The Sunday Gentleman (13 page)

Living among the amps became a horrible embarrassment to me, and with each day and each contact my misery gnawed deeper. Always before, when people wanted to know what I did in the army, I was proud to say that I was a writer, writing propaganda and orientation and training films. I felt that this being a writer, proclaiming it, made me retain my civilian standing, my special high-level individuality. It was defensive evidence that I was not of the stupid herd, I was no part of the blurred GI image. It was my reaction to being pushed around and downgraded for three years and three months.

Now, suddenly, among the amps, I was thoroughly ashamed and miserable. I was ashamed of everything, of how far I’d been from combat, of the amount of secondhand reporting converted into celluloid I’d contributed. Most of all, I was ashamed of my legs.

My legs felt fat and luxurious when I walked on them, and I kept knowing the amps were looking at them and resenting them.

I was glad when it was over.

The train was fast going back. When I arrived at Pennsylvania Station, it was late in the evening, but still there were people clustered, waiting. I rode up on the escalator, and strode through the row of shops, and outside. It was snowing, light flakes swirling around and down, and I could see the pavement was glassy. I stood a while, watching people going and coming. People hurrying home for warmth and dryness and dinner and talk.

I decided to walk up to Sixth Avenue and then to my hotel. Suddenly, in the snow and cold, the two weeks past seemed impossible, isolated like a half-forgotten event among creatures of a night’s dream in a hidden valley. Here there was life, and whole people were moving, talking, rustling newspapers, laughing loudly in groups. I began moving, too, and I shivered a little in the cold. I walked faster and faster, and did not slip, even though it was slippery. Nobody was looking at my legs.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

“The Amps” was a record I wrote primarily for myself, begun in Atlanta and finished in New York City, of my last assignment as an enlisted man in the United States Army.

Of my three years and four months in the service, I spent one year in the Army Air Force writing training films, and after a transfer, the remaining period was spent in the Army Signal Corps writing orientation and propaganda films for our troops. Despite my efforts to become an overseas correspondent for
Yank
, the weekly periodical for all the services, I was never near the smoke of battle. The closest I came to combat was a credit dispute over an orientation film, waged with my superior officer, the renowned but exasperating Colonel Frank Capra.

While stationed in Los Angeles, I had done the major writing job on
Know Your Enemy Japan
, and Colonel Capra, in submitting the list of credits to Washington, D.C., omitted my name completely, giving full credit instead to several well-known civilian writers who had played only a small role in the backbreaking policy effort. There was no appeal—nor should there have been, considering what other young men had done for their country without credit. But it was irritatingly amusing to know how Hollywood standards carried over into the army, where most of my group—including such co-workers as Captain John Huston and Colonel Theodore Geisel—lived a schizoid existence, half the time playing soldier, and half the time playing Hollywood producer or director or screenplay writer. For many of us, too, it was a schizoid existence in another way. Every day, we reported for roll call, in uniform, at a motion picture studio leased by the Army Signal Corps. There, we wrote narration for propaganda films telling our men why they were fighting and how to survive—or for what cause they might die—and then we went back to our cozy but uneasy homes at night (since there were no barracks on the post) to live as Hollywood civilians in uniform, deeply resentful of the real civilians all around us who were going merrily ahead making civilian money and who were free of the restrictions of army life. And yet all of us felt guilty about the real soldiers far away, who were suffering and dying on Iwo Jima or at Anzio, and who were unlikely to be helped one damn bit by our films.

Finally, our post in Hollywood closed down, and with intense relief I learned that I was being transferred elsewhere. On November 8, 1945, I was transferred to the Signal Corps Photographic Center on Long Island, New York, but this was little better—for on this post, which was another reconverted motion picture studio, there had been or were still such officers and fellow enlisted men as William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, Stanley Kramer, Gottfried Reinhardt, Carl Laemmle, Jr., to name but a few.

