The Caine Mutiny

The first book I read this year was a Herman Wouk's 1952 Pulitzer Prize winner The Caine Mutiny, a Christmas gift from a friend of discerning reading taste. Wouk's novel had the misfortune to be published a year after James Jones's From Here to Eternity, which won the National Book Award, as Wouk explained in a foreword to a 2003 paperback:

Early in 1951 there appeared a gigantic army novel, From Here to Eternity, at once beautiful and brutal. . . . It won critical hurrahs and instant vast popularity, and my book came out in its shadow to a discouragingly poor start.

However, in a reminder that the early 1950s were a different, distant era, Wouk goes on to say that sales began to perk up a bit, and then one particular retail decision fanned them into a flame:

The Doubleday people . . . advised me to go and see for myself at Macy's, which was having a price war on the two books with Gimbel's. . . . It was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime sight, people lining up through the department store and out into the street just to buy my novel, or From Here to Eternity, or both.

What also speaks powerfully of another era is what Wouk says he was told about early attempts to sell film rights: "Nobody is interested in World War II anymore." Just a bit more than five years after victory, another war--in which staggering numbers, by our contemporary standards, of American soldiers would be killed--quietly underway in Korea, and what people wanted, if the movie scouts were to be believed, was to move on.

You can understand it, certainly. Read any good memoir or novel that encompasses V-E Day and the weariness that underlies the relief is palpable. But at the same time, looking back at the literature from the period, we realize that while the men who served may have wanted to leave the war behind, it wasn't quite done with them yet.

The Caine Mutiny is an interesting example of that. It's in a lot of ways a distinctly untroubled book, given the subject, but at the same time it's about how the war years turned a whole lot of callow boys into men. Wouk's main character, Willie Keith, sees the Navy simultaneously as his duty and, once he gets there, as a job. Through the course of the book's 500+ pages, he'll struggle with the central fact of military service: that it's designed to strip you of your individuality in order to serve a larger goal, and that to do so it has to in many ways be a dumb, brutal, machine-like system. But whereas James Jones's Robert Prewitt is determined to fight that machine, even if it costs him everything, Willie Keith is focused on living through the experience, and helping his shipmates do the same. Reading about Prew is a bracing, troubling experience; reading about Willie Keith's service is like watching a version of the growth and maturation we all (one hopes) experienced in our early adulthood. As a portrait of that process, and its acceleration in wartime, The Caine Mutiny is wholly convincing.

What remains most interesting about it after all these decades, however, is the turn it takes partway through. (Given the prominence of the film version, I'll assume there's little that can surprise you, but if you've not read or seen it, you might want to stop reading here.) Up through the titular mutiny, we've more or less been on Willie Keith's side. We see his flaws, and we do get some other perspectives, but he's our focal point and the character who most readily draws our sympathy. So when the mutiny occurs, and Keith plays a major part, we blow right past our nagging questions about its propriety. The moment is dramatic, and our protagonist has chosen a side, so we align. But then . . . the trial comes, and Wouk does something remarkable: he shows us how Keith was wrong--and therefore, by extension, so were we. Neither side is clear-cut, but the very fact that Wouk is able to upend our understanding, push against our sympathy, is impressive, and  would in itself be enough to recommend the book. It's a feat of storytelling.

These days, The Caine Mutiny still lives to a large extent in the shadow of From Here to Eternity. Wouk is seen as a craftsman, Jones more like an artist; Jones's story of individuality and self-torment draws more interest than Wouk's tale of men setting out to do a difficult job. But both novels are worth reading, and both, I think, belong, with James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor and Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, in the small group of essential novels about the war.

On the gods, their agents, and their doings, part two

From Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "The Spider Thread" (1918), collected in Rashamon and Seventeen Other Stories

And now, children, let me tell you a story about Lord Buddha Shakyamuni.

It begins one day as He was strolling alone in Paradise by the banks of the Lotus Pond. The blossoms on the pond were like perfect white pearls, and from their golden centers wafted forth a never-ending fragrance wonderful beyond description. I think it must have been morning in paradise.

From Virgil's Aeneid, Book Four, Robert Fagles's translation (2006)

"I . . . you have done me
so many kindnesses, and you could count them all.
I shall never deny what you deserve, my queen,
never regret my memories of Dido, now while I
can recall myself and draw the breath of life.
. . . .
And now the messenger of the gods--I swear it,
by your life and mine--dispatched by Jove himself,
has brought me firm commands through the racing winds.
With my own eyes I saw him, clear, in broad daylight,
moving through your gates. With my own ears I drank
his message in. Come, stop inflaming us
both with your appeals. I set sail for Italy--
all against my will."

