Men Die

by H.L. Humes

Genres: Sea Adventures; Literary Fiction; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

Just before World War II, Lieutenant Everett Sulgrave is stationed at a Navy ammunitions base in the Caribbean, along with Commander Hake—an anguished, intimidating leader nicknamed “Admiral God”—and Hake’s right-hand man, the enigmatic Lieutenant Dolfus. Dolfus has dark premonitions that soon come true when a massive explosion destroys the island. Sulgrave and five black enlistees with scores to settle are the only survivors. Now Sulgrave must contend with his memories and his reality, with the aftermath of the tragedy and the beginning of his volatile affair with Hake’s widow, and with his disturbing past and the abyss that is his future.

Infused with intrigue, symbolism, and mounting drama, Men Die, back in print after more than forty years, showcases H. L. Humes’s astounding versatility, proving itself a timelessly intense and exciting read.

Praise for Men Die

“Humes’s novel is tersely and convincingly composed, and while it echoes other works [it] never seems derivative, the result perhaps of its powerfully made scenes . . . and the essentially clear and direct nature of Humes’s prose.”—Alan Cheuse, from the Introduction

“Clean writing, crisp description . . . Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind; yet every page is also immensely readable.”—Time

“Hume [was] sublimely confident and alarmingly talented.”—The New York Times

“[An] achievement of dazzling virtuosity.”—Partisan Review

Release date: January 21, 2009

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 208

Sample

INTRODUCTION
 
Alan Cheuse
 
As much as I would like to offer a thoroughly persuasive and wholly sound critical appraisal of these two novels by Harold “Doc” Humes, one of the least-known and most enigmatic members of his writing generation, I won't be able to speak about the books without first explaining how they intertwined with my own education. Or more precisely, how they became part of my education, in the way that some fine (or sometimes merely ordinary) books often do during that special phase in your life when raw minutes and art bind together in what, years later, you might recognize as the first blush of vocation.
 
I was completing my sophomore year at Rutgers and had taken over the editorship of the literary magazine, The Anthologist, from a fellow named James Shokoff (whose whereabouts today I sometimes wonder about) when William Sloane, who directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference with another teacher of mine, John Ciardi, offered me and a few others the chance to wait tables at the workshop that summer of 1958. We drove up to Vermont and carried trays for various famous writers and not-so-famous editors. One of them, a trim, dark-haired woman named Mary Heathcote, became a friend to the tall, stoop-shouldered, enthusiastic would-be bohemian that I was.
 
That autumn she invited me and a few other Rutgers boys to parties at her apartment in Greenwich Village. At one of these pleasant little fiestas, I met a chunk-boned, jocular man a little shorter than me, with his lovely wife and some small children in arms. He turned out to be Harold Humes, a founder of the Paris Review, recently returned from a long postwar sojourn in Europe. His first novel, The Underground City, had just been published in New York. Unlike the work of some of the other writers I had met that summer (Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Yates, among others), Humes' fiction was unknown to me. Mary Heathcote sent me a copy of his massive book; I put aside my regular reading (an act not unknown to me in my student years) and spent some days in my dustbin of an apartment a few blocks from the Rutgers campus in dilapidated New Brunswick, New Jersey, feasting on Humes' story of politics and the disasters of war and love and peace and paternity in France circa 1944-47.
 
That year—in the spring of 1959—we inaugurated a regular reading series by accomplished visiting writers, something that we take for granted as part of an undergraduate literature education these days. But in the late fifties and early sixties it was a trick that we had to learn to do by trying it out. With a little financial help and a lot of encouragement from a few sympathetic instructors in the Rutgers English department, those of us on the magazine staff invited Yates (who came to read), Mailer (who did not), Ciardi (who was already in place), and a few others, including Harold Humes.
 
Humes showed up. In the front room of a splendid nineteenth-century townhouse appropriated by the university years before and with book in hand, he read vigorously from The Under-ground City. Head bobbing, arms waving, he looked like a middleweight boxer with his fight strategy in front of him. He then led a question-and-answer period about modern writing.
 
“Let me ask you a question,” he said to the audience. “How many of you”—there were about forty of us in the crowd before him, mostly students, a few faculty members including John McCormick (critic, bullfight expert, and biographer), and Ciardi and Sloane—”have read a book called Under the Volcano?”
 
McCormick's hand shot up. Mine did, too, except that I hadn't read it, though as was often the case with my education in those days I found a copy of the novel and took care of that deficiency in my life soon after.
 
