Alas Babylon (Harper Perennial Olive Edition) Read online

  pat frank

  ALAS,

  BABYLON

  Foreword

  by David Brin

  Contents

  Inroduction and Backward Glance

  Foreword

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Alas, Babylon 1959

  About the Author

  Also by Pat Frank

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INRODUCTION AND BACKWARD GLANCE

  Alas, Babylon was published by J.B. Lippincott in 1959, becoming one of the first novels dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear war. Together with British author Neville Shute’s 1957 blockbuster, On the Beach, the vastly different stories shaped the popular consciousness of an ‘atomic age’ and a suddenly fragile civilization.

  My father’s fifth novel, Alas, Babylon built on the popular success of his first, Mr. Adam, which took a comedic approach to a possible nuclear disaster—its earnest and shy protagonist was left as the only man in the world still fertile following a nuclear power accident. The amusing tale chronicled the hapless Mr. Adam’s attempts to escape from a national and international mob in hot pursuit of his ‘vital fluids,’ so to speak.

  Appearing in 1947, that book appealed to war-weary readers eager to put the decidedly un-amusing impact and future implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki behind them. Mr. Adam sold millions of copies and launched my father as a novelist, following on his career as a journalist with stints at The New York Post, The Washington Herald, and the Overseas News Agency; perhaps most important for Alas, Babylon, he served as a War Correspondent during World War II, witnessing and reporting some of the most important events. His experience indelibly impressed him with the catastrophic potential of atomic warfare; it also confirmed his lifelong distaste for the Soviet Union, which he had sized up as totalitarian and dour while traveling as a young man.

  As tensions built in Berlin and our policy of “containment” led to increased involvement in military conflicts, my father emerged in the 1950s as a convinced and voluble “Cold Warrior”: his contacts and assignments gave him access to interesting information, and he published pieces about U.S. preparedness in periodicals such as Life. By the time he started writing Alas, Babylon, he was already consulting with the Office of Civil Defense, a role he continued until his death in 1964. (Although much overshadowed by our loss, it’s probably best that my father didn’t see the day that my brother, Patrick Frank, declared himself a conscientious objector when called for the draft in 1966.)

  Alas, Babylon was widely reviewed when first published and quickly climbed the sales charts. It was adapted as a Playhouse 90 TV production in 1960, starring Don Murray and Barbara Rush, with narration by Dana Andrews. When Patrick and I assumed stewardship of the Pat Frank copyrights in 1964, the book was still selling well; somewhat to our surprise, the novel was still in print when Lippincott merged with Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) and took over distribution around 1980. Harper brought out new editions in 1993 and 1999, and in 2005 republished the book in its Modern Classics series with a foreword by David Brin (The Postman, 1985).

  As the novel assumed the status of a classic over the decades, it became required reading in many schools, accompanied by the requisite Cliff Notes, and later, Wikipedia summaries. The book has been under option for a motion picture adaptation several times and continues to attract the attention of would-be producers, although so far none of these projects has come to fruition. In 2009 the Florida College English Association marked the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication with a lively roundtable at their annual conference at Rollins College, an event in which I was pleased to participate. In 2010 Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon, produced a sound version that was nominated as the company’s most noteworthy fiction offering of the year.

  From my perspective, the year during which my father worked on Alas, Babylon at his home office in Mount Dora, Florida, and my grandmother’s manse in Jacksonville, was notable only because I started college at the University of Florida, while Patrick followed in my footsteps at Seacrest High School in Delray Beach. We had known that my father made a living as a writer from earliest childhood—what that mainly meant to us was that we could not disturb him during the several hours of each day that he was in his study with the typewriter clacking. (My mother claimed, perhaps apocryphally, that when we lived in Irvington-on-Hudson she had to lock him in to ensure that he met his deadlines.) During the Mount Dora years, the office adjoined the guest cottage on his lakeside property where we stayed when visiting; we heard a lot about “the evil empire” and SAC bases as the book took shape.

  So it was that when the book came out I was not terribly excited. In Gainesville, I had quickly fallen in with a crowd of young literati who were challenging the football culture of the school, and I helped start an avant-garde literary magazine, The Campville Herald. I read the classics at Florida, but my favorite required book was The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a harbinger of the counterculture deluge that was to challenge and ultimately topple the complacency and conformity of middle-America in the 1950s. In fact, I had already read On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s picaresque beat travelogue, in the summer between high school and college. At Florida, I quickly discovered poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso, who stood out as loud critics of American foreign policy and, especially, the nuclear buildup.

