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.

The Bar of Perspicacity

{Photos by rocketlass}

A passing phrase from my Trollope post led me into a few thoughts on the Bar of Perspicacity.

The Bar of Perspicacity is open only between three a.m. and dawn, and even in those hours it's never open to anyone who could otherwise be asleep. No, the only ones allowed into its dingy precincts are those who have lain awake, the low ebb of their circadian rhythm amplifying and feeding an uncertainty that has been gnawing at them for days. It's for the smokers in bed, the late-night beach walkers, the ones who turned on that solitary light in the dark-windowed high-rise sky.

The room is shadowy, lit only by a battery of aged, low-wattage bulbs in tarnished sconces behind the bar. A murmur of indistinguishable conversation rumbles at the edge of your hearing, and half-glimpsed movements in the murky corners suggest the presence of unseen, secretive patrons. The bartender could be James Salter, but no, I think he is instead James Jones, leaning there in a worn jacket, tie knotted loosely around a rumpled collar.

You take your stool--there's always one open--and James Jones listens to your order. Then he nods and brings you, not necessarily what you ordered, but what you needed. He doesn't say much, mostly just smokes and keeps a weather eye on your glass as he aimlessly wipes down the thickly varnished oak bar, cleaning the same section again and again. Occasionally, though, he leans in close to you and speaks terse suggestions--commands, really--his voice quiet but forceful.

The barback is Marcel Proust, extravagantly overdressed in his striped waistcoat and evening jacket. He, too, says little most nights, just shifts bottles, arranges glasses, and mixes the simplest of drinks. But once in a while, upon seeing particular customers, Proust will sparkle into life, leaning forward on the bar next to Jones and telling long, detailed, and quite funny stories. Once he gets started talking, he's unlikely to stop much before closing, and Jones, knowing that, slips behind him and silently takes over the barback's duties. Proust's stories are always about him and people he knows, but at the same time they're always for you.

Once in a while Anton Chekhov is there, too, but he's a customer rather than an employee, at least so far as anyone can tell. He sits on a stool writing letters. On certain nights, sitting next to certain customers, he makes frequent trips to the bathroom, pointedly leaving a sheaf of half-finished letters on the bar. The letters, unguarded, are seductive; the customer can't be blamed for reading bits of them. Sometimes he reads this:

Everything I have is crumpled, dirty, torn! I look like a pickpocket.

Or this:

As for me, I have a cough too, but I am alive and I believe I’m well.

While other times he reads this:

It seems to me it is not for writers of fiction to solve such questions as that of God, of pessimism, etc. The writer’s business is simply to describe who has been speaking about God or about pessimism, how, and in what circumstances. The artist must be not the judge of his characters and of their conversations, but merely an impartial witness. I have heard a desultory conversation of two Russians about pessimism—a conversation which settles nothing—and I must report that conversation as I heard it; it is for the jury, that is, for the readers, to decide on the value of it. My business is merely to be talented—i.e., to know how to distinguish important statements from unimportant, how to throw light on the characters, and to speak their language.

When the first wisps of dawn begin to pierce the dimness of the Bar of Perspicacity, James Jones steps around the bar, takes you--not quite gently--by the arm and leads you toward the door. You may not think you're not ready to go yet, and, looking around at the suddenly silent bar, you may not see any reason that it has to close just now. But then you find yourself on the sidewalk, the morning papers thumping to the concrete down the street, the city's millions slowly forcing themselves into wakefulness, and you realize that James Jones was right: it's time to go home. As you turn away, some mornings you might see that behind you, where the bar had been, is a dusty shop window offering wedding cake figurines forever wearing long-outmoded dresses and tuxes.

It's possible that you'll end up back at the bar the next night, and the one after that, and that's fine. But six in a row is the limit. Oh, you'll get in a seventh time. The staff, after all they've seen, are anything but hard-hearted. But at the end of the seventh night, when you turn over the tab James Jones has handed you, you'll find not numbers, but a hand-written note from Dawn Powell. Get over yourself, it says. Or: you think we haven't seen worse? This may not sit well with you at the time, or even later, but it will serve; it will make you reconsider your presence on that stool.

And the eighth night, stare at the ceiling above your bed as you might, you'll not find the bar. There will be other bars open, but they will be lesser bars, and you'll come out of them less, too. Best, instead, to get it taken care of within that first week.

