the Le Dio stories

The Le Dio stories are the earliest sustained fictional project of the young Gordon Lachance, a series of war narratives written between the ages of nine and fourteen that center on a grim squad of American soldiers trying to retake a fictional French town from the Nazis. They hold a particular, almost obsessive appeal for his friend Teddy Duchamp, who sees in them a validation of his own father's wartime heroism, and they represent a crucial stage in Gordon's development as a writer—a phase he later regards with a mixture of embarrassment and grudging respect for their raw, derivative energy.

Origins and Content

The Le Dio stories were set in a fictional French town during 1942, a setting Gordon chose two years before he discovered that the Allies did not land in France until 1944. In these narratives, a grim squad of tired American dogfaces fought their way from street to street, attempting to retake the town from the Nazis. Gordon wrote approximately forty Le Dio stories between the ages of nine and fourteen, and the formula became so ingrained that French peasants were always hissing to GI dogfaces to "Fermez le porte!" The stories were filled with the sounds of air-cooled Brownings and whistling 88s, and they typically ended with one lone American soldier coughing out a dying declaration of patriotism and love for the girl back home into the sad and wise face of the platoon sergeant.

Teddy Duchamp's Obsession

Teddy Duchamp was absolutely mad for the Le Dio stories. When Gordon read them aloud, Teddy would hunch over the pages, his eyes big, his brow beaded with sweat, his face twisting. Gordon found the way Teddy clamored for more Le Dio stories both pleasing and frightening. The stories resonated deeply with Teddy because his father, Norman Duchamp, had stormed the beach at Normandy—a fact Teddy always stated with pride, despite the atrocity his father had later committed against him by holding his head down on a cast-iron stove burner. For Teddy, the Le Dio stories were not just entertainment; they were a validation of his father's identity as a war hero, a counterweight to the town's dismissal of Norman Duchamp as a "loony" confined to Togus VA Hospital. Gordon wrote the last dozen or so Le Dio stories just for Teddy, by then heartily sick of the setting and its clichés.

Narrative Role and Evaluation

Years later, the adult Gordon Lachance reflects on the Le Dio stories with a critical eye, recognizing them as the work of a young man too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside. He acknowledges that the stories were influenced by the same sort of comic books that had given Vern Tessio nightmares, and that they were part of a larger body of early work that included tales of getting burned alive, crooks coming back from the dead, and a hero named Curt Cannon who "cut the subhuman, screeching madman to pieces with round after round from his smoking .45 automatic." Despite their derivative nature, the Le Dio stories were the first time Gordon had ever really used the place he knew and the things he felt in a piece of fiction, and there was a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled him for years come out in a new form over which he had imposed control. The stories also connect to a deeper, recurring childhood fear: the image of his dead brother Dennis in the closet of his spookily preserved room, an image that later surfaced in Gordon's story "Stud City," only slightly changed but controlled.