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, Mount Dora, the putative model for Alas, Babylon’s Fort Repose, was hardly my favorite vacation destination. Unlike the fictional town, we had no African American neighbors, I never heard of any controversy about progressive (some would have said subversive) books in the village library; I didn’t notice any shanties on the outskirts of town. The village didn’t have a telegraph office (or, for that matter, a movie theater). My preppy Mount Dora boyfriend—the son of a retired colonel—couldn’t compete with my bohemian suitors in Gainesville. And, despite the Cold War backdrop and my father’s preoccupation with civil defense, there were no signs of imminent danger or preparation in our household—instead of canned goods, coffee, and first aid supplies, my stepmother’s windowless utility room contained only the washer and dryer.

  In 1959, as the country struggled to counter what was thought to be Soviet weapons superiority and defeat the spread of communism, the homefront clung to the post-war belief in progress, prosperity, and ‘family values’, largely interpreted as a stable, two-parent household where Dad worked and Mom cooked. College graduation rates for women and employment outside of the home both dropped in the 1950s—the reality that minorities and those locked out of good union or professional jobs were working at subsistence rates and succumbing to urban blight was kept in the background—even for those experiencing it—by a robust popular culture that included sit-coms typified by Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Celebrities such as Ed Sullivan and Bob Hope promoted an uncritical celebration of “the American way of life,” and despite a long-running genre of film and TV westerns superficially glorifying “rugged individualism,” it was understood that in the end the outsider hero and the flourishing, democratic community were one.

  Although the public was drawn into the national project of civil defense (best-remembered by those of a certain age as “duck and cover” school drills), realistic depictions of nuclear war and its aftermath were ab
sent from popular fiction and media. John Hersey’s great documentary chronicling the devastation of Hiroshima was not widely read, leaving virtually the only voices addressing the issue the pacifistic beat poets. Given this context, Alas, Babylon electrified middle America, providing a familiar point of reference from which to process and understand a confusing world where Disneyesque facades masked rotting beams and flimsy foundations.

  But what accounts for the amazing staying power of this book, now an iconic text that helped to spawn a cycle of survivalist literature and popular culture, anchors many a book club, and remains a required text in high schools across the land? First, and most obviously, the novel remains timely because its central conceit, the threat of nuclear holocaust (not to mention other types of cataclysmic disasters), continues at the forefront of popular awareness and drives our national policies. (A newscast from p. 3 of the novel informs us that “there is a new crisis in the Middle East.”)

  Only two years after publication of Alas, Babylon, the country faced its nearest brush with an atomic war with the Cuban missile crisis. And although the Cold War wound down over the following generation, the potential for Armageddon persists—one need hardly mention 9-11, North Korea, and Iran. Atomic holocaust, with the possible collapse of the human project, is now joined by natural forces—Katrina and, most recently Sandy, remind us that the long-anticipated degradation of the earth’s ecological systems is virtually upon us. The taste of what existence would be like in a post-industrial world plunged into pre-technology conditions is made more bitter by the growing recognition that we ourselves are responsible for this precipice.

  The appeal of the story, however, goes beyond its topical relevance. The book is a microcosm of Americana--a portrait of the United States at a critical social moment and an exploration of family, community, and civil society in a world hurtling toward post-modernism. We are drawn to the characters of the novel because we already know them—through our own lived experiences and through representations in such works as Our Town, The Spoon River Anthology, and Main Street.

  Thus, protagonist Randy Bragg invokes the tortured soul of the 1950s, struggling to come to terms with the centuries-long tragedy of race relations in the United States while holding together his blended family amidst the aftermath of an atomic attack. We meet Randy at the beginning of the tale as the failed descendent of a distinguished line, an attorney who has carved out a bachelor apartment and office in the deteriorating mansion built by his great-grandfather before the Civil War. On distant terms with much of the town’s social and commercial upper crust, in many ways his closest associates are the Henry family, comprising four generations African Americans representing evolving lifestyles and mores of the period. A supporter of integration, Randy has been roundly beaten and humiliated in a quixotic quest for a state house seat at a time when Brown vs. Board of Education was being resisted throughout the South. Randy’s complex relationship with the Henrys is a subtext of the novel, which, along with the treatment of women, pushes the boundaries of 1950s racial and gender conventions—notwithstanding that the discerning reader will recognize some inadvertent stereotypes in the book’s language and plot. The layered message may partially account for the book’s value as a teaching tool.

  Randy’s aimless routine of bird watching, drinking, and womanizing is interrupted by a mysterious telegram from his older brother, a military officer, warning of an imminent nuclear attack. With the arrival of his sister-in-law and young niece and nephew, Randy is thrown into a struggle for survival amidst the collapse of infrastructure, communications, and the food supply. But the drama plays out amidst the details of domesticity, placing Randy firmly in a community consisting of his African American neighbors, the village physician and best friend Dan Gunn, and the telegraph operator who lives next door and fantasizes that Randy is peeping into her windows. The cast of characters is rounded out by Lib McGovern, his spunky girl friend and daughter of a retired colonel, librarian Alice Cooksey, and Admiral Hazzard, who has the one functioning short wave radio through most of the book.

