Eisenhower's Party

About the Book

Eisenhower’s Party is a comic novel which begins with a surreal picture of The Snow Mountains, during the German breakthrough into the Ardennes in the winter of ’44. Richard (like Don Quixote) thinks their fi rst days at the front make sense, especially when he meets Joe Dimaggio pealing potatoes near their camp. Timmons (like Sancho

I’ve never read a more powerful anti-war novel than Eisenhower’s Party, not that it is an anti-war novel in an ideological sense or a political novel. The reader shares the fact that no one knew what was going on, the blinding snowstorms working beautifully. There is the quixotic pair, idealistic and realistic, but again, not as symbols, but as real people. The letters to the family are an imaginative stroke because they convey the family’s incomprehension about what war is like, and Gloria/Dulcinea is amusing and attractive. The poems which refl ect on the scenes, (written by Richard) are lovely and imaginative. What a contrast with the brutality all around. The fi nal liberation is beautifully accomplished.

( John Dizikes, formerly Professor in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Panza) believes their actions are ridiculous. Because their inept, absurd Captain takes them up the wrong road, the two GIs are captured. In a fl ashback and part of the comedy we have Timmons’ sex experience with a mysterious woman in the States, and later his orgy with three English USO girls. Richard sends odd love letters to a Pennsylvania farm girl – Gloria, his Dulcinea. He also runs into T.S. Eliot in a London pub – who reads his new poem to him. Eisenhower appears throughout the novel, and during the massive German attack, is celebrating his 5th star at a party in Versailles. The two soldiers, during an American air raid, escape from the POW camp to the Russian zone, and then end up in Paris, where Timmons has an amusing, ludicrous afternoon with a French prostitute. Richard receives a comical letter from Gloria who happens to mention she’s married. Richard wonders whether his war effort meant anything, or was a meaningless farcical endeavor. He recalls a strange talk he had with Einstein in college – who said, “The miracle is that we can comprehend the mystery of existence.”