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The World War II Trilogy #1
From Here to Eternity
Diamond Head, Hawaii, 1941. Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company's boxing team, he gets "the treatment" that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he's risking his career to have an affair with the commanding officer's wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: the Army is their heart and blood . . .and, possibly, their death.
In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.
In this magnificent but brutal classic of a soldier's life, James Jones portrays the courage, violence and passions of men and women who live by unspoken codes and with unutterable despair. . .in the most important American novel to come out of World War II, a masterpiece that captures as no other the honor and savagery of men.
860 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1951
1550 people are currently reading
25775 people want to read
About the author
James Jones
48 books252 followersJames Jones was an American novelist best known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath. His debut novel, From Here to Eternity (1951), won the National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. The novel, along with The Thin Red Line (1962) and Whistle (published posthumously in 1978), formed his acclaimed war trilogy, drawing from his personal experiences in the military.
Born and raised in Robinson, Illinois, Jones enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1939 and served in the 25th Infantry Division. He was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal, where he was wounded. His military service deeply influenced his writing, shaping his unflinching portrayals of soldiers and war.
Following his discharge, Jones pursued writing and became involved with the Handy Writers' Colony in Illinois, a project led by his former mentor and lover, Lowney Handy. His second novel, Some Came Running (1957), was adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. Over the years, he experimented with different literary styles but remained committed to exploring themes of war, masculinity, and the American experience.
Jones later moved to France with his wife, actress Gloria Mosolino, before settling in the United States. He also worked as a journalist covering the Vietnam War and wrote several non-fiction works, including Viet Journal (1974). His final novel, Whistle, was completed based on his notes after his death. In later years, his daughter Kaylie Jones helped revive interest in his work, including publishing an uncensored edition of From Here to Eternity.
Jones passed away from congestive heart failure in 1977, leaving behind a body of work that remains influential in American war literature.
Born and raised in Robinson, Illinois, Jones enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1939 and served in the 25th Infantry Division. He was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor, and later fought in the Battle of Guadalcanal, where he was wounded. His military service deeply influenced his writing, shaping his unflinching portrayals of soldiers and war.
Following his discharge, Jones pursued writing and became involved with the Handy Writers' Colony in Illinois, a project led by his former mentor and lover, Lowney Handy. His second novel, Some Came Running (1957), was adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine. Over the years, he experimented with different literary styles but remained committed to exploring themes of war, masculinity, and the American experience.
Jones later moved to France with his wife, actress Gloria Mosolino, before settling in the United States. He also worked as a journalist covering the Vietnam War and wrote several non-fiction works, including Viet Journal (1974). His final novel, Whistle, was completed based on his notes after his death. In later years, his daughter Kaylie Jones helped revive interest in his work, including publishing an uncensored edition of From Here to Eternity.
Jones passed away from congestive heart failure in 1977, leaving behind a body of work that remains influential in American war literature.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 678 reviews
March 7, 2025
The war is already at the door… From Here to Eternity is an unflattering account of the army life on the threshold of the war… All down the line…
The army dislikes individuality… The army is all for uniformity… The army loves subordination…
Intrigues and machinations… Heavy favouritism… Boozing, gambling, fornicating, brawling… Those are the ways of the army life… All down the line…
And everyone standing on a higher step of hierarchy is considered as a kind of antagonist…
The main character of the novel wished to live his own way… He tried to swim against the current… He was locked in the stockade… He kept pissing in the wind… And if one riots against the system, system becomes outright sadistic…
If one is a square peg in a round hole the system will eventually whittle one down to naught.
Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?
The army dislikes individuality… The army is all for uniformity… The army loves subordination…
Two aging men confabing with each other, leaders of men, patting each other on the back and looking frantically about to find someone to lead.
Warden had a theory about officers: Being an officer would make a sinner out of Christ himself. No man could swallow so much gaseous privilege and authority without having his guts inflated.
Intrigues and machinations… Heavy favouritism… Boozing, gambling, fornicating, brawling… Those are the ways of the army life… All down the line…
And everyone standing on a higher step of hierarchy is considered as a kind of antagonist…
The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truckdrivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their very tonguelessness – so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it.
The main character of the novel wished to live his own way… He tried to swim against the current… He was locked in the stockade… He kept pissing in the wind… And if one riots against the system, system becomes outright sadistic…
He was barely recognizable. His broken nose had swollen and was still running blood in a stream. Blood was also flowing out of his mouth, whenever he coughed. His eyes were practically closed. Blows from the grub hoe handles had torn the upper half of both ears loose from his head. Blood from his nose and mouth, and the ears which were not bleeding much, had spotted his chest and the white drawers.
If one is a square peg in a round hole the system will eventually whittle one down to naught.
October 12, 2019
Don't give out many five stars anymore but I really loved the first two in this trilogy, Whistle not so much. Loved the voice, the setting and sense of place.
Highly recommend.
Highly recommend.
June 19, 2021
[9/10]
I feel exhausted, emotionally drained, as if I had run a marathon, all dressed up in full military kit. Reading James Jones is often hard work, but there is also the satisfaction of reaching the finish line and knowing you achieved something great. Because, even as I think that a good editor could have cut the text in half and still achieve the same effect, I know that James Jones has captured the spirit of army life in the 1940's flawlessly, that the ocean of trivial details from the lives of trivial people builds up into a monumental canvas of a whole society : Hawaii on the brink of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
I didn't know what to expect beforehand, as I steered away from the movie version until I could read the book. I found no heroes and no glorious battles here. I found instead many failed human beings stumbling about in the dark, a lot of suffering and mountains worth of the tedious routine that is repeated day in day out for the enlisted man.
"This here's the Pineapple Army," exclaims at one point Chief Choate, a full Choctaw Indian that has found refuge from discrimination and poverty in the military life. Echoing him is the opening scene of the main character, Robert E Lee Prewitt, a former star bugler who resigned his grades and comes to join a new outfit at the Schofield Barracks as a simple infantryman.
Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?
Prewitt is a fully developed character, multi-faceted and deeply troubled by the events that surrounds his one year in the 'jockstrap' G Company. But if I were to pick up one defining feature of his personality, it would be his devotion to the army, despite the many injustices he is subject to. In his own words, he is a 'thirty-year-man', a professional, career soldier and not a drafted, temporary visitor.
The word 'jockstrap' that I used earlier is just one of the numerous jargon terms and acronyms that military outfits seem to love so much. In the 1941 context, the word refers to a peace-time policy of gathering in one company all the athletes and fighters in a regiment, give them privileges and ranks, and train them for internal competitions where their regiment and their officers gain prestige by the athletic achievements. Prewitt lands in this G Company because he used to be not only a damn good bugler, but also a champion lightweight boxer. An unfortunate accident that left his sparring partner blinded convinced Prewit that he should give up boxing, something that his new commanding officer refuses to accept, putting in motion a whole chain of events aimed at breaking the will of the new recruit. In the same military parlance this is called "The Treatment", something I experienced a mild form of in my own short term military service. The subject of The Treatment is singled out for the most exhausting drill routines, for the least appealing 'fatigue' duties, for repeated punishment for any real or imaginary insubordination. What the officers don't realize is that Prewitt is a former child miner from the Kentucky mountains, a man who would rather die than bend to the will of an outsider:
In one way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sport and gambled on it. He had never looked at it that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
I am tempted to write a detailed review of the steps taken by Prewitt from the morning he gazes at a field of pineapples outside the barracks to his night time run across a golf field in the aftermath of the Japanese attack, but there are so many important aspects of his personality that it would take me weeks to organize and explain his motivations and his outlook on life. Just as important as Prewitt, and just as well drawn, are the people that surround him, with their own powerful dramas, their own disappointments and defeats in love, in their professional career, in their sanity even. The modell first sergeant Milton Warden, the cook Maylon Stark, fellow infantryman Angelo Maggio, love interest Lorene, army wife Karen Holmes, star athlete Chief Choate and many, many other memorable people that together justify the epic scope of the novel. Also worthy of analysis are the numerous philosophical, social and political debates that slow down the pacing of the novel, yet provoke the reader to give more attention to the context and implications of the story. Maybe I will do all of these aspects justice on an eventual re-read (I'm still recovering from pneumonia at the moment).
For now I can only show you a few highlights that I thought significant:
The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, an understanding, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.
Music is the most powerful redemptive force in the life of Prewitt, who was exposed at an early age to the blues culture of his native South and who found expression for his inner soul in the sound of his bugle, a passion denied to him by the narrow mindedness and corruption of his superiors. My favourite passage from the book (and from the movie that I had finally been able to watch with a clear conscience) is of Prewitt singing his regiment to sleep :
"Day is done ...
Gone the sun ...
From-the-lake
From-the-hill
From-the-sky
Rest in peace
Sol jer brave
God is nigh ..."
The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman once told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, don't close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes.
This spirituality in Prewitt is countered and subverted by his impulsive, sensualist temperament. He is a heavy drinker, like everybody else in the regiment from the lowest infantryman to the top general. He is an addicted gambler, losing his pay at poker in a couple of hours after he gets it in his hands ( But before the big win he was just waiting for to quit on came they caught him, they caught him good. ). He is womanizer, a regular of the bawdy houses, again like almost everybody around him. He is foul mouthed and violent, rigidly proud and suspicious and difficult to befriend. He is even showing signs of racism and homophobia, again symptoms of the society he is living in. Yet Prewitt does open up to a few select people, like the fellows he is jamming with in the evenings on guitars, singing interminable blues sessions that will produce maybe the one enduring masterpiece of Prewitt's life : "The Re-enlistment Blues"
Because he was a soldier, and because he could see it all then, in the easily shattered crystal clarity of the thin glass goblet of the silence that is guard duty in the field at night the last hour before you are relieved.
Maybe the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
Outside the barracks, Prewitt is a man searching - for companionship, for oblivion in a bottle of hard liquor, for love in the most inappropriate places, for an answer to existential questions:
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself.
So we get to know Prewitt also through the eyes of Lorene, a professional hooker that is still capable of falling in love with a vulnerable man who hides many insecurities behind the tough guy exterior. Maureen, another of his love interest reads him like a book:
All you got is a feeling you're locked up in a box thats two sizes too small for you and theres no air in it and you're suffocatin, and all the time outside the box you hear the whole world walking around laughin and having a big, big time. Thats all you got.
In the same existentialist vein, here is a glimpse of the see-saw experience Prewitt is going through, from exhilaration to despondency:
Life frightened him, sometimes. But there was nothing to do, anyway. Because this special quality was a thing he could not control in himself, that he could not stop. But then when he was going good he knew it was better to face it, that it was always better to face things no matter what it cost anybody. He knew that. He believed it. Only in the bad spells did life frighten him with its unbelievable cruelty, its inconceivable injustice, its incredible pointlessness.
I have told you about my favourite part : Prewitt singing Taps in the evening. I should also talk a little about some parts that were problematic. One of these is the portrayal of homosexuals - it may be a good thing that their culture is mentioned and given exposure at a time when most of the establishment pretended they don't exist, but for one thing Prewitt and his friends are boasting about beating these guys up, and for another, there is an implication that gays are damaged goods and have deep psychological issues:
Why do you always pick up somebody who aint queer? Because if you're with another queer, you don't feel evil enough, thats why.
Women don't get a much better outlook than gays, an issue that bothered me a lot also when reading "Some Came Running" . Jones if often making me think that, through his characters, he hates women intellectually, even as he desires them physically.
And they called them the weaker sex! That was prone to crack up and cry at every crisis! Like hell. The women ran this world; and nobody knew it better than a man in love. Sometimes he thought they did it deliberately, all this conspiracy stuff, just to satisfy some ancient racial love of intrigue inherited from the generations of conspiring to play the role of being dominated.
and, His trouble was when he had admitted to her and to himself that he loved her. That was always the greatest single blunder in this game. That put him in her power as Dana had never been in her power. She could make him do anything now, even become an officer, now that she was sure he did love her. He was no longer a free agent, and as a result the old wild terrible strength that had been the power and pride of Milt Warden was gone.
