And that is the way it should be read and absorbed because it will have more impact that way.

It isn’t the sort of novel you can dip into here and there and get something. There is no particular poetry in the writing style. It simply gathers momentum from the beginning and never lets up. That’s a tribute to the writer and to his theme.


Many men will read Shaara’s book and say, I know the feeling." That Tom McClain was able to make peace might serve as an inspiration to so many who are still searching.


"There is reality and meaning in the lives of his other characters, too. Women may not like it,

because he is not kind to their sex—but what writer is these days?

There is a feeling that the Florida State University professor has put a great deal of himself into this novel. Perhaps that is why it strikes fire.

—Tallahassee Democrat

"A former cop in the St. Petersburg Police Department and now a teacher of creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee has just come out with an absorbing and convincing first novel about violence and what it does to one man.

"Michael Shaara also has been a soldier, boxer and wanderer in his long and varied career, and this book demonstrates his rare ability to fuse his experience with his very substantial abilities as a writer. Usually men of action can’t express themselves very well, but The Broken Place knows that when writing and doing go together something genuine and exciting can result.

"His hero is Tom McClain, a typical man of action who usually means more than he says. Badly shot up in the Korean War, bemedaled but cynical, McClain tries to find himself after his discharge, first at college, then on a long and eventful journey in the Middle East, and finally in the boxing ring, where he has had previous experience.

"Wherever he goes he is in constant and strenuous movement, and it is in the descriptions of McClain’s varied and often violent actions that Shaara is at his best. You believe him because he has been through the same things himself—and he knows how to make his experiences come to life.

The book has some imperfections. There are some stylistic difficulties—a good deal of repetition and occasionally too much use of such trite expressions as feeling no pain" for just plain drunk. You are battered pretty constantly by the awareness that McClain is a killer, especially in the last section, though the battering adds to you understanding of what Shaara is doing with his story.

But McClain and the characters who surround him are genuine and interesting, and in the last fight scene and later, when McClain finally makes his peace, you’re deeply involved enough with him to hope that this time it’s for real.
—Orlando Sentinel, Florida Magazine

A good fighter is fun to watch. A good writer is fun to read. But they don’t often come together in one person. That’s why most athletes write their biographies as told to" somebody else.

"Michael Shaara, presently a resident of Tallahassee, is one of the few to have mastered both gentle arts—a fact well illustrated in his new novel—his first—just published called The Broken Place (New American Library, $5.50.)

"Once a policeman on the St. Petersburg City Police Force, Shaara is a man of varied experience and talents. Soldier, boxer, teacher, among other things, he has managed to fuse his life of action into that of his art, impregnating his prose with a genuineness that gives it the flavor of truth. In stories about men of action, this flavor is hard to come by, but Shaara manages to do it with plenty to spare.

"His hero is Tom McClain, a reasonably inarticulate man of action who usually means more than he says. Badly shot up in the Korean War, bemadalled but a little cynical, he tries to find himself— first back in college, then on a vividly described journey to the Middle East, and finally in the boxing ring. Wherever he goes he is in constant and strenuous movement, and it is in the descriptions of McClain’s varied (and often violent) actions that Shaara is at his best. He has been these ways himself—and knows how to vivify his experience so that it becomes a part of the reader’s own.

"Not that The Broken Place is flawless. There are repetitions and a few stylistic misfortunes— expressions like feeling no pain for drunk are a bit too plentiful; but the clichés are far outweighed by the general excellence of the writing.

The reader is battered pretty constantly by the awareness that McClain is a killer—but again it’s a beautiful kind of battering that adds to his understanding of all men as well as of McClain. McClain’s friends and his women—and there are many—are interesting, honestly conceived people. His descriptions of prize-fighting from the inside—McClain’s actual thoughts, impuses and feelings as he throws, and takes, his punches—are magnificent. And when he makes his peace at the book’s end, the reader is involved deeply enough with him to hope that this time it’s for real.


—St. Petersburg Times

"Tom McClain, a professional fighter, attempts to do in 239 pages what would take another many hours on an analyst’s couch. He is looking for a reason for being, a point for existence.

A Korean War hero, McClain returns home in the year of the guitar and discovers he is out of tune with the conventional world he knew. HE feels his frailty like dry glass vacant in the wind."

