LETTERS: A CHARACTER STUDY

I have returned from Quebec, and while events prevented me from even thinking about blogging for a week, I haven't forgotten the task I assigned myself before I left, which is to use this platform to explore the craft of writing. To that end I would like to analyze an episode of television which, in 26 minutes of actual airtime, serves as a masterclass in character study. I have long maintained that radio and television scripts are a superb place to study character dialog, but I also maintain that the built-in brevity of the form is also a great way to learn the ratio of force to space -- in other words, to pack the most punch with the least number of words. Novelists would do well to study these different but related mediums. So let's get started.

"Letters" is the second episode of the ninth season of M*A*S*H, (actually the show's 200th episode). It was written by Dennis Koenig, and originally aired on November 24, 1980. Before I jump into the story, I will briefly summarize the TV show in question for those of you who might happen to be unfamiliar with it due to your tender years. M*A*S*H was a hit series which ran from 1972 - 1983, chronicling the lives of a group of Army doctors and nurses at a mobile surgical hospital during the Korean War. It is regarded as the first television "dramedy," meaning that it began as a normal situation comedy but the storylines became increasingly dramatic over the years, until the blend of comedy and dramatics was roughly even. It had a large ensemble cast of extremely distinct characters, and at the time "Letters" aired, it consisted of the following:

Hawkeye Pierce: The chief surgeon of the hospital, a wisecracking, Martini-guzzling, skirt-chasing pacifist, drafted unwillingly into military service, who hates the Army and war.

B.J. Hunnicutt: A skilled surgeon who is a devoted husband and father, he harbors great resentment and anger at being forced away from his family by the war.

Sherman Potter: The commanding officer of the 4077 MASH, the folksy, fiery Potter is an old career soldier, a wise country-style doctor, also a gifted commander, who understands how to manage "civilians in uniform."

Charles Emerson Winchester III: A brilliant surgeon hailing from immense wealth, Charles is also a pompous, mean-spirited snob, obsessed with his own pedigree, yet capable of decency if sufficiently moved.

Margaret Houlihan: The camp's chief nurse is a career soldier from a military family who takes her job with religious seriousness. Tough as nails and possessing a hair-trigger temper, she is also a deeply passionate, and compassionate, human being.

Francis Mulcahy: A kind-hearted but scrappy chaplain who struggles with feelings of uselessness in the face of the war, he serves as the informal "camp counselor" to the 4077, be they religious or not.

Max Klinger: The long-suffering company clerk. Once obsessed with getting out of the Army on a psycho discharge, the ever-scheming Klinger is now resolved to performing his duties, but never the Army way.

To cases.

"Letters" opens during a rainstorm which has been going on for days, leaving the men and women of the 4077 restless, bored and depressed. They have nothing to do but complain about the food and the mud. At breakfast one morning, Klinger appears with an enormous sack of mail for Hawkeye, who announces that a friend of his from his hometown has instructed her fourth grade class to write the personnel of the MASH. He distributes batches of letters to each of his comrades, instructing them that each must answer the letters they are given, no swapping; everyone cheerfully accepts, with the exception of Charles, who sarcastically states he doesn't need to correspond with children as he already lives with one...Pierce.

The episode then tracks each character's attempt to answer the questions posed to them by the children of Crabapple Cove, Maine. Father Mulcahy is asked if he has ever saved a life. Distressed by the question, he tries to pawn off the letter despite Hawkeye's injunction, but Col. Potter reminds him that he did indeed perform this task. Mulcahy then recounts how he cured the liquor-guzzling camp mutt, Irving, of his rampant alcoholism, thus saving him from a premature death. This opening bid in the script is a light touch which demonstrates both the humor and the compassion of the popular priest.

Klinger is asked by his correspondent if the Army pays well. Klinger responds by detailing the rise and fall of his latest get-rich-quick scheme, raising chinchillas for their fur. When Winchester sarcastically points out Klinger has purchased two male chinchillas, Klinger's dream dies. He informs the child that he is now investing his capital in a school for bowling alley pin boys. This aside is another comedic touch, one which shows Klinger's disdain for the army and his addiction to scams, dodges and hustles, all of which end up exploding in his face.