Also disturbing, but I believe in a necessary way, is the exposure of the cruel practices deployed by the jailers of recalcitrant soldiers in the Stockade. Both Maggio and Prewitt end up in the slammer, where they are subject to much more atrocious brutalities than "The Treatment" . It is said that Jones book provoked a review of these practices and abuses in the US Army. If true, the novel has served its purpose admirably.
... the quickest, efficientest, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any animal. boasts the odious Major Thomson as he unleashes his minions on the unfortunate inmates, under the leadership of one sergeant Fatso Judson. Despite these abuses, it is inside this Stockade that Maggio and Prewitt find a sort of redemption with the help of a renegade sailor, a guru of Oriental sensibilities:
If God is Instability rather than Fixity, if God is Growth and Evolution, then there is no need for the concept of forgiveness. The mere concept of forgiveness implies the doing of something wrong. Original sin. But if evolution is growth by trial and error, how can errors be wrong? since they contribute to growth?
Before I close my review, I would like to mention that I saw the movie of Fred Zinnemann from 1953 soon after reading the novel. I believe the casting was inspired, in particular Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster. I also think Zinneman did a decent job with the huge material he had in the book, but he also did a lot of changes to tone down the harshness of the foul language, the drinking and the whoring. This isn't as important as the whitewashing of the army officers, who are shown in the late parts of the movie to punish the abusive behaviour of Captain 'Dynamite' Holmes. In the novel he is promoted and given more power to apply his doctrine of discipline through fear.
As an epitaph, I include at the end the song of Robert E Lee Prewitt and of his friends in the G Company at Schofield Barracks:
Re-Enlistment Blues
Got Paid out on Monday
Not a dog soljer no more
they himme all that money
So much my pockets is sore
More dough than I can use.
Re-enlistment blues.
Took my ghelt to town on Tuesday
Got a room and a big double bed
Find a job tomorrow
Tonight you may be dead
Aint no time to lose.
Re-enlistment blues.
Hit the bars on Wednesday
My friends put me up on a throne
Found a hapa-Chinee baby
Swore she never would leave me alone
did I give her a bruise?
Re-enlistment blues!
Woke up sick on Thursday
Feelin like my head took a dare
Looked down at my trousers
All my pockets was bare
that gal had blown my fuse.
Re-enlistment blues.
Went back around on Friday
Asked for a free glass of beer
My friends had disappeared
Barman say, "Take off, you queer!"
What I done then aint news.
Re-enlistment blues.
The jail was cold all Sa'day
Standin' up on a bench lookin down
Through them bars I watched the people
All happy and out on the town
Looked like time for me to choose,
them Re-enlistment blues.
Slept in the park that Sunday
Seen all the folks goin to church
Your belly feels so empty
Dog soljers dont own pews.
Re-enlistment blues.
So I re-upped on Monday
A little sad and sick at my heart
All y fine plans was with my money
In the poke of a scheming tart
Guy always seems to lose.
Re-enlistment blues.
So you short-timers, let me tell you
Dont get yourself throwed in the can
You might as well be dead
Or a Thirty-Year-Man
Recruitin crews give me the blues,
Old Re-enlistment Blues.
I feel exhausted, emotionally drained, as if I had run a marathon, all dressed up in full military kit. Reading James Jones is often hard work, but there is also the satisfaction of reaching the finish line and knowing you achieved something great. Because, even as I think that a good editor could have cut the text in half and still achieve the same effect, I know that James Jones has captured the spirit of army life in the 1940's flawlessly, that the ocean of trivial details from the lives of trivial people builds up into a monumental canvas of a whole society : Hawaii on the brink of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
I didn't know what to expect beforehand, as I steered away from the movie version until I could read the book. I found no heroes and no glorious battles here. I found instead many failed human beings stumbling about in the dark, a lot of suffering and mountains worth of the tedious routine that is repeated day in day out for the enlisted man.
"This here's the Pineapple Army," exclaims at one point Chief Choate, a full Choctaw Indian that has found refuge from discrimination and poverty in the military life. Echoing him is the opening scene of the main character, Robert E Lee Prewitt, a former star bugler who resigned his grades and comes to join a new outfit at the Schofield Barracks as a simple infantryman.
Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?
Prewitt is a fully developed character, multi-faceted and deeply troubled by the events that surrounds his one year in the 'jockstrap' G Company. But if I were to pick up one defining feature of his personality, it would be his devotion to the army, despite the many injustices he is subject to. In his own words, he is a 'thirty-year-man', a professional, career soldier and not a drafted, temporary visitor.
The word 'jockstrap' that I used earlier is just one of the numerous jargon terms and acronyms that military outfits seem to love so much. In the 1941 context, the word refers to a peace-time policy of gathering in one company all the athletes and fighters in a regiment, give them privileges and ranks, and train them for internal competitions where their regiment and their officers gain prestige by the athletic achievements. Prewitt lands in this G Company because he used to be not only a damn good bugler, but also a champion lightweight boxer. An unfortunate accident that left his sparring partner blinded convinced Prewit that he should give up boxing, something that his new commanding officer refuses to accept, putting in motion a whole chain of events aimed at breaking the will of the new recruit. In the same military parlance this is called "The Treatment", something I experienced a mild form of in my own short term military service. The subject of The Treatment is singled out for the most exhausting drill routines, for the least appealing 'fatigue' duties, for repeated punishment for any real or imaginary insubordination. What the officers don't realize is that Prewitt is a former child miner from the Kentucky mountains, a man who would rather die than bend to the will of an outsider:
In one way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sport and gambled on it. He had never looked at it that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
I am tempted to write a detailed review of the steps taken by Prewitt from the morning he gazes at a field of pineapples outside the barracks to his night time run across a golf field in the aftermath of the Japanese attack, but there are so many important aspects of his personality that it would take me weeks to organize and explain his motivations and his outlook on life. Just as important as Prewitt, and just as well drawn, are the people that surround him, with their own powerful dramas, their own disappointments and defeats in love, in their professional career, in their sanity even. The modell first sergeant Milton Warden, the cook Maylon Stark, fellow infantryman Angelo Maggio, love interest Lorene, army wife Karen Holmes, star athlete Chief Choate and many, many other memorable people that together justify the epic scope of the novel. Also worthy of analysis are the numerous philosophical, social and political debates that slow down the pacing of the novel, yet provoke the reader to give more attention to the context and implications of the story. Maybe I will do all of these aspects justice on an eventual re-read (I'm still recovering from pneumonia at the moment).
For now I can only show you a few highlights that I thought significant:
The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, an understanding, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something.
Music is the most powerful redemptive force in the life of Prewitt, who was exposed at an early age to the blues culture of his native South and who found expression for his inner soul in the sound of his bugle, a passion denied to him by the narrow mindedness and corruption of his superiors. My favourite passage from the book (and from the movie that I had finally been able to watch with a clear conscience) is of Prewitt singing his regiment to sleep :
"Day is done ...
Gone the sun ...
From-the-lake
From-the-hill
From-the-sky
Rest in peace
Sol jer brave
God is nigh ..."
The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman once told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, don't close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes.
This spirituality in Prewitt is countered and subverted by his impulsive, sensualist temperament. He is a heavy drinker, like everybody else in the regiment from the lowest infantryman to the top general. He is an addicted gambler, losing his pay at poker in a couple of hours after he gets it in his hands ( But before the big win he was just waiting for to quit on came they caught him, they caught him good. ). He is womanizer, a regular of the bawdy houses, again like almost everybody around him. He is foul mouthed and violent, rigidly proud and suspicious and difficult to befriend. He is even showing signs of racism and homophobia, again symptoms of the society he is living in. Yet Prewitt does open up to a few select people, like the fellows he is jamming with in the evenings on guitars, singing interminable blues sessions that will produce maybe the one enduring masterpiece of Prewitt's life : "The Re-enlistment Blues"
Because he was a soldier, and because he could see it all then, in the easily shattered crystal clarity of the thin glass goblet of the silence that is guard duty in the field at night the last hour before you are relieved.
Maybe the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
Outside the barracks, Prewitt is a man searching - for companionship, for oblivion in a bottle of hard liquor, for love in the most inappropriate places, for an answer to existential questions:
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself.
So we get to know Prewitt also through the eyes of Lorene, a professional hooker that is still capable of falling in love with a vulnerable man who hides many insecurities behind the tough guy exterior. Maureen, another of his love interest reads him like a book:
All you got is a feeling you're locked up in a box thats two sizes too small for you and theres no air in it and you're suffocatin, and all the time outside the box you hear the whole world walking around laughin and having a big, big time. Thats all you got.
In the same existentialist vein, here is a glimpse of the see-saw experience Prewitt is going through, from exhilaration to despondency:
Life frightened him, sometimes. But there was nothing to do, anyway. Because this special quality was a thing he could not control in himself, that he could not stop. But then when he was going good he knew it was better to face it, that it was always better to face things no matter what it cost anybody. He knew that. He believed it. Only in the bad spells did life frighten him with its unbelievable cruelty, its inconceivable injustice, its incredible pointlessness.
I have told you about my favourite part : Prewitt singing Taps in the evening. I should also talk a little about some parts that were problematic. One of these is the portrayal of homosexuals - it may be a good thing that their culture is mentioned and given exposure at a time when most of the establishment pretended they don't exist, but for one thing Prewitt and his friends are boasting about beating these guys up, and for another, there is an implication that gays are damaged goods and have deep psychological issues:
Why do you always pick up somebody who aint queer? Because if you're with another queer, you don't feel evil enough, thats why.
Women don't get a much better outlook than gays, an issue that bothered me a lot also when reading "Some Came Running" . Jones if often making me think that, through his characters, he hates women intellectually, even as he desires them physically.
And they called them the weaker sex! That was prone to crack up and cry at every crisis! Like hell. The women ran this world; and nobody knew it better than a man in love. Sometimes he thought they did it deliberately, all this conspiracy stuff, just to satisfy some ancient racial love of intrigue inherited from the generations of conspiring to play the role of being dominated.
and, His trouble was when he had admitted to her and to himself that he loved her. That was always the greatest single blunder in this game. That put him in her power as Dana had never been in her power. She could make him do anything now, even become an officer, now that she was sure he did love her. He was no longer a free agent, and as a result the old wild terrible strength that had been the power and pride of Milt Warden was gone.
Also disturbing, but I believe in a necessary way, is the exposure of the cruel practices deployed by the jailers of recalcitrant soldiers in the Stockade. Both Maggio and Prewitt end up in the slammer, where they are subject to much more atrocious brutalities than "The Treatment" . It is said that Jones book provoked a review of these practices and abuses in the US Army. If true, the novel has served its purpose admirably.
... the quickest, efficientest, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any animal. boasts the odious Major Thomson as he unleashes his minions on the unfortunate inmates, under the leadership of one sergeant Fatso Judson. Despite these abuses, it is inside this Stockade that Maggio and Prewitt find a sort of redemption with the help of a renegade sailor, a guru of Oriental sensibilities:
If God is Instability rather than Fixity, if God is Growth and Evolution, then there is no need for the concept of forgiveness. The mere concept of forgiveness implies the doing of something wrong. Original sin. But if evolution is growth by trial and error, how can errors be wrong? since they contribute to growth?
Before I close my review, I would like to mention that I saw the movie of Fred Zinnemann from 1953 soon after reading the novel. I believe the casting was inspired, in particular Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster. I also think Zinneman did a decent job with the huge material he had in the book, but he also did a lot of changes to tone down the harshness of the foul language, the drinking and the whoring. This isn't as important as the whitewashing of the army officers, who are shown in the late parts of the movie to punish the abusive behaviour of Captain 'Dynamite' Holmes. In the novel he is promoted and given more power to apply his doctrine of discipline through fear.
