The Eye You See With: Selected Nonfiction

By Robert Stone and Madison Smartt Bell

The definitive collection of nonfiction—from war reporting to literary criticism to the sharpest political writing—from the “legend of American letters” (Vanity Fair)

Robert Stone was a singular American writer, a visionary whose award-winning novels—including Dog Soldiers, Outerbridge Reach, and Damascus Gate—earned him comparisons to literary lions ranging from Samuel Beckett to Ernest Hemingway to Graham Greene. Stone had an almost prophetic grasp of the spirit of his age, which he captured with crystalline clarity in each of his novels. Of course, he was also a sharp and brilliant observer of American life, and his nonfiction writing is revelatory.  
 
The Eye You See With—the first and only collection of Robert Stone’s nonfiction—was carefully selected by award-winning novelist and Stone biographer Madison Smartt Bell. Divided into three sections, the collection includes the best of Stone’s war reporting, his writing on social change, and his reflections on the art of fiction. This is an extraordinary volume that offers up a clear-eyed look at the twentieth century and secures Robert Stone’s place as one of the most original figures in all of American letters. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780358212140

Robert Stone

ROBERT STONE (1937–2015) was the acclaimed author of eight novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2007.

Book preview

The Red Field

Stone’s military service occurred in the peacetime navy, from 1955 to 1958; some of its routines are described in Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You! written in another period of peace, though decades later (1993), during the controversy over gays in the US armed services. During his three-year kiddie cruise, which ranged from Western Europe and Africa to Antarctica, Stone saw combat only once, in circumstances that allowed him to observe it from a position of reasonable safety. His vessel was on a mooring when, in the course of the Suez Canal conflict, French aircraft strafed and bombed the harbor, but the United States was in a noncombatant role then, and Stone’s vessel was not directly fired on.

The first thing Stone saw when he came on deck was that "the sea was red . . . And not only was it red, it was swarming with people. It was swarming with Egyptians . . . A French jet would go in. You’d hear it, I don’t know how many minutes later. It was going along the corniche of Port Said, and it was killing every living thing . . . And what it’s always reminded me of was the pictures of cavalry combats where the horses’ eyes are turned to one side in the middle of a cavalry charge. It reminds me of the eyes of the Egyptians who were all around us in their reed boats while the French shot them down, blew them up . . . all around me was this red water and exploding reed boats and Egyptians floating face down and Port Said being absolutely blown apart.* And I thought, ‘This is what I always thought it was like. This is the real thing. This is the way it is.’

And it never occurred to me that anybody was doing anything wrong. Not for a moment . . . I thought to myself, ‘God, I’m glad I’m here. I’m so glad that I’m here.’ . . . And the illumination rounds being fired against the sunset, I thought was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And people were still being killed.

Eventually, it began to penetrate our consciousness that the harbor was filled with dead people . . . But the overwhelming response that I had was ‘I always knew this was the way things were.’ I always thought that the world was filled with evil spirits, that people’s minds teemed with depravity and craziness and weirdness and murderousness, that that basically was an implicit condition, an incurable condition of mankind. I suddenly knew what was meant when Luther said, ‘The world is in depravity.’ I thought I always knew it was like this. It took me all night long to figure something terrible was happening. But when I figured it out, I thought, ‘This is the way it is. There is no cure for this. There is only one thing you can do with this. You can transcend it. You can take it and you make it art.’

In 1971, Stone spent several weeks in Vietnam as a reporter. He spent most of his time observing the general scene, away from active combat zones, but on one occasion he did come under fire. For the rest of his life he was so reticent on this subject that it’s hard to be certain exactly when and where it took place, but aspects of the experience were assigned to his partial alter ego, the reporter John Converse in the novel Dog Soldiers. The Red Field was in Cambodia, near a place called Krek. There Converse and his companions are flattened by friendly fire—specifically, firebombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force. Converse, clinging to earth and life, abruptly recognizes that the world is capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into an instrument of agonizing death. There’s nothing resembling Stone’s elation during the Suez Canal Zone battle; instead, Converse is reduced to a little stingless quiver in the earth. That was all there ever was of him, all there ever had been.