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.”

The Death of the Detective

On the recommendation of my former coworker, Jim, I picked up the Northwestern University Press reissue of Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective (1974) expecting a dark noir tale. And that's what I got . . . for a while.

The Death of the Detective is set in Chicago at some vague point between the late fifties and the closing of the Riverview amusement park in 1967. The postwar boom has faded and is beginning to be replaced by urban decay, white flight, racial and ethnic strife, and a creeping sense that the city is beginning an irreversible decline. It opens with a madman intent on murdering a dying Lake Forest millionaire, and we quickly meet the detective who will oppose him, Arnold Magnuson. In his fifties and essentially retired, Magnuson is famous for the detective agency he founded, which now makes most of its money supplying the ubiquitous Magnuson Men, a sort of combination of Andy Frain ushers and the Pinkertons. Called in by the millionaire, who anticipates the murderer's arrival, Magnuson finds himself deeply enmeshed in what quickly becomes a confusing web of murder and deception.

But that's just the basic plot that gets the book moving; after a while, it becomes clear that the plot is the least important part of The Death of the Detective. To have a sense of the thick, textured concoction this novel really is, you need to blend that story with Carl Sandburg's hog butcher, steep the result for a few decades in a broth of Dickens, Kafka, and Melville, and then salt it with a bit of the prose styles of James Jones, Nelson Algren, and W. M. Spackman. From Dickens, Smith takes a love of the grotesque and a fascination with the patterns of urban life: the unpenetrated neighborhoods rife with secrets, the endless hiding places to be found there, the unexpected and unsettling meetings with people one has known in other contexts. Kafka supplies the gaping horror at the fact that we can never quite do what we mean to do, perpetually distracted trying to catch up to what we should have done already--overlaid with the gnawing fear that there is no hope for any true justice because guilt is showered liberally on us all. Melville, meanwhile, provides the unstinted ambition and raging, unbridled prose: the full, complete story of every part of this brawling city can be told, and Smith is determined to make the attempt.

So he puts us perpetually, restlessly, in motion. We travel to the 31st Street Beach, a meat-packing plant, the Gold Coast, a West Loop Skid Row, Evanston, Edgebrook, Uptown, Bughouse Square, a topless bar in unincorporated Niles, Rogers Park, Bronzeville, the West Side, North Avenue Beach--the list goes on, covering every conceivable Chicagoland location. Yet somehow Smith never gives the sense that he's checking items off a list; rather, the wanderings of his characters seem to make a crazed sort of sense, like they, too, need to see the city as a whole in order to begin to understand how its corruption, decay, and sickness have damaged them--and yet how its underlying vitality has enabled them to keep up the fight.

Throughout, the characters see Chicago in its past and present incarnations simultaneously, casting dark shadows on its uncertain future:

What a change from the old days when ironmongers and rag-pickers would cruise up and down the alleys in horse and wagons or those high ancient trucks like ornate indestructible stagecoaches, each man with his own unique, recognizable, unintelligible cry; as would the trucks and wagons delivering coal and hawking whatever fruits and vegetables were in season, produce from the truck farms just to the north and west of the city and no that far from the neighborhood. And the residents themselves, man, woman, and child, would walk the alleys, preferring them to the sidewalks or the streets, using them like a secret network of footpaths and short cuts that traversed the neighborhood.

Throughout, there is a sense that the city may have in the past made sense, with everyone and everything in its place--but the future is uncertain, its categories shifting in unexpected ways. Smith spends a lot of time exploring the city's simmering racial and ethnic divisions, and his characters find themselves frequently confused both about their own identities and where those identities, if it's possible to stabilize them at all, could fit in the ever-shifting mosaic of the city. Large-scale change is on the way, and even the vague intimations of it the characters feel are unmooring them. At times, it seems all of Chicago is slowly going mad.

Smith crams the book's 600 oversized pages with description and digression, and he drags dozens of characters through multiple overlapping plots. I can't deny that The Death of the Detective could have used some editing: some portions drag, some characters never amount to much, and some scenes are repetitive. But Smith's ambition is so vast, and the tapestry he weaves so detailed and compelling, that I'm willing to forgive him the occasional lapse. I imagine that the book's length is one of the reasons it stayed out of print for so long--upon its release in 1974 it was a best seller and a National Book Award finalist, but it spent more than twenty-five years out of print. It's tough to print such a big book economically, and it can be similarly tough to convince readers to pick up such a huge book by a little-known author.