As an epitaph, I include at the end the song of Robert E Lee Prewitt and of his friends in the G Company at Schofield Barracks:
Re-Enlistment Blues
Got Paid out on Monday
Not a dog soljer no more
they himme all that money
So much my pockets is sore
More dough than I can use.
Re-enlistment blues.
Took my ghelt to town on Tuesday
Got a room and a big double bed
Find a job tomorrow
Tonight you may be dead
Aint no time to lose.
Re-enlistment blues.
Hit the bars on Wednesday
My friends put me up on a throne
Found a hapa-Chinee baby
Swore she never would leave me alone
did I give her a bruise?
Re-enlistment blues!
Woke up sick on Thursday
Feelin like my head took a dare
Looked down at my trousers
All my pockets was bare
that gal had blown my fuse.
Re-enlistment blues.
Went back around on Friday
Asked for a free glass of beer
My friends had disappeared
Barman say, "Take off, you queer!"
What I done then aint news.
Re-enlistment blues.
The jail was cold all Sa'day
Standin' up on a bench lookin down
Through them bars I watched the people
All happy and out on the town
Looked like time for me to choose,
them Re-enlistment blues.
Slept in the park that Sunday
Seen all the folks goin to church
Your belly feels so empty
Dog soljers dont own pews.
Re-enlistment blues.
So I re-upped on Monday
A little sad and sick at my heart
All y fine plans was with my money
In the poke of a scheming tart
Guy always seems to lose.
Re-enlistment blues.
So you short-timers, let me tell you
Dont get yourself throwed in the can
You might as well be dead
Or a Thirty-Year-Man
Recruitin crews give me the blues,
Old Re-enlistment Blues.
October 20, 2017
An epic read and an epic story. This book took me literally months to finish, but I’m so glad that I did. It was well worth the effort.
I’d always had a hankering to read this book, purely for the fact that Frank Sinatra was obsessed with getting a role in the movie of the same title, to revive his (then) flagging career.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book, and how believable I found the characters to be. James Jones certainly had a knack for getting right into the character’s heads, and making them very human and people you could empathise with (even if you didn’t necessarily like them).
The fact that there was a sizeable portion of the book which included the female perspective, was also a facet I wasn’t expecting, and it added to the “realness” of the story.
A very long book, but definitely worth ticking off your book “bucket list”.
”Just where is, he thought, the line that separates insanity?”
”Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth, they alone can never buy it.”
”Maybe we only love the things we cannot have.”
I’d always had a hankering to read this book, purely for the fact that Frank Sinatra was obsessed with getting a role in the movie of the same title, to revive his (then) flagging career.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book, and how believable I found the characters to be. James Jones certainly had a knack for getting right into the character’s heads, and making them very human and people you could empathise with (even if you didn’t necessarily like them).
The fact that there was a sizeable portion of the book which included the female perspective, was also a facet I wasn’t expecting, and it added to the “realness” of the story.
A very long book, but definitely worth ticking off your book “bucket list”.
”Just where is, he thought, the line that separates insanity?”
”Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth, they alone can never buy it.”
”Maybe we only love the things we cannot have.”
October 3, 2020
The movie is among my favourites,it has a great cast and some unforgettable moments including the iconic beach scene.
The story is about soldiers in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour,and what happens in the aftermath.
Burt Lancaster,Frank Sinatra,Deborah Kerr and Montgomery Clift lead a star studded cast.Lancaster's character,a sergeant has an affair with the captain's wife.
Montogomery Clift plays a soldier,Prewitt who won't box for his unit's team as he has blinded a sparring partner a year ago.He gets relentlessly bullied and punished for his refusal to box.He then falls in love.His only support comes from Maggio,played by Frank Sinatra.
Then,Pearl Harbour is attacked and there are some good battle scenes,though the ships burning in the harbour are not shown.
The book is very lengthy and the writing style isn't particularly elegant.There are some things which have been changed in the movie including what happens eventually to Captain Holmes and the fate of Maggio,which adds to the dramatic impact of the film.What happens to Prewitt at the end adds even more to the drama.
Four stars for the film,three for the book.
The story is about soldiers in Hawaii just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour,and what happens in the aftermath.
Burt Lancaster,Frank Sinatra,Deborah Kerr and Montgomery Clift lead a star studded cast.Lancaster's character,a sergeant has an affair with the captain's wife.
Montogomery Clift plays a soldier,Prewitt who won't box for his unit's team as he has blinded a sparring partner a year ago.He gets relentlessly bullied and punished for his refusal to box.He then falls in love.His only support comes from Maggio,played by Frank Sinatra.
Then,Pearl Harbour is attacked and there are some good battle scenes,though the ships burning in the harbour are not shown.
The book is very lengthy and the writing style isn't particularly elegant.There are some things which have been changed in the movie including what happens eventually to Captain Holmes and the fate of Maggio,which adds to the dramatic impact of the film.What happens to Prewitt at the end adds even more to the drama.
Four stars for the film,three for the book.
January 9, 2013
For years this has just been that "super-long WWII novel about Hawaii during Pearl Harbor" that I knew was supposed to be good but never could bring myself to read. So when I finally read it, I was pretty surprised that it wasn't anything that I was expecting.
This is held up as a WWII novel. But its NOT a war novel. It's a novel about peacetime soldiers. The book takes place over the full year of 1941, and Pearl Harbor happens near the end, and is not what the book is about.
This is a book about what it was like to be in the army in the peacetime years leading up to WWII. Its amazing that it was published in the early 1950s...relationships with whores and commanding officers' wives, serious exploration of homosexuality and oppression of gays, the military prison system, alcoholism, the (realistically) casual use of the word "fuck" and "cocksucker" (tip of the iceburg) at a time when Norman Mailer didn't have the balls but to use "fug" (who the fuck ever said "fug").
This is a character novel, and the characters are amazing: crisp, consistent, flawed, real. Historical fiction is too much about events and facts and specific key individuals. This is historical fiction that is much different than other "WWII novels"....it goes deep into characters with no historical significance, with plot with no historical significance, that you walk away from feeling like you understand that time more than any other book you've read from that period.
It was interesting, yet not surprising, when I read in the afterward that the book From Here to Eternity beat out for the National Book Award in 1951 is another great character study of that decade: The Catcher in the Rye. Frankly, I think this one is better (though you can read The Catcher in the Rye five times in the time it takes to read From Here to Eternity). Though its not for everyone: this is a character novel about military enlisted men. So it's unapologetically manly. Because its about unapologetic men (who do really stupid shit).
NOTE: If you decide to read this, be sure to read the "Restored Edition", which does add back some of the original manuscript that was edited out when it was originally published (at Jones' adamant objection).
NOTE 2: My new years resolution is to read fewer books, but longer/better ones, but also to write a review for every 5-star rating that I give. This is the first.
This is held up as a WWII novel. But its NOT a war novel. It's a novel about peacetime soldiers. The book takes place over the full year of 1941, and Pearl Harbor happens near the end, and is not what the book is about.
This is a book about what it was like to be in the army in the peacetime years leading up to WWII. Its amazing that it was published in the early 1950s...relationships with whores and commanding officers' wives, serious exploration of homosexuality and oppression of gays, the military prison system, alcoholism, the (realistically) casual use of the word "fuck" and "cocksucker" (tip of the iceburg) at a time when Norman Mailer didn't have the balls but to use "fug" (who the fuck ever said "fug").
This is a character novel, and the characters are amazing: crisp, consistent, flawed, real. Historical fiction is too much about events and facts and specific key individuals. This is historical fiction that is much different than other "WWII novels"....it goes deep into characters with no historical significance, with plot with no historical significance, that you walk away from feeling like you understand that time more than any other book you've read from that period.
It was interesting, yet not surprising, when I read in the afterward that the book From Here to Eternity beat out for the National Book Award in 1951 is another great character study of that decade: The Catcher in the Rye. Frankly, I think this one is better (though you can read The Catcher in the Rye five times in the time it takes to read From Here to Eternity). Though its not for everyone: this is a character novel about military enlisted men. So it's unapologetically manly. Because its about unapologetic men (who do really stupid shit).
NOTE: If you decide to read this, be sure to read the "Restored Edition", which does add back some of the original manuscript that was edited out when it was originally published (at Jones' adamant objection).
NOTE 2: My new years resolution is to read fewer books, but longer/better ones, but also to write a review for every 5-star rating that I give. This is the first.
September 30, 2024
From Here to Eternity (The World War II Trilogy) by James Jones has long been an enduring classic that has eluded me over the years. However, recently I have been catching up on a lot of the works of Joan Didion and a section that she wrote in one of her essays was all about Honolulu and the island of Oahu where we spent a lot of time visiting our son and his family when they lived there a few years. So I had no choice but to read this powerful tome taking place in Honolulu, Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head with the big hotels, the Royal Hawaiian, Halekulani, and the Moana all in the narrative as well as Schofield Barracks adjacent to the town of Wahiawa and Wheeler Army Field. This is the quote that started me on this path:
What is interesting about this edition is that it has the previously censored and cut sections in the Scribner edition, first published in 1951, restored. As noted by George Hendrick, this was quite a task researching the manuscript From Here to Eternity in the Rare Book and Special Collection Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where James Jones often wrote in the margins of the manuscript objecting to the deletions. In this edition if Jones had revised a section, Hendrick allowed that revision to stand and states that it is now restored to its original state. Hendrick also notes that this is a much better book than what was published by Scribner's in 1951. Indeed!
From Here to Eternity takes place during the few months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and during the aftermath of the bombing. It is the tale of life on an Army base with one of the main characters, Robert E. Lee Prewitt from Harlan, Kentucky, probably the best bugler in Schofield Barracks until he transferred from this elite outfit after not making First Bugler. Prewitt then transferred to the infantry unit where he is urged to go out for boxing, but his refusal to do so ultimately causes him problems. This was an epic tale of army life in the Pacific Islands on the cusp of war with a lot of colorful characters from the enlisted men, to the officers and their wives. At 850+ pages, there is a lot of detail. It was a riveting and powerful book. While I had not planned to read the trilogy, how can I not?
"Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi belongs to William Faulkner."------Joan Didion, The White Album
"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones."
What is interesting about this edition is that it has the previously censored and cut sections in the Scribner edition, first published in 1951, restored. As noted by George Hendrick, this was quite a task researching the manuscript From Here to Eternity in the Rare Book and Special Collection Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where James Jones often wrote in the margins of the manuscript objecting to the deletions. In this edition if Jones had revised a section, Hendrick allowed that revision to stand and states that it is now restored to its original state. Hendrick also notes that this is a much better book than what was published by Scribner's in 1951. Indeed!
From Here to Eternity takes place during the few months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and during the aftermath of the bombing. It is the tale of life on an Army base with one of the main characters, Robert E. Lee Prewitt from Harlan, Kentucky, probably the best bugler in Schofield Barracks until he transferred from this elite outfit after not making First Bugler. Prewitt then transferred to the infantry unit where he is urged to go out for boxing, but his refusal to do so ultimately causes him problems. This was an epic tale of army life in the Pacific Islands on the cusp of war with a lot of colorful characters from the enlisted men, to the officers and their wives. At 850+ pages, there is a lot of detail. It was a riveting and powerful book. While I had not planned to read the trilogy, how can I not?
July 29, 2011
Hell of a book. Feminist characters. Cuckolded husbands (actually, everyone gets cuckolded). Homosexuals debating (at length) the nature of their sexual orientation. Proto-Hippie gurus. Non-conformist rebels. And, an Army story in there somewhere too. Must've been very heady stuff for 1951! I can't believe it was even published back then. Great book. Great summer read. Could've used less "grinning".