Stone reserved this experience for the transcendence of art. Soon after his return from Vietnam he wrote about the quotidian ironies of life in wartime Saigon in his piece for the Guardian, There It Is, and later he wrote a broader, more penetrating analysis of the American failure there, A Mistake a Hundred Miles Long. The corruption of idealism is one of Stone’s great subjects as a novelist, and he saw the Vietnam War as possibly the most important instance of that for his generation and the one following. Most of the characters in his novels are overshadowed by direct experience of Vietnam or, in the later work, by a sort of atavistic memory of it.

The Vietnam experience obviously colors Stone’s reading of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, but also his reading of Stephen Crane, somewhat more obliquely. When jihad turned its sights on the World Trade Center in 2001, Stone looked at the devastating outcome with the sense of déjà vu, expressed in Out of a Clear Blue Sky—the wreck of the General Slocum serving as another proof that the world is ever ready to morph into an instrument of agonizing death.

To a degree, we have claimed exemption from the forces of history, he writes in The Holy War—another expression of déjà vu. Now, history has come for us, presenting old, half-forgotten due bills. By the time of that writing Stone had understood for a long time that those bills always come due, and that as the old warrior indicates in No Such Thing as Peace, the potential of the red field is necessary for peace to be meaningful. Before death I have nothing to offer but dread reverence, Stone wrote near the end of his life. But the practice of hope, of life against death, of edges and surviving, were what I wanted to write about.

MSB

Introduction to

The Red Badge of Courage

Both Stephen Crane and The Red Badge of Courage have a quality of mystery. The process of composition is always mysterious, but here the term applies particularly.

In the winter of 1893, a twenty-two-year-old from New Jersey, a youth of literary and bohemian pretensions living at the Art Students League, announced to his friends that he proposed to write a historical romance, a pot-boiler about the American Civil War. Young Stephen Crane had a painter friend named Linson with whom he sometimes attempted collaboration on humor pieces that left most editors unamused. Linson owned a set of Century Magazine’s series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, which he had stacked on a divan in one corner of his studio. Over the freezing winter months, Crane, whose impoverished style of living quite threatened his health, browsed the magazines and began writing a novel while Linson painted. Sometimes, stationery being unaffordable, he wrote on butcher paper. Later Linson remembered Crane squatting among the stacked magazines and complaining about the war memoirs: "I wonder that some of those fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps! They spout eternally of what they did but they are emotionless as rocks!"

It turned out that Crane was not good at pot-boilers, lacking the appropriate patience, discipline, and sensibility. Perhaps for the same reasons, he was already showing very little promise as a newspaperman. In fact, by 1893 Crane had already written one highly unsuitable novel, called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Rather than make his fortune, Crane had spent every penny of his schoolboy savings to have it privately printed. Dealing with slum life in and around the Bowery, Maggie was not considered a respectable publication, and only its obscurity spared the young author involvement in scandal.

With the publication of this unlikely youth’s unlikely second book, The Red Badge of Courage, American literature entered the modernist age. Like all great works, The Red Badge of Courage can claim the whole of literature as antecedent and remain unique. Perhaps there are earlier novels that have so combined psychological intimacy with dense external detail. Few since have done it so simply and surely and eloquently. The effect is of light, the clear light of nature illuminating an utterly realized landscape. Clarity is the essence, clarity of thought and of description.

William Dean Howells, who was one of Crane’s earliest and strongest supporters, liked to say that Crane’s genius had sprung to life fully armed, like Athena. But Athena sprang from the head of a god. The Red Badge of Courage and its author seem to have appeared out of the seamless American ether. Stendhal had seen Marengo and Moscow in flames. Tolstoy had commanded troops in the Caucasus. Crane’s most strenuous experience before the composition of The Red Badge of Courage seems to have been a semester catching for the Syracuse University baseball team.

