Books: Tragic Island

MEN DIE (183 pp.)—H. L. Humes—Random House ($3.50)

A talented young first novelist named H. L. (for Harold Louis) Humes last year produced an almost classic example of the ambitious book that tries to say too much. The Underground City (TIME, May 26, 1958) was at once a war novel, a treatise on right and wrong, an indictment of the human condition. Its 755 pages were too many and too tiring. Now, in less than one-quarter the wordage. Author Humes, 33, has produced a new book that gives off more significance than his first could even suggest.

Enigma with Cutlass. Just before World War II, the rock island of Manacle Shoal in the Caribbean is being tunneled to serve as an unsinkable ammunition ship. The labor force consists entirely of U.S. Negro enlisted men; directing them are three white officers. No one is under any illusion about the overhanging risk: a wrong move, a detonated shell, a rule-breaking smoke—and the whole lot of them could be blown up. Along with the danger come few compensations. For the Negroes, there is an occasional cockfight and beers on a nearby island; for the commander, who is sure that his dreary assignment is punishment for once having run a destroyer aground, there is endless compulsive reading, mixed with lone drinking bouts. Commander Hake is an Annapolis man, in many ways a first-rate officer, but an enigma and a terror to his men, who call him “Admiral God.” He is frightening at inspections, when he wears an ancient Navy cutlass. His sole link with the outside world is the erotic letters he gets from a beautiful wife. His overriding passion is to get his island job done at whatever risk or human cost—and he regards his men as scarcely human, for he hates Negroes.

For Hake’s second in command, Lieut. Dolfus, and Lieut. Sulgrave, the commander’s young aide, life on the island is a combination of boredom and premonition of disaster. The disaster is not long in coming; half a dozen enlisted men and Sulgrave are the only survivors. It is then that the Negroes get a grisly, ironic revenge on the commander. Looking for his body, they find only the head and shoulders. Into the improvised coffin go arms and legs, black and white, sufficient to provide a corpse for the military funeral Commander Hake is to get back in the States.

Love with Torture. Author Humes has devised a story that goes well beyond the tensions and the holocaust on the island. At the funeral, young Sulgrave meets the commander’s wife, and there begins a tortured, driving love affair that is not only credible but deeply revealing. Through it the reader and Sulgrave begin to see what made the commander and Lieut. Dolfus the inscrutable men they seemed on the island. Theirs had been a common past, itself a prelude to ultimate unhappiness.

Author Humes does his work in flashbacks, not the smooth ones of a Marquand, but brusque revelations carved out like sections of a monument to doom. Unfortunately, he also chooses to interpolate interior monologues, which prove only that he has not read James Joyce well enough. But these form a minor irritant compared to the book’s merits —clean writing, crisp description, and a surprisingly accurate sense of the bitter relationships, mostly unspoken, between the enlisted Negroes and their commander. Author Humes is no optimist. Every page of Men Die implies an underlying sense of doom for mankind; yet every page is also immensely readable.