Oh yeah- (not to make too much of an understatement) if you've seen the film you've really only scratched the surface of the story. Highly recommended if you liked the movie.
Oh yeah- (not to make too much of an understatement) if you've seen the film you've really only scratched the surface of the story. Highly recommended if you liked the movie.
October 11, 2015
Love the movie with Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Cliff, Burt Lancester, Deborah Kerr. I have had the book on the shelf for probably close to 30 years,and never read it till now. I need to rewatch the movie again now...this book is great.....I enjoyed it,and it went into a lot more details about the characters lives, then any movie ever could,and it was heavy on the military life, and what it's like to be a soldier in those days.
I would recommend this to anyone...and it's a first in a trilogy, which I didn't know.... The Thin Red Line (also a film, which I've not seen),and Whistle Stop are the other two. I may read those some day.....and if I decide to , I won't wait another 30 years.
Enjoy the book first before you see the film...and if you've seen the film in years past...enjoy the book first.....the character development is top notch,and you really get a feel for the characters, much more in depth.
I would recommend this to anyone...and it's a first in a trilogy, which I didn't know.... The Thin Red Line (also a film, which I've not seen),and Whistle Stop are the other two. I may read those some day.....and if I decide to , I won't wait another 30 years.
Enjoy the book first before you see the film...and if you've seen the film in years past...enjoy the book first.....the character development is top notch,and you really get a feel for the characters, much more in depth.
February 13, 2026
This monster tome may not be for everyone, but I enjoyed it. Jones' first novel, published in 1951, chronicles the 'Pineapple Army' stationed in Hawaii from about a year before Peral Harbor to just after that event. While the USA did have a standing army/navy/etc. post WWI, the numbers were relatively small, the equipment largely outdated (remember the old WWI era destroyers that constituted the bulk of the US Pacific fleet in the Philippines?). Most of the members of the infantry company elucidated here joined up during the Depression, largely for three hot squares a day. War was in the air, however, with Germany and Japan already engaged on various fronts, and most people thought the US would join up sooner or later...
Jones provides us here a detailed character study of the men and their lovers constituting an infantry company, their daily trials and tribulations, and also some introspective philosophy regarding life, love and war itself. Although From Here to Eternity contains a smaller cast than his later The Thin Red Line, the cast is still large. Nonetheless, two characters stand out-- Prewitt (Prew), on his third term, who starts the novel 'busted' from the bugle corp into the regular infantry, and 1st Sgt Warden, the senior NCO that largely runs the infantry company Prew 'joined'. The depth of character development surprised me, but maybe it should not have given the over 800 pages Jones took to flesh it out. Prew and Warden's love interests also stood out as complex, intriguing characters.
Prew hailed from Harlen County, Kentucky (remember the killer documentary of that name about a coal miner's strike?) and after the death of his parents when he was a young teenage in the 20s, he bummed around the country until he found an army recruiter willing to sign him up when he as 17. Prew possesses some musical talent, playing the git-tar, but found his niche with the bugle and then the bugle corp. Unfortunately, a lesser bugle player was promoted ahead of him for the top bugle spot (due to the NCO there liking male lovers and Prew would not play ball); so demoted, he starts again. In the infantry company he joins the 'jockstraps' rule. This means that privates receive promotions primarily due to their athletic skills in the army intermurals. Prew knows how to box, and was an 'up and comer' before taking the bugle assignment, but refuses to box again (long story). The captain the company, however, really wants the next boxing title and puts pressure on Prew to join up, ordering that he gets the 'treatment' until he does. This simplistic representation of Prew does not come close to capturing his complexity, however. Prew, deeply proud, at times stubborn, really just wants to be a 30-year-man, or make a career in the army...
Warden on the other hand, wants respect and his talents on being able to run the company become evident when most of his NCOs are busy in training for the next event and someone has to keep up with supplies, etc. He also serves as an intermediary between the captain and the enlisted men. His affair with the captain's wife really steals the show!
Anyway, Jones gives us a drama here for the ages and if anything surprised me it concerned the dollops of penetrating philosophy woven into the tale. What is love? What makes life meaningful? Prew meets a guy in the stockade who used to run with the IWW folks (wobblies) and he gives us lots of ideas of what makes an economy run (I really loved this part-- the stand out for me of the entire novel). The fears, loves and desires of everyone made for a tasty treat, but jeez, Jones delivered this at a snail's pace. YMMV!! 4 bugles!!
Jones provides us here a detailed character study of the men and their lovers constituting an infantry company, their daily trials and tribulations, and also some introspective philosophy regarding life, love and war itself. Although From Here to Eternity contains a smaller cast than his later The Thin Red Line, the cast is still large. Nonetheless, two characters stand out-- Prewitt (Prew), on his third term, who starts the novel 'busted' from the bugle corp into the regular infantry, and 1st Sgt Warden, the senior NCO that largely runs the infantry company Prew 'joined'. The depth of character development surprised me, but maybe it should not have given the over 800 pages Jones took to flesh it out. Prew and Warden's love interests also stood out as complex, intriguing characters.
Prew hailed from Harlen County, Kentucky (remember the killer documentary of that name about a coal miner's strike?) and after the death of his parents when he was a young teenage in the 20s, he bummed around the country until he found an army recruiter willing to sign him up when he as 17. Prew possesses some musical talent, playing the git-tar, but found his niche with the bugle and then the bugle corp. Unfortunately, a lesser bugle player was promoted ahead of him for the top bugle spot (due to the NCO there liking male lovers and Prew would not play ball); so demoted, he starts again. In the infantry company he joins the 'jockstraps' rule. This means that privates receive promotions primarily due to their athletic skills in the army intermurals. Prew knows how to box, and was an 'up and comer' before taking the bugle assignment, but refuses to box again (long story). The captain the company, however, really wants the next boxing title and puts pressure on Prew to join up, ordering that he gets the 'treatment' until he does. This simplistic representation of Prew does not come close to capturing his complexity, however. Prew, deeply proud, at times stubborn, really just wants to be a 30-year-man, or make a career in the army...
Warden on the other hand, wants respect and his talents on being able to run the company become evident when most of his NCOs are busy in training for the next event and someone has to keep up with supplies, etc. He also serves as an intermediary between the captain and the enlisted men. His affair with the captain's wife really steals the show!
Anyway, Jones gives us a drama here for the ages and if anything surprised me it concerned the dollops of penetrating philosophy woven into the tale. What is love? What makes life meaningful? Prew meets a guy in the stockade who used to run with the IWW folks (wobblies) and he gives us lots of ideas of what makes an economy run (I really loved this part-- the stand out for me of the entire novel). The fears, loves and desires of everyone made for a tasty treat, but jeez, Jones delivered this at a snail's pace. YMMV!! 4 bugles!!
January 31, 2020
This complete, uncensored version of James Jones' 1951 naturalistic classic is raw, gritty and (despite its nearly 900-page length) free of extraneous information or adornment. What it does do is immerse the reader in the intolerable situation Robert E. Lee Prewitt from Kentucky finds himself as a member of Schofield Barracks in Hawaii: he's a boxer who refuses to box after badly wounding a man. As a result, and with James Jones' adroit use of peripheral characters and their plights, we get a nearly complete overview of U.S. Army life just before the American entry into the second World War.
Readers who encountered this masterful novel prior to the early 1990's most likely encountered a version that was full of cuts and compromises. Those redactions have been restored here, and give a more graphic and realistic look at a recruit's sexual life, including forays into what we'd today call "gay for pay" -- those and other sections Jones saw cut out of the 1951 bestseller are the reason this book is almost 80 pages longer.
Yes, as sprawing, naturalistic American novels go, this one is a chest-crusher and a head-banger. It may also be one of the most sigificant pieces of fiction you ever learned to love.
Readers who encountered this masterful novel prior to the early 1990's most likely encountered a version that was full of cuts and compromises. Those redactions have been restored here, and give a more graphic and realistic look at a recruit's sexual life, including forays into what we'd today call "gay for pay" -- those and other sections Jones saw cut out of the 1951 bestseller are the reason this book is almost 80 pages longer.
Yes, as sprawing, naturalistic American novels go, this one is a chest-crusher and a head-banger. It may also be one of the most sigificant pieces of fiction you ever learned to love.
May 22, 2023
Il più bel libro di guerra (termine riduttivo al massimo) che sia mai stato pubblicato. Se la gioca con "il nudo e il morto" di Mailer... questo romanzo è sullo stesso piano di "guerra e pace" e di "Vita e Destino"... Austerlitz (vittoria assoluta di napoleone) e Borodino (vittoria mutilata di napoleone) in Tolstoj e Stalingrado (la battaglia delle battaglie della WWII) in Grossman 3 battaglie tra le più famose di quelle combattute negli ultimi 250 anni... in questo romanzo il punto apicale è stato l'attacco di pearl harbor (vittoria sul corto raggio per i giapponesi ma che su lungo raggio si è trasformato in un boomerang colossale per gli stessi giapponesi)
National Book Award 1952
National Book Award 1952
April 19, 2024
What a bleak, bold and beautiful monster of an epic.
After seeing the immortal film version as a 13 year old, and crushing on Montgomery Clift's Prewitt, I revisited the classic 1953 film version a year ago as an adult. My fondness for the actors remained, and enjoyed the nostalgia of watching several of the film's iconic moments (such as the beach love scene between Karen Holmes and Anthony Warden (Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, super sexy); and the scene where Monty Clift's Prewitt stars to play "The Reenlistment Blues" on his bugle.
I picked up the book during the pandemic in 2020, and it took 2 years after to finally invest my time in reading such a doorstop.
Finishing this novel is one of the most harrowing pieces of World War II literature I've read. It's intimate and epic at the same time. The trauma of being part of an unforgiving Army, vivid scenes that illustrated the dread and existential threat of an Axis invasion; and characters so damaged by physical and emotional scars and psyches are written with beautiful, brutal human empathy. Each character leapt off the page, drawing me in.
First, the novel is really about Prewitt. Unlike the film where his character is every bit Warden's equal because of the star power of both Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster, the book’s main point of view is Prewitt's damaged psyche. His self loathing juxtaposed with his desire to be patriotic hovers as an ever present shadow on the other characters he interacts with. His presence looms so powerfully that it consumes other moments with tragedy.
Warden's character is also complex, suffering from a desire to settle down and love Karen Holmes, is equally tormented as Prewitt. But he is able to keep himself from being too hot headed. But both male protagonists drip with toxic masculinity that is riddled with both empathy, and alarming misogyny.
The female protagonists, Karen and Lorene are also well drawn out. But they are supporting characters that orbit the worlds of Warden and Prewitt. The novel establishes Karen's bitterness towards her boorish husband, Major Holmes. Karen had a hysterectomy since the cheating Major Holmes gave her the clap. Lorene is often hardened and exhausted from the demands of sex work.
Angelo Maggio is the comic relief character, but also develops a real backbone when he is brutalized by the sadistic Fatso Judson.
Since the film version was heavily sanitized by the Hays Code, the experience reading this must have shocked readers everywhere with Jones' honest and brutal depictions of toxic masculinity, violence; cynical views on sex, and the heavy doses of profanity. I completely understand why a major film studio had do make decisions that kept the novel's integrity, but had to cut out the grit.
Some takeaways from the novel that I noted that were excised from the movie were:
Angelo as someone who was "gay for pay" and willing to have sex with men for transactional purposes. His interactions with openly gay characters Hal and Tommy illustrate the prevalence of homosexuality in army life. Like Lorene, he dabbles in sex work.
A character named Bloom commits suicide out of fear of being gay, and is also attacked with antisemitism. I don’t recall him being part of the film.