Deuteronomy 4:27-31,

And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples and you shall be left men few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. And you shall worship there their gods that are human handiwork, wood and stone, which neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell. And you shall search for the Lord your God from there, and you shall find him when you seek Him with all your heart and with all your being. When you are in straits and all these things find you in time to come, you shall turn back to the Lord your God and heed His voice. For the Lord your God is a merciful god. He will not let you go and will not destroy you and will not forget your fathers’ covenant that He swore to them.

From Justin Marozzi’s Tamerlane (2004)

When reports reached the Turk of this lightning manoeuvre, he was “seized with panic as though it were the day of resurrection and bit his hands with grief and remorse and roared and howled and burning with the fire of anger was almost suffocated and abandoned rest and sleep.”

From Pearl S. Buck's Imperial Woman (1956)

Since snow had not fallen in the late winter when the wheatfields needed snow as fertilizer, the gods must be persuaded by three days of public reproach, the priests carrying the gods out from their pleasant temples to survey the dry and frozen fields.

From Garry Wills’s What Jesus Meant (2006)

The angel has to reassure [Mary]: “Have no fear, Mary, this is because you have found favor with God.” Did she know already how dangerous is such favor? God’s chosen people are commonly chosen to suffer. Of Jesus in particular, John Henry Newman wrote: “All who came near him more or less suffered by approaching him, just as if pain and trouble went out of him, as some precious virtue for the good of their souls.”

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

“That’s right,” Malloy said. “But listen. A guy named Spinoza wrote a sentence once. He said: Because a man loves God he must not expect God to love him in return. Theres a lot in that, in lots of ways. I don’t use passive resistance for what I expect it will get me. I dont expect it to pay me back any more than it ever has. That isn’t the point. If that was the point, I’d of given it up years ago as a flop.”

From Garry Wills’s What Jesus Meant (2006)

Jesus’ followers have the obligation that rests on all men and women to seek justice based on the dignity of every human being. That is the goal of politics, of “the things that belong to Caesar.” But heaven’s reign makes deeper and broader demands, the demands not only of justice but of love.

From John Mortimer’s Quite Honestly (2006)

“How did God come into it?”

“Well, he didn’t really. Not when Robert was a vicar. In those days he seemed to take God for granted. But as soon as he became a bishop—I don’t know, I suppose because it was a step up and Robert felt responsible for God and treated him more as an equal. Anyway, he began to find fault with him or question anything he did. Of course, it’s got a lot worse since President Bush. He can’t understand how God would have anything to do with the man.”

On brotherhood, duty, and death

From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1800-06)

When he goes to church and reads his Bible the ordinary man confuses the means with the end. N.B. a very common error.

From Plato’s Socrates’ Defense (Apology)

You, too, gentlemen of the jury, must look forward to death with confidence, and fix your minds on this one belief, which is certain—that nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death, and his fortunes are not a matter of indifference to the gods. This present experience of mine has not come about mechanically. I am quite clear that the time had come when it was better for me to die and be released from my distractions. That is why my sign never turned me back. For my own part I bear no grudge at all against those who condemned me and accused me, although it was not with this kind intention that they did so, but because they thought that they were hurting me; and that is culpable of them. However, I ask them to grant me one favor. When my sons grow up, gentlemen, if you think that they are putting money or anything else before goodness, take your revenge by plaguing them as I plagued you; and if they fancy themselves for no reason, you must scold them just as I scolded you, for neglecting the important things and thinking that they are good for something when they are good for nothing. If you do this, I shall have had justice at your hands, both I myself and my children.

Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live, but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

And now, being invulnerable since there was nothing left for them to hurt, he had been quite sure that these men meant nothing to him. What he had forgotten, of course, was that these men were men and, being men, could not help but mean something to him, who was also a man. . . . What he had forgotten entirely was that though he had matched them for his faith in comradeship and understanding and had lost, he still had his faith in men kicking around somewhere, and that this was where they could still reach him. It did not take the hurt long in getting started.

