“The Day the Century Ended” Francis Irby Gwaltney

My ACT score in English was one point too low to get into Honors English at Arkansas Tech, and so I had to take two semesters of regular composition and rhetoric. My professor was Ecey Gwaltney. We wrote endless 5-paragraph essays in class; I don’t remember writing anything outside of class. She had a 4-point grading scale of which 3.6 was the lowest A. At the beginning of her class I was making grades of 3.0 to 3.2 on my essays, but she gave no feedback on how to improve. Through shear effort, with no specific thinking behind it since I had no idea where my problems were, I worked my way into the 3.6-3.8 range. Of course, I never got that elusive 4.0, but overall I made As in both of her classes. I liked English class and I liked Mizz Gwaltney (remember I am from the South and at that time all women were Mizz; if our families had been closer, I would have called her Mizz Ecey). The mystique, though, was that Mizz Gwaltney was married to the "famous" author Francis Irby Gwaltney, and he was the one I always wanted to take a class from. I wondered what kind of teacher he would be like, and I naïvely thought that he would teach just like she did, because I had only known one college English professor. Who knows. Francis Irby Gwaltney died in 1981, my senior year in college and the same year as Harry Chapin. Ecey Gwaltney died in 2004.

This should help answer the question of how I became interested in reading works by Francis Irby Gwaltney, a writer that few people have ever heard of. In college and after, I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, and later in grad school I read Richard Brautigan. The books of Gwaltney’s that were popular at Tech when I was there were “Destiny’s Chickens” (1973) and Idols and Axle Grease (1974). I have always associated Gwaltney’s writing with Vonnegut and Brautigan, absurd tales with some elements of fantasy and science fiction, but Gwaltney’s writing is much more down to earth. He wrote about what he knew, growing up in Arkansas and fighting in the Philippines. I have read “Yeller-headed Summer” (1954) and “The Day the Century Ended” (1955), and they are not at all what I had expected, but I enjoyed reading them nonetheless. These books are stories about events, told in a somewhat linear format. I plan on looking for some of his other works, because I particularly like southern writers, and I understand many of the books of Gwaltney's that I haven’t read are about growing up in Arkansas, so I suspect I will feel a connection to them.

I have been looking for a list of books by Gwaltney, and as best I can tell he wrote the four above plus “A Moment of Warmth” (1957), “A Step in the River” (1960), “The Violators” (1960) and “The Number of Our Days” (1960). Gwaltney is the only author I know that does not have a Wikipedia page, and there seems to be no comprehensive on-line source for his writing. I got much of the information I have from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, EBay and used book websites, and from there it seems that “The Day the Century Ended” was also published as “Between Heaven and Hell.” For the shorter books that he wrote in the 50s you should expect covers that involve the typical “bad” woman with copious cleavage draped over a man. These images aren’t just the advertising chosen by the publishers of these pulp fiction offerings; they actually depict something from the book. Some of the sexual details he provides are pretty explicit and would have been quite eye opening if I had read them while I was in college. Gwaltney also wrote screenplays, and I found references to “Corner of Hell,” an episode that he wrote for “The Fugitive” in 1965 and “Lonely Place” that he wrote for “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” in 1964. I suspect that I had seen both of these as a child, because these were shows that our family would have watched, especially “The Fugitive.”

On one used book website I found “Corn Recipes from the Indians” by Francis Gwaltney. Interesting. At this point I am likely to believe that these were actually corn recipes and not the name of some interesting novel along the lines of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.” I also found an uncorrected galley proof of “A Step in the River” at the University of Virginia with open access. Maybe if I am in the neighborhood someday, I will check it out. I am beginning to get that Library of Forgotten Books feeling about Gwaltney’s writing.

Should his books be forgotten? They are period pieces, and unlike some of his contemporaries whose works are more timeless, his work had a dated feel. In “The Day the Century Ended,” I think the battle scenes are of enduring interest, but his discussion of Sam’s marriage to Jenny is a throwback to the myth of marriage in the fifties. When I found out that this was a book predominately about war, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. I’m not a fan of current day war movies. For example, I saw “Saving Private Ryan,” and found the scenes about the storming of Normandy moving, but could have done without the rest of the movie. On the other hand, I sometimes could not put down “Century” if I was in the middle of a battle scene. There was a big difference between being in a man’s mind during a battle, which is possible in a book, and watching a battle scene in a movie wondering what he is thinking. Gwaltney was there for the storming of the beaches of the Philippines and fought there, so although he insisted that the book is fiction, he must have based it on his experiences. I think someone wanting to read about the war in the Pacific will find it interesting, but since I have not read many books like it, I can’t compare the battle scenes with other writing. The relationship between Sam and Jenny, on the other hand, seems more like a soldier’s wet dream than reality. Sam and Jenny are respectively the most attractive young man and woman in town, they both come from influential and wealthy families, they are both well adjusted, and they are perfectly compatible sexually and in personality. Give me a break. How often do these characteristics happen all at the same time to two people who get together? It seems that Sam’s image of Jenny is centered on sex, and maybe that is the way it is for a 22-year-old man who has just gotten married, but I would like to think that she serves some additional purpose in his life. I am currently reading “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” by Carson McCullers, and it is also charged with sexual images, but the characters are more fully developed than Jenny Cozzens in “Century.” The reference “The Day the Century Ended” is to a change in Sam’s attitudes; the century that ends is the nineteenth century with its Victorian views on class. Somehow amidst the war in the Philippines during WWII and the love story between Sam and Jenny is a collision of classes, the soldiers that were rich landowners and those that were the poor sharecroppers that work for them, and it is this dichotomy that Sam comes to recognize and attempts to eliminate. We don’t know how well he succeeds, because there is no after story for us to know what happens when the soldiers return to Arkansas after the war, but based on my own experiences in Arkansas growing up, I suspect he was not successful. This aspect of the book is not as well developed, and again I think the book works better as a war story than as the coming-of-age story of a privileged young man who recognizes how privileged he is.

Something I read on the cover of the book resonated with me throughout the book. It said, "there is a mature appreciation of human beings as people, not types...[a sentiment] found all too rarely." I agree. In particular, the Japanese were not demonized or made into caricatures. One of the soldiers was desecrating the bodies after they were killed, looking for gold teeth, but that was not the attitude of the troops in general, and one of the images that haunted Sam until the end of the book was the look on the face of the first Japanese soldier he killed face-to-face. There was no softening of the sharp edges of jungle combat in this book, and some of the images are gruesome, but these images only helped remind us that people were being killed, even if they were the enemy, they were still people.

The book “The Day the Century Ended” was made into the movie “Between Heaven and Hell” by 20th Century Fox with Robert Wagner starring as Sam and Buddy Ebsen is Willie, Sam’s most steadfast supporter during the last days of the war. Broderick Crawford plays Colonel Grimes, a disillusioned commander of the fuckup company that Sam and Willie end up in. This movie is available on Netflix and I plan on watching it when I get back to Iowa. The “Heaven” of the book is the love of Jenny, and the “Hell” is the fighting in the Philippines, but I am curious to see how they incorporate the other aspects of the book. The reviews say that the ending is anticlimactic, so I am particularly interesting in seeing how they use the last battles, because I thought the last part of the book was particularly tense.