Friday, Jan. 27, 1961
Universal Heel
RADITZER (152 pp.) -- Peter Matthiessen--Viking ($3).
Any serviceman will recognize Raditzer. There is one in every outfit--the sniveling, creepy little muckup who not only fails to pull his weight but manages to add it to the load carried by others. In his third novel, Author Peter Matthiessen, 33, has pinned him to the page as the prototype of the heel who arouses disgust in better men but touches off something uneasily protective in the best of them.
When the U.S.S. General Pendleton sails from San Francisco in 1944, Raditzer is aboard. So is Charlie Stark, and the two men could hardly be more different. Charlie's family is sound, conventional, well to do. He has been turned down for combat duty and has in turn rejected his chance at a commission; instead, he was drafted for service on a troop transport. On the Pendleton, Raditzer spots him at once as a decent man who is above abuse, a man to tie to for protection. Raditzer glories in his whining autobiography--born illegitimate, raised in an orphanage, never knew a decent woman, never had a chance. He ducks his sea duty and Charlie Stark fills in for him. He is loud, cowardly, physically repulsive and yet arrogant. In a sensitive character probe which recalls the sharp male insights of Joseph Conrad, Author Matthiessen shows how disgust and almost unwilling compassion are at war in civilized Charlie Stark and how compassion always wins. Raditzer's only defense against the naked revulsion of his fellows is the claim that Stark is his buddy. And Stark, admired by everyone and abused by his protege, refuses to let Raditzer down.
It is on the way home at war's end that Raditzer gets his comeuppance. He brags about combat duty that he never saw, swaggers through the transport with a fat roll that he has picked up running a joint in Hawaii. But this time the Pendleton is carrying combat veterans as well as the scraped-barrel group of the outward voyage. When Raditzer is caught cheating in a below-decks poker game, they decide to pitch him overboard. In a scene that is brutal and powerfully true, Charlie Stark as his protector is tried as Raditzer has not tried him before. And from there to the powerful ending, Stark suffers the agonies of a man who has tied himself unwillingly, irrevocably, to a wretched fellow human whose claim is based subtly on weakness. Author Matthiessen has successfully brought off something more than a war novel. The reader cannot avoid thinking of all the Raditzers he ever knew; he may even dwell uneasily, however briefly, on the Raditzer-Charlie Stark amalgam in himself.
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