A brave character named Blues Berry is killed by Judson in the stockade after standing up to him was also cut. I read somewhere that both Bloom and Berry's deaths were part of a decision to kill off Maggio in the film to make him a more tragic figure, whereas in the novel, Maggio lives.
To me the character of Maylon Stark, who was almost completely cut from the film was the novel's most affecting. As the cook of the infantry, he carries a torch for Karen Holmes as well, and he and Warden vie for her affection, and for her body. He's heartbroken that she broke off their relationship, and his interactions with Warden are often awkward and confrontational.
I understood that after I finished reading this book that its one of the greatest war masterpieces written. Engrossing, vivid and touching- its starkness and brutality is one hell of an unforgettable reading experience.
.
After seeing the immortal film version as a 13 year old, and crushing on Montgomery Clift's Prewitt, I revisited the classic 1953 film version a year ago as an adult. My fondness for the actors remained, and enjoyed the nostalgia of watching several of the film's iconic moments (such as the beach love scene between Karen Holmes and Anthony Warden (Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, super sexy); and the scene where Monty Clift's Prewitt stars to play "The Reenlistment Blues" on his bugle.
I picked up the book during the pandemic in 2020, and it took 2 years after to finally invest my time in reading such a doorstop.
Finishing this novel is one of the most harrowing pieces of World War II literature I've read. It's intimate and epic at the same time. The trauma of being part of an unforgiving Army, vivid scenes that illustrated the dread and existential threat of an Axis invasion; and characters so damaged by physical and emotional scars and psyches are written with beautiful, brutal human empathy. Each character leapt off the page, drawing me in.
First, the novel is really about Prewitt. Unlike the film where his character is every bit Warden's equal because of the star power of both Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster, the book’s main point of view is Prewitt's damaged psyche. His self loathing juxtaposed with his desire to be patriotic hovers as an ever present shadow on the other characters he interacts with. His presence looms so powerfully that it consumes other moments with tragedy.
Warden's character is also complex, suffering from a desire to settle down and love Karen Holmes, is equally tormented as Prewitt. But he is able to keep himself from being too hot headed. But both male protagonists drip with toxic masculinity that is riddled with both empathy, and alarming misogyny.
The female protagonists, Karen and Lorene are also well drawn out. But they are supporting characters that orbit the worlds of Warden and Prewitt. The novel establishes Karen's bitterness towards her boorish husband, Major Holmes. Karen had a hysterectomy since the cheating Major Holmes gave her the clap. Lorene is often hardened and exhausted from the demands of sex work.
Angelo Maggio is the comic relief character, but also develops a real backbone when he is brutalized by the sadistic Fatso Judson.
Since the film version was heavily sanitized by the Hays Code, the experience reading this must have shocked readers everywhere with Jones' honest and brutal depictions of toxic masculinity, violence; cynical views on sex, and the heavy doses of profanity. I completely understand why a major film studio had do make decisions that kept the novel's integrity, but had to cut out the grit.
Some takeaways from the novel that I noted that were excised from the movie were:
Angelo as someone who was "gay for pay" and willing to have sex with men for transactional purposes. His interactions with openly gay characters Hal and Tommy illustrate the prevalence of homosexuality in army life. Like Lorene, he dabbles in sex work.
A character named Bloom commits suicide out of fear of being gay, and is also attacked with antisemitism. I don’t recall him being part of the film.
A brave character named Blues Berry is killed by Judson in the stockade after standing up to him was also cut. I read somewhere that both Bloom and Berry's deaths were part of a decision to kill off Maggio in the film to make him a more tragic figure, whereas in the novel, Maggio lives.
To me the character of Maylon Stark, who was almost completely cut from the film was the novel's most affecting. As the cook of the infantry, he carries a torch for Karen Holmes as well, and he and Warden vie for her affection, and for her body. He's heartbroken that she broke off their relationship, and his interactions with Warden are often awkward and confrontational.
I understood that after I finished reading this book that its one of the greatest war masterpieces written. Engrossing, vivid and touching- its starkness and brutality is one hell of an unforgettable reading experience.
.
May 30, 2012
It's really very interesting. Not this book, which is in my view a complete waste of time, but the whole concept of the middlebrow novel, a genre that has disappeared. Being new here at Goodreads, I've spent quite some time wandering around and jiggering all the bells and whistles. And I've seen hundreds and hundreds of book titles and authors, both those chosen by members and those otherwise included and promoted on the website. And while of course I can find old mid-20th Century middlebrow novels if I specifically enter their names in the search function, they're nowhere mentioned or named or bruited about by current members or as favorites or leading choices.
Most of these middlebrow novels aren't worth anyone's time, at least if you're not really insisting on killing that time dead, dead, dead. There are those which have some continuing value, like some John O'Hara and some Mackinlay Kantor. But most of them (there are so MANY!) have gone out with the tide and will never come back, waiting until some future anthropologist starts rooting around in the 20th Century for a thesis topic. Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of novels from the 1920-1960 period that are now and always have been great and remarkable and valuable. But most of those, in my view at least, are genre-types.
What are the unifying characteristics that make it possible for me to issue such sweeping generalizations about middlebrow novels? Well, for starters they were written, published and purchased for and by members of a very specific stratum of then American society. Primarily middle and upper middle class women with some education who stayed at home. I was growing up then, as a child and an adolescent, and can remember only too well the quiet, peaceful, spotless living rooms of these women into which would arrive every so often the latest choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Not in theory unlike the kind of self-censorship practiced by Dickens in an earlier age, these novels were restricted. There were numbers of taboos that had to be respected in their language, their subject matter, their plots and their settings. Not to mention their people and their people's roles.
The vast majority of social restrictions that now or at any other time hold or held sway do so in an entirely unconscious manner. With regard to middlebrow novels in the mid-20th Century it was taken for granted at the time that the family living space, a purely mental construct in which the novel reader and her family lived and loved and had their being, was, like the physical house itself, a boundaried space. There was our space "here", where she and her family and friends existed and had as pleasant as possible a social life, and then, beyond the mental garden wall, so to speak, there was the outside "there", dangerous terrain in which anything could and probably did happen. Just as was true for the inside of the actual physical house, the local mental space, the "here", of course required cleanliness and protection from all the negative things in the outside "there".
You wouldn't track outside mud into the house, you'd scrape it off your shoes on the mat at the door. And the same could be said of that mental space in which the family existed. There were attitudes (negativism, cynicism, defeatism, communism, sexuality) that were simply dirt to be excluded. Not in the slightest in a nasty, repressed, pursed-mouth fashion. By no means. One did that in order to preserve for the family mental living space the kind of quiet, ordered, cleanly calm and peace of the living room in the actual house itself. It was natural. It was automatic. It was what self-respecting people did. And the writers of that era, or most of them at least, who desired some kind of commercial success, wrote novels that excluded not only objectionable language (does ANYONE remember "objectionable language"?), but objectionable ideas, thoughts, feelings, personae, etc., etc., etc.
Looking back on it now, it's almost cute. Almost endearing. I'm sure it wasn't for the poor novelists of the time. But there really has been a huge, huge development since that era, to the point that it's very, very doubtful that young adults of today have any conception of what it was like to grow up and live in such an "unchallenged" (and "unchallenged" is the key word here), self-limited way. Everyone then, unconsciously, helped everyone else keep "dirty" things on the other side of the mental door. The lady of the house did it for her friends and relations. Her friends and relations did it for her. Everyone cooperated, most certainly including teachers and librarians. And the novelists did it too. Just go back and try to read "Marjorie Morningstar" without either bursting into uncontrollable laughter or throwing up. Or, for that matter, "From Here to Eternity." You may like the story line. You may like the characters. But after you get under way in your reading you will, at some point, develop a sense of strangeness, of being in a sealed-off little bubble of unreality. All by yourself.
All by yourself. And that was the price of admission. For those folks who wanted to keep their mental homes spick and span, clean and neat, healthy and wholesome and without the taint of infection, the cost was substantial. The cost was loneliness and a sense of unreality. Middlebrow novels. They're gone now. Their market has been shattered into a thousand genres and sub-genres that permit authors to focus on very particular protocols applying to very specific types of fiction. Authors can specialize and readers can specialize, in a kind of symbiosis advantageous to both. Nor will people of today put up with the kind of mental straitjacket that was absolutely normal in 1955. Most readers today, at least part of the time, want to come to grips with what's really out there. Escapism is all well and good but most people today want some reassurance that at least some aspects of their preferred fictions deal with fundamental realities. It's true in science fiction. It's true in fantasy. It's true in mysteries and thrillers, and it's even true in romance. Escapism plus, sort of like breakfast cereal with added vitamins and minerals.
Were he to come back to earth tomorrow, James Jones would have a very hard time orienting himself to who and what we are in 2012. He might try again to write books, but if he wanted to be published in our time, he'd have to include a much more substantial slice of reality which, like garlic, is today's public taste. Myself, I think it's a good thing.
Most of these middlebrow novels aren't worth anyone's time, at least if you're not really insisting on killing that time dead, dead, dead. There are those which have some continuing value, like some John O'Hara and some Mackinlay Kantor. But most of them (there are so MANY!) have gone out with the tide and will never come back, waiting until some future anthropologist starts rooting around in the 20th Century for a thesis topic. Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of novels from the 1920-1960 period that are now and always have been great and remarkable and valuable. But most of those, in my view at least, are genre-types.
What are the unifying characteristics that make it possible for me to issue such sweeping generalizations about middlebrow novels? Well, for starters they were written, published and purchased for and by members of a very specific stratum of then American society. Primarily middle and upper middle class women with some education who stayed at home. I was growing up then, as a child and an adolescent, and can remember only too well the quiet, peaceful, spotless living rooms of these women into which would arrive every so often the latest choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Not in theory unlike the kind of self-censorship practiced by Dickens in an earlier age, these novels were restricted. There were numbers of taboos that had to be respected in their language, their subject matter, their plots and their settings. Not to mention their people and their people's roles.
The vast majority of social restrictions that now or at any other time hold or held sway do so in an entirely unconscious manner. With regard to middlebrow novels in the mid-20th Century it was taken for granted at the time that the family living space, a purely mental construct in which the novel reader and her family lived and loved and had their being, was, like the physical house itself, a boundaried space. There was our space "here", where she and her family and friends existed and had as pleasant as possible a social life, and then, beyond the mental garden wall, so to speak, there was the outside "there", dangerous terrain in which anything could and probably did happen. Just as was true for the inside of the actual physical house, the local mental space, the "here", of course required cleanliness and protection from all the negative things in the outside "there".
You wouldn't track outside mud into the house, you'd scrape it off your shoes on the mat at the door. And the same could be said of that mental space in which the family existed. There were attitudes (negativism, cynicism, defeatism, communism, sexuality) that were simply dirt to be excluded. Not in the slightest in a nasty, repressed, pursed-mouth fashion. By no means. One did that in order to preserve for the family mental living space the kind of quiet, ordered, cleanly calm and peace of the living room in the actual house itself. It was natural. It was automatic. It was what self-respecting people did. And the writers of that era, or most of them at least, who desired some kind of commercial success, wrote novels that excluded not only objectionable language (does ANYONE remember "objectionable language"?), but objectionable ideas, thoughts, feelings, personae, etc., etc., etc.
Looking back on it now, it's almost cute. Almost endearing. I'm sure it wasn't for the poor novelists of the time. But there really has been a huge, huge development since that era, to the point that it's very, very doubtful that young adults of today have any conception of what it was like to grow up and live in such an "unchallenged" (and "unchallenged" is the key word here), self-limited way. Everyone then, unconsciously, helped everyone else keep "dirty" things on the other side of the mental door. The lady of the house did it for her friends and relations. Her friends and relations did it for her. Everyone cooperated, most certainly including teachers and librarians. And the novelists did it too. Just go back and try to read "Marjorie Morningstar" without either bursting into uncontrollable laughter or throwing up. Or, for that matter, "From Here to Eternity." You may like the story line. You may like the characters. But after you get under way in your reading you will, at some point, develop a sense of strangeness, of being in a sealed-off little bubble of unreality. All by yourself.
