Jim Beane is the author of the new novel The Deadening. His other work includes the story collection By the Sea, by the Sea. He lives west of Baltimore, Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write The Deadening?
A: Before Covid I had published numerous short stories and essays but struggled with longer forms. I had written a novel, as many short story writers do, but fretted it didn’t work as it should. So, I shelved it.
At the same time, a fellow writer suggested I start leading workshops focused on the short story at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. I took his suggestion. I felt the opportunity provided a chance for me to pay back an institution that had offered me the environment I needed to learn the craft.
While working at The Writer’s Center, I became involved with two veterans’ organizations. As a mentor for the Veterans Writing Project (VWP), I helped and continue to help military veterans polish and prepare their manuscripts for possible publication. For the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP), I developed and taught a creative writing workshop. All went well until Covid ended person-to-person classes.
The veterans I met at both programs were sources of inspiration. Learning the difficulties veterans faced returning to civilian life from war and how they coped prompted me to delve deeper and fictionalize what I learned.
Q: The writer Harry Jaffe said of the book, “Set in the American West still raw with struggling ranchers, the novel comes with tinges of Remarque’s All Quiet on The Western Front and Louis L’Amour’s frontier novels.” What do you think of that description?
A: First, I’ll say thanks to Harry. But I think the key word in his quote is “tinges.” Although there are echoes in flashback of the horrors of the war in The Deadening, the story takes place several years after World War I in the American West and not in the trenches of Europe.
The Deadening exposes the aftermath of the emotional cost soldiers pay when they do their jobs. I think Harry is referring to the common anti-war sentiment in both Remarque’s story and mine, a theme of innocence lost, and lives yet unlived thrown into the meat grinder of war.
My focus was on what happens when combat veterans come home, and who helps them find their way back to the lives they left. I hope The Deadening speaks to how difficult it is for some to adjust and how little is done for their mental health after service, then in 1921 as now in 2024.
As far as Louis L’Amour’s frontier novels, the phrase Harry used, “the American West still raw with struggling ranchers” rings true to describe the locale. Beyond that, I know Louis L’Amour was a very popular author, so that’s good.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I used the internet to discover what I could about the rugged people and their daily lives after the Great War in small towns in Nebraska, Montana and North Dakota. I read historic records, maps and personal accounts. I created the fictional town of Wisdom and the surrounding areas.
For characterization, I used sites offering accounts from combat veterans, doctors, nurses, anyone affected by the war. I examined photos from the era to get a sense of the burgeoning cities and still remote small towns of the West.
I read about hopping trains, the use of laudanum which is a highly addictive opiate prescribed for pain and anxiety, and the newly established, ineffective, and understaffed Veterans Administration. I found facts and flipped them into fiction to create the story.
Most studied were the victims of “shell shock”, the term coined by British doctors during World War One to classify a soldier’s mental health breakdown from combat trauma.
Doctors at that time had little knowledge and limited resources to deal with the number of soldiers suffering mental illnesses caused by their experience. Drug treatments led to addiction and self-medication.
In the states, unaffected Americans were far from understanding or accepting the label “shell shocked.” Some believed America’s hospital beds were for wounded soldiers, not cowards.
I was surprised during research, to discover 1921 was a turbulent time in the United States. It was an age of new government regulation including Prohibition, federal drug laws, laws to prohibit usage of patent medicines, and the new Veterans Administration.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify to you?
A: Originally the manuscript was entitled Wisdom 1921. But after he’d read the manuscript, my wise publisher Merrill Leffler mentioned he felt the title was not reflective of the book’s thematic thread. We threw out a few ideas, and agreed on Merrill’s suggestion, The Deadening.
From what I have read and studied, many combat veterans who have lived through the emotional trauma of war did so by deadening their sensibilities, their values and beliefs. Optimism, compassion, empathy, love and happiness must be stored away until their duty is done. To survive, they live their combat lives in an emotional dead zone.
But when the war is over, and the survivors return home, what then? With support from family, friends and religious communities, many return to lead what our society coins “productive lives.” But without the strength gathered from family love and a supportive community to rejuvenate soul and self, those deadened hearts and minds may remain lost, wanting to fit in but unable.
Hickman suffers from shell shock. His disfigured counterpart in the story, Sheriff Willem Redd, bears the scars of war, but through his town and family’s support, he can break free from the deadening shroud war can bring. Alone to face the world after his experience, Hickman’s wounds don’t heal.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have two novellas I am editing. The first, titled The District, takes place in 1971. The second (in a bit rougher shape), titled The Wilderness, takes place in 2021. The pieces focus on the aftermath experience of veterans from Vietnam and the Middle East.
At some point I’d like to see the three, The Deadening, The District, and The Wilderness, in one volume to illustrate how the efforts to return veterans to civilian life have not changed enough.
I am in the final stages of editing a novel I’ve been working on a long time that ranges from the Jersey shore to tidewater Virginia, and I am polishing a collection of mostly published stories that delve into the lives of working-class Americans.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I worked as a carpenter for 37 years as my day job. I enjoy vegetable gardening, restoring furniture, and my grandchildren. I am a founding member of a 25-year writing critique group that helped seven writers become seven published writers, every one with a book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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