BY 1948, with life restored to a semblance of normalcy, Louis Guilloux accompanied his friend and editor Albert Camus on a trip to Algeria. In 1949, he finished Le Jeu de Patience. It won the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s three top literary prizes.
Louis Guilloux lived another three decades without ever crossing the Atlantic. His month with the Army remained his only direct experience of American life.
He never forgot his stint as interpreter. For the next twenty years, as France recovered from the trauma of occupation, as the relationship of France and the United States evolved through the Cold War, as France’s empire was dismantled, and as he grew older, Louis Guilloux thought back on the month he spent with the Americans in Morlaix, about the cases he witnessed and what they signified. Certain events faded; others came more clearly into focus. The writer altered, magnified, omitted what he once experienced, giving value and shape to a bygone world. His sources were his own: he had nothing but the sketchy notes he had kept in Morlaix, his few letters from the officers on the court-martial, and his prodigious memory for scenes and voices. No archives, no interviews, no fact checking.
Today, an extensive body of literature and documentary is available to anyone interested in the history of the Jim Crow Army. It makes Guilloux’s achievement clear: through his art, he was able to delve deeper and come closer to the meaning of that history than any one of the actual trials could.
Guilloux started taking notes for a novel about his experience in 1964. Nineteen sixty-four was the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, the year Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through the Congress. The summer of 1964 was known to civil rights workers, who flooded the South like so many liberators, as “freedom summer.” In June, the bodies of three civil rights workers were found slain in Mississippi. The world’s attention was riveted on the American South.
It seemed to Guilloux, as he worked, that the turbulent present offered clues for understanding the essence of the past. On the international stage, the American image had changed since World War II. No longer the young, idealistic liberator of Europe, the United States was slipping into a war it could not win in Vietnam, ten years after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The Army Guilloux had known was gone, but the United States had kept a strong military presence in France, with NATO bases that brought a new generation of American soldiers and their way of life to many French towns. In 1966, de Gaulle announced France’s withdrawal from the integrated military command system of NATO, but asked that the NATO governing council remain in Paris. All American bases on French soil were relocated to other parts of Europe. An angry Lyndon Johnson refused de Gaulle’s request and pulled NATO’s governing council out of Paris. It was a low point for French-American relations.
Guilloux followed American politics through the French press and debated world politics with many companions in the course of his travels throughout Europe. On July 16, 1966, thinking, perhaps, of his American friend Bill Cormier, he wrote in his diary: “This morning’s papers are full of the riots in Chicago.” The trouble had started when police turned off a fire hydrant that black children had opened, trying to cool off from the summer heat.
The young people in his own country, attuned to the struggles of Algerian and African independence movements, vocal in their opposition to the American war in Vietnam, moved to unite with workers against the French state. Guilloux, nearly seventy years old, took to the streets with them. Marching in the Latin Quarter, he was tear-gassed along with the students.
In 1968, in the thick of the French social revolution, Guilloux traveled to Orléans to participate in a debate on French and American violence. Students showed slides of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as scenes of French police clubbing students at the Sorbonne. In his diaries, Guilloux criticized the French press for downplaying the severity of police violence against demonstrators.
His sense of injustice, sparked by a cascade of world events, made Guilloux think hard about what could account for a society where so much turmoil was possible. He had witnessed racial segregation firsthand in the U.S. Army, and now, as he searched his memory, his own experience took on new weight; even the great fatigue and melancholy that had precipitated his departure from the Army took on meaning.
In the 1930s, Guilloux had been disillusioned with the Soviet Union. With the United States, his disappointment was more intimate. Men like Joe Greene and Bill Cormier had been his friends, his fellow soldiers in the Liberation. In his novel, he wanted to show how closely their optimism was tied to a dangerous sense of the world being theirs to shape, and to a blindness about their own shortcomings. It was a difficult challenge: What he wanted to convey, he said later, was the sense he had in 1944, at the moment of the Allied landing, that the future promised a great new happiness, and to combine that expectation of happiness with his retrospective knowledge that the dream of a better society had not come to pass.
