A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

First published: 1991

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1899-1964

Locale: Primarily Italy

Principal Characters:

• Allesandro Giuliani, a professor of aesthetics
• Nicolo Sambucca, a young factory worker
• Signore Giuliani, Allesandro’s father, an attorney
• Luciana Giuliani, Allesandro’s sister
• Rafi Foa, a friend of Allesandro, Luciana’s fiancé
• Guariglia, a harness-maker
• Orfeo Quatta, a copier in Signore Giuliani’s office who later works in the defense ministry
• Ariane, Allesandro’s wife, a nurse

The Novel

Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War relates, through a long flashback, the early manhood of Allesandro Giuliani, particularly his life during World War I. Told in the third person, the narrative begins in 1964. Allesandro is journeying by streetcar from Rome to visit his granddaughter’s family. A young factory worker, Nicolo Sambucca, futilely chases the car in an attempt to board. Allesandro demands that it be stopped. Refused reentry by the driver, Allesandro decides that he and Nicolo will walk the seventy kilometers to their respective destinations. They have little in common. Allesandro, from an old and successful Roman family—his father was an attorney—is a professor of aesthetics. Nicolo, a helper in a factory, is young, naïve, and uneducated. During their walk, Allesandro relates the crucial events of his life, centering on the years of World War I.

Life is idyllic for Allesandro before the war, centering on his family and their home in Rome. One evening, he hears singing in the garden of the French Academy. Entering, he sees three young girls. The youngest, at sixteen, and the most beautiful, is Ariane. He also saves the life of a fellow university student, Rafi Foa, who had been harassed because he is a Jew. Afterward, Allesandro introduces him to his passion for mountain climbing.

In the autumn of 1914, while millions of men are marching to war and death, Allesandro travels to Munich to view Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a painting that had survived time; Allesandro comments that “he knew from Bindo Altoviti’s brave and insolent expression that he was going to stay alive forever.” There Allesandro first hears the thundering cannons of war. To avoid the carnage of the infantry, Allesandro joins the navy; instead of escaping the front, however, he is assigned as a river guard in the mountains he knows so well.

It is there that he meets Guariglia, a Roman harness-maker. Although unsympathetic to the war aims of his country—or any political or economic ideology— Allesandro becomes an excellent soldier. Later, he and Guariglia are transferred to Sicily to search for deserters. In the interim, Allesandro visits Venice, where he sees Giorgione’s La Tempesta, a painting of a woman, a baby, a male figure that Allesandro believes to be a soldier, and an approaching storm. Paradoxically, while taking the captured deserters back to trial and execution, Allesandro and Guariglia desert. Allesandro returns to Rome, where his father is dying.

Hoping to get the medicine that might save his father, Allesandro turns to Orfeo Quatta, a copier of documents in Signore Giuliani’s office before the war who is presently working in the defense ministry. Orfeo, who believes that the secret to the universe is the “blessed sap,” initially seems merely madly eccentric. Then, however, he confides that he is directing the Italian war effort through his documents and that he has often reversed the orders of his superiors. It was he who had assigned Allesandro to the front lines, supposedly to protect him. Orfeo has become a demented deus ex machina to millions. He provides the medicine, but it does not help. Allesandro is arrested and sent to a military prison for eventual execution. At the last moment, he is reprieved thanks to Orfeo’s intervention. He tries to give his life for Guariglia’s because of the latter’s children, but he is clubbed into unconsciousness.

Returning to battle, Allesandro is injured. He is cared for by a nurse who turns out to be Ariane, the girl from prewar days, and they fall in love. Ariane becomes pregnant, but as a recovered Allesandro marches again to war, an Austrian plane destroys the hospital. Back in the mountains, Allesandro retrieves Rafi’s body from a cliff in the face of enemy fire and is captured. A prisoner in Vienna at the end of the war, Allesandro flees to Munich to kill the pilot who bombed Ariane’s hospital, but he changes his mind because of the pilot’s young child. There, he again sees Raphael’s painting of Bindo Altoviti, taking consolation from the portrait that nothing is ever lost: All can be remembered, even Ariane.

After the war, with his father dead and his sister having emigrated, Allesandro becomes a gardener. Again he visits Venice to see La Tempesta, which he believes should have been the story of his life—a woman and child waiting for a soldier returning from war. The guard mentions that a woman with a baby had recently cried when she viewed the painting. Hoping it could be Ariane, Allesandro finally discovers his son sailing a toy boat in Rome.

The narrative returns to 1964, to the old Allesandro and the young Nicolo. Allesandro relates his life with Ariane, who had since died, and their son, who had been killed in World War II. At the end of their long walk, Allesandro feels death approaching. Dismissing Nicolo, he descends into a valley, recollecting again his life and art.

The Characters

Allesandro Giuliani dominates the novel, since it is his life he relates to Nicolo. Although a professor of aesthetics, Allesandro is not a typical academic. He rejects the traditional critical approach, claiming that critics “parse by intellect alone works that are great solely because of the spirit.” Drawn to art, Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti and Giorgione’s La Tempesta help illuminate his life. So, too, does nature— the seas, skies, and mountains. As a counterpoint, war also has its lures; as in everything else, Allesandro excels on the battlefield. Opposed to the twentieth century “isms” of communism, fascism, and nationalism, Allesandro’s polestars are love and beauty.

