Raditzer

by Peter Matthiessen

". . . one of the finest novels to come along since the advent of John Updike . . . brilliantly realized and written with an economy and sureness of control that are magnificent."--San Francisco Examiner.

Genres: Fiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 1961

About the author

Peter Matthiessen is the author of more than thirty books and the only writer to win the National Book Award for both non-fiction (The Snow Leopard, in two categories, in 1979 and 1980) and fiction (Shadow Country, in 2008). A co-founder of The Paris Review and a world-renowned naturalist, explorer and activist, he died in April 2014.

Reviews

[Ned · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author never disappoints, with his exquisite writing of the natural world confounded by the ravings in the human psyche. We learn of the title character from the protagonist, Charlie Stark, who is embarking on a tour of duty to the Pacific War theater in 1945 aboard a rollicking old tub with nearly everyone seasick. Matthiessen captures the essence of the claustrophobic bunking of the men, scared, foul-smelling in the close air and scared to death about what is to come. They are en route to Pearl Harbor, still damaged from the attack, to await instructions. Our protagonist is recently married and enlisted to prove his manhood (as was expected in that time), yet secretly warring with his guilt from a privileged upbringing. He’s 26, much older than the other naval draftees and enlisted men, and internally struggles between an ordinary life in his father’s law firm vs an infatuation with art, particularly the lifestyle of the French impressionist Paul Gaugin. He fancies himself a bohemian of sorts, and his new wife is part of that fantasy. He worries he has contaminated her purity with his aspirations and is very much unsure of what the future brings.

Charlie then meets Raditzer, a character unlike anyone he has ever met. An orphan, on the streets young yet with a peculiar obnoxious tendency to obliterate the illusions of his fellow men, none more than Charlie. He has a strange innocence about him, like an unschooled child seeking structure and morality and a father figure, forever testing the patience of all those around him with wild braggadocio and ridiculous claims. I’ve known a few personality types like this, almost with a will to be beat silly and into submission for some machoistic urge that is unfathomable. The rest of the sailors quickly dismiss and avoid Raditzer, but oddly Charlie takes him under his wing and becomes his only friend. Charlie despises nearly everything about this wayward child-like waif, yet has some deep urge to care for him, reluctantly like a misbehaving child. Raditzer is largely tolerated, thanks to the neutrality and grudging toleration of his only friend, but another of Charlie’s friends, Giancarlo, implores him to cut him loose. Arriving in Honolulu, all three get mundane duty (laundry, cafeteria) and don’t join the others in combat. They become part of the scene in Hawaii, and on days off enjoy the culture, Charlie with his paining on the islands and Raditzer becomes part of a Chinese restaurant and accrues a measure of respect by stealing basic foodstuffs from the US military. It becomes obvious that Charlie respects almost no man, seeing them as whoring self-interested beasts like himself, except he idolizes Charlie & begins an elaborate fantasy about his wife, Charlotte, from what he learns of her. In this regard, Charlie is the symbol of purity to the impure Raditzer, who tests that purity by constantly tempting him with licentious women. Teasing aside, he is impressed by the man of principle, Charlie, and the friendship becomes more like an infatuation. We learn of the bomb dropping in Hiroshima, and in the violent celebrating, Charlie gets roaring drunk and finally beds the native woman, thus destroying his image in the eyes of his protégé. Eventually Raditzer is caught and shipped miles away and he loses touch with his friend. Charlie is contorted with guilt over his affair, even doubting the purity of his wife back home. His artistic romanticism wanes, and eventually he is reunited with Raditzer on the ride back home. They mix with men from real combat, wary and clearly with PSTD and dangerous. Raditzer is caught stealing in a card game and Charlie’s loyalty is tested with some rough soldiers as they nearly throw the cheater off board. They pound him mercilessly, strip him of his clothes, and expose him for the fraud he is (he claimed falsely to have seen combat). The ride home is weird and upon landing Charlie realizes his wife is not the same, and he is irreparably damaged himself. The buildup and the climax is stomach churning, as he and Raditzer finally have it out – I won’t spoil the fabulous and disturbing ending.