Today The Red Badge of Courage is in the canon, as it should be, an educational rite of passage. High school students continue to receive it as an assignment, and many of its young readers discover what the rest of us may have forgotten: that its power is shattering and undiminished by time. To reread it after many years is a rich and disturbing experience.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that so many of the young have had The Red Badge of Courage thrust on them. As everyone remembers, it is a novel about a youth’s experience of war by a young writer who himself had no such experience. Most of its first-time readers are approaching the end of their adolescence. If they are open to books, they can hardly resist identifying with its young soldier protagonist, Henry Fleming. He stands on the brink of adulthood at its most terrifying and dangerous, facing the most dreaded and celebrated of all human endeavors. So accomplished is the realism that it persuades completely. How many who have read The Red Badge of Courage in high school over the years—it’s impossible not to wonder—from Belleau Wood to Bastogne to Phu Bai, have approached their first battle thinking of Henry and hoping to share his pilgrimage and his survival? Yet down the generations comes this surly objection, this adolescent murmur: He wasn’t there. It’s a muted objection because of the book’s uncanny power, but it’s always present.

Modern readers, the sort of readers that Crane was in a sense creating, highly value authenticity. We’ve been trained to it. Crane’s heir and disciple Hemingway, with his anti-intellectualism and his vanity, claimed to set great store by authenticity. But if the existence of The Red Badge of Courage proves anything, it’s that fiction justifies itself entirely on its own terms. For reasons we imperfectly understand, Crane in Linson’s studio was seized by inward visions of hallucinatory intensity which, through the strength and simplicity of his language, he was able to transmit intact to his readers. It is as good an example of the primary process of fiction as literature affords. Mysterious though it is, it represents a unitary personal vision about which we may make certain observations.

One consistently fascinating quality of the narrative is its psychological sureness. Of young Henry Fleming we read:

He had, of course, dreamed of battles all his life—of vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire. In visions he had seen himself in many struggles. He had imagined peoples secure in the shadow of his eagle-eyed prowess. But awake he had regarded battles as crimson blotches on the pages of the past. He had put them as things of the bygone with his thought-images of heavy crowns and high castles. There was a portion of the world’s history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever.

From his home his youthful eyes had looked upon the war in his own country with distrust. It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.

This passage is really much more complicated than Crane makes it seem, and it does a number of things at once. While involving the reader’s imagination in the character’s situation, it simultaneously defines the character, telling much that we need to know about young Henry’s education, inner life, and cast of mind. As the narrative proceeds, the intensity and vividness increase. Things take on a coloration that the reader only gradually recognizes as fear. The key word is recognizes. Little by little, the reader is displaced by Henry Fleming. Before it is declared, Henry’s growing fear surprises and overtakes us. Then:

A little panic-fear grew in his mind. As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities. He contemplated the lurking menaces of the future, and failed in an effort to see himself standing stoutly in the midst of them. He recalled his visions of broken-bladed glory, but in the shadow of the impending tumult he suspected them to be impossible pictures.

In the darkness of the night before his first fight:

He wished, without reserve, that he was at home again making the endless rounds from the house to the barn, from the barn to the fields, from the fields to the barn, from the barn to the house. He remembered that he had often cursed the brindle cow and her mates, and had sometimes flung milking stools. But, from his present point of view, there was a halo of happiness about each of their heads, and he would have sacrificed all the brass buttons on the continent to have been enabled to return to them. He told himself that he was not formed for a soldier. And he mused seriously upon the radical differences between himself and those men who were dodging implike around the fires.

From this point on, the reader’s fortunes are Henry’s, not only for the rest of the book but, as it were, for life. That is why so many young soldiers—perhaps astonished to find themselves soldiers, having thought, incorrectly, that men had become better, or more timid—have so closely pondered The Red Badge of Courage. But even if war stopped coming back for more unlucky generations, its power would hold.

How did Crane do it? How does genius do what it does, know what it knows? One thing is certain: young Stephen Crane, there in Linson’s cold studio, had a number of the elements required for a great novel. For one thing, he was prodigiously gifted. For another, he had a vision of life and of the world, complete and thoroughgoing. At the mere age of twenty-two he may not have had a right to one, but he had it, all right: The Red Badge of Courage is its artistic rendering.