All by yourself. And that was the price of admission. For those folks who wanted to keep their mental homes spick and span, clean and neat, healthy and wholesome and without the taint of infection, the cost was substantial. The cost was loneliness and a sense of unreality. Middlebrow novels. They're gone now. Their market has been shattered into a thousand genres and sub-genres that permit authors to focus on very particular protocols applying to very specific types of fiction. Authors can specialize and readers can specialize, in a kind of symbiosis advantageous to both. Nor will people of today put up with the kind of mental straitjacket that was absolutely normal in 1955. Most readers today, at least part of the time, want to come to grips with what's really out there. Escapism is all well and good but most people today want some reassurance that at least some aspects of their preferred fictions deal with fundamental realities. It's true in science fiction. It's true in fantasy. It's true in mysteries and thrillers, and it's even true in romance. Escapism plus, sort of like breakfast cereal with added vitamins and minerals.
Were he to come back to earth tomorrow, James Jones would have a very hard time orienting himself to who and what we are in 2012. He might try again to write books, but if he wanted to be published in our time, he'd have to include a much more substantial slice of reality which, like garlic, is today's public taste. Myself, I think it's a good thing.
August 17, 2013
Society can be considered a fabric that surrounds us. It’s a warm blanket that has been pieced together to suit our way of life and our collective needs. Society, keeps us safe, wards off isolation, and also defines the possibilities of our success. But society is not tailor-made. It is lumpy where it’s been stretched and binding in the places that have never been touched. Regardless of who we are, however, we must live with the fit that society affords us or suffer the consequences of living without its collective warmth.
From Here to Eternity use the world of the Army as it existed pre-draft, pre-WWII, to recreate a small, deeply personalize model of society. The Army, with all of its politics, vices, egotistical influences, and rules interacts with the two main characters in ways that echo our modern-day interactions with society. And it’s this miniaturization effect that intensifies this theme and brings the irregular fit of their blanket into a modern-day context.
The two main characters serve to illustrate the two extremes of human-societal interactions. On one side of the extreme, Sgt. Warden exemplifies the rewards that society bestows upon those that adhere to its rules while also depicting the parts of our humanity that we must give up (or have taken away) while achieving society’s expectations.
Pvt. Prewitt exemplifies the other extreme. Prewitt is driven by his personal need to be true to himself regardless of expectations. Rather than try to pull the lumpy parts of the blanket over him to create a better fit, he simply throws the blanket off, accepts the consequences, and lives true to his convictions. Prewitt exemplifies the punishment that society doles out to its non-conformists.
Warden and Prewitt; both men know instinctively who they are. Not only do they suffer their individual fates but they also suffer their desires to be more like each other. Prewitt desires the collective warmth but cannot deny his true self. Warden desires to live as his true self but cannot give up the rewards that society has bestowed upon him. By the end of the book, you are left to evaluate the suffering that both men endure and you are left to wonder if we, as individuals, will ever be at peace amongst our collective selves.
And so it goes for all of us, from here to the end of time.
From Here to Eternity use the world of the Army as it existed pre-draft, pre-WWII, to recreate a small, deeply personalize model of society. The Army, with all of its politics, vices, egotistical influences, and rules interacts with the two main characters in ways that echo our modern-day interactions with society. And it’s this miniaturization effect that intensifies this theme and brings the irregular fit of their blanket into a modern-day context.
The two main characters serve to illustrate the two extremes of human-societal interactions. On one side of the extreme, Sgt. Warden exemplifies the rewards that society bestows upon those that adhere to its rules while also depicting the parts of our humanity that we must give up (or have taken away) while achieving society’s expectations.
Pvt. Prewitt exemplifies the other extreme. Prewitt is driven by his personal need to be true to himself regardless of expectations. Rather than try to pull the lumpy parts of the blanket over him to create a better fit, he simply throws the blanket off, accepts the consequences, and lives true to his convictions. Prewitt exemplifies the punishment that society doles out to its non-conformists.
Warden and Prewitt; both men know instinctively who they are. Not only do they suffer their individual fates but they also suffer their desires to be more like each other. Prewitt desires the collective warmth but cannot deny his true self. Warden desires to live as his true self but cannot give up the rewards that society has bestowed upon him. By the end of the book, you are left to evaluate the suffering that both men endure and you are left to wonder if we, as individuals, will ever be at peace amongst our collective selves.
And so it goes for all of us, from here to the end of time.
March 17, 2020
A Great Novel
This spectacular novel was published in 1951, was a huge best seller and made into a classic film (Oscar for best picture). For some reason I never read it until now and I am glad that I waited since I was able to read the restored version published in 2011. This is the version as originally written and edited by Jones. The bestselling 1951 version was severely edited by the publisher to remove profanity and other taboos which would never have passed the censors of that era. I cannot imagine this book being as good in that butchered version. Highly recommended. If you read the censored version years ago and liked it, read the restored version. If you never read it get it now and settle into almost 900 pages of a 20th century epic novel.
This spectacular novel was published in 1951, was a huge best seller and made into a classic film (Oscar for best picture). For some reason I never read it until now and I am glad that I waited since I was able to read the restored version published in 2011. This is the version as originally written and edited by Jones. The bestselling 1951 version was severely edited by the publisher to remove profanity and other taboos which would never have passed the censors of that era. I cannot imagine this book being as good in that butchered version. Highly recommended. If you read the censored version years ago and liked it, read the restored version. If you never read it get it now and settle into almost 900 pages of a 20th century epic novel.
October 30, 2013
Of course,” you hear them say, “the book was much better than the movie.” And while we’ve heard this observation time and again, no one really elaborates as to why. Then, too, I suspect that in instances when the movie was the original, inspired creation, and the book was the one riding the coattails—as in the novelized versions of Dark Knight and Terminator—the opposite is true. The movie is much better than the book. Someone else might have to corroborate this idea, because I, for one, have never and will never read the novelization of any movie. My main premise is as follows: The emotive fire of the creative artist loses its heat when transferred to another medium.
In this instance, I watched the movie before I read the novel, and although I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t think it was “great.” I sure as hell didn’t see why it won eight (8) Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Now that I’ve read the novel (which was a runaway best-seller) and now that I’m more familiar with the casting decisions of the director, Fred Zimmerman, it all becomes very clear that the film was indeed riding the coattails of a hugely successful book; people flocked to the theater to see how all this salaciousness and debauchery might appear on the big screen. If you knew that Donna Reed from It’s a Wonderful Life, was going to play a sultry prostitute, wouldn’t you be at least a little curious?
"Watching her walking he could see the flat triangle of hair underneath the thinness of the dress, but with her it was not like it had been with Maureen who had been unaware of it completely. This girl was aware of it , aware of him, but she was utterly above it. She was aware of it and she ignored it.
Must be twenty-three or –four, he thought, noticing that she walked very straight and that her hair was done in a circular roll low on her neck and that she had very wide eyes that looked at him serenely openly. She stopped by them and smiled at him and he noticed her mouth was very wide across the thin childishness of her face, he noticed the long lips were very full especially at the corners. She has a beautiful face, he thought.
Mrs Kipfer introduced them formally, and then asked if she wouldn’t look after him because he was new here? If she wouldn’t show him around?
'Surely,' she said, and he noticed how pleasingly low pitched, how poised her voice was. It was the voice that belonged with the rest of her. 'Let sit down, shall we?' she smiled."
If you knew Burt Lancaster, as Sergeant Warden, would be having an affair with his commanding officer’s wife, a character played by the very epitome of genteel propriety, Deborah Kerr, wouldn’t you be hoping to see a little skin on the big screen? And let’s not forget Mr. Frank Sinatra, whose Italian Brooklyn character is one of the funniest in modern fiction, the equivalent of King Lear’s jester:
“I even climbed up on the doorknob to look through the transom to see if he had died and the son of a bitch had hung a towel over it. I call that plain goddam bad manners.”
“What you mean is,” Prew grinned, “you think he’s a suspicious bastard.”
“Yeah,” Angelo said. “As if anybody would look through his goddam old transom.”
He frowned at them so indignantly so long that Lorene giggled and finally had to laugh out loud.
“Well,” he said, getting up. “I’m a kind of guy can tell when he’s overstayed his welcome. I can tell when I ain’t wanted. I leave you people to your lovin.”
“Aw, stick around,” Prew grinned, “Please don’t rush off.”
“Yas,” Angelo said, “I like you too, you bastard. I will just leave you some of this whiskey and then I won’t feel so guilty.”
Indeed, now that I’ve read this 850-page monolith, I want to see the film again, just to note how much innuendo made it past the censors, or perhaps just to visit with these characters for 118 more minutes. Did I mention prostitutes—male solicitors included— gambling, gay night life, boxing, homicidal beatings, vengeance murders, and gun-in-the mouth suicides?
“[He] was lying back across his bunk in that peculiarly lifeless position dead people get into, with the top of his head gone and the rifle on the floor and the one pastywhite bare foot dangling down ridiculously. There was a large blot of blood and phlegmy matter on the ceiling around the hole where the bullet had gone on through. It was still [his] face, but it looked as if all the bones had been taken out from behind it, like one of those cured headhunter’s head you could see in the curio shop windows downtown on Hotel Street.”
Compared to the book, the movie seems like a Disney after-school special. It’s my understanding that the book itself, as published in 1952, was also watered-down from James Jones’s original manuscript, which contained an explicit sex scene with two men as well as some more choice language.
But to say that the book is better than the movie because it’s less diluted or because we get to spend more time with our beloved characters is still missing the point. At the heart of the matter, the book is truer, both emotionally and philosophically. In the wholesome, domesticated ideology of the 1950s when shows like Leave it to Beaver sought to impose a moral compass on postwar America, From Here to Eternity reminded a generation of men of what they had, in fact, experienced: suicides, genocide, prostitution, gambling, boxing, explicit language, beatings, court martial, extra-marital affairs.
As an enlisted soldier of the US Army, I myself was summoned, along with the Chaplain, to the scene of a suicide. An MP had shot himself in the head. It wasn’t pretty. This soldier had left his wife and kids for a German national only to have the Fraulein empty his bank account and leave.
We were stationed in Holland, not Germany, where both marijuana and prostitution were legal; many soldiers were sent home, including the Sergeant Major (for allegedly assaulting a girl). Drinking and gambling were popular pastimes in the barracks. I recall one particular officer who lost his security clearance because of bad debts. One PFC was busted down to a plain private because he had been drinking on guard duty. Yes, the military was dramatic, even in peace time, and I suppose that’s why we loved it almost as much as we hated it—because nowhere else, except on the edge of death, could we feel so alive.
Which reminds me of the title of the work itself, a phrase that is lost (like the emotional and philosophical truth of the story) upon anyone who sees the movie without having read the novel. It’s taken from a poem entitled “Gentlemen-Rankers” by Rudyard Kipling.
Jones cites the last four lines: “Gentlemen-rankers out on a spree/ Damned from here to Eternity,/ God ha’ mercy on such as we,/ Ba! Yah! Bah!” A gentleman-ranker is an enlisted solider who is qualified, through education, breeding, or military training, to be an officer, and yet chooses to remain an enlisted rank. Why would someone do such a stupid thing?
Well, I for one did it because I made more money (through singing bonuses and student-loan repayments) than I would have as an officer. Also unlike an officer, I could choose my MOS (Military Occupation Specialty), and my station in Europe.