In those last three months of my army career, since again there were no accommodations on the post, I lived at the Royalton Hotel on 44th Street in Manhattan. Every night, when I returned by subway from my Long Island post to the Royalton Hotel, I entered into a remarkable world. George Jean Nathan had a suite on one floor. Robert Benchley had a suite on another. And just before I left for Atlanta, Thomas Wolfe’s aged mother Julia (the Eliza Gant of
Look Homeward, Angel
) registered at the hotel. I met her one evening in the lobby, introducing myself with great diffidence as “a writer” and “an admirer” of her son, and after that, she talked on and on about Tom, as if he were alive and about to call for her, although he had been dead seven years. She had some unproduced and unpublished plays her Tom had written, and she was in New York hoping to arrange for either production or publication of them.

I was eager to know Julia Wolfe better—there was even stirring within me, based on her lonely visit to New York, an idea for a novel—but it was not to be. My soldier-writer existence suddenly submerged my civilian-writer existence. The Army Signal Corps ordered me to Atlanta for what was to be, although I did not know it then, my last assignment, before my discharge in February of 1946. I was ordered to proceed to Atlanta to work with a colonel from St. Louis at Lawson General Hospital on a film project to be called
Construction and Use of Provisional Prostheses
.

Altogether, I was in Atlanta for fourteen days. What the Army got out of my visit was a training film, which I wrote during my last two weeks in the service. What I got out of my assignment was the experience recounted in “The Amps,” a memoir which I wrote for myself. Long after, when I came to write my novel
The Prize
, and I sought a locale for the story of Professor Max Stratman and his bruised niece, Emily, my memories of the patients’ traumas at Lawson General Hospital came back to me, and I placed Stratman and Emily in Atlanta and at Lawson General Hospital.

What I lost, because of this assignment, was a chance to get to know Thomas Wolfe’s mother better, and perhaps to develop a novel that might have been based on her. For when I returned to the Royalton Hotel, I learned that shortly after I had gone to Atlanta she had moved across the street to the Algonquin Hotel, and there, a few days before my return, she had died. Julia Wolfe was gone. Only Eliza Gant survived. It would be futile to attempt to show how well she had survived after “Eugene Gant’s” death—when I could no longer really know.

Except for one day in 1961, when I reviewed my Atlanta experiences briefly in preparing
The Prize
, I did not reread “The Amps” until I decided to include it in this collection. Since rereading it, I have wondered what my colonel in the Orthopedic Surgery Building, then late thirtyish, now late fiftyish, had done with himself in the two decades since we had worked together. Had he remained in the service? Had he gone into private practice in St. Louis? Was he still involved with amps? It is unlikely I shall ever know, for I could not remember his name. What had happened to the Thing in the glass container in his office? Or to the triple amputee who had been a Georgia University football end? Or to those of the nation’s fifteen thousand amps who were patients in Atlanta when I was there? I do not know the answers. I made no effort to learn them. I did not have the nerve.

All that I made an effort to find out, and all that I did learn, was that the Lawson General Hospital which I had seen I would never see again. The medical director of the Veterans Administration in Atlanta replied to my recent inquiry: “The Lawson General Hospital, as Mr. Wallace may have known it in 1945, has ceased to exist as a VA medical facility since 1951. In its stead, the Atlanta VA Hospital was established as a general medical and surgical facility, currently operating approximately three hundred beds for many types of acutely ill VA patients. Although amputees are often a small part of its patient population and a few prostheses are issued, it no longer remains or specializes as an amputee center.”

And finally, I determined to find out what happened to the film I wrote for the Signal Corps after Atlanta, the film called
Construction and Use of Provisional Prostheses.
I do not mean that I was interested in finding out what happened to the reels of celluloid, but rather in learning what had happened in the twenty years since, to the subject I had written about—the development of artificial limbs. Had there been any progress? Had there been any major changes? Were the amputees I had known and observed, or their sons or neighbors’ sons who had lost limbs in Korea and Viet Nam, any better off today (in terms of receiving an artificial limb for a real limb taken away) than their fathers were at the end of the Second World War?