This felt like a salvation story, where Charlie’s Christ-like tendency to love the unlovable was tested time and time again. Ultimately, he fails in his quest, finding himself disgustingly venal like all the others and needing redemption but having no clue how to get there. I see younger self in the protagonist, with aspirations of holiness and the inevitable downfall. My father-in-law, recently diagnosed with cancer, is my philosophical foil and a father figure to me (was I a bit of a less offensive Raditzer at one time?). He read this during our annual vacation in Hilton Head, being the only one of our large family that will actually read the books I carefully select and provide on the shelf for everyone (few even look at the title, much less read). So, I am tinged with a sadness, that this part of my life and my support system will not last. Will I be able to resume that role, will I have a kinship with someone else as we have enjoyed? Such is the uncertainty that haunts and crowds my worried mind. He was rather perplexed by this book, I suspect he found it disturbing to his born-again sensibilities where there is no comfort to be found in Charlie or his sadly maligned friend. At times I have felt younger people reaching to me to provide comfort as in the security of eternal life, and I cannot create that fantasy (that is a reality for my father in law). That gulf separates us, I’m sure he prays I will come around to his more positive view of life after death. But I’m probably more like the author of this book (Matthiessen), with zen-like happiness, hoping it will sustain when my hour of death arrives. I think about it often. I read this about 1 month after my father in law did, so I will be discussing it with him. We love books, they are often the trigger that cements our fragile, special and comforting relationship.

This slim volume was written in 1960, pre-Vietnam and when the WWII events were still relatively fresh. It was the generation just between my father in law and mine. I look forward to hearing his views on veteran stories he heard when he was a young man.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short little book that I read in one sitting. Matthiessen is an amazingly good writer in both fiction and nonfiction.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly my kind of book. Spare, focussed, atmospheric, this novella is so good I am surprised I had never heard of it before. This is the story of Charlie Stark's war. Stark comes a good family, and had his whole future mapped out for him by his father, until he started to rebel by enrolling in art classes instead of sticking to his law studies. Inspired by the figure of Gauguin, he began to fantasize about a different life altogether, but eventually married a superficially Bohemian girl, Charlotte. In a further attempt to blaze his own path, he chose to enlist as a private instead of going to officer school, or even using his bad knee as an alibi to stay out of the war entirely. The book starts when Charlie ships out to Honolulu in October 1944. Onboard, he is immediately thrown together with a pathetic rascal and shirker, Raditzer, who seems to know quite a lot about him. Raditzer is morally and physically repulsive to everyone, including Stark himself, but because he is an orphan who has grown up in dreadful circumstances, he manages to exploit Stark's bad conscience about his social advantages. Raditzer imposes his "friendship" on Stark, who is too conflicted about himself to shun this unwholesome clown. In the end, in spite of his efforts to "do the right thing", Stark has an easy war, stationed in Honolulu on laundry duty instead of doing active service. Raditzer thrives in business with a couple of Chinese guys who run a restaurant to which he sells Army supplies at discounted prices. There Stark meets Myrna, a local girl who exudes animal magnetism. Raditzer stokes Charlie's interest in Myrna every way he can, while manifestly hoping that his "hero" will resist the temptation and stay faithful to his wife, who has inspired a bizarre devotion in Raditzer, unfamiliar with women other than prostitutes. However, in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Charlie, more adrift and disillusioned with life than ever, does sleep with Myrna, and realizes that he is no longer in love with Charlotte, and she, judging by her letters, probably no longer with him either. Eventually Raditzer's lucrative operations with the Chinese comes to light, and he is punished with detention on one of the smaller islands of the Hawaiian archipelago. By coincidence, Stark and Raditzer meet again on the ship bringing the troops back to California. Raditzer makes himself unpopular all over again by displaying spoils of war, including a scalp from one of Hiroshima's victims, with which he intends to make civilians believe his saw active duty. He also cheats in a card game, and comes very close to getting killed by the other players. Stark saves Raditzer's life, at considerable risk to himself. However, when the troops get ready to disembark, Raditzer is missing. Finally he shows up, half-naked, and tumbles to his death when Stark calls out to him. Charlie is a very complex character, and this bitter story in which everybody behaves badly is quite haunting.