From Mesa Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish (1966)

I am forty years old, an ugly age: one is still young enough to have dreams, but already too old to fulfill them. This is the age when the restlessness in everyone subsides so he can become strong by habit and by the certainty he has acquired of the infirmity to come. But I am merely doing what should have been done long ago, during the stormy flowering of my youth, when all the countless paths seemed good, all errors as useful as the truth. What a pity that I am not ten years older, then old age would protect me from rebellion; or ten years younger, since then nothing would matter. For thirty is youth that fears nothing, not even itself. At least that is what I think now that thirty has moved irretrievably into the past.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. . . . Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.

From Halldor Laxness’s Independent People (1946)

They stood with bowed heads, all except Bjartur, who would never dream of bowing his head for an unrhymed prayer. Then they lifted the coffin out. They lifted it on to the horse and tied it across the saddle, then laid a hand on each end to steady it.

“Has the horse been spoken to?” asked the old man; and as it had not yet been done, he took an ear in each hand and whispered to it, according to ancient custom, for horses understand these things:

“You carry a coffin today. You carry a coffin today.”

Then the funeral procession moved off.

Some of the perils of thinking

From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1800-06)we

With all my indolence I have ever grown in knowledge of myself without possessing the power to effect an improvement; indeed, the fact that I could perceive how indolent I was has often seemed to me sufficient recompense for it, and the pleasure I received from the exact observation of a fault was often greater than the vexation aroused in me by the fault itself. So very much more did I account the professor in me than I did the man. Strange are the ways Heaven directs its saints.

From Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843), collected in The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)

The act of choosing is essentially a proper and stringent expression of the ethical. Whenever in a stricter sense there is a question of an either/or, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded upon by work, pleasure, melancholy, or despair.

From Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Leonartus Fuchsius, Felix Plater, Herc. de Saxonia, speak of a peculiar fury which comes by overmuch study. Fernelius puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation as an especial cause of madness: and in his 86th consul. cites the same words. Jo. Arculanus amongst other causes reckons up studium vehemens [passionate study]: so doth Levinus Lemnius. “Many men” (saith he) “come to this malady by continual study, and night-waking, and of all other men, scholars are most subject to it”; and such, Rhasis adds, “that have commonly the finest wits.” Marsilius Ficinus puts melancholy amongst one of those five principal plagues of students, ’tis a common moll unto them all, and almost in some measure an inseparable companion.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

As we grow older, in fact, we discover that the lives of most human beings are worthless except in so far as they contribute to the enrichment and emancipation of the spirit. However attractive in our youth the animal graces may seem, if by out maturity they have not led us to emend one character in the corrupt text of existence, then our time has been wasted. No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn by ourselves, from a book.

From Cicero’s De Senectute

For my part, in truth, I should rather be old less long than to be old before my time.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

Warden sighed. “I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army as an EM. Now what do you say we have another drink? Since we’ve settled the problems of God, Society, and the Individual I really think we should have another drink.”

From Here to Eternity

A book has to be extremely good for me to admire it if I don’t like its prose style. My thinking about writing tends to begin at the level of the sentence, and overwritten or poorly executed prose is almost always an insurmountable distraction. So it’s saying something that James Jones’s From Here to Eternity—the prose style of which I not only disliked, but actively disagreed with—completely captivated me, pulling me into its world with a miss-your-train-stop kind of fascination. It’s a hell of a book.

From Here to Eternity is thought of as a World War II novel—many people think it’s the best World War II novel. But, like my other favorite novel about that war, James Gould Cozzens’s less-remembered Guard of Honor, it takes place away from war, on an army base, where the only violence is that which the officers and enlisted men compulsively inflict on one another. The life of the men at their Hawaii base is so all-encompassing that when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor towards the end of the book, it almost comes as a surprise.

Though Jones creates and develops dozens of distinct characters, From Here to Eternity’s two poles, the commanding presences from which it draws its power and around which it’s organized, are Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt and 1st Sergeant Milton Warden. Prewitt is a thirty-year Army man who’s chosen the Army for life without ever fully accepting the sacrifice of individuality that it requires of him. Warden, on the other hand, has channeled his frustrations with the Army into iron-willed control over all the details of G Company—details that should be the purview of his superiors, whose incompetence and uninterest only serve to fuel Warden’s relentless, hard-edged competence. The struggles of the two men—against, at various times, each other, their superiors, their fellow enlisted men, and the Army itself—are the heart of the book. Do you kick at every imposition, fight until you're utterly broken, or do you focus your energies on bending one circumscribed area to your will, while making the necessary compromises outside your domain?

