Philip D. Beidler - Böcker

Readers of Mark Twain seldom doubt his genius, but defining that genius and locating its source continue to challenge students of American literature, and provoke a number of powerful responses, as these original essays demonstrate.

Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more.

In these essays, a combination of personal remembrance and broad-stroke cultural history, Philip Beidler addresses the culture and politics of post–WWII America: the national blindness toward the Holocaust and a rising China, the canker of McCarthyism, ascendant cultures of hard smoking and heavy drinking, the worship of cars and film idols, and the chronic fear of an always-possible nuclear apocalypse. In lively, driving prose, he recalls veiled episodes in the history of the Korean War, the civil rights movement, and the struggle for women’s liberation. On these subjects and many others, Beidler draws from his own experience and a penetrating grasp of American social history, offering deep, pointed, and comprehensive perspectives on iconic moments in American history.

A probing and holistic meditation on the key question: Why do we continue to make art, and thus beauty, out of war?Beautiful War: Studies in a Dreadful Fascination is a wide-ranging exploration of armed conflict as depicted in art that illustrates the constant presence of war in our everyday lives. Philip D. Beidler investigates the unending assimilation and pervasive presence of the idea of war in popular culture, the impulses behind the making of art out of war, and the unending and debatably aimless trajectories of war itself.  Beidler's critical scope spans from Shakespeare's plays, through the Victorian battle paintings of Lady Butler, into the post–World War I writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, and up to twenty-first-century films such as The Hurt Locker and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. As these works of art have become ubiquitous in contemporary culture, the many faces of war clearly spill over into our art and media, and Beidler argues that these portrayals in turn shift the perception of war from a savage truth to a concept.  Beautiful War argues that the representation of war in the arts has always been, and continues to be, an incredibly powerful force. Incorporating painting, music, photography, literature, and film, Beidler traces a disturbing but fundamental truth: that war has always provided an aesthetic inspiration while serving ends as various and complex as ideological or geopolitical history, public memory, and mass entertainment.Beautiful War is a bold and vivid account of the role of war and military conflict as a subject of art that offers much of value to literary and cultural critics, historians, veterans, students of art history and communication studies, and those interested in expanding their understanding of art and media's influence on contemporary values and memories of the past.

More than fifty writers, from Timothy Leary and Malcolm X to Helen Gurley Brown and Rachel Carson, are individually profiled in this lively survey of the literature of the 1960s. A look at the books behind the decade's youth movements, Scriptures for a Generation recalls the era as one of unprecedented literacy and belief in the power of books to change society. In showing that the generation that came of age in the '60s marked both the height and the end of "the last great reading culture," Philip D. Beidler also implies much about the state of literacy in our country today.Featured are bona fide 1960s classics ranging from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves. Represented as well are such works of revered elders as Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Beidler's coverage also extends to works of the early 1970s that are textual and spiritual extensions of the 1960s: the Portola Institute's Last Whole Earth Catalog, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and others.

The glow of 1945 persists as a kind of beacon for American society, symbolic of an era when good and evil were easily defined. This image is at the center of Philip D. Beidler's entertaining look at the way World War II reshaped American popular culture.The legend of the "Good War" was fostered by wartime propaganda and reinforced in the aftermath of victory through books, the news media, movies, songs, and television. Beidler captures the aura of the times as he chronicles the production histories of more than a dozen projects with wartime themes, examining how books and plays evolved into films, how stars were considered and selected, technical problems and personality conflicts during production, and the public's reactions.From the upbeat tempo of the musical South Pacific to the weary disillusionment of The Best Years of Our Lives, from the patriotic nostalgia of Life's Picture History of World War II to the moral ambiguity of From Here to Eternity, a powerful mythology of the war developed. As a consequence, the line between fact and fiction has blurred for the war generation and its inheritors, and Hollywood's version of the Good War has become enshrined as historical fact in the nation's collective memory.

Philip D. Beidler, who served as an armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam, sees less and less of the hard-won perspective of the common soldier in what America has made of that war. Each passing year, he says, dulls our sense of immediacy about Vietnam’s costs, opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary, neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become. Here Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war’s lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with them.Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature, and film. His catalog of soldier slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one’s sense of absurdity. His survey of the war’s pop hits looks for meaning in the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads. Beidler also explains how “Viet Pulp” literature about snipers, tunnel rats, and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like Duong Thu Huong’s Novel without a Name. Likewise we learn why the movie The Deer Hunter doesn’t “get it” about Vietnam but why Platoon and We Were Soldiers sometimes nearly do.As Beidler takes measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at My Lai, and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a schoolteacher and hospital worker.Beidler also looks at Vietnam alongside other conflicts—including the war on international terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our sense of providential destiny and geopolitical invincibility but now realizes, with dismay, that those myths are still with us. “Americans have always wanted their apocalypses,” writes Beidler, “and they have always wanted them now.”

American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam is a perceptive and evocative book that is both a comprehensive discussion of the literature of the war and a study of literature and literary consciousness considered in relation to the larger process of cultural myth-making.In his exploration of the ways in which writers have tried to make sense of the Vietnam experience, Philip Beidler brings to light a whole literature that in its moments of fullest achievement quite literally “creates” a Vietnam more real than reality. In his discussion of the literature of the war he turns his attention to a wide variety of literary texts: novels, plays, poems, memoirs, oral histories, and works of documentary and reportage.Beidler begins with an analysis of the peculiar difficulties involved in writing about an experience like Vietnam. He moves from the early attempts to deal with the experience (including Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? and Arthur Kopit’s Indians) to more recent works as diverse as Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato, Phillip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the plays of David Rabe, the poems of John Balaban and Bruce Weigl, and recently published experiments in oral history such as Al Santoli’s Everything We Had and Mark Baker’s Nam.

Philip D. Beidler, who served as an armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam, sees less and less of the hard-won perspective of the common soldier in what America has made of that war. Each passing year, he says, dulls our sense of immediacy about Vietnam’s costs, opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary, neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become. Here Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war’s lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with them.Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature, and film. His catalog of soldier slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one’s sense of absurdity. His survey of the war’s pop hits looks for meaning in the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads. Beidler also explains how “Viet Pulp” literature about snipers, tunnel rats, and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like Duong Thu Huong’s Novel without a Name. Likewise we learn why the movie The Deer Hunter doesn’t “get it” about Vietnam but why Platoon and We Were Soldiers sometimes nearly do.As Beidler takes measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at My Lai, and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a schoolteacher and hospital worker.Beidler also looks at Vietnam alongside other conflicts—including the war on international terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our sense of providential destiny and geopolitical invincibility but now realizes, with dismay, that those myths are still with us. “Americans have always wanted their apocalypses,” writes Beidler, “and they have always wanted them now.”