Part of genius is timing. The disaster of Crane’s premature death obscures his placement in literary history. If all had gone differently he might have sat with Robert Frost as an ancient of the arts at President Kennedy’s inauguration. He was roughly contemporary with Frost, and with Joyce and Pound. He belonged to the century he never lived to see. He was that Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, the minister’s child, the preacher’s kid, or PK, as they said at Syracuse University when Crane attended. The language of overcoming, of elevated striving and moral improvement, was in his childhood’s ear. His talent, together with his vision, turned that language into something wonderful.

The Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, DD, Stephen’s father, did not possess his son’s gifts but was also an author. Popular Amusements (1869) was one of his books. Arts of Intoxication (1870) was another. (He was against them.) Dr. Crane followed these up with Holiness, the Birthright of All God’s Children (1874). (He was in favor.) When Stephen was not yet nine, Jonathan Crane died prematurely, and this may have had quite a lot to do with the vision that informs The Red Badge of Courage.

The vision is of what Stephen Crane elsewhere called the Red Universe. It is a specter of the world as never-ending struggle, a struggle that must be endured and even embraced. In it, life is hard and unforgiving, without security, without peace. Yet in the very inferno is a great beauty that can belong to the strong. That is what The Red Badge of Courage is about: the earth as battleground and field of blood, terrible, infinitely desirable. At the close of the book Henry Fleming is rewarded with a vision for the courage he ultimately displays after running away. He sees things as they are in their dreadful majesty. He believes he has the courage now to accept them:

With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

Thus life as pilgrim’s progress, as a moral journey. Reading it we are reminded that Stephen Crane was also a contemporary of Nietzsche and Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps we have learned a few things over the past hundred years. We too hope that men will become better, or more timid.

Of course it is not possible to say what formed Stephen Crane’s vision of the world as war. We can speculate about the loss of his father or premonition of his own early death or prophecy of the next century itself. In his day Americans were forgetting what they had learned about war at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. They were reaching out, growing adventurous again. They sang about the fateful lightning, but they had forgotten what it was like.

War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., late of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers, told a Harvard graduating class in 1895. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. A war with Spain was only a couple of years away, and some in his audience would be in it. For the neo-Roman republic, an imperial age was beginning. Crane himself had only a short time to live. He had inherited his father’s constitution and undermined it, partly by his never-ending journeys to every available war in quest of authenticity. As a combat correspondent in the Balkans and Cuba, he bent his descriptive powers to the service of Hearst and Pulitzer. He always felt he had to justify writing The Red Badge of Courage without having been there.

When Stephen Crane died young in 1900, the United States saw itself as young also, setting out on a great journey. If our young friend Henry Fleming survived the war, he would no doubt have learned in time that life resists the unitary vision. Fiction will probably always pursue it nevertheless, doubtless in vain but as gloriously as possible. And in it we can be sure that courage—peremptory, embarrassing word—will always be required.

—Introduction to the Library of America edition, 1984

There It Is

Last month I went to Vietnam and stayed there for a couple of weeks. I went because I was working on a second novel which sought to deal with the condition of American life in 1970, and this condition, as is well known, is pervaded with a consciousness of the Vietnam War. Many Americans have even come to believe that the nature of our society and its impact on the history of this century is being defined in Vietnam. In any case, I felt a certain personal necessity to transform my own awareness of the country and the war from abstract outrage to people and places I could perceive, however briefly and imperfectly, from one day to the next.

The previous occupant of my Saigon hotel room apparently had a thing about squashing lizards. There must have been nearly a dozen mashed into the walls and the tiles of the floor. Since house lizards are useful insectivores, a cheerful friendly presence in every hot country on earth, it is difficult to understand why anyone should want to massacre them in this fashion. So the vision of my faceless predecessor stalking about his Sydney Greenstreet colonial hotel wasting lizards with a framed tintype of Our Lady of Lourdes (on evidence, the hunter’s instrument) is a disturbing one with which to begin the day.

