A Soldier Erect by Brian Aldiss

'How much the girl?'

'Short time ten rupee, Johnny.  If she like you, eight rupee.  You come see!  My sister.  Very pretty lovely girl of pale face.'  He took my hand and I went along the path with him.  My impulse was to say to him, 'We don't do this sort of thing in England,' but it was not the place for small talk; also, I was burningly curious to see the girl.  Just curious.  It was such a foul set-up.  Perhaps we should have let the Japs take over running the country.

I still remember the first time I learned of the existence A Soldier Erect, 20 or more years ago.  I was in some narrow little used bookstore in Lower Manhattan, in or near the Village, way in the back of the store where the SF books were against the back wall.  They had paperback copies of David Gerrold's Deathbeast, with its garish and glorious cover featuring women in tight clothes shooting laser rifles at a tyrannosaurus, and A Soldier Erect, which appeared to be about two of my favorite topics, the World War II British Army and sex, and was written by the guy who wrote The Malacia Tapestry, a book I had loved when I read it in high school.  I really wanted to buy these books, but I was incredibly cheap and, more importantly, mortified at the thought of carrying them up to the young woman at the register--no doubt she would think I was some kind of pervert or a severe case of arrested development.  The image of her shaking her head in disdain or grimacing in disgust would render me unable to look at them.  So, I talked myself out of buying them.  But I never forgot them!  As a middle-aged man who had lost much of his capacity to be embarrassed I finally bought (a thousand miles from Manhattan) and read Deathbeast in 2013, and just this year finally spotted A Soldier Erect in a jacketless water-damaged hardcover edition at Wonder Book in Frederick, Maryland, where I paid 95¢ for it.  This week I read the 1971 novel, the second volume of Aldiss's semi-autobiographical Horatio Stubbs trilogy.

The first volume of the Stubbs saga, The Hand-Reared Boy, was striking in that it was focused on masturbation, homosexual activity and incest.  A Soldier Erect offers plenty of masturbation, but the proportion of homosexual and incestuous content is considerably reduced.  Instead we get Stubbs's experiences with prostitutes while serving in the British 2nd Infantry Division in India; these sexual encounters are disgusting and depressing.  (Maybe it is just as well a younger MPorcius didn't get his hands on this book.)  

After a brief opening section in England about the farewell party his family throws him--his mother interrupts him just as he is about to have sex with an English girl in the shadows by the family air raid shelter--we accompany Stubbs to India with the fictional 1st Battalion of the 2nd Royal Mendip Borderers.  For almost 200 pages the battalion is in training far from the enemy, and the text focuses on the soldiers' interactions with each other and the native population--there is very little in A Soldier Erect about equipment or tactical doctrine or that sort of thing.  Then in the last 60 or so pages of the book the Mendips travel east to participate in the famous Kohima-Imphal battle against the invading Japanese. 

The battle stuff is fine; good, but sort of ordinary.  The strongest element of the novel is Stubb's relationships with his fellow soldiers.  Stubbs is a smart middle-class boy, and back in Blighty was trained to operate a radio.  Twice he has been promoted to sergeant, but he is something of a troublemaker and has been twice stripped of his stripes, and so his relationships are with privates rather than with commissioned officers.  Many of these semi-autobiographical books of military fiction I read, like Patrol by Fred Majdalany and The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, are largely about the heavy responsibility of command and the sorts of decisions officers have to make, but A Soldier Erect is told from the point of view of the rank and file, and any planning or decision-making Stubbs engages in is with the object of finding an  opportunity to jerk off in peace or get his hands on a whore.

The various soldiers Stubbs meets, and over the course of his service bonds with, all have fun personalities--one is well-read and well-travelled and full of queer trivia and conspiracy theories, another is a die hard communist, one is a shyster who is always trying to pull strings to get cushy assignments or unauthorized leave, while another is shy and nervous--and their dialogue as they challenge and joke around with each other, and endeavor to come to terms with the war situation they find themselves in amid the quite alien world of India, had me laughing out loud.  Aldiss, in this book at least, proves to be a good comedian! 

Perhaps the best scene of the novel has Stubbs chasing a monkey who has stolen two loaves of bread and is scampering along the roofs of train cars with this booty:

I gave an answering yell, flung my rifle to Carter the Farter, and dashed forward.  The robber-monkey was making off along the roof of the train, not going particularly fast, a loaf of bread under each arm.  I jumped into the open doorway, put a foot up on the window-sill, and heaved myself on to the roof.  The world looked different up there--a wider panorama of desolation. 

Several monkeys were scrabbling about on the roof.  They froze and looked at me reprovingly, with the scepticism reserved for an outsider.  Perhaps they had their own ghastly society up there, a duplicate of the one below. 

Aldiss's portrait of India, its landscape, people and culture, as seen through the eyes of the British soldiers, is amusing and compelling and constitutes the other powerful and noteworthy element of the novel.  While he draws everybody with sympathy, neither the Tommies nor the "Wogs," as the British soldiers call the Indians, come out smelling like roses.  As you might guess from the quotes above ("foul...desolation...ghastly") India is depicted as filthy, overcrowded, and impoverished, the city streets swarming with beggars, women who collect and sell animal droppings ("shit wallahs"), and young boys eager to personally provide fellatio ("You like gobble, Johnny?") or access to a sister ("You want fuck girl, Johnny?") for a few coins.  Calcutta, Stubbs tells us, is the "capital city of the impoverished world" and the "capital of cholera."  Stubbs finds Indian culture fascinating, even buying posters of Hindu gods, like Hanuman the monkey god who rips open his own chest, to hang over his bunk between his posters of Jinx Falkenberg and Ida Lupino, but his comrades are indifferent or openly contemptuous of Indians and their culture and berate Stubbs for "going native."   

A solid piece of work; A Soldier Erect is definitely worth your time.  The sex isn't sexy, but the jokes are funny, and while there might not be as much about different sorts of weapons and equipment as military history buffs might like to see, there is a lot about the lived experience of being a soldier in the Kohima-Imphal campaign, the physical and psychological reality of climbing and fighting in all those densely forested mountains, for example.  The cover blurb of one edition of the book (under a totally deceptive cover photo which gives the impression Stubbs has sex with a French maid) suggests A Soldier Erect is "uplifting," and Aldiss's presentation of service life in the East is in some ways surprisingly positive.  Stubbs comes to respect and even love his fellow soldiers, including the officers, and during their service together they become a well-functioning team, while Stubbs himself realizes he has an ability to endure, even thrive, under the worst of circumstances:

Suddenly it struck me--I had an infinite capacity for happiness!  I was really a hell of a feller!    

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I've read quite a bit of Brian Aldiss' work during this blog's life.  Among my blog posts about Aldiss we find my assessments of more or less traditional SF novels like Non-Stop and Bow Down to Nul, a quasi-mainstream novel about the white man and his technology in black Africa, The Male Response, some New Wavish stories I thought were gimmicky and lazy, and some New Wavish stories I thought successful.  Aldiss was prolific and has a large body of work, and he didn't do the same thing again and again but instead was always going off in different directions and trying something new, making a journey through his work an adventure with some pitfalls but also plenty of rich rewards.