Tonight Is Forever (original title: Don't Wait Up For Spring) is a 1944 novel by Charles Mergendahl that delivers (as vintage paperback usually do) a different story than the cover advertises.
My Popular Library paperback edition states this is "The romance that defied all convention", which is pushing a small segment of the story.
Harry Trexler is already indifferent to the world in his early twenties. He dates or doesn't date, he drinks or doesn't - it's all the same. His roommate George sleeps all day and sleeps with a new girl each night. Nothing seems to affect them until Pearl Harbour hastens their draft. Harry sees himself as the hot young playwright and has one in production downtown. Maybe he will be a huge success, maybe not; it's all the same. The girl cast in the lead is blonde, beautiful, and independent; Barbara is from a wealthy family and they are at odds when they date. Despite this and either feeling any real passion, they continue and end up married.
This is all in the first 40 pages, because then the novel changes into a different story. Harry is called to join the Navy in the new amphibious force, managing boats taking battle soldiers from the ships to shore. After a training period and friendships made, he is sent to the coast of Morocco to defend the French against the invading Germans. On the first attempt to contact local resistance fighters, they are violently ambushed by the German forces as they land; Harry runs for his life under sniper fire and is separated from his troop. For days, he wanders the fields looking to meet up with American or French camps. Along the way there are man to man attacks from snipers; French German Tunisian Arab, it's all the same. Finally captured by the Germans, he is held as a prisoner until Casablanca capitulates to the American forces. Released, he waits in the filthy native ghettos of Fedala until he gets transport home, but that's not the end. As they leave port, their ships are torpedoed by the Germans in a violent battle that sends Harry into the ocean, landing on the propeller as the ship capsizes. If he survives, and gains the strength to return to Barbara and New York, will she have waited for him, and could they pick up the pieces of their life together?
Harry seems young, bewildered, awkward and angry. This is a novel of a young man thrown into war with some surprisingly violent outbreaks and the weary despondency of a lonely man. His apathy towards Barbara and the world in general before the war is off-putting - it's hard to decide if it is a defence of insecurity or just disinterest in life, he certainly comes across as lacklustre and he wears it on his sleeve. As a novel of a naive and untrained youth entering the war, it works best. This seems a personal story, both the stilted romance and the intimate experiences of battle - perhaps a thinly veiled version of the author himself.
This is not a romance. It's the story of a man caught in a battle to survive under fire, and how it may change him going forward. Interesting, but not really recommended.
My other reviews for Charles Mergendahl:
1944 / Paperback / 192 pages
Comments