Breakfasting on a croissant and a bottle of soda pop, I contemplate tiny dinosaur corpses and entertain unbidden associations. The first association is a story I have been told the night before of the Great Elephant Stomp.

In the hills some time ago, the American military authorities, who are carnally perceived in the many-faced, many-armed deity known as MACV (Military Advisory Command, Vietnam), declared elephants to be enemy agents, since they were employed in logistical transport by the NVA and the Front. There ensued what might have been an episode from the Ramayana, in which MACV unleashed enormous deadly flying insects known as choppers to destroy his enemies the elephants. Whooping gunners descended on the herds to mow them down with 50-millimeter machine guns, and even my scandalized informant remembers the operation with something like insane exhilaration.

Outside, a man without legs sits on the pavement holding his hat; I throw 10 piasters in it and walk on. The legless man and I exchange smiles. I’m smiling about what a good guy I am. Who knows why he’s smiling?

The legless man is one of the many blown-up people one sees about the city. Some of them have been blown up by MACV and his associates, some by the Front, some, it seems, by enthusiasts of obscure affiliation. Most of the year, tons of selective ordnance—weird explosive weaponry out of a comic strip sadist’s fantasy—is being directed at the enemy or at those who will do until the enemy comes along. Now the rains have somewhat reduced the traffic in aerial interdiction, but people are still being blown up.

At eight o’clock in the morning it is not very hot by the standard of an American summer. On Nguyen Hue there is a flower market; stalls are bright with lilies, poinciana boughs, and small oriental roses. I walk through the hot fragrant air to the stall of a mama-san to buy a pack of Winstons and some matches. The cigarettes have no revenue stamp; presumably they were once the property of the US Post Exchange, but changed ownership at the dockside or soon after.

I walk around the street vendors and parked Hondas to an arcade in the Eden Passage, where I propose to photograph myself in quadruplicate in order to file my credentials with the Ministry of Information. Several dapper passersby softly inquire if I would like to change money.

I sit looking at my reflection in the take-your-own-picture thing; outside, three little boys about eight years old are looking at my watch. In the course of my short walk from the hotel, I have seen several lepers, a couple of crippled ARVN* soldiers, and a begging cretin led by an ancient woman, but it still seems to be the lizards that worry me.

Lights flash in my eyes—the carefully nurtured outraged humanism I brought with me seems to have stalled at Reptiles.

Who was that kill-crazy bastard? He left a little hash pipe in the writing drawer. Maybe he freaked out and went berserk. Maybe the lizards kept him awake at night. Maybe he just didn’t like them.

The ministry eventually provides me with a press card, and I go to the terrace of the Continental to buy something cold with which to wash down several aspirins. My fever is coming back, the low-grade fever I’ve been nursing for several days along with that outraged humanism.

From the terrace my view commands the National Assembly, which was once a theater, and a heroic statue of two ARVNs in combat stance, which, from the positioning of the principals, is known to local Americans as the National Buggery Monument.

There is a blind ARVN soldier, led about by a small boy, who sells newspapers every day on the hotel terrace, and I have been making it a point to buy my Saigon Post from him. Doing so, I am challenged by a correspondent.

He can see as well as you can, says the correspondent.

I say that he looks blind enough to me.

He’s got about ten different kids, my acquaintance insists. He rents them. He’s here at the same time every day, and every day he’s got a fresh ARVN uniform. You know why he’s got a fresh ARVN uniform? ’Cause he’s in the ARVN—and even the ARVN don’t take blind people.

In the afternoon I take a taxi to Hoa Lu football stadium; it is the day of the Saigon Rock Festival. At Hoa Lu, the infield is crowded with blank-faced mildly curious Vietnamese. Tents have been erected, and some of them raise colored streamers to the wet limp wind, but the effect is closer to the Army of the Potomac by Mathew Brady than Psychedelic City.

