My Creative Year in the Army: Conflict and Literature

In his new memoir, My Creative Year in the Army, David Madden tells a story of creativity and conflict. In 1954 during the Korean Civil War, when nineteen-year-old Madden showed up at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he set in motion a series of creative acts and conflicts, sometimes comic. A romantic, an idealist, an agnostic, and a liberal, he had actively attacked racism, censorship, the death penalty, and tyranny. During basic training, he befriended Rooks, a disturbed farm boy, and Jacob, the company's Jewish scapegoat. When given an order, his response frequently was to ask, "Why?" He refused to sign the loyalty oath that Senator Joseph McCarthy imposed upon the military, causing a prolonged investigation of him as a possible communist. In a free-writing hour in Clerk Typist School, he wrote an essay on Jesus that shocked the officers of his regiment. When someone stole his cartridge belt, he refused to obey a direct order to pay for another. Madden includes lively letters to and from Iva Lee, his childhood sweetheart, Vera, his intellectual friend, Hope Savage, a bizarre Greenwich Village bohemian, his teachers, his many friends, his mother, and his two convict brothers. David Madden's memoir will appeal to creative writers, veterans, and the general reader. When he entered the army, he had already created many stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction. In reading and in writing, his focus was on technique, style, and imagery. Throughout his Army ordeals, Madden worked on his first novel, Cassandra Singing.