The Best Years of Our Lives includes a divorce as one of its subplots, but I’m writing this post because I was intrigued to learn that Glory For Me, the book on which the movie is based, is a novel in verse. This is a genre I’m particularly invested in these days.
The author, MacKinlay Cantor, is best known for his Civil War novel Andersonville, which I’d like to read someday along with the two memoirs published, respectively, by Kantor’s son and grandson.
Glory For Me is written in unrhymed iambic lines that vary in number of feet, generally between three and five, sometimes up to seven or as few as two, with no particular scheme. It’s an interesting mid-century artifact, and I wanted to like it as a poem . Despite some moving passages, though, the verse form tends merely to make everything sound frightfully earnest. Here’s Fred working at the drug store:
He set the Kotex boxes true when they had tumbled down.
As in the film, the story here is about three soldiers returning from service in World War Two to their hometown of Boone City. Fred is working-class and had just gotten married after a brief engagement before he was shipped overseas. The bank executive Al is well-off, older, and married with two teenaged children. Homer has been physically disabled in the war, and does not want to be seen by his fiancée. They are all traumatized by their wartime experiences.
Each struggles to adjust to civilian life, and for much of the story can only find the understanding they crave in each other, with alcohol as a frequent crutch. In both book and movie, their male fellowship must be broken open to the women who love them and can help them live their lives beyond the war.
Yet the film, directed by William Wyler and with its Academy Award winning screenplay by Robert Sherwood, preserves only the general outline of Kantor’s poem. There are a number of notable differences, making the poem a kind of double-vision experience for lovers of the film. These differences include the following.
Kantor’s Homer is not a double amputee like Harold Russell in the film, whose affecting performance earned him the first Oscar ever given to a non-professional actor. Instead, damage taken in a torpedo attack has given Homer athetoid cerebral palsy. He drools and shakes, and finds only brief relaxation of his motor functions when he drinks alcohol.
Rather than the touching scene in the film in which his fiancée Wilma buttons his pajamas after he removes his prosthetic limbs, the poem’s Homer tries to kill himself. Wilma, who has read a slew of books on living with and rehabilitating from what was then called “spasticity,” ultimately convinces him that she will love and support him, not pity him, and he regains the will to live.
In the film, the main obstacle to Fred’s romance with Al’s daughter Peggy is that he is married. In the book, though, Fred’s divorce from his wife happens relatively easily. The obstacle here is Fred’s class insecurity, his awareness that he does not have the earning power to support Peggy at anything close to her upper-middle-class socio-economic level. Fred thinks:
This girl—she’s had
The lovely things of life.
She’s had them all the time.
She doesn’t know what it would be
To stand in line with tray in hand,
Except perhaps—a school-girl lark.
She doesn’t even buy her things—
Her clothes (the sweater that she has,
The little shoes,
The ribbons in her hair)—
She doesn’t get those things at Oppenheimer-Stern’s,
Or any such department store.
She goes into Chicago shops.
[…]
Everything must cost a lot.
It always has, it always will.
The poem’s Peggy, meanwhile, is the smartest and most willful character in the book. She takes the soldiers and their disorders in stride, she is relatively savvy about sex, and she is determined to marry Fred and raise him up from his station. In fact, she is a bit improbable: it is not at all clear what she sees in Fred, and she comes across as a fantasy, the 1940s Boone City version of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Or perhaps this is my skewed perspective from today’s vastly more class-stratified America.
In the well-known scene towards the end of the film, Fred is about to give up on Boone City when he has a reverie in an airplane graveyard and is subsequently offered a job in housing construction. In the book, Fred hits bottom rather more dramatically when he decides to rob the bank where Al works. Circumstances stop him from carrying out the plan, but he is still at loose ends, until Peggy steps in to marry him and take charge of his life. Under her tutelage, he will attend college on the G.I. Bill.
There is more sexual reality in the poem, more acknowledgement of sheer horniness, more awareness of how men behave when overseas. And not just men: we learn that Al’s wife Milly (Myrna Loy in the film) went out one New Year’s Eve with a sergeant while Al was fighting in Europe. “He brought you home at five,” Peggy chides her mother.
Milly’s mature sensuality in the poem is a lovely thing—though I may simply have too many images of the film’s Myrna Loy in my head. The bar-owner Butch (Hoagy Carmichael in the film) approves of Milly: “She’s got a chassis just as good / as Claudette Colbert! Yet she’s kind of noble—/ Like my mother too.”
And the poem has a scene in which Milly and Al embrace, with a little touch I love: “And she bit his coat lapel.”
Glory For Me also shows more of the carnage of war. The poem is shot through with traumatic memories, including Al’s of his comrade Pascowitz stepping on a German mine. There is an explosion and then Al wipes something off his helmet:
The pink and dangled little thing
With veins and stuff attached:
A testicle.
In another scene, Al is brooding on the German soldiers he has killed, uncertain how to feel. There is guilt, but then he mentally questions one of the dead Germans how his wife and his children Peggy and Rob would have fared under Nazi rule: “Milly’s mother / Was a partial Jewess—name of Levinsohn. / Would you have mutilated Rob?” Not a surprising question given that Kantor’s father was Jewish.
Overall, the book is marked by an indictment of the United States lacking in the film, a pervasive contempt for a middle-class normalcy that is presented as a betrayal of the sacrifice of the soldiers.
The movie has a scene in which an isolationist harangues Homer, telling him he lost his limbs for the wrong cause and should have been fighting the rich bankers—before Fred steps in and decks him.
Kantor was evidently enough of a Communist sympathizer to have taken a credit for screenwriter Dalton Trumbo while the latter was working anonymously under the blacklist. Yet the tone, if not the politics, of the book is in some ways a fit with the isolationist: casting doubt on a corrupt America that is too complacent, petty, and materialistic to care for the physical and psychic damage of its returning soldiers, or to live up to their heroism at home.
War is hell, the poem makes clear. “But savage too the weather of a peace,” writes Kantor at the poem’s end, pondering the prejudice and brutality he finds in post-war America:
But savage too the weather of a peace—
When glare exposes class and race
With bludgeon lifted for a blow—
When staring flash reveals a blackened face
As monster to the babies in their beds,
And to the blacks reveals a monster pale.
When Star of David is a curse, a jeer,
A lodestone and a sacrament in one.