Looking back on it, I’m not sure I made the right choice. Like Kipling so eloquently wrote in his poem, I did feel like a “little black sheep” who had gone astray. On the other hand, I suppose social limbo and biting my tongue were a modest price to pay for having the opportunity to tour Europe on Uncle Sam’s dime, all the while paying off a small mortgage’s worth of student loans. As for other gentlemen-rankers—like First Sergeant Milton Warden of the story—their reasons can be found, all the same, in their values and identity.
Warden’s commanding officer, Captain Holmes, is too busy fornicating to be of much use in running G-Company. Consequently, the administrative burden falls on Warden, who, as usual, does a superb job—evening while seducing the Captain’s wife.
In the novel, Captain Holmes actually befriends a young general and is promoted to the rank of major. In the movie, he’s reprimanded. But the point is that an enlisted man, an NCO (non-commissioned officer) specifically, does the real, day-to-day work of the army, and the officers get the credit.
Warden shares the same view of many NCOs that I came across in the army. When a private accidentally called them sir, they responded, “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!” Or if an officer asked them what materials they needed for a particular mission, their response might have been, “All I need is for you to stay out of the way, sir.”
Unlike Captain Holmes, First Sergeant Warden has a deeper connection with the army, a sense of it beyond himself. He’s fair and impartial to his subordinates. Unlike Holmes, he “never overstep[s] his own private, self-constructed line of equity.” In the deepest sense, Warden simply has more respect for his enlisted colleagues than the commissioned officers who have commanded him. He’s a capable, educated, sophisticated, and empathetic man—virtually the very opposite of the hard and harsh exterior that he portrays; It’s as if he’s hiding his capabilities not out of humility, but out of shame. Karen Holmes loves him, but she “can’t” (a.k.a. won’t) marry him unless he submits his paperwork to become an officer.
Jones, too, as the author, seems to have his own private line of equity, striving to portray each character as honestly as possible. Even though the reader wants Private Prewitt to win a gloves-off boxing match with Corporal Bloom, he doesn’t win. The fight is pretty much a draw.
Also, despite the foibles of his main characters, Jones gives them redeeming qualities that, on the balance, make them likable. This is the first literary novel I have read where a highly intelligent and respectable main character has a seventh-grade education and was raped as a child by a bum in a “rolling box car.” The characters from The Man with the Golden Arm have disadvantageous backgrounds as well, but they never emotionally or intellectually rise above this background like Prewitt does. They don’t have his internal code, work ethic, or sophistication. Consequently, he earns our respect and love, while they remain intellectually, physically, and morally lazy.
In terms of craft, Jones creates a Thrillerary, my favorite types of novel. He superbly “sets up” each major scene by creating a sublime anticipation, as when 1) Prewitt is about to meet Alma, 2) Warden is about to seduce Karen Holmes, 3) another stockade prisoner is about to have his arm broken by a sixteen pound sledge hammer. Like the consummate author of a thriller, Jones plants the question of the scene first: Will Angelo escape or be arrested or killed?; Will Prewitt murder the guard or die trying?; Will Alma marry him?; Will Warden be caught having the affair or enjoy the vacation?; Will he become an officer and marry her or remain a gentlman-ranker and be damned from here to eternity?
And like the consummate author of a literary novel, Jones portrays conflicts born of the very psychology of his characters. Prewitt will have an easy stay in G-Company if he simply agrees, against his principles, to box for Captain Holmes. Warden can be an officer if he agrees, against his will, to submit the paperwork.
Add to this mix an authentic, expertly rendered dialogue, and you have a book, a National Book Award winner, that for all intents and purposes, is much better than any movie.
In this instance, I watched the movie before I read the novel, and although I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t think it was “great.” I sure as hell didn’t see why it won eight (8) Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Now that I’ve read the novel (which was a runaway best-seller) and now that I’m more familiar with the casting decisions of the director, Fred Zimmerman, it all becomes very clear that the film was indeed riding the coattails of a hugely successful book; people flocked to the theater to see how all this salaciousness and debauchery might appear on the big screen. If you knew that Donna Reed from It’s a Wonderful Life, was going to play a sultry prostitute, wouldn’t you be at least a little curious?
"Watching her walking he could see the flat triangle of hair underneath the thinness of the dress, but with her it was not like it had been with Maureen who had been unaware of it completely. This girl was aware of it , aware of him, but she was utterly above it. She was aware of it and she ignored it.
Must be twenty-three or –four, he thought, noticing that she walked very straight and that her hair was done in a circular roll low on her neck and that she had very wide eyes that looked at him serenely openly. She stopped by them and smiled at him and he noticed her mouth was very wide across the thin childishness of her face, he noticed the long lips were very full especially at the corners. She has a beautiful face, he thought.
Mrs Kipfer introduced them formally, and then asked if she wouldn’t look after him because he was new here? If she wouldn’t show him around?
'Surely,' she said, and he noticed how pleasingly low pitched, how poised her voice was. It was the voice that belonged with the rest of her. 'Let sit down, shall we?' she smiled."
If you knew Burt Lancaster, as Sergeant Warden, would be having an affair with his commanding officer’s wife, a character played by the very epitome of genteel propriety, Deborah Kerr, wouldn’t you be hoping to see a little skin on the big screen? And let’s not forget Mr. Frank Sinatra, whose Italian Brooklyn character is one of the funniest in modern fiction, the equivalent of King Lear’s jester:
“I even climbed up on the doorknob to look through the transom to see if he had died and the son of a bitch had hung a towel over it. I call that plain goddam bad manners.”
“What you mean is,” Prew grinned, “you think he’s a suspicious bastard.”
“Yeah,” Angelo said. “As if anybody would look through his goddam old transom.”
He frowned at them so indignantly so long that Lorene giggled and finally had to laugh out loud.
“Well,” he said, getting up. “I’m a kind of guy can tell when he’s overstayed his welcome. I can tell when I ain’t wanted. I leave you people to your lovin.”
“Aw, stick around,” Prew grinned, “Please don’t rush off.”
“Yas,” Angelo said, “I like you too, you bastard. I will just leave you some of this whiskey and then I won’t feel so guilty.”
Indeed, now that I’ve read this 850-page monolith, I want to see the film again, just to note how much innuendo made it past the censors, or perhaps just to visit with these characters for 118 more minutes. Did I mention prostitutes—male solicitors included— gambling, gay night life, boxing, homicidal beatings, vengeance murders, and gun-in-the mouth suicides?
“[He] was lying back across his bunk in that peculiarly lifeless position dead people get into, with the top of his head gone and the rifle on the floor and the one pastywhite bare foot dangling down ridiculously. There was a large blot of blood and phlegmy matter on the ceiling around the hole where the bullet had gone on through. It was still [his] face, but it looked as if all the bones had been taken out from behind it, like one of those cured headhunter’s head you could see in the curio shop windows downtown on Hotel Street.”
Compared to the book, the movie seems like a Disney after-school special. It’s my understanding that the book itself, as published in 1952, was also watered-down from James Jones’s original manuscript, which contained an explicit sex scene with two men as well as some more choice language.
But to say that the book is better than the movie because it’s less diluted or because we get to spend more time with our beloved characters is still missing the point. At the heart of the matter, the book is truer, both emotionally and philosophically. In the wholesome, domesticated ideology of the 1950s when shows like Leave it to Beaver sought to impose a moral compass on postwar America, From Here to Eternity reminded a generation of men of what they had, in fact, experienced: suicides, genocide, prostitution, gambling, boxing, explicit language, beatings, court martial, extra-marital affairs.
As an enlisted soldier of the US Army, I myself was summoned, along with the Chaplain, to the scene of a suicide. An MP had shot himself in the head. It wasn’t pretty. This soldier had left his wife and kids for a German national only to have the Fraulein empty his bank account and leave.
We were stationed in Holland, not Germany, where both marijuana and prostitution were legal; many soldiers were sent home, including the Sergeant Major (for allegedly assaulting a girl). Drinking and gambling were popular pastimes in the barracks. I recall one particular officer who lost his security clearance because of bad debts. One PFC was busted down to a plain private because he had been drinking on guard duty. Yes, the military was dramatic, even in peace time, and I suppose that’s why we loved it almost as much as we hated it—because nowhere else, except on the edge of death, could we feel so alive.
Which reminds me of the title of the work itself, a phrase that is lost (like the emotional and philosophical truth of the story) upon anyone who sees the movie without having read the novel. It’s taken from a poem entitled “Gentlemen-Rankers” by Rudyard Kipling.
Jones cites the last four lines: “Gentlemen-rankers out on a spree/ Damned from here to Eternity,/ God ha’ mercy on such as we,/ Ba! Yah! Bah!” A gentleman-ranker is an enlisted solider who is qualified, through education, breeding, or military training, to be an officer, and yet chooses to remain an enlisted rank. Why would someone do such a stupid thing?
Well, I for one did it because I made more money (through singing bonuses and student-loan repayments) than I would have as an officer. Also unlike an officer, I could choose my MOS (Military Occupation Specialty), and my station in Europe.
Looking back on it, I’m not sure I made the right choice. Like Kipling so eloquently wrote in his poem, I did feel like a “little black sheep” who had gone astray. On the other hand, I suppose social limbo and biting my tongue were a modest price to pay for having the opportunity to tour Europe on Uncle Sam’s dime, all the while paying off a small mortgage’s worth of student loans. As for other gentlemen-rankers—like First Sergeant Milton Warden of the story—their reasons can be found, all the same, in their values and identity.
Warden’s commanding officer, Captain Holmes, is too busy fornicating to be of much use in running G-Company. Consequently, the administrative burden falls on Warden, who, as usual, does a superb job—evening while seducing the Captain’s wife.
In the novel, Captain Holmes actually befriends a young general and is promoted to the rank of major. In the movie, he’s reprimanded. But the point is that an enlisted man, an NCO (non-commissioned officer) specifically, does the real, day-to-day work of the army, and the officers get the credit.
Warden shares the same view of many NCOs that I came across in the army. When a private accidentally called them sir, they responded, “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living!” Or if an officer asked them what materials they needed for a particular mission, their response might have been, “All I need is for you to stay out of the way, sir.”
Unlike Captain Holmes, First Sergeant Warden has a deeper connection with the army, a sense of it beyond himself. He’s fair and impartial to his subordinates. Unlike Holmes, he “never overstep[s] his own private, self-constructed line of equity.” In the deepest sense, Warden simply has more respect for his enlisted colleagues than the commissioned officers who have commanded him. He’s a capable, educated, sophisticated, and empathetic man—virtually the very opposite of the hard and harsh exterior that he portrays; It’s as if he’s hiding his capabilities not out of humility, but out of shame. Karen Holmes loves him, but she “can’t” (a.k.a. won’t) marry him unless he submits his paperwork to become an officer.
Jones, too, as the author, seems to have his own private line of equity, striving to portray each character as honestly as possible. Even though the reader wants Private Prewitt to win a gloves-off boxing match with Corporal Bloom, he doesn’t win. The fight is pretty much a draw.
Also, despite the foibles of his main characters, Jones gives them redeeming qualities that, on the balance, make them likable. This is the first literary novel I have read where a highly intelligent and respectable main character has a seventh-grade education and was raped as a child by a bum in a “rolling box car.” The characters from The Man with the Golden Arm have disadvantageous backgrounds as well, but they never emotionally or intellectually rise above this background like Prewitt does. They don’t have his internal code, work ethic, or sophistication. Consequently, he earns our respect and love, while they remain intellectually, physically, and morally lazy.
In terms of craft, Jones creates a Thrillerary, my favorite types of novel. He superbly “sets up” each major scene by creating a sublime anticipation, as when 1) Prewitt is about to meet Alma, 2) Warden is about to seduce Karen Holmes, 3) another stockade prisoner is about to have his arm broken by a sixteen pound sledge hammer. Like the consummate author of a thriller, Jones plants the question of the scene first: Will Angelo escape or be arrested or killed?; Will Prewitt murder the guard or die trying?; Will Alma marry him?; Will Warden be caught having the affair or enjoy the vacation?; Will he become an officer and marry her or remain a gentlman-ranker and be damned from here to eternity?
