A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
SUICIDE IS
PAINLESS...
BUT LOSS OF CREATIVE CONTROL CAN HURT LIKE THE
DICKENS
On November 4, a
physician/writer named Dr. H. Richard Hornberger
died at the age of 73 in Portland, Maine. You
undoubtedly have no idea who he was. His death
received zero attention from TV or radio, and
your local paper probably gave him three or four
column inches in the weekly obit wrapup on
Sunday, if anything.
Give up? Perhaps
it would help if I told you that H. Richard
Hornberger was Hawkeye Pierce.
Under the nom
de plume Richard Hooker, Dr. Hornberger
related his experiences as a Korean War army
sawbones in his novel M*A*S*H.
Hornberger spent
twelve years working on the novel while earning
his keep as a thoracic surgeon
("chest-cutter" in M*A*S*H
parlance) in small towns on the Maine coast.
After enduring numerous rejections, he finally
found a taker for his book in William Morrow Co.
in 1968. It became a runaway bestseller, one of
the most popular novels published in the sixties.
He would later author two more novels.
As big as the
novel was, it was eclipsed in the popular
imagination by Robert Altman's film version of
M*A*S*H, released in 1970, which starred
Donald Sutherland as Dr. Benjamin Franklin
"Hawkeye" Pierce and Elliott Gould as
Dr. "Trapper" John McIntyre. In turn,
the movie gave way in terms of public mindsight
to the CBS television series starring Alan Alda
and Wayne Rogers in the Pierce and McIntyre
roles; it ran for eleven wildly successful
seasons beginning in 1972.
After Hornberger
died, his son told the New
York Times that the author had based the
randy and irreverent draftee surgeon Pierce on
himself.
Like Hornberger,
Pierce was a small-town doctor from Maine who had
gone to a small Maine college (the fictional
"Androscoggin" instead of Hornberger's
Bowdoin). And like Hornberger, Pierce was as
devoted to the slow-paced life he had left behind
as he was to the frat-boy hijinks he performed to
pass the time and ease the tension at the
front-line army hospital where he served in
Korea.
M*A*S*H
bears similarities to such contemporary military
novels as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five,
particularly in its picaresque and ironic feel.
Unlike Heller and Vonnegut, however, Hornberger
was interested in telling his story straight, no
chaser. He sought to capture the experience of
life on the front lines as an army surgeon as
accurately and unblinkingly as possible.
Because he
identified so closely with his main character,
Hornberger was repulsed by the television
portrayal of Pierce by actor Alan Alda. His son
said, "He liked the movie because he thought
that it followed his original intent very
closely...but my father was a political
conservative, and he did not like the liberal
tendencies that Alan Alda portrayed Hawkeye
Pierce as having.
"My father
didn't write an antiwar book. It was a humorous
account of his work, with serious parts thrown in
about the awful kind of work it was and how
difficult and challenging it was."
Hornberger's son
is right about Altman's film paralleling the
book. Aside from a few vague swipes at the ideals
of career-officer type Hot Lips Houlihan (Sally
Kellerman) and patriotic hypocrite Frank Burns
(Robert Duvall), the movie does not preoccupy
itself with the stupidity and absurdity of the
U.S. Army, and there is no overt political
content.
The film does
improve on the novel in that it cuts out much of
the fat, specifically the boot camp and
voyage-home sections that dissipate much of
Hornberger's narrative momentum. But the film
essentially replicates the episodic and
implausible tone of the book, locker-room antics
interspersed with gory (although never graphic)
surgery scenes leavened with ironically laconic
dialogue. It was the film that broke Altman as a
major directorial talent, masterfully paced and
casted and filled with such enduring images as
the Last Supper tableau at the Painless Pole's
suicide feast. Even the twenty-minute section of
the film which showed the football game between
Pierce's 4077th M*A*S*H and the 325th Evac
Hospital stands as the best gridiron scenario in
a film of its era, outpacing North Dallas
Forty and The Longest Yard by a
Hail-Mary pass. No wonder; the screenwriter for M*A*S*H
was Ring Lardner, Jr., son of the Prometheus of
American sportswriting. The apple didn't fall far
from that goalpost.
The television
show was something else, entirely. Although it
naturally was bowdlerized in terms of risque
material, it focused on laughs during its first
few seasons. It did this well; although the cast
was generally inferior to that of the movie (with
the exception of McLean Stevenson's wonderfully
befuddled Lt.Col. Henry Blake), the show's
executive producer and head writer was Larry
Gelbart, veteran scenarist of Sid Caesar's Your
Show of Shows during television's golden age
of comedy. It was a top-notch sitcom. Gradually,
however, key members of the cast departed and
were inadequately replaced. The show became
Alda's venue, both in terms of screen time and
creative content (Alda became a pioneer in the
actor-as-director-and-writer department of TV
hubris). Although it was willing to take chances
in terms of presentation that kept production
standards high, the show became as preachy and
ideological as Alda was off-camera.
People began to
wonder if the series, as it stretched on years
beyond the actual length of the three-year-long
Korean War, was more a commentary on the Vietnam
War than a portrayal of the Korean conflict it
was supposed to depict.
In contrast,
Hornberger's succeeding work made it clear where
Hawkeye Pierce really stood on the
issues of the day. In the sequel novel M*A*S*H
Goes To Maine, Hornberger has Pierce taking
on a collection of antiwar types in the sixties,
years after his Korean experiences, and
"kicking some hippie ass". Clearly,
Pierce as he remained in the literary hands of
his creator was unrecognizable to the devotees of
Alda's character on the television series. The
Pierce of the printed page believed that war is
hell and that authority could be both arbitrary
and mindless. However, that particular Pierce
never doubted for a moment that his calling was
to stand in the service of others, both as a
doctor and as an American citizen. The TV Pierce
went from a somewhat-jaundiced footloose bachelor
to a noble dissenter who questioned every order
and doubted every intention. A more unlikely
bifurcation from the same literary character
could not have been created.
Hornberger had to
surrender creative rights to his character when
the producers of Altman's movie bought them from
him. In turn, these rights moved on to
Twentieth-Century Fox Television when they
produced the TV series M*A*S*H. In light
of the way the series evolved, one can't help but
wonder how much pain Hornberger must have
suffered watching his creative life's work travel
down such a drastically oppositional path.
In the dark night
of his soul, he certainly must have given thought
to the ultimate price an artist pays to hand over
his work to other people.
Did he sell out
his alter ego Hawkeye Pierce for thirty pieces of
silver?
The famous logo of
the novel (and the movie advertising) was of a
man's hand with index and middle fingers extended
in a "V". Atop the middle finger is an
American soldier's helmet. Extending from the
bottom of the hand is a woman's shapely legs. It
was an image that perfectly captured the spirit
of the novel and the film. In retrospect, though,
one can't help but wonder if the
"V-for-victory" didn't turn out to
actually be a peace sign.
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
Hooray
For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
Hooray
For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash
Hooray
For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?
Hooray
For Me #12-- Why America Gets No Kicks from
Soccer
Hooray
For Me #13-- O Canada! Who Stand on Guard For
Thee?