  The story covers the run-up to the blast and the year following, tracking the characters as they absorb the scope of their loss—first the immediate and obvious—food and electricity—then the less tangible and seemingly less-central accoutrements of civilization—eye glasses, privacy, music. As the novel progresses, each character reveals sorrows, each is tested, and one dies. Civil order breaks down amidst the chaos, and is only restored by courage and shared sacrifice. Yet, the group begins to rebuild, sustained in part by the legacy of Randy’s ancestor, whose rediscovered log provides hints for survival.

  The novel is most often described as affirmative—a story celebrating human creativity and perseverance, as well as the meaning of community. Without doubt, these timeless qualities go a long way in explaining its enduring popularity. Yet, the book’s conclusion is more ambiguous, as Randy turns away from his would-be rescuers “to face the thousand-year night.” There is no doubt that my father meant the book as a cautionary tale, presented as it is within the Biblical context of Revelation 18:10: “Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy judgment come.” The message is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

  We have high hopes that the electronic edition will make Alas, Babylon will please current fans and make the novel accessible to new generations of readers.

  Perry Frank

  Washington, DC

  November 2012

  Foreword

  The world always seemed a dangerous place. Huddling in caves and isolated huts, our ancestors feared whatever lurked beyond the fire’s light. Taking shelter behind village stockades and town walls, we dreaded the next flood, drought, plague, or invading horde. Nature appeared so mysterious, and our place in the world so tenuous, that legends of doom and ultimate loss were commonplace in nearly every culture.

  Time became an arch-villain, plotting to make things worse. Any golden age lay in the past. The future—except for some vague promise of final redemption—was portrayed as a realm of peril or woe. If doomsday would not come by fore-ordained fate or heavenly decree, then it must surely be wrought by human hands.

  One may imagine that Alas, Babylon—a classic novel about catastrophic nuclear war—fits into this grand human tradition of dire prophecy.

  But it does not.

  Yes, you will find here a tale about Doomsday. At the time this book was written, we all felt its hot breath. While pundits and politicians fretted over fallout shelters, “thinking about the unthinkable,” we school kids pictured a burning flash whenever our teacher sprang another surprise duck-and-cover drill, sending us diving under our desks with the chilling command: Drop! On television, Armageddon’s death angel took form as a broad-shouldered cloud whose radioactive glower stalked our dreams, prickling the hairs on the back of our neck, and killing our sleep.

  Our unease expressed in many ways, some of them contradictory: in a crisis of confidence…and in the arrogant hubris to take on a land war in Asia. In both materialistic obsessions and a new willingness to question old prejudices. In smugness and self-criticism. Enthusiasm for the adventure of technology combined with brooding suspicion of its cost.

  Pat Frank’s novel came along at a particular moment when our nerves were especially on edge—just after the shock of Sputnik, when it seemed likely that the very skies above might fall, in a rain of nuclear bombs. While the Soviet Union heaped triumph after triumph in space, American rockets seemed capable only of fizzling on the launch pad. A national defense that was based on fighter planes and bombers suddenly seemed old-fashioned, as some had been warning for years.

  At one level, then, Alas, Babylon is highly specific to an era of just a few years. One character—an air force officer—even says so when he foretells that the enemy will take advantage of a narrow window of opportunity—one due to close fairly soon, as soon as the United States redressed the imbalance by catching up in missiles and submarines.
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  Today we know this “Missile Gap” was more figment than reality, based partly on an inflated notion of Soviet competence and eagerness for war—a mistake that was easy enough to make at a time when secrecy exacerbated every nightmare. In any event, this “Gap” featured prominently in the 1960 presidential election, as well as in the minds of millions who made this book a topical bestseller.

  Certainly Pat Frank was accurate in predicting that some deterrence would be restored to the teetering world situation when the “Gap” closed, especially with the arrival of Polaris submarines that protected national deterrence against vulnerability to a sudden First Strike. What he could not foresee was that surveillance satellites would prove such a boon to humanity and peace, helping to stabilize the world and calm down the Cold War, rather than aggravating it.

  This firm placement in a particular era does not detract from the book, but rather adds to its charm. We see in the main character, Randy Bragg, a person about as admirable as you might hope to find at a time and place where Americans still took segregation of the races for granted. Randy’s personal struggle to foster honorable change in his small corner of 1959 Florida is a touching portrayal of someone more honorable than his time, though still mired in habits that would take years and anguish to break.

  Anguish that we would all go through during the decades that followed. Clear-eyed, Pat Frank foretold what our task would be in the years to come after 1959…assuming that we survived to take it on. Throughout the following era, while we struggled with our institutions, with one another, and with our own moral flaws, one of the things that kept many of us going was a sense of privilege. Only the very fortunate get to struggle. Only the living may improve. Whenever events had us feeling especially low, we might look to dark imaginings like this one and tell ourselves—it could be a whole lot worse.