I think that neglect is also a reflection of Chicago's second-city status: had this book been set in New York, I have no doubt that it would have remained in print and would be regarded as a true American classic. But that's fine by me. Everyone knows New York's glories; us Chicagoans get to keep many of our city's treasures to ourselves, secret recompenses for living through February and August. The Death of the Detective definitely belongs on that list, Chicagoans.

[I see the writer of Neglected Books agrees with me; you can find some more information there about the book's critical reception.]

Book to book to book

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably have a sense of the oblique routes I take from one book or subject to another. Today’s post is a brief glimpse into that process.

Last week, I read Graham Greene’s A Gun for Sale (1936) because in Julian MacLaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties, which I read earlier this month, he describes meeting Greene to discuss the possibility of MacLaren-Ross’s adapting the novel for the BBC. It turned out to be the right time of year to read the book, because I always like to read some Christmas book or other in December, and the events of A Gun for Sale take place right around the holiday. It’s a Graham Greene Christmas, however, so (even though this was before his Catholic novels) it’s a Christmas that serves mostly as a shabby attempt to tart up a fallen, grubby world. Raven, an utterly amoral professional gunman, finds himself hunted by the police in the town of Nottwich, and he soon discovers that, rare as aid and comfort are, goodness itself is even less common, in the upper classes or the lower. Raven is an outsider in a world of outsiders, which renders a holiday like Christmas mostly a cruel joke and life a painful struggle to the death:

Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation.

A Gun for Sale reminded me of the existence of James Jones’s The Pistol (1958), a tightly written novella about Richard Mast, a U.S. Army private in Hawaii who takes advantage of the confusion immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold onto a pistol that he had been temporarily issued. Over the next few weeks, as the Army fortifies the beaches and roads of Hawaii in anticipation of a Japanese amphibious invasion, the pistol becomes a talisman, the tangible form of his hope for survival. With the pistol, he half-reasons, half-feels, he’ll have just enough advantage, just enough edge to make it through what’s ahead.

Word of his illicit firearm makes its way rapidly through the company, and Mast’s fellow soldiers fixate on taking it for themselves, by force if necessary. Most of them deliver variations on the same argument: “I need the pistol more than you because . . .” The repeated arguments and the symbolic role of the pistol could easily push the novella too far into allegory, but Jones pays such close attention to the details of life and work that the story doesn't ever come unmoored from reality. It’s a quick read and, if you’ve been interested in Jones but unwilling to commit the time to From Here to Eternity or The Thin Red Line, it would be a good starting point, giving a glimpse of his understanding of human motivations and of how men behave under pressure.

Logic would have led me from The Pistol to Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear (1940), which was sitting on my table and would have kept up some of the tone and subject of the Greene and the Jones, concerning as it does an English armaments engineer who finds himself caught up in World War II intrigue. But that will have to wait, because Christmas intervened, and for Christmas Stacey got me Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map (2006). It tells the story of the London cholera epidemic of 1854 and Dr. John Snow’s discovery that cholera is transmitted through contaminated water. In recent weeks I'd discussed the book with friends who, like me, knew some of the story from Edward Tufte’s discussion in Visual Explanation of the map of mortality that Snow drew up as part of his evidence. But whereas Tufte was primarily interested in the successful information design of Snow’s map, Johnson tells, in gripping fashion, the larger story of the epidemic and what Snow’s discovery reveals about history, innovation, science, intuition, and human thought in general.

Johnson presents Snow (and the mostly forgotten Reverend Henry Whitehead, whose work, both independently and with Snow, contributed greatly to the ultimate vindication of Snow’s theory) as a consilient thinker, someone who, by being interested in all fields and—more important—willing to apply insights from one field of study to a problem in another—was able to see connections and draw conclusions that other scientists and medical professionals of the era, blinded by received wisdom, were simply unable to see. As Johnson presents the evidence, it is extremely hard to understand how anyone could fail to accept Snow’s conclusions. Yet many extremely smart and educated people refused to surrender their adherence to the longstanding theory that disease was caused by “miasma” emanating from the slums.