"Friends try to help. Charley Ravenal is honest and protective, Lise Hoffman tender, innocent and warm. For McClain she is the earth and he her meteor. But at the moment he is surest of his feelings for her, McClain leaves Lise still in search of himself.

"He travels with an ill-fated friend through Palestine and India, where the most desperate moments of the night reveal things to the wanderer what the days have kept hidden.

When McClain comes home again it is to the boxing ring, the only place where he feels complete. He doesn’t fight for money, for a future or even for release of hate. He knew when his arms were moving this was his natural life, he was a fighter."

"Author Shaara has the sensitivity to present the interior voyage of a man becoming. Often McClain’s world fractures, but at those moments beauty and freshness enter like sunlight. McClain, the reader feels, will make it around the bend.

This is a novel at once soft and strong, tender and tough, like the journey of a man, in search of his soul.

—Miami Herald

Michael Shaara of Florida State University has been widely known for several years as a successful writer of short fiction and essays. One of the latter, narrating in The Saturday Evening Post his death" and recovery from a heart attack, reached millions of readers.

"Now Shaara’s impressive creative talent manifests itself in The Broken Place, a novel that is at once tough and tender, that moves rapidly and still remains reflective, that is sexually realistic without being pornographic, that is funny in spots, yet serious about the human condition.

The novel covers two clearly defined years in the life of Thomas McClain. Wounded in Korea in the spring of 1953, McClain returns to the college he had been attending before entering the service. There he renews his friendship with Charlie Ravenal, soon to graduate from medical school, and has a brief affair with one girl before falling in love with Lise Hoffman, who is lovely and innocent," as he himself is not. Although their relationship is interrupted, and almost terminated, while McClain

makes a promised trip across Asia with a wartime friend, Lise helps McClain to recover from a lifetime of spiritual and physical hurt.

For McClain is clearly one of the wounded. In the hospital in Korea, Everyone now and then there would seep through him like a spreading stain this wet thick feeling of despair... In another passage, he views Lise’s feeling for him as sympathy, ...if it wouldn’t last but a moment and even if she should look behind the sad face and see the appalling sick blackness that lay just inside the bone vault, just under the white brow, and even if she should see the reality for what it was, a mindless man in a godless world, a killer, a suicide, and even if then she should run away, it would all make no difference, it would all have been worth it."

"Yet McClain is not just spiritually wounded. His left eye is fragile, having been hit too many times in the prize ring, to which he returns briefly; he suffers a concussion in his final fight; his leg was smashed in Korea; he bruises his hand knocking down a snob at one of Ravenal’s parties and breaks it smashing it against a rock after suffering the concussion.

Through all of this punishment McClain is searching for peace and belief in God. In taking him on this search, Shaara provides us with parallels with Hemingway, who furnishes the title for the novel in a passage from A Farewell To Arms. There is the Hemingway world of violence: (McClain) went in after the hurt with all the barriers down, everything shattered and flying away and nothing but a red rage, a genuine raw red blindness... There’s the Hemingway concreteness and feeling for nature: There no wind and no sound, and the gray vividness ceiling of cloud was just above him, smoky and still, caught in the top of the tall pines. Or He could see the snow mounded slightly over the hidden rocks, and he could see the grain of frozen bark under glazed ice..." And one drunked party has the wild frenzy of those in The Sun Also Rises.

"Yet one feels more compassion for McClain than one feels for most of Hemingway’s heroes. Shaara makes us want McClain to find love and peace and belief. And in the best sense of the word, this is an intellectual novel, one that comments seriously upon man’s life: Shaara has a cure for the broken places that mar man’s soul. As for those other matters that concern critics, the dialogue rings true, the frew characters are done in depth, the style if effective without being intrusive.

I think Florida has a new novelist of great promise.

—Tampa Tribune, Florida Accent Magazine

THE BROKEN PLACE

Michael Shaara

Antenna Books

Brooklyn, New York

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE BROKEN PLACE. Copyright © 1968 by Michael Shaara. All rights reserved. For information, address Antenna Books, 156 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, New York, 11215.

