Books: A Figure in History

ARTIE GREENGROIN, PFC. — Harry Brown—Knopf ($2.50).

Wan, talkative Artie Greengroin was part of a period which is fast slipping into history. He lived, in the words of his 28-year-old creator, Private Harry Brown, “in the grimly fabulous time when we were building up our military strength in Britain in preparation for the invasion of Europe . . . a time of enforced inactivity . . . in which the average American soldier . . . was alternately bored, astonished, delighted, and depressed by what he saw about him.” In a long-running series for the British edition of Yank, Artie became about the best-known U.S. enlisted man in what he called “the English Isle.”

Not that Artie was the average American soldier. Like his G.I. cousins, Sad Sack and Private Breger, he was maladjusted, maladroit and wonderfully incompetent and unreliable. His grousing, griping and goldbricking were a vicarious safety valve for other G.I.s. Now Author Brown has introduced Artie to U.S. civilians in a collection of 51 stories. Brown’s earlier best-selling A Walk in the Sun won acclaim as a serious work, but Artie Greengroin, Pfc. is not likely to be hailed as a great comic work.

The stories are written in a jarring blend of phonetic dialect (“Shuddap, you bassars or I’ll trun the lot of you out”) and literary flourishes (“She saw in the bough of the child the tree of the man”). As explained by Brown, the accent contains “the ghosts of several dialects common to soldiers . . . [but] is certainly not Brooklynese.”

Artie and his glib earthiness are frequently amusing. (He rebels at standing “the thoid inspection in three days . . . I got enough to do to keep me truck clean without bothering too much about me person.”) His weekly appearance in Yank was a popular one. But untraveled civilians who try to read 51 of his adventures at a sitting will find the laughs wearing thin. Author Brown himself puts a finger on the weakness of his book as civilian entertainment when he notes that Artie’s “character was appreciated by those who were living with someone like him and listening to him every day.”