Jones’s themes grow out of those strong personalities: the place of the individual in a system designed to crush initiative and difference; the fate of integrity and achievement in an organization that rewards neither—that in fact fears them; the fine lines between sensible compromise and self-abasement, honor and self-destruction. But it’s not just the army that’s the problem. In a sense, From Here to Eternity doesn’t even need the military: Jones could drop his characters into nearly any situation, and we’d learn many of the same things about them. The same is true of Guard of Honor. But for both books, the unique conditions of the army—its clear lines of authority, its legitimation of violence, and its close quartering of volatile personalities—serve to increase the pressure on the characters, confronting them daily with the compromises and failures that in civilian life they might unwittingly train themselves to ignore.

Around Prewitt and Warden, Jones builds a cast of convincing, well-developed characters, ranging from the hardworking, honorable, racist Mess Sergeant Maylon Stark to the gifted athlete and alcoholic Corporal Choate. Jones gives us moments where we truly understand each of these characters, including a stunning scene where Warden’s superior, Captain Dana "Dynamite" Holmes, who has previously been presented entirely through Warden’s disapproving eyes, becomes the focus of our sympathy; the swiftness and power of the reversal is jaw-dropping.

Then there’s Prewitt’s friend, Private Angelo Maggio, one of the most compelling characters in the book. He’s the indomitable scrapper who so impressed Frank Sinatra that, rumor has it, he went to great lengths to secure the part in the 1953 movie. Maggio’s rant while in the Stockade for a drunken brawl limns the struggle that is Jones’s focus:

“Well, I’ve stood all I can stand—if I can get myself out of standing any more of it. They aint going to drive this soldier to any goddam suicide. And they aint going to drive this soldier into growing a brown nose. They shouldn’t teach their immigrants’ kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is disassociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.”

Maggio’s speech also demonstrates one of the problems I had with Jones’s prose: his cluttered dialogue that, despite the use of dialect (my least favorite of the tools available to a writer) manages to sound utterly unlikely and unnatural. He fragments sentences and duplicates adverbs and adjectives in a distracting attempt to suggest the multiplicity and complexity of the world; unlike Anthony Powell, whose descriptions and redescriptions feel like careful attempts to reach exactitude, Jones’s extravagance with modifiers feels forced—and therefore lifeless.

But, as I said at the opening, it doesn’t matter, in the same way that Melville’s logorrhea in Moby-Dick doesn’t matter. There’s just way too much going on in From Here to Eternity for me to quibble, too many characters to watch and worry about. Too many individuals set loose to work with, fight against, and wonder about other individuals who are stuck doing the very same thing, separated by apprehension and misunderstanding from the camaraderie and mutual support they might otherwise share. The richness of characters and Jones's deep understanding of human nature overcome the limitations of the prose. And once in a while, they do work together, as in this passage that, for the first time, gave me real insight into the actual workings of self-destructive impulses:

Warden got up from the meatblock that was beside the chair and stepped around the chair and bent to get the bottle. There was a way to handle this. There was a way to handle everything. All you had to do was be careful. But then, you got so tired of always going around always being careful.

Near the end of the novel, Jones boils the whole book down to one sentence, and he puts it in Warden’s mouth. “‘Why does the world have to be the way it is,’ Warden said, letting himself go completely. ‘I dont know why the world has to be like it is.’”

His lover responds, “I dont know either. And I used to be very bitter about it. But now I know it has to be that way. Theres no other way for it to be. Whenever a menace is conquered, a new more subtle menace arises. There is no other way it could be.”

Or, in the blunt idiom appropriate to the army: if the world weren't SNAFUed in this particular way, we’d have found some other way to SNAFU it. Living with it—and the way it taints us—day to day is the best we can hope to do.

Dipping into books

From James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951)

He went on a reading jag. It was the second real reading jag in his life. The first had been when he was laid up in the hospital at Myer getting over the clap that the rich girl had given him. They had had a good, though small, library at the Myer hospital and he had read his way through almost all of it with a dictionary at this elbow mainly because there hadn't been anything else in the GU ward to do. Reading, he found was like with pain, or a delicate appetite; you minced your way around the outside tasting this dish and that and getting more and more irritable. And nothing suited you, until you had made up your mind to promise yourself you would read every word on every page. Once you got yourself started and into it you weren't irritable any more and it was kind of fun, in a way.

He did that with every book in Georgette's Book of the Month Club collection, even the bad ones that did not sound true to life, at least not as he had become acquainted with life. But he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since obviously he had not known every kind of life (like, the life of the rich, say) and anyway, if you just shut off part of your mind from asking acerbic questions about this and that and limited yourself to just the words you read in through your eyes, you could almost believe all of them, even the worst ones. Besides, it was a good way to pass the time. Much better than newspapers. And it did not give you a hangover.