On the bandstand an Indonesian group called Exodus is getting badly warped by the acoustics. In the shaded stands a polite crowd of middle-class Vietnamese are drinking lemonade. The ladies of the corps diplomatique are present, for the festival is in fact a benefit performance for the maintenance of the widows, orphans, and surviving remnants of Lam Son 719, the ARVN’s spring offensive into Laos.

In the center of the stands is a space reserved for Madame Thieu, wife of the president of the republic. Press people on the field are speculating about whether the president’s lady will appear. If she does, the press believe, it will be after CBC have played their set and departed.

CBC is the best of the Vietnamese rock groups to have appeared in the course of the Aquarian Age war. Their style is essentially San Francisco 1967 with echoes of the Grateful Dead.

But rock music is as thoroughly un-Vietnamese as bobsledding or gang rape (which seems to have been another innovation stimulated by the American presence), and watching CBC, one is aware that the process through which a twenty-five-year-old Vietnamese transforms himself into a San Francisco bass player must be extremely dislocating.

Bands of GIs, many of them hopelessly out of uniform in headbands and Japanese beads, wander around checking it all out. Wow, they’re saying. There it is. They’re smoking Park Lane cigarettes, which are filtered packaged joints—600 piasters for twenty.

There it is is the great American catchphrase of the war, a three-word summary of the whole situation perceived detail by detail. The GIs go around saying it all day long, since these days consist of a series of unsolicited encounters with the nature of the scene. Dope is so pervasive that the language of the war has become head shorthand. There it is is a phrase to be exchanged by people who are staggering through an interminable bum trip. It is the Whole Expedition, the Vietnamese-American encounter, the War—which is also frequently referred to as this shit.

Two days earlier I went into a bar on Tu Do Street, a bar that had the reputation of serving heroin in beer on request. I thought it sounded pretty improbable, but I believe it now. Inside there were about twenty beautiful Vietnamese bar girls lined up behind the bar. Since the latest army policy is to keep the number of troops in Saigon down to a minimum, business is slow during the day and I was the only customer. Leaning on the chromium, facing twenty people on barstools, I felt like I was the bartender and they had the bottles on the wrong side. The girl opposite me started dealing me a hand of cards. The beer had cost about 200 piasters and I didn’t much want to play cards, so I let them sit there on the wet chrome and smiled knowingly. I didn’t feel very knowing, though. Pretty lame. The ladies watched me drink my cold can of Schlitz; there wasn’t any heroin in it. I was standing there with a dumb expression and my pockets full of money and there was no way they could get it off me short of turning me upside down and shaking it loose. I think one of the girls started to cry. I downed the last of the beer and looked around; they were really digging my knowing smile. As I put my hand on the door, the girl who had dealt the cards turned to the girl beside her.

Well, she said. There it is.

In the evening I go out to dinner in company, which is what foreigners do each evening in Saigon. No one talks about anything for very long except the war. We talk about the contradictions—like my presence in the country, and the fact that the Saigon bar girls seem actually to like Americans in some perverse fashion.

The people I’m with are all serious war reporters who have paid their dues. They

Reviews for The Eye You See With

[jphamilton-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robert Stone’s intriguing novels have been a great pleasure to me for my entire adult life. I’ve gladly followed him through so many storylines, and I’ve been richly rewarded every time. But until now, my reading of his nonfiction was limited to a piece here and there in a few periodicals. Driven by a fellow author and an enormous fan of Stone, the first collection of his nonfiction writings has now been released. The engaging introductions for the book and each of its sections are written by the collection’s enthusiastic editor, Madison Smartt Bell. Bell has also recently written a large biography of Stone, titled Child of Light—which currently sits beckoning to me from a nearby shelf. Reading piece after piece of Stone’s was a glorious experience. His nonfiction writing was rich, varied, and always intelligent. Sometimes life offers great rewards, lately I have been finding myself reaping the riches of Joan Didion’s writings, and now Mr. Bell has brought forth a wonderful volume of Robert Stone in his nonfiction glory. Reading the words of a fine writer holds the darkness of one’s life at bay. When my wife was alive, she was my rock. Now, I find that reading has become my rock, but right now, Stone is my rock.