Foreword Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Shaara. All rights reserved.

www.antennabooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shaara, Michael

The broken place / Michael Shaara.—1st ebook ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 13 978-1-62306-030-5

1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—Fiction. 2. Vermont—Fiction. I. Title

First Hardcover Edition: 1968, New American Library

First Paperback Edition: 1994, Pocket Books

First Ebook Edition: September 2013, Antenna Books

To Helen

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY,

A Farewell to Arms

Contents

Copyright

Foreword

HOMECOMING

Spring, 1953

THE JOURNEY

Summer, 1954

THE MOUNTAIN

Spring, 1955

About the Author

Foreword

The Broken Place, published in hardcover by New American Library in 1968, was my father’s first novel. As the author of over forty published short stories, albeit mostly science fiction, my father followed the dictum he no doubt gave to his creative writing students at Florida State University: Write about what you know. So when you read the story of Tom McClain, decorated Korean War hero, up-and-coming boxer, and a man searching for inner peace, you can read the tea leaves and find Michael Shaara in the character of McClain.

While the truth of his life story and the novel aren’t a perfect match (it is fiction, after all), my father was indeed an army veteran, albeit not during the Korean War. A paratrooper with the army’s 82nd Airborne Division, my father went into the service at the tail end of WWII (he was born in 1928 and graduated high school two years early in June 1945, after the war in Europe had ended, and just couple of months before it would end in Japan). An illustrious unit, the 82 nd had seen incredible action from Sicily to Normandy to Operation Market Garden in Holland to the Battle of the Bulge and all the way into the heart of Germany (similar to the action seen by the 101st Airborne as told in Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers). While the 82nd saw no action during my father’s peacetime stint, he wouldn’t have seen any action in Korea either, as President Truman kept the unit at Fort Bragg in North Carolina during that conflict. It may seem silly now, but the idea then was to keep the 82nd in reserve in case of a Soviet invasion and ground attack on U.S. soil — a constant worry during the early years of the Cold War.

My father went through all the training, including numerous parachute jumps, and had the broken bones to show for it. And he no doubt saw men back from WWII who had what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It had gone by other names in previous wars — shell shock in World War I, exhaustion or battle fatigue in World War II, etc. — and it was only with the development of the field of psychology that we were beginning to understand what was going on with the men who witnessed or participated in constant combat, unspeakable horrors, and the ever-present chance of death from any direction at any time. Once berated as cowards, men with PTSD suffered with everything from recurring nightmares (there are WWII veterans who have nightmares to this day even though they are now elderly men nearly seven decades removed from battle), to an extreme withdrawal into themselves, emotional numbing, anger, etc. It’s pretty clear that we can say that Tom McClain is suffering from PTSD throughout the events of The Broken Place, even the title referring to McClain’s shattered psyche from his battle experiences on some unnamed Korean hillside.

When McClain decides to return to the boxing ring, my father was more in his element. As an amateur boxer himself while in the army reserve during his undergrad years at Rutgers University (he graduated in 1951), my father knew the game not only inside the ring but outside. The smell of the gym, the dingy and cold locker rooms, the loud promoters, the taciturn trainers, the crowds out for blood, the glamorous women and hangers-on, the local mobsters — this was a world he knew well. While McClain’s boxing takes place in scenic Burlington, Vermont, ratty old gyms and arenas were the same all over the country, so my father’s experiences in comparatively gritty New Brunswick, New Jersey translate just fine to northern Vermont. The reality of the ring in The Broken Place is skillfully, almost lovingly crafted — it was a rotten world but there was something about it, an almost Hemingway-esque masculinity, which my father loved.

When McClain is in Korea, he befriends a soldier named Tony Wilson. Wilson has a dream to visit the Holy Land, driving through the Middle East then on through Central Asia with a final destination of Singapore, and he has enlisted McClain to ride shotgun with him. Wilson even visits McClain in the hospital after he’s wounded, and reminds McClain of their plan. In post WWII America, there was a great pent-up wanderlust released, a tremendous desire to travel, to see the world. After a decade of the Great Depression, four years of a brutal war on two fronts, and America’s status as one of the two great superpowers in the world, the American standard of living rose to incredible heights. We made goods that were sold all over the world. We helped rebuild Germany and Japan after reducing the countries to rubble. America’s place in the world brought prosperity to all her citizens, and soon enough the ability to travel overseas was no longer only for the rich. While the faithful had been making pilgrimages to Jerusalem for nearly 2,000 years, it was still a long, arduous, and potentially dangerous trip in 1954. Israel had only gained its independence six years earlier, and there remained a near-constant state of hostilities both in Israel and all her neighboring countries. (Some things never change.)