[Mitch Duckworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raditzer the reprehensible, Raditzer the repellent, Raditzer the repugnant, the rejected. He is a pathetic creature, but one who stirs enmity not empathy, inspires revulsion and anger rather than pity; by his manner Raditzer himself forbids anything but aversion, and yet he is a compelling character. He makes a normal range of emotions impossible; he doesn’t just enter a room, he assaults all present, openly and loudly blames the world and everyone in it for his condition, and largely, he is justified in his blame. It is all he knows. One reacts to Raditzer as one reacts to disease . . . Still, Raditzer seeks one good and just man. He is willing to believe better of the world if only one righteous man steps forward and presents evidence to contradict his assessment of the unworthiness of it all.

Raditzer views the world and his place in it from the limited perspective of the have nots; minimal life reduced to only that glimpsed from the slums, and from the gutters. He sees the world as a cesspool, and humanity as a species with mere pretense to spiritual enlightenment; he is contemptuous of humanity. That unseemly opinion deeply angers those whom Raditzer encounters, and this point he drives home repeatedly, and forcefully by the nature of his existence. One does not interact with Raditzer, but is confronted by him, he is in your face, and reactions to him make his case and prove his point; we cannot open our hearts to him. We wish to eliminate the catalyst of our irrational anger—Raditzer himself—and fulfill the only promise ever made him from birth. Raditzer knows he is doomed; it is only a matter of time, and it is a time when good and evil men alike are dying in vast numbers. The time is World War II.

When we meet him, Raditzer is one of hundreds of men onboard a troop transport ship heading west from California, across the Pacific to Pearl. Among his counterparts, we find Radizer’s exact opposite, Charles Stark, beneficiary of every possible advantage, an ivy league educated would be painter, and destined, it would seem, to assume his father’s law practice. Recently admitted to the bar, recently married, Stark has left home to serve his country, and seek the adventure of war, to illuminate the deep, dark knowledge that binds men in fascination. Alone among his shipmates, Stark offers Raditzer a simple human kindness as he would for any man, as much because it coincided with his own wishes—by repeatedly standing Raditzer’s night watch on the sea-tossed deck for the entire crossing—and that the seasick Raditzer takes advantage of by never offering to resume his duty when illness passes. Despite his demonstrative lack of gratitude and claims to the contrary, Raditzer further complicates the matter by insisting that because Stark is upper crust—Stark could not have done anything otherwise; he helped Raditzer only because of his good breeding—and Raditzer insists, maddeningly, that among a ship of Philistines, only he and Stark could appreciate the concept of noblesse oblige. Naturally, Stark objects and does his best to distance himself, insulate against further contact with Raditzer, but that proves impossible.

Stark is a good man, a fair man, open to his peers; he wants to react graciously to Raditzer, and he tries, but Raditzer latches on to Stark like a bad cold, eventually identifying and securing himself like a poisonous remora; his relationship with Stark, he blows out of all proportion. He wants to be Stark, even to the point that he fantasizes Stark’s wife as his own, and eventually in the coming years even writes to her, betraying Stark’s stray from moral rectitude, the betrayal of his wife with a woman on Pearl . . . Finally, Stark reacts like other men, and yet denies the impulses of a normal man. Normal men react to Raditzer with abhorrence; the brutes of the world feel that this unfortunate personage invites annihilation, and by his mere presence almost begs them to finish him in violence, to abort him as an adult as they wish would have happened as a fetus. Raditzer the unwanted, Raditzer the unfortunate, abandoned to an orphanage as an infant, raised as the runt of the litter; shoved aside and denied nourishment from the onset, he has learned to scrape and survive primarily by whining and conniving. He is an insidious sycophant searching for a virtuous man who will prove him wrong, befriend him and accept him—when every fella human bean (his words) in the world—has condemned him to the sole of their boots.