“Three of us!” Humes chuckled. “Three good readers. The rest of you will remain flawed until you know that novel. Not damaged. But flawed somewhat. You're missing out on a great feast, a great fiesta of human frailty and extraordinary writing.”
 
Talk about frailty—the next season saw Humes publish his second and only other novel, Men Die, a book as compact in its genius as The Underground City was huge and overbearing. Then he seemed to disappear from the New York scene. One heard rumors that he was experimenting with a new drug called LSD—and later in the decade I read accounts in the New York press that he was seen distributing five-dollar bills to crowds at the entrance to Columbia University. A scheme of his for building houses out of paper drew a write-up in The New York Times. But no more fiction came from him.
 
I encountered him again in Bennington, Vermont, in the early seventies. I was teaching there and one of his daughters was a student. Humes seemed to have made himself over into a character from a novel in progress. He was a graying, shambling wrack of paranoia and good cheer, talking of a massage cure for heroin addicts, which he had tried to promote in Italy and the United States, and explaining that it was well understood in certain circles that the CIA could monitor the progress of radical dissidents, of whom he was one, from seemingly innocuous clouds that traveled above them on roadways across the country. He bunked in his daughter's dormitory. Students gathered around him. They had just read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and here was the mariner in the flesh.
 
I never saw Humes again after his Bennington visitations, but fifteen years later his remark about Malcolm Lowry's work came to mind when, invited by David Madden to contribute to the second of his “Rediscoveries” volumes, I chose Humes' books as the fiction I thought ought to come back into print. I discovered upon rereading them that he made rare books in the best sense, great feasts and fiestas, and my reencounters with them convinced me that in the raw, instinctual days of early recognitions, my admiration for Humes' writing was not at all misplaced. I recommended them at nineteen because I found the books thrilling in ways that I could not at the time explain. In my late forties, I found them just as thrilling, and in addition I could muster a few ideas as to why.
 
The Underground City stands as one of those rare birds of American fiction, a true novel of ideas with credible characters and a powerful realistic plot. Humes divides the book into three large chunks, and by the way he sets his first scene, with a vast canvas of cloud and sky above Paris at the opening of a day about a year or so following the end of World War II, he seems to have nothing less in mind than the desire to create a monumental story of epic range:
 
The eastern sun, full and fiery orange, just risen clear of the horizon, began slowly to sink back into the gray ocean of clouds as the plane started down; the sky altered; clouds changed aspects. To the southeast, delicate as frozen breath, an icy herd of mare's tails rode high and sparkling in the upper light of the vanishing sun; they were veiled in crystalline haze as the plane descended through stratocirrus, the sun in iridescent halo at its disappearing upper limb. And below, slowly rising closer, the soft floor of carpeting clouds gradually changed into an ugly boil of endless gray billows, ominous, huge. Against the east, rayed out in a vast standing fan: five fingers of the plummeting sun.…
 
That airplane carries the crippled and ailing American ambassador to France, the portentously named Bruce Peel Sheppard, back to Paris after a medical leave, in order to deal with an impending crisis: the war-crimes trial of a collaborator named Du-jardin, whose case the French Communist Party has just taken up—on the side of the supposed war criminal—as a way of attacking the U.S. presence in postwar Europe. Caught in the middle of this rising political storm is New Jersey-born John Stone, a heroic but now burned-out alcoholic American undercover agent. Under the code-name “Dante,” Stone led a group of commandos who smuggled arms to the French Resistance in advance of the Allied invasion. Stone, appropriately enough, now works in the civilian wing of the U.S. embassy under the guise of a graves registration official. As Ambassador Peel's aircraft prepares to make its descent below the clouds into what Humes, with deliberate homage to Andre Malraux (author of that great novel of ideas, Man's Fate) calls “the world of men,” we encounter a broad cast of characters and become engaged in a masterly setup for a dramatization of the world of modern Western geopolitical affairs. Just as the trial will rip open the wounds on the French body politic still fresh from the war, the large central portion of the novel gives us the narrative of Stone's undercover work during the war—a dense, dramatic novel within the novel that may be the best story of the Resistance told by anyone in English (which stands as the testimony Stone will give at the trial of the accused and contentious Du-jardin). The last third of the novel shows us the aftermath of the trial, and the unfolding fates of Ambassador Sheppard, Stone, a Resistance leader named Merseault, the Communists Picard and Carnot, and a number of other characters involved in the wartime and postwar drama.