The rest of the characters revolve around Allesandro, satellites to his world. Signore Giuliani, his father, is the great influence on Allesandro’s life—his mother is almost absent from Allesandro’s story—but he is a shadowy and somewhat symbolic figure who represents family, love, and stability in a universe torn by war. Luciana, Allesandro’s sister, also remains a secondary figure; she too is an undeveloped character, of greater importance to Allesandro than to the reader.

Even Ariane remains obscure. When they meet in the hospital, she literally sits in the shadows, remaining nameless. She becomes the great love of Allesandro’s life, and he seeks her in both art and life until he finds her. Yet the reader is left with little knowledge of Ariane except through Allesandro’s own words and feelings, which illumine him but not her.

Nicolo, young, innocent, and uneducated, is an antithesis to Allesandro. Allesandro treats Nicolo as a professor might approach a student: imparting knowledge and wisdom and hoping that the lesson will have effect. In turn, Nicolo validates Allesandro’s life, not only because he listens to the story but also because he will live into the future. Nicolo, because of his youth and innocence, is still malleable, and nothing is lost that can be remembered.

Guariglia is also Allesandro’s antithesis. Guariglia is unattractive and uneducated; he works with his hands, not his head. Yet the furnace of war unites them in the same manner as the later walk unites Allesandro and Nicolo. Beauty is more than appearance, and Guariglia is sanctified by his love for his family.

Other than Allesandro, the most notable character is also the most fantastic: Orfeo Quatta. A repulsive dwarf who could populate the pages of Charles Dickens, Orfeo is mad. Convinced of the reality of the “blessed sap” and fearing that the advent of the typewriter will lead to civilization’s demise, Orfeo at first seems a harmless eccentric. In the insanity of war, however, Orfeo’s dementia takes a sinister turn; his is the perverse hand on the levers of power. Orfeo wants Allesandro to live—he transfers Allesandro to the front instead of allowing him to drown on a naval ship, and he aborts Allesandro’s execution—but his megalomania and irrationality are a paradigm of the war itself. In the end, however, even he is a minor figure. It is Allesandro who is at the center of the novel’s universe.

Critical Context

A Soldier of the Great War was Mark Helprin’s third novel, following Refiner’s Fire (1977) and Winter’s Tale (1983). He has also published many short stories and has written for children. Many years in the writing, A Soldier of the Great War is the most ambitious of Helprin’s works. A serious author who has attained best-seller status, he claims that he is basically a teller of tales who eschews the modernist literary concerns of introspection and alienation in his characters.

Helprin’s first novel, Refiner’s Fire, also uses the flashback technique, recounting the picaresque adventures of a widely traveled Israeli soldier who has been mortally injured in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Winter’s Tale, Helprin’s second novel, is a surrealistic fantasy that relates the lives and adventures of a number of characters, including a horse who flies, in an idealized New York City. Popular with readers, the book received mixed reviews from critics. Helprin’s father, to whom Helprin was very close and who died in 1984, suggested that he make his next work more realistic. As Helprin has noted, in contrast to the previous novel, there is “nothing that violates the laws of physics” in A Soldier of the Great War. It too became a best-seller.

All Helprin’s novels have in common the struggle against mortality. In Refiner’s Fire, Marshall Pearl, although apparently dying, exhibits the will to live as he rises from his bed. The same battle and victory is true of many of the characters in Winter’s Tale. Although many characters physically die in A Soldier of the Great War, the spiritual, through art, beauty, and love, can and will endure. At times out of step with much of modern literature, Helprin’s works are life-affirming, humanistic tales of heroic adventures.

Bibliography

Eder, Richard. “Radiance Is in the Details.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 5, 1991, p. 2. Praises the novel for its magical radiance, which “claps together comedy and sudden beauty . . . as a gateway not to skepticism but to wonder.” Argues that the battle scenes are less successful, however, for they are merely realistic and have been done before.

Edwards, Thomas R. “Adventurers.” The New York Review of Books 38 (August 15, 1991): 43-44. Suggests that Helprin’s novel may be part of a new literary trend, reacting against certain current expectations in art and life. States that the work exhibits a disillusionment with secular explanations but at times becomes portentous and abstract.

Keneally, Thomas. “Of War and Memory.” The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1991, p. 1. Keneally admires Helprin for asking the big questions and notes that the author’s answers are sometimes banal but often illuminating. Keneally suggests that Anton Chekhov would have hated Helprin’s work, but he points out that Chekhov disliked Fyodor Dostoevski’s concern with God’s mysteries.

Linville, James. “The Art of Fiction.” The Paris Review 35 (Spring, 1993): 160-199. A revealing interview that examines Helprin’s obsession with privacy, his reactions to criticisms of his work, the influence his military career has had on his writing, and his desire to convey beauty through his work.

Solotaroff, Ted. “A Soldier’s Tale.” The Nation 252 (June 10, 1991): 776-781. Noting that the tension in the novel is between the glory of war and its horror, Solotaroff finds Helprin’s account more lyrical than dramatic. For Helprin to be a great novelist, Solotaroff argues, he must become less facile.

Steinberg, Sybil. “A Soldier of the Great War.” Publishers Weekly 238 (March 8, 1991): 68. A brief but complimentary review that praises Helprin’s ability to “create vivid settings; magnificent landscapes teeming with activity and colored by extremes of weather, illuminated with the clarity of a classical painting.”

Wade, Alan. “The Exquisite Lightness of Helprin.” The New Leader 74 (August 12, 1991): 19-20. Calling the work a marvelous fairy tale for adults, Wade claims that Helprin is the “most gifted American novelist of his generation.” His gift, Wade says, is in creating great adventures, not complex characters or literary realism.