Things turn serious when Margaret is asked if she ever gets close to the patients in the hospital. Writing through tears, Margaret recounts comforting a dying soldier for hours, asking him about his girlfriend and his plans for home, knowing -- as he does not -- that he has only a few hours to live. Weeping, she tells the tot that there are some patients she will never forget. This scene reveals the deep compassion which lies beneath Margaret's disciplined, hot-tempered surface.

Charles, who initially refuses to bother with the letters, is ignited by one which BJ reads allowed, saying the child is envious of Army life "because you get to camp out every night and eat Army food." He writes a wittily insulting response, which delights him and causes BJ to remark that Charles is the world's first "poison pen pal." Delighting in his own cruelty, Charles continues taking letters, lambasting each of his correspondents.

The flow of the narrative is interrupted when Hawkeye reads a letter that upsets him enormously:

"Doctor, My brother was a soldier in Korea. He got hurt, but some doctors fixed him up so he could go back and fight some more. Then he got killed. Now I'll never see Keith again. You doctors just make people better so they can end up dead. I hate you all. Signed, Ronnie Hawkins."

Hawkeye is badly shaken by the epistle. "What do I say to this kid?" He plaintively asks BJ. "I mean, he's...He's kind of struck a nerve. We've all sent boys back to the line and then had them end up dead. What do I say to him?"

While Hawkeye grapples with a response, BJ recounts to his own pen pal, who asks if it takes a long time to become a doctor, how the Army sent the 4077 a replacement surgeon who turned out to be a lawyer, and how he and Hawkeye used the attorney to assist in surgery, much to Margaret's displeasure. He then offers Hawk help with his answer, but Hawkeye refuses, only to visit the chaplain. The following scene ensues:

MULCAHY: So this letter has triggered a crisis of conscience for you.

PIERCE: A crisis of guilty conscience. Essentially he's saying I'm a very large cog in the war machine. I'm not sure he's wrong.

MULCAHY: Hawkeye, do I need to point out that you don't take lives, you save them.

PIERCE: I'm also in weapons repair. I fix people up so they can go out and get killed. Or kill other people. I can't deny that. And I can't live with it either.

MULCAHY: How can I help you?

PIERCE: Answer this letter for me, okay?

MULCAHY: All right, Hawkeye. I'll help you by not answering the letter.

PIERCE: Huh?

MULCAHY: Well, you did say no trading.

PIERCE: Oh, come on, Father. This is serious. Come on.

MULCAHY: I am serious. This letter has stirred up some very deep feelings in you, Hawkeye, and you're going to have to deal with those feelings whether you answer the letter or not. It seems to me that the problem isn't just what you tell him. It's also what you tell yourself. Perhaps you can find an answer that will satisfy both of you.

This conversation not only shows a much deeper, stronger and more complex side to the priest than was revealed by his harmless dog anecdote, it also lays bare the writhing mass of doubts, insecurities and guilts that exist beneath Hawkeye's glib, Martini-swilling exterior. A committed pacifist who once told Colonel Potter, "I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash-and-carry, carry me back to Old Virginie, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun," he lives in a state of often self-righteous denial about the fact he nevertheless is part of the Army and therefore part of the machinery of warfare whether he personally takes life or not. When he remarks that he "can't deny it, and can't live with it, either," he is expressing the increasingly violent internal dissonance which eventually causes his character to break down completely during the opening of the series finale several years later.

More nuances now exhibit themselves through Charles. The show's principal antagonist following the departure of Maj. Frank Burns, Charles is altogether a different character. Unlike Burns, who was a psychological junkyard with almost no redeeming qualities at all, Charles' imperious, self-serving, disdainful nature masks a sensitive soul, one which is capble of great compassion. It is a peculiar quality of the character that he views this compassion as an embarrassment and hides it whenever possible. Thus, when he discovers the leaf of a birch tree pressed into a little girl's letter and is profoundly moved by the memory of Autumn in New England (he's from Boston), he dismisses it verbally as "more childishness" but then responds to the child with a lovely letter:

"Dear Virginia, It is with indescribable joy that I accept your gift. It is indeed testimony to the beauty that exists in all creation, but perhaps nowhere more than
in a young girl's heart."