McClain agrees to accompany Wilson, at first out of an obligation to a wartime buddy made in a foxhole, and then later as a man seeking meaning for his own life. McClain’s life was spared (we never do find out the details of what he did that got him wounded and earned him a silver star), and he has survivor’s guilt to go along with his PTSD — why did he survive when so many others did not? There must be a higher purpose to life. Is God out there, listening, watching, paying attention to him? My father, like Tom McClain, was raised as a Catholic — a Roman Catholic by his Italian immigrant parents, similar to McClain’s Irish background. To be Catholic in the early 1950s was to revere the Pope, to attend church where the service was still conducted in Latin, to have faith and believe. My father was not a religious man; neither was Tom McClain. But you cannot undergo a childhood filled with indoctrination into the religion of your parents without something rubbing off.

Similarly, you cannot undergo the horrors of war without questioning everything you ever learned in religious school. My father did make that trip himself, in 1960, bringing home tales (and 8mm film) of a land far more alien than even he expected. That kind of journey was not new to him. His writing career had been launched in 1950 by the publication of his the first genre that appealed to him, science fiction. While those stories related to the world at the time (the Cold War, the threats of nuclear annihilation, etc.) surely you cannot write about the cosmos without wondering if there isn’t something more out there than just a series of molecules that somehow got together and created various life forms. Is life that random? If that’s the case, then it is up to each individual to make of life what he or she will. Rather than following God’s pre-ordained plan without a free will, my father believed that we do have free will and we make our own choices, both good and bad. When tragedy strikes as McClain and Wilson are traveling through Kandahar, Afghanistan, McClain realizes his search for meaning will go on. The trip proves to be a failure when it comes to providing answers.

However, my father did experience a near-death experience closer to the publication of this book. In March 1965, at the age of thirty-six, the stress of writing The Broken Place while teaching a full load of classes became too much for him and he suffered a major heart attack. Rushed to the hospital, his heart stopped beating and he was declared clinically dead. For nearly an hour, the ER doctors worked on him with everything at their disposal — electric shock, heart massage, drugs. Against all odds he was revived, the doctors nicknaming him the new Lazarus. If that didn’t serve as a wake-up call to the presence of something out there, I don’t know what would. It was no doubt a terrifying experience, one that left my father confused, almost numb to the world around him for a while. Much like Tom McClain after surviving his Korean War ordeal. I remember well my father pouring this deep personal experience of coming back from the dead into the writing of The Broken Place.

Upon McClain’s return to his native Vermont, his search for meaning continues. Unlike my father, he drops out of school. And while McClain doesn’t exactly find meaning in the ring, he finds purpose. He comes to the realization that he is a fighter. It’s all he knows, whether boxing or shooting at the enemy as a soldier. Until the fateful moment where one of his punches in the ring leads to the death of a fellow boxer.

The only hope for McClain is embodied in the novel’s golden girl, Lise Hoffman, the campus beauty who falls under McClain’s spell. (Lise is

Reviews for The Broken Place

[andyray_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

mike and i shared a couple of years on this planet together. we also shared a kind of tortuous perfection with our prose, and we both shared an admiration of Papa Hemingway's starkly simple style. I think Mike's writing got better as he aged. I wish he could have had a decade or more and I think he would have surprised us (again). The Broken Place is what it appears to me -- a good writer's first novel, complete with all the enhancements and conveyances such a novel has. Sometimes it works, as it did for Normal Mailer and James Jones, but more often it doesn't, mostly becasue the author is too conscious of outside influences and still trying to find his voice. Mike found his with THE KILLER ANGELS and it is evident again in THE NAME OF THE GAME, (originally titled BILLY BOY). Actually, the style was moulded by Mike's numerous sci-fi and mystery short stoeis over a period of years, but he (like me) became entranced with the art of the novel. Sometimes we install fear in our writers by differentiating the novel and the short story, for what is a novel but a long, detailed, created world, JUST AS IS A SHORT STORY. Hemingway reeks all over BROKEN PLACE, from the title through the numerous conscious similarities in prose style. And what's wrong with that?