William Edward March Campbell was an American author, writing under the pen name of “William March”.
Background
William Edward March Campbell was born on September 18, 1893 in Mobile, Alabama, United States; the son of John Leonard and Suzy March Campbell. His father was a sawmill worker in small Florida and Alabama towns, the terrain that later dominated March's fiction.
Education
William's family moved frequently and his formal education was erratic. After high school he began working full time to finance a year of study at Valparaiso University in 1913-1914. He then studied law at the University of Alabama in 1915-1916 and worked for a New York law firm to earn money for further education.
Career
The United States entry into World War I interrupted March's plans. He served in every major Marine engagement.
More important, his military experience troubled him psychologically throughout his life and affected his fiction. In 1933 he published Company K, a novel based on his wartime diaries. Although March became successful in business and retired young with a large fortune, his fiction creates the atmosphere of a feverish nightmare: "When you are well again, you will not remember these terrifying things" (Come in at the Door). In 1920 March helped organize the Waterman Steamship Company and rose in the executive hierarchy until his 1938 retirement. Because of his business travels he was able to dramatize the unhappy lives of "drummers, " or traveling salesmen, in such stories as "A Sum in Addition. " His work in Hamburg, Germany, in 1932 was the basis of "Personal Letter, " an early anti-Nazi story in which he wrote, "Everybody here frightens me a little--they are all so full of sentiment and fury. " His assignment in London from 1935 to 1937 stimulated him to write "A Short History of England, " a satire on social and economic injustice. Also during this period March, a lifelong bachelor, wrote steadily and completed "The Little Wife, " a paradigm for much of his fiction. The salesman-protagonist of the story tries so desperately to deny his wife's death that everyone views him as either drunk or unbalanced. His learning the truth brings him neither illumination nor resignation but intensifies the isolation inherent in his profession. Many of March's characters suffer both from repressing truths and from uncovering them. Writing in a flat, matter-of-fact style that seems detached from the horrors he cataloged, March created parables of helplessness and frustration generating violence. He earned critical acclaim for stories published in periodicals as diverse as Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Pagany, Yale Review, and Alabama Rammer-Jammer, and for his three collections of stories: The Little Wife (1935), Some Like Them Short (1939), and Trial Balance (1945). March's popular reputation, however, derives from his novels Company K and The Bad Seed (1954). The former work examines a Marine unit in World War I, emphasizing its general brutality and indifference, which culminate in the slaughter of a group of captive Germans. Praised for its technical innovation, the novel presents first-person narratives from more than 100 characters, creating a kaleidoscope of perspectives that begins "blurring, and then blending together into a composite whole, an unending circle of pain. . " Unfortunately, the episodes, often individually successful, become more repetitious than obsessive, thus weakening their cumulative impact. March set his next novel, Come in at the Door (1934), in Reedyville, the fictional Alabama town of his representative prose. In the book March explored a white boy's suppressed guilt for the hanging of the adult Negro he loves. After realizing his implicit guilt, the protagonist runs screaming along a road, "his words lost in the larger sound of the world's fury. " In this work March again attempted to present a complex narration by interpolating into the novel passages from a diary and including parable-like episodes, but his method confusingly combined psychological analysis with fantasy. Although his fiction dramatizes a wide variety of sexual practices (including shoe fetishism in the inadvertently ludicrous "Cinderella's Slipper" of 1937), March never developed the implications of boyish intoxication with an older male in Come in at the Door or The Looking-Glass. Another distraught child, whose psychological problems stem from his mutilated lip and impeded speech, dominates The Tallons (1936). This book begins as Faulknerian folk comedy but unconvincingly shifts to rural tragedy as plot exigencies force the characters into inconsistent actions. March's novels often sacrifice believably lusty and attractive small-town behavior to make a point about Southern bigotry and indifference. March's most skillful novel, The Looking-Glass (1943), explores all the Reedyville social strata in a deceptively casual fashion by linking the past and future lives of a series of characters by means of a "basting-thread technique, " a device enriching the image of the town. Although the book boasts its quota of abused children and acts of sexual violence, a genial irony, previously absent from March's fiction, makes these extremes credible. The shifts in time and multiple points of view succeed in generating the sense of reality in process toward which March's innovations often aim. Only in italicized pronouncements by certain characters does the book exhibit a lack of faith in its power: "'There is an instinct toward love and an instinct toward hate, ' continued Ira Graley, 'and the instinct toward hate is the stronger. '" Recovering from a serious depression suffered during the late 1940's, March expanded an earlier story into the novella October Island (1952), a strained satiric fable of American repression and healthy South Pacific sexuality. In 1954 he commanded wide attention with the publication of The Bad Seed, which Maxwell Anderson dramatized in the same year and which was made into a film in 1956. The book traces the origins of evil to the "bad seed" that a mass murderer transmits to her charming but equally lethal eight-year-old granddaughter. An effective horror story, the book focuses on the girl's mother as she researches the topic of child crime and learns the truth about her genetic inheritance. But the forced climax, which cynically allows for the triumph of evil, seems too bitter for the genre. March used the "bad seed" as a metaphor for the sin tainting all men, but the implausible theory of inherited evil weakens the book's credibility. Yet it is eminently readable, superior to Anderson's inflated play and also to the film that punishes the child with a Hollywood justice that ironically affirms March's stress on human corruption. Soon after the appearance of The Bad Seed March died in New Orleans, where he had settled a year earlier after a long residence in New York. March's work often suggests the pessimistic irony of Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, and Eugene O'Neill; but March lacked those authors' ability to create either tragic figures wrestling with a perverse fate or pitiable ciphers. Although he mentioned political tyranny, racial and economic injustice, and political radicalism, March repeatedly sacrificed social immediacy to abstract, often fuzzy, universality. (His lifelong writing of fables and his use of the form in much of his fiction may explain his sermonizing effect. ) March's stories of sexual frustration seem more didactic, less explicit versions of the work of William Inge and Tennessee Williams. In his treatment of violence, he prefigured Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, especially in "The Funeral" (1937), a fine story about a mistreated black girl's suicide. But March, lacking O'Connor's theological framework, ultimately underlined even this perceptive work with the petulant view that man is better off dead.
Views
Quotations:
"As a result of wounds I received in action I shall never be entirely well so long as I live. "