M. A. S. H.: A Novel about Three Army Doctors

I found Richard Hooker's 1968 novel MASH disappointing. I think of it as "poor man's Rudyard Kipling." Like Kipling's immortal SOLDIERS THREE tales of British India and his fictionalized school boy reminiscences in STALKY & CO., Hooker's MASH is about male bonding among a trio of people engaged in the same occupation: whether, as for Kipling, soldiering for Queen Victoria in an alien sub-Continent, or atttending together in England a prep school for future government servants or, in the case of Hooker's MASH, surgeoning together north of Seoul during the 1950s Korean War. Part of the glory of Kipling's depictions (like Shakespeare's) is that Kipling had a very good ear for English as it is really spoken. Richard Hooker, alas, does not. And this is the most annoying single fault in a frequently disappointing novel. *** The novel's title, MASH, is an acronym for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. The MASH about which the tale revolves is the 4077th, located in 1951 and 1953 45 miles north of Seoul, capital of South Korea, and on the 38th Parallel of Latitude separating the two warring Koreas. The tale begins in November 1951. Enter forthwith two newly assigned surgeons, both draftees, "Captains Augustus Bedford Forrest and Benjamin Franklin Pierce." Pierce aka Hawkeye is 28. Forrest aka Duke is 29. Soon Captain Forrest commits for the first time an authorial tin-ear malapropism to be pointlessly repeated hundreds of time before novel's end. Speaking to the only other person in a Jeep driving north from Seoul, Duke asks Hawkeye, "What are y'all anyway? ... A nut?" "Y'all" is supposed to let the reader know that Captain Forrest is a Southerner, specifically a Georgian. Trouble is, of course, we Southerners do not use "you all" or its variants when addressing single individuals. *** Whereas Shakespeare and Kipling individualize their characters through accurate reproduction of the sounds they make speaking English, almost every single character in MASH sounds as if he was born and raised in the same Midwestern neighborhood -- despite Hawkeye's being from Maine and Trapper John's being from Boston. Obvious exceptions are Captain Forrest and a late in the yarn black football star whose father had been a sharecropper on a farm owned by Forrest's father. And they both sound like tin-ear parodies. *** In Chapter 3 there enters chest surgeon John McIntyre, formerly a famous high school and college athlete nicknamed Trapper John. He moves into a tent called the Swamp completing the third of the three Swampmen, the novel's heroes. The rest of MASH is about their growing companionship as unusually good but eccentric surgeons performing "hurry-up, short-cut or call-it-what-you-will surgery you have to do in a place like this" (Ch. 14). Like SOLDIERS THREE and STALKY & CO., MASH is essentially a string of short stories focusing on Hawkeye, Duke and Trapper John at work and at play, in depression and exaltation until each one's 15 months of front line surgery are over. *** The novel spun off a movie directed by Robert Altman which followed the book fairly well, albeit with exaggerations of the mayhem that the surgical Musketeers strewed about them. An eleven-seasons television series was more popular than either novel or movie. If you must read MASH the novel, do it as the price of admission to the movie or television MASH. --OOO--