Apparently, for the amps who survived the Second World War, peace was somewhat less than wonderful. Most of them “displayed keen disappointment with the artificial limbs provided them,” admits A. Bennett Wilson, Jr., a member of the Committee on Prosthetics Research and Development. And then he adds, “Since they were now all familiar with extremely intricate mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic mechanisms, it was incomprehensible to them that a country so adept at turning out efficient weapons of destruction had seemed to have failed so miserably in providing substitutes for limbs lost in battle.”

As a result of this disappointment felt by disabled veterans and their sympathetic physicians, severe pressure was exerted upon the military, and upon Congress, to step up a scientific program of prosthetics research. Through the Surgeon General of the Army, the National Academy of Sciences (a nonprofit organization of scientists established by Abraham Lincoln) and its National Research Council (established by Woodrow Wilson) were brought into the picture. Between 1947 and 1964, work on improving artificial limbs was vastly accelerated. By 1961, there were thirty-three “separate groups engaged in some phase of research and development related to artificial limbs.” There was also a committee, with its own laboratory, that examined and evaluated new prosthetic inventions. There was even a government journal called
Artificial Limbs
.

What has been accomplished? For one thing, it appears that the hook device that served to replace a human hand has been gradually replaced by a molded rubber hand of five fingers, with three movable fingers made of aluminum and steel covered by felt While scientists agreed that the hook device was “more functional,” they also knew that the amps found it “distasteful,” and they abandoned the hook in order to bolster morale.

But scientists feel that real hope for the amps lies in another direction. According to Mr. Wilson, himself an engineer: “It has long been recognized that prostheses powered by some form of energy other than from human body sources (external power) would represent the next major advance in upper-extremity prosthetics.”

How advanced is “the next major advance”?

In the United States, International Business Machines had, by 1952, produced electrically powered artificial arms. Although they worked, they were rejected by the government because “the wearer was unable to operate the device without conscious thought.” Since then, there has been much optimism about applying the miniature components used in guided missiles to artificial limbs, while at the same time attempting “to develop or uncover sources of body power for control of the powered units.”

In Germany, at the Orthopedic Clinic in Heidelberg, an artificial arm powered by compressed gas has been developed. Brought to the United States, and modified somewhat, it was tried on 150 American amps, and of these 148 were able to use it successfully while two were not. The shortcomings of this compressed-gas arm, according to American researchers, are a “problem” sensory feedback and the fact that gas does not store as efficiently as electricity. Its virtue is that the actuators for compressed gas are lighter than those for electricity.

In Soviet Russia, there has been considerable drumbeating for an electrically powered arm of Russian design. In 1960, Dr. J. B. Reswick saw this arm in operation in Moscow. He reported to his colleagues in America that the Russians refused to reveal how the device worked, but “hinted at electromyographic control.” Unable to obtain interviews with Soviet scientists, or learn more, Dr. Reswick suspected that “the device does not meet the claims made.”

Perhaps the most promising artificial limb produced abroad is the so-called “Vaduz hand,” an electrically powered artificial hand developed at a private limb shop in France, and manufactured in Vaduz, the capital of the Lilliput kingdom of Liechtenstein, adjacent to Switzerland. According to American scientists, the opening and closing of this hand “is controlled by muscle contraction against an air-filled plastic bladder. Feedback is provided by a force-reflecting servo…” While American scientists believe that it possesses many praiseworthy features, especially its sensory feedback system, they do not feel it is ready for widespread usage because of “its complexity, apparent frailty, and limited application.”

The hope for the future, the experts seem to indicate, is an electrically powered artificial limb, since electricity is most likely to integrate well with the human nervous system.

Reflecting on all of this, so many years after my visit to Atlanta, I find that I can only come to the most banal of conclusions: That there can be no satisfactory substitute for what man’s mad wars take away from man, and that the only advance that will ever be meaningful to amps and potential amps will be a means of ending international violence forever.