The two acts -- responding with such beautiful sentiments while simultaneously hiding them from his tentmates -- sum up the character of Charles in a single scene.

The tone shifts back to comedy when Colonel Potter recounts to his own correspondent how he tried to break the all-time record of consecutive baskets (31) but failed by one shot, succumbing to the pressure of an expectant crowd. When he chokes, the crowd drifts away in disappointment, and Potter formally relinquishes his nickname, "Hoops." He jokingly advises the child to take up an easier sport, like horseshoes.

At last a patient is brought into the hospital, a girl with a severe concussion who needs surgery. BJ and Hawkeye perform an operation to relieve the pressure on her brain, and the incident gives Hawk the impetus he needs to finally answer Ronnie's letter:

"Ronnie, it's not a good idea to take the love you had for your brother and turn it into hate. Hate makes war, and war is what killed him. I understand your feelings.
Sometimes I hate myself for being here. But once in a while, in the midst of this insanity, a very small event can make my being here seem almost bearable. I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you, Ronnie... except to suggest that you look for good wherever you can find it."

As Hawkeye learns the girl will survive, it also finally stops raining. He opens the door, is flooded with sunshine and hears birds singing. "Well, what do you know," he murmurs. "A break in the gloom."

The final scene in the episode occurs some time later, when replies to the replies have arrived at the camp, and Klinger upends a huge bag of letters in the Swamp, the tent where Hawkeye, BJ and Charles live. As the men discuss the letters, Potter bursts in, drenched in sweat and carrying a basketball, "Hot sausage!" He shouts. "Thirty-two!" Though thrown in for comic relief, this moment sums up the proud and fiercely competetive nature of the colonel perfectly: his inability to live with defeat (and take his own advice) puts a marvelous finish on a remarkable story.

"Letters" is a classic example of what can be accomplished when a writer understands a) his characters, b) how to get the most out of them using the smallest number of words, i.e. by demonstrating character through action as much as through well-crafted dialog. We are not told "Father Mulcahy is compassionate but isn't afraid of tough love," we are shown two examples of this, first in the way he "cures" the dog of his alcoholism by allowing him to drink to the point of sickness (a play on Pavlov, one might say), and then, more dramatically, by forcing Hawkeye to answer the letter which is troubling him. Similarly, we are shown Margaret's tenderness, Klinger's penchant for harebrained schemes (and his inability to learn from their inevitable failures), and the complexity of Charles' character. But most importantly, Hawkeye's internal struggle plays out through a series of actions and small but extremely effective set-pieces, and the answer he provides Ronnie, while only a half-answer, it is the best Hawk can give, because no better answer exists. The problem is soluble only in the sense that the cog in the war machine must accept that he is a cog, and in the meanwhile continue to fight what the by-then departed character of Radar O'Reilly described as "the war against the war," i.e. the struggle to stay sane in an insane situation.

My editor is fond of telling me that "character is action." He is right. A writer must always strive to tell his audience as little as possible while showing them as much as he possibly can: some exposition is unavoidable in storytelling, but usually it can be minimized by contextualization (i.e., we don't tell the audience that Igor is the cook: we show him in his hat and apron, holding a ladle; we don't tell the audience Charles is often a jerk, we show him writing poison pen letters to children and relishing the experience.) M*A*S*H, at its worst, had an aggravating tendency to preach to its audience, usually through Hawkeye, and then to compound the sin by often failing to have other characters push back against his self-righteousness and hypocrisy. At its best -- and I think "Letters" is a fairly good representation of the show firing on every cylinder -- it allowed for nuances and uncomfortable truths. It showed its characters as what they were and what they were meant to represent: ordinary humans under extraordinary pressure, dealing with their traumas and challenges according to their personalities, and entertaining us enormously in the process.