A novel view of that condition called war

KEY WEST, Fla. -- Everyone tells war stories. The difference is that Joseph Heller, Robert Stone and Philip Caputo made them into literature.

For two intense hours Sunday morning at the Key West Literary Seminar, an annual four-day conclave where 20 or so of America's most distinguished writers gather to mull a literary genre before hundreds of paying enthusiasts, you could have heard a pin dr opped -- or pulled.

Three of the greatest American war novelists reflected upon their work, their subject and the not-so-humble art form that tries to capture it. Some of their remarks stunned the audience.

"The attitudes that went into Catch-22," confided the snowy-haired, 75-year-old Heller, whose 1961 antiwar classic contributed an indelible phrase to the language, "were not those in me as a soldier."

On the contrary, Heller recalled, he found his service late in World War II as a 21-year-old first lieutenant and bombardier in the Mediterranean theater "adventurous, exciting."

"I cannot remember ever having a grievance against a superior officer," admitted the man who invented Yossarian, and perhaps by extension the modern literature of comic military intrigue.

"Part of me loved the war," said Caputo, 57, whose novels drawn from his '60s Vietnam service as an officer in the Marines, and memoir, A Rumor of War (1977), depicts its many horrors.

"I have memories of leading my rifle platoon in several firefights and winning -- as much as one can say that," he recalled. Caputo would experience a kind of "exhilaration" even as he moved on to such grim tasks as lying to parents of dead soldiers about why their sons' coffins were closed before being sent home.

"What literature can't do is morally instruct you," warned Stone, 61, whose early 1970s stint as a journalist in Vietnam led to Dog Soldiers (1974), winner of the National Book Award and basis of the movie, Who'll Stop the Rain? "Good intentions get you nothing. A book has got to work as literature."

Stone, now a Yale professor (with Hemingway beard), provided a historical overview of the subject, echoing program director Irving Weinman's opening remark that the war novel begins with Homer's Iliad. Into the 19th century, Stone observed, traditional glorification and acceptance of war allowed soldiers to be depicted as "dance partners to Jane Austen," and novelists like Austen could write cleanly about war.

Only after World War I, Stone continued, when war became "all-encompassing and universal," did its impact on both language and morality shift. He, like both of his co-panelists, named Philadelphian Paul Fussell's nonfiction The Great War and Modern Memory as the single most brilliant account of that war's effect on modern consciousness. He also stressed how an older "sense of cleansing through battle" gave way to "the disillusionment, the bitterness" expressed in such works as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), with its stoic disgust over such notions as "honor" and "glory."

Hemingway could express that, Stone noted, even though he, like Caputo, struggled to reconcile the bitterness of war with its powerful impact on ego and adrenaline, leading Hemingway to exaggerate his wartime service when he was, in fact, said Stone, "handing out chocolate and postcards" for the Red Cross.

As all novelists must, said Stone, Hemingway "knew more than he knew." Asking himself if there was a moral to his own ruminations on war and the novel, Stone concluded, "War corrupts everything and everyone that has to do with it, yet it ennobles many too."

Caputo picked up on the theme of war's paradoxical effect on character and its changing novelistic treatment. While the emotions felt by people going to war, he noted, "have remained the same from Homer," it is mainly modern writers, from the British poet Wilfred Owen on, who began to capture its horrific quality.

Caputo distinguished two separate generations of mid-20th century American war novelists: the "realistic, naturalistic" wave of World War II veterans represented by Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951), and the more absurdist sorts led by Heller and Kurt Vonnegut (a late cancellation from the panel), whose Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) took the war novel "out of the realistic into the surrealistic."

That division, Caputo suggested, repeated itself in Vietnam, where earlier participants like himself, "saw ourselves as the direct heirs of our fathers," and leaned toward conventional realism. Later, he said, writers such as Tim O'Brien, whose Going after Cacciato (1978) drew appreciation from all three as a classic, took the Vietnam novel into "a kind of fantasy."

As the discussion began to flow among the writers, the audience could tell that exactly what was meant to gel on the many weekend panels devoted to "the American novel" -- candid, intimate self-examination by writers at the top of their craft -- was actually taking place. That especially occurred as the talk moved toward the aesthetic realities of "articulating the inarticulable," as an audience member put it.

Heller, for instance, remarked on how he had become aware over the years of a "certain deceptiveness in my own writing about war."

"We're writing a romance," he said, explaining that the novel's concentration on individuals with names, its march "in a narrative way to make the points we want" misrepresents the chaos and anonymity of war.

In fact, he added, that's why it should make sense that his "attitudes in Catch-22 were shaped by postwar experience," a hostility to government Heller began to acquire during the '50s. Many war novels fail, he said, because they're "too close to the war itself to be enjoyable." He admitted he sometimes felt "immoral" in the way he bent the war setting of Catch-22 to his narrative aims.

For Caputo, Heller had put his finger on an insider reality of the war novel: Some aspects of war are just too grim and unbearable to write about.

"Ground combat," Caputo said, "is almost another dimension of reality . . . it is almost indescribable."

Heller, Stone and Caputo also agreed that even though war, like sport, provides "conflict," the life-blood of the novel, in easily identified form, the most profound conflict at the heart of war is the moral paradox it produces: ugly impulses and beautiful impulses, sometimes in the same people.

War, said Stone, "brings out the most noble and altruistic" parts of people even as it "brutalizes" them. That's why, he suggested, we're always returning as Jimmy Carter did, to William James' call for "a moral equivalent to war" in peacetime -- something that can stir us to moral greatness.

On they went, verbally composing what many listeners ranked as the best of the weekend's encounters. They assessed the film Saving Private Ryan (Caputo praised its accurate battle scenes while deriding its cliché characterizations) and pondered whether actual combatants do a better job as novelists (the jury's still out).

In a session filled with more solemn moments than light ones, the conclusion at least filled the old Hollywood need for an upbeat finish. The last audience questioner announced that anyone could see "bringing up children" was plainly the peacetime moral equivalent of war.

"But you're not allowed to shoot your kids," Stone quickly shot back.

"As much as you might want to," said Caputo.

"OK, I'm ending the session," ruled Heller, and he did.