War profoundly affects all humans, each according to his own experiences and personality. Even if one does not see actual combat, war can change a man. But in many ways, it was Raditzer and not the war that had the greater affect on Stark.

When they meet again, going home, long after the war’s conclusion—oddly enough on the same troop transport that had carried them away from California and into the Pacific war—Raditzer proves to be the same, unchanged and completely unfazed by his time in the brig on an island prison; it was hardly his first enforced institutionalization. Nor had the way men reacted to Raditzer changed. To the contrary, some of the more hardened Marine combat vets, the ones for whom life had proven cheap and fleeting wanted to erase him from their sight. His mere presence was a complete insult to their brave compatriots and good friends who died in battle. Again, Raditzer affixed his unwanted attentions; again, he looked to Stark to protect him, which heaped brooding suspicion and resentment among the shipmates toward Stark. In their eyes, any man who would befriend Raditzer could not be much of a man, should possibly share his fate, and at the very least, certainly could not be trusted.

Stark, could have been an officer, but to the dismay of his father, he had opted for the experience of war as a common enlisted man for the valuable insights to be gained from the adventure, which would benefit his life and inform his art. Instead, he found Raditzer. Eventually, even Charlie Stark, the one man who had tried to find the good in Raditzer and failed, ultimately wants to assure his demise. The problem with Raditzer is that he draws every person he comes across down to his level; whereas Stark, on one level a quixotic idealist, initially helpful and protective of the unfortunate pest, after years of unfortunate association . . . finally is ready to kill him.

Among thousands of competitors for the title, Raditzer is the lowest common denominator, the lowest expression of humanity any of the men who meet him have ever observed, even the most depraved murderer would be less objectionable; he is the most reviled man in the Navy, and by his very existence, blackens the souls of all men. Raditzer provides compelling insight into a rarely presented evil; an insider's view of one rotten apple spoiling the bunch; it is not a study in biology but a keenly observed account of an invasive darkness that once observed, is ever after thought possibly contagious. Raditzer the character finds a way to guarantee that he will not survive this final ocean voyage, but Raditzer the spirit is alive and well, reborn in every encounter endured with truly unfortunate maladjusted sociopaths and/or possibly psychopathic extremists. Raditzer is the patron saint of all the people who give you the creeps, the people you wish—to make the world a better place—would just go away.

Raditzer, the slim novel, deserves a place of honor on your shelf.

[Hal · Rating 4 out of 5]

It feels like there's an entire sub-genre dedicated to sailors and their inescapable tragedies (though off-hand I can only come up with Billy Budd), and this is another one. There's certainly some repulsive behavior in this novel, but it's short enough to easily get past. War may be hell, but life really isn't this bad.

[Z. Tracy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charlie’s moral decline was forecasted the second he revealed himself a Gauguin stan. Mildly interesting but unimpressive. Not for me.

[Jamie Teller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had this book for years, finally read it, have since forgotten about it. As I recall, it was fine, just...nothing special. I'd go 2.5 stars had I the option, but 2 stars seems too harsh. I don't recall it being bad—just okay.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not quite sure where to put this but it was an early book by Matthiessen and definitely not his best.

[dead letter office · Rating 3 out of 5]

If Peter Mathiessen could retract this book, like go to traffic court and have it expunged from his literary record, I bet he would.

[Chuck H · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fast read, well-written, novella of only about 150 pages. I love Matthiessen (Snow Leopard), but this book didn't interest me as much.