Living one's ideals

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

You cant disagree with the adopted values of a bunch of people without they get pissed off at you. When people tie their lives to some screwy idea or other and you attempt to point out to them that for you (not for them, mind you, just for you personally) that this idea is screwy, then serious results can always and will always come out of it for you. Because as far as they care you are the same as saying their lives are nothing and this always bothers people, because people prefer anything to being nothing, look at the Nazis, and that is why they tie their lives to things.

From A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

Pregnancy had become an almost permanent condition of life for Tolstoy’s unfortunate wife. Little Lev had hardly been weaned before she feared herself to be once more with child. “With each child,” she wrote philosophically in her journal, “one sacrifices a little more of one’s life and accepts an even heavier burden of perennial anxieties and illnesses.”

But for her husband, the thought of new minds to educate, new little beings to boss into a correct way of viewing the world was irresistibly tempting.

As so often happened when Tolstoy embarked upon something with repellent intentions, he produced sublime results.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

He had learned that Warden would not do that, that that old private line of equity, drawn with such sharpness with such close secrecy that it was wholly invisible to everyone but Warden, would not let the big man take advantage of the situation in that way. . . . It was, Prew often thought, as if The Warden had applied to his whole life the principle which applied to all other games of sport—that laying down of certain arbitrary rules to make success that much harder for the player to attain, like clipping in football or traveling in basketball, or in the same way, as he had read someplace, that sporting fishermen would use the light six-nine tackle in fighting for sailfish instead of the heavy tackle that makes it easy for the novice, thereby imposing upon themselves voluntarily the harder conditions that make the reward worth more to them. But where fishermen only did it on their day off or on vacation, to gain some obscure satisfaction that the cut- throat business ethics of their lives no longer gave them, The Warden applied it to his whole life, and stuck by it.

From A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy: A Biography (1988)

Bulgakov’s diary depicts for us more vividly than most of the accounts the underlying tension of day-to-day life at [the Tolstoys’ home] Yasnaya Polyana. At meals, the master of the house and the mistress were already bickering, or eyeing each other with suspicion. Tolstoy complained ceaselessly about the “elaborate” diet. Sofya Andreyevna [Tolstoy] justified it “on the grounds that a vegetarian table needs variety.” Tolstoy took to elaborate sotto voce apologies to guests which were designed to get a “rise” out of his increasingly hysterical wife.

When the painter N. N. Ge came to a meal, Tolstoy whispered, “I think that in fifty years people will say: ‘Imagine, they could calmly sit there and eat while grown people walked around waiting on them—their food was served to them, cooked for them.’”

“What are you talking about?” asked Sofya Andreyevna. “About their serving us?”

“Yes,” said Lev Nikolayevich [Tolstoy] and repeated aloud what he had said.

Sofya Andreyevna began to protest.

“But I was only saying it to him,” said Lev Nikolayevich, pointing to Ge. “I knew there would be objections and I absolutely do not wish to argue.”

2 Timothy 4:7

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

On the job

From James Salter’s Solo Faces (1979)

A breed of aimless wanderers can be found in California, working as mason’s helpers, carpenters, parking cars. They somehow keep a certain dignity, they are surprisingly unashamed. It’s one thing to know their faces will become lined, their plain talk stupid, that they will be crushed in the end by those who stayed in school, bought land, practiced law. Still, they have an infuriating power, that of condemned men. They can talk to anybody, they can speak the truth.

From Richard Aleas’s Little Girl Lost (2004)

I thought about all the other bruises I’d gotten over the past half decade of working for Leo, that and the other threats, the fights I’d only narrowly talked my way out of, the dirt I’d dug up on people who’d wanted to keep it hidden. How had I ended up doing this for a living? Around the time Miranda had been making plans to become a doctor, what was it I thought I’d be doing? I couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t this. I did remember the day I met Leo and the day I joined him full-time because it was either that or go to work for an Internet company, and I still had some self-respect.

From William Hazlitt’s The Indian Jugglers (1821), collected in On the Pleasure of Hating

[Seeing the Indian juggler] makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labours and pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to do is write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as I can.

From James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951)

"And remember," Warden said. "Mon-Sewer O'Hayer says you got to straighten up this mess sometime today."

"Your face," Leva said.

"Your mother's box," Milt said. "Get to work."