Guilloux worked on his American story for twelve years, looking for the right form and tone. He chose fiction rather than essay, not only because fiction was his principal form of expression but because writers of his generation considered the novel a powerful—perhaps even the most powerful—genre for social commentary. He came up with a kind of roman noir, using what the French considered American style and technique: short sentences, quick repartee and reactions, an interior psychology that was implicit, never explicit.
The main character and narrator of his novel was the Army interpreter. At first he called him François Marmier, then Bernard Corley, finally just Louis. Guilloux kept Bill Cormier’s real name, but Lieutenants Fogarty and Greene become Bradford and Greenwood, then Bradford and Stone. Juan Sedillo was Lieutenant Colonel Marquez, the bon vivant who always seemed to be studying his manicure in the courtroom. “All right!” the officers repeated to one another, then “OK!” In the very last draft, Guilloux found his title: “OK, Joe.”
As he thought back on the trials and on what he had translated, he streamlined his memories. His decisions were literary, but also political. Hendricks became “the only black man in the assembly of whites”; Donald Tucker, the black commanding officer who testified for four hours in his trial, did not fit the story. And although Hendricks’s crime against Victor Bignon is transposed with remarkable fidelity—even the bullet holes in the wooden door of the Bignon farmhouse are included—Guilloux left out the details of Hendricks’s attempted rape on Noémie Bignon, making Hendricks a purer victim. In OK, Joe, the Ranger captain is a killer who guns down an entire row of prisoners of war rather than three men emerging from a gun nest, or a single German colonel who had just been taken prisoner. There is no scene from the Ranger captain’s trial because the French interpreter isn’t allowed to participate. Military Intelligence officers take over Louis’s job. But he hears them strategizing: they’re going to argue that the Free Frenchman was a Nazi spy.
In his work with the U.S. Army, Guilloux had no direct contact with the accused men. His closest contact had been with French civilian victims of crimes, the people whose testimony he translated into English. He knew little about the accused soldiers other than what he observed in court. In his novel, they appear as symbols, iconic images. He gave them epithets rather than proper names. Hendricks becomes “the idol”; “the cat who didn’t even dream of taking a leap”; Whittington, “the ogre, grinning from ear to ear.” It was the system that was rotten, and Guilloux’s defendants were expressions of that system.
When OK, Joe was published in France in 1976, the reviewers agreed. What was remarkable about this author, one of the great political writers in a cohort that included Gide, Camus, and Malraux, was that he never preached or judged overtly. The plot of OK, Joe, as they described it, was simple: a series of black GIs condemned to death; a single white officer acquitted.
One reviewer compared Guilloux to a boxer who never loses his nerve, who keeps his adversary at a distance, waits patiently for an opening to place his punch.
“But why always blacks, Bob?”
“Ah! That’s a hell of a problem!”
“I know, Bob. Apparently you have to be an American to understand it. But why only blacks? It isn’t a special tribunal for blacks?”
Guilloux had always been a deeply political writer. Yet he recoiled at the idea of a “committed literature.” A writer’s responsibility was above all to be lucid. In his novel, his narrator asks the simplest questions, but never answers them. Nonetheless, the sketches and dialogues in OK, Joe provided quiet ballast for an underlying argument—a profoundly simple one. The black GIs were guilty of their crimes, but so was the white officer, who went free.
Guilloux had a reputation in the Parisian press as a sphinx, a willfully elliptical writer who revealed nothing to anyone who tried to sound him out. But in speaking about OK, Joe with writer Gilles Lapouge in the summer of 1976, he was unusually forthcoming. Despite his disappointments in world politics, he told Lapouge, he retained a fervent belief in social action: “It’s my misfortune not to believe in God, so I don’t count on eternity. I count on people.” At seventy-six, looking, as Lapouge put it, just the way an owl would look if owls smiled, Louis Guilloux explained why he had set his novel in a court of justice: “Society reinforces monstrous differences among people. And gives itself permission to punish some and not others.”