As Johnson explores that blindness, the book becomes more than just good popular history. Johnson is fascinated by the question of how ideas come together and how various factors, from individual temperaments to religion to social thought to urban planning (or lack thereof) aid or hinder the furthering of knowledge and the acceptance of ideas. As he explains,

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

By the conclusion of the book, a Jane Jacobs-driven paean to urban living, The Ghost Map has become as much a book about ideas and knowledge in general as about the 1854 cholera epidemic itself. It's a success in both regards.

And, finally, where will The Ghost Map lead me? Well, one reason I had been discussing it earlier in the month with my friend Maggie is that she was reading Robinson Crusoe, which led to us talking about Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which led to The Ghost Map. And I've never read A Journal of the Plague Year. . .

And now you understand why I’ll never get everything on my shelves read.

On the importance of a good prose style

A good dinner, a martini, a quiet hotel room with a wireless connection, a good book, and a Blogger account. What more could I want after a long week in New York of work and visiting friends?

So, as I've said before on this blog, I'm unlikely to enjoy a novel if I don't approve of the author's prose. The sentence, after all, is the first evidence I have by which to judge an author, and a writer who can't figure out the difference between a good sentence and a bad one is necessarily suspect. There are exceptions (see Jones, James), but usually what I want to know about a writer is, first of all, can he or she write?

The prose I like most straddles a fine line between careful observation and too much aestheticism, describing the world the way it is with near-perfect precision while not drawing attention to itself at the expense of the described. It's a product of continued, careful attention to the details that make up life and the language available to us for describing those details. At its best, such prose serves simultaneously to provide the background in which characters are placed for our contemplation and to convey a sense of those characters themselves. The following description of Dr. David Melrose, from the first page of Edward St. Aubyn's Never Mind (1992, collected in Some Hope), is a good example:

In his blue dressing gown, and already wearing dark glasses although it was still too early for the September sun to have risen above the limestone mountain, he directed a heavy stream of water from the hose he held in his left hand onto the column of ants moving busily through the gravel at his feet. His technique was well-established: he would let the survivors struggle over the wet stones, and regain their dignity for a while, before bringing the thundering water down on them again. With his free hand he removed a cigar from his mouth, its smoke drifting up through the brown and gray curls that covered the jutting bones of his forehead. He then arrowed the jet of water with his thumb to batter more efficiently an ant on whose death he was wholly bent.

Now, any half-competent high school English student could explain what St. Aubyn is conveying about the man--a doctor--in this paragraph, but that makes the achievement, concise and pointed, no less impressive. St. Aubyn has chosen the right details and the precise words in which to convey them. And it's not a matter of picking particularly unusual or erudite words, but of using words in a way that, in a sense, allows them to realize their full potential. Technique, struggle, thundering, arrowed, batter, wholly bent: these are not unusual words, but they are unusually well-chosen, creating an indelible picture of intense, almost finicky cruelty. Again, it's a matter of attentive observation of the world--or, in this case, of careful imagination of a character and how he would manifest himself in the world--followed by equal care applied to the words in which those observations are presented.

That sort of precision is the basis for the odd melding of minds of which the best reading consists, that sense of a real encounter with a previously unknown person who, through their prose, is showing you how they see the world. Encountering such clear evidence of care and intelligence in the first pages of a novel creates the trust that allows me to lend essential credence to the author's ideas about life and human relationships; I want to know what the author thinks because his prose has convinced me that those thoughts will repay the time I invest in them.

Further, in satire of this sort that trust, in turn, allows the author . . .

And yet, to Eleanor, David had seemed so different from the tribe of English snobs and distant cousins who hung around, ready for an emergency, or a weekend, full of memories that were not even their own, memories of the way their grandfathers had lived, which was not in fact how their grandfathers had lived. When she had met David, she thought that he was the first person who really understood her. Now he was the last person she would go to for understanding. It was hard to explain this change and she tried to resist the temptation of thinking that he had been waiting all along for her money to subsidize his fantasies of how he deserved to live. Perhaps, on the contrary, it was her money that had cheapened him. He had stopped his medical practice soon after their marriage. At the beginning, there had been talk of using some of her money to start a home for alcoholics. In a sense they had succeeded.

. . . to sink the stiletto with absolutely bloodless, surgical precision.

St. Aubyn seems to have the asperity, the cruel, unblinking honesty, of Waugh or Saki or Dawn Powell. Oh, I think I've found an author I'm going to really like.

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."