And like the consummate author of a literary novel, Jones portrays conflicts born of the very psychology of his characters. Prewitt will have an easy stay in G-Company if he simply agrees, against his principles, to box for Captain Holmes. Warden can be an officer if he agrees, against his will, to submit the paperwork.
Add to this mix an authentic, expertly rendered dialogue, and you have a book, a National Book Award winner, that for all intents and purposes, is much better than any movie.
August 1, 2025
Dime la verdad: si te digo que este es un novelón de casi mil páginas sobre soldados en una base militar antes de Pearl Harbor, ¿ya pusiste los ojos en blanco? ¿Pensaste en batallas, estrategias y tipos gritando “¡Señor, sí señor!”? Pues suelta ese prejuicio, porque De aquí a la eternidad no es la novela que crees. Es mucho más sucia, más trágica, más condenadamente humana. Esto no es una historia de guerra. Es una historia de hombres atrapados en un sistema que los devora, de amor y deseo en habitaciones clandestinas, de celos que queman más que el sol de Hawái. Es una historia de lucha cuando sabes que vas a perder.
Vale, pero ¿de qué va la novela? Pues mira, en pocas palabras y sin spoilers, imagina esto: Hawái, 1941, en una base militar donde la disciplina lo es todo, poco antes del ataque japonés. Un soldado desafía las reglas y se niega a ceder, un sargento lidia con deseos imposibles, y un amigo intenta burlarse de un sistema que no tolera debilidad. Mientras las reglas del ejército aplastan a quienes no encajan, el amor, la traición y la lealtad se juegan en las sombras. La guerra aún no ha llegado, pero la batalla ya ha comenzado. ¿Suena bien, no?
Pues al lío. James Jones escribió la novela en 1951, pero sigue vigente con una fuerza brutal. Nos mete en el mundo de los soldados de infantería como nunca antes se había hecho: sin idealismos, sin discursos patrióticos. Aquí tenemos a Robert E. Lee Prewitt, “Prew”, un trompetista testarudo que podría hacer su vida más fácil, pero elige no doblarse. Prew no es un héroe tradicional. Es un hombre que se niega a ser parte del engranaje, luchando por mantener su integridad aunque eso lo destruya. Su rebelión no solo es contra el sistema militar, sino contra la masa que intenta engullirlo; la de los hombres que quieren ser algo más que piezas dentro de una máquina.
Pero también está Warden, un sargento que entiende todas las reglas del juego pero se obsesiona con la única que no puede romper. Y Maggio, por supuesto, ¿que sería de la novela sin el amigo que intenta reírse del sistema hasta que el sistema le devuelve el golpe? Los personajes de Jones no son simples estereotipos militares. Son hombres rotos, frustrados, atrapados en sus propios dilemas emocionales, buscando desesperadamente un propósito o algo por lo que vivir. Prewitt, Warden, Maggio… todos se sienten reales, porque son hombres marcados por el mismo vacío existencial que, lamentablemente, todos conocemos.
Y si crees que esto va solo de masculinidad y disciplina, déjame hablarte de las mujeres de esta historia. Porque sí, hay romance, pero no el de los cuentos de hadas. Aquí el amor es clandestino, imperfecto, marcado por la culpa y la necesidad. Está Karen Holmes, atrapada en un matrimonio muerto, y está Lorene, la princesa del burdel que sabe exactamente lo que quiere y lo que vale “Yo me acuesto con cualquiera que quiera lo que tengo”. Y entre todo esto, el deseo, los celos, las decisiones que se toman en una noche y cambian una vida entera.
Porque el amor en esta novela no es suave ni redentor. Es sucio, imperfecto, marcado por la desesperación y la necesidad. Las relaciones son complejas, impulsadas por deseos tanto oscuros como humanos. No hay amor perfecto aquí, solo la búsqueda de algo que dé sentido a una vida rota, aunque sea por un instante. Y eso es lo que convierte la novela en algo dolorosamente real.
Y lo que hace verdaderamente grande a esta novela es su crudeza. Jones te mete en la piel de sus personajes y te hace sentir cada golpe, cada borrachera, cada traición. La violencia no es solo física, es emocional, es estructural. Jones no se anduvo con rodeos: nos dio la guerra antes de que estallaran las bombas, nos mostró el desgaste de los hombres antes de que empezaran a disparar. Y es en esa brutal honestidad, en esa inmersión en un universo de códigos de honor rotos, de esperanzas que sangran, de almas que luchan contra su propio destino, donde radica su inmortalidad. La guerra todavía no ha llegado, pero la batalla ya se libra en los pasillos de los barracones, en las calles de Honolulu, en las habitaciones donde se ama sin promesas.
Porque Jones no está interesado en hacernos ver la guerra como una serie de batallas gloriosas, sino en desmenuzar la vida de estos hombres dentro de un sistema que los consume. La relación entre el individuo y el grupo es casi biológica: un ecosistema donde las reglas son sagradas y cualquier intento de romperlas es castigado. Los soldados están atrapados en un vacío emocional, llenado por los ritos y las reglas de un mundo que no tiene espacio para los matices. En este contexto, las fuerzas que los destruyen no son solo las bombas o las balas, sino una vida sin rumbo, donde la supervivencia se convierte en el único fin y la humanidad en una palabra vacía.
Ah, ¡que ya viste la película! Que Montgomery Clift está impecable como Prew, que la escena de Burt Lancaster y Deborah Kerr en la playa es pura química, que Frank Sinatra se luce como Maggio.… Sí, sí, todo eso es cierto. Pero amigo, la novela es otra liga. Lo que la película no puede mostrar es la crudeza real de este mundo, la profundidad de los personajes, los matices que hacen que cada decisión duela más. La historia de Prewitt es mucho más trágica, Warden es un personaje mucho más complejo, y la relación entre Karen y él tiene una carga emocional que en la pantalla se queda corta. James Jones no suaviza nada: aquí el amor es más sucio, la violencia es más brutal y la vida militar es más asfixiante. La película es excelente, pero el libro te sumerge hasta el fondo y te deja sin aire. Créeme, cuando termines la última página, entenderás que Hollywood solo pudo arañar la superficie.
Así que dime otra vez que no lees novelas de guerra. Porque esto no es una novela de guerra. Es un choque frontal con la vida misma. Y créeme, una vez que te adentres en este mundo, no saldrás igual. No hay forma de que salgas ileso porque cuando el deseo, el dolor y la traición se entrelazan así, te marcan de tal manera que esa huella perdura… de aquí a la eternidad.
Vale, pero ¿de qué va la novela? Pues mira, en pocas palabras y sin spoilers, imagina esto: Hawái, 1941, en una base militar donde la disciplina lo es todo, poco antes del ataque japonés. Un soldado desafía las reglas y se niega a ceder, un sargento lidia con deseos imposibles, y un amigo intenta burlarse de un sistema que no tolera debilidad. Mientras las reglas del ejército aplastan a quienes no encajan, el amor, la traición y la lealtad se juegan en las sombras. La guerra aún no ha llegado, pero la batalla ya ha comenzado. ¿Suena bien, no?
Pues al lío. James Jones escribió la novela en 1951, pero sigue vigente con una fuerza brutal. Nos mete en el mundo de los soldados de infantería como nunca antes se había hecho: sin idealismos, sin discursos patrióticos. Aquí tenemos a Robert E. Lee Prewitt, “Prew”, un trompetista testarudo que podría hacer su vida más fácil, pero elige no doblarse. Prew no es un héroe tradicional. Es un hombre que se niega a ser parte del engranaje, luchando por mantener su integridad aunque eso lo destruya. Su rebelión no solo es contra el sistema militar, sino contra la masa que intenta engullirlo; la de los hombres que quieren ser algo más que piezas dentro de una máquina.
Pero también está Warden, un sargento que entiende todas las reglas del juego pero se obsesiona con la única que no puede romper. Y Maggio, por supuesto, ¿que sería de la novela sin el amigo que intenta reírse del sistema hasta que el sistema le devuelve el golpe? Los personajes de Jones no son simples estereotipos militares. Son hombres rotos, frustrados, atrapados en sus propios dilemas emocionales, buscando desesperadamente un propósito o algo por lo que vivir. Prewitt, Warden, Maggio… todos se sienten reales, porque son hombres marcados por el mismo vacío existencial que, lamentablemente, todos conocemos.
Y si crees que esto va solo de masculinidad y disciplina, déjame hablarte de las mujeres de esta historia. Porque sí, hay romance, pero no el de los cuentos de hadas. Aquí el amor es clandestino, imperfecto, marcado por la culpa y la necesidad. Está Karen Holmes, atrapada en un matrimonio muerto, y está Lorene, la princesa del burdel que sabe exactamente lo que quiere y lo que vale “Yo me acuesto con cualquiera que quiera lo que tengo”. Y entre todo esto, el deseo, los celos, las decisiones que se toman en una noche y cambian una vida entera.
Porque el amor en esta novela no es suave ni redentor. Es sucio, imperfecto, marcado por la desesperación y la necesidad. Las relaciones son complejas, impulsadas por deseos tanto oscuros como humanos. No hay amor perfecto aquí, solo la búsqueda de algo que dé sentido a una vida rota, aunque sea por un instante. Y eso es lo que convierte la novela en algo dolorosamente real.
Y lo que hace verdaderamente grande a esta novela es su crudeza. Jones te mete en la piel de sus personajes y te hace sentir cada golpe, cada borrachera, cada traición. La violencia no es solo física, es emocional, es estructural. Jones no se anduvo con rodeos: nos dio la guerra antes de que estallaran las bombas, nos mostró el desgaste de los hombres antes de que empezaran a disparar. Y es en esa brutal honestidad, en esa inmersión en un universo de códigos de honor rotos, de esperanzas que sangran, de almas que luchan contra su propio destino, donde radica su inmortalidad. La guerra todavía no ha llegado, pero la batalla ya se libra en los pasillos de los barracones, en las calles de Honolulu, en las habitaciones donde se ama sin promesas.
Porque Jones no está interesado en hacernos ver la guerra como una serie de batallas gloriosas, sino en desmenuzar la vida de estos hombres dentro de un sistema que los consume. La relación entre el individuo y el grupo es casi biológica: un ecosistema donde las reglas son sagradas y cualquier intento de romperlas es castigado. Los soldados están atrapados en un vacío emocional, llenado por los ritos y las reglas de un mundo que no tiene espacio para los matices. En este contexto, las fuerzas que los destruyen no son solo las bombas o las balas, sino una vida sin rumbo, donde la supervivencia se convierte en el único fin y la humanidad en una palabra vacía.
Ah, ¡que ya viste la película! Que Montgomery Clift está impecable como Prew, que la escena de Burt Lancaster y Deborah Kerr en la playa es pura química, que Frank Sinatra se luce como Maggio.… Sí, sí, todo eso es cierto. Pero amigo, la novela es otra liga. Lo que la película no puede mostrar es la crudeza real de este mundo, la profundidad de los personajes, los matices que hacen que cada decisión duela más. La historia de Prewitt es mucho más trágica, Warden es un personaje mucho más complejo, y la relación entre Karen y él tiene una carga emocional que en la pantalla se queda corta. James Jones no suaviza nada: aquí el amor es más sucio, la violencia es más brutal y la vida militar es más asfixiante. La película es excelente, pero el libro te sumerge hasta el fondo y te deja sin aire. Créeme, cuando termines la última página, entenderás que Hollywood solo pudo arañar la superficie.
Así que dime otra vez que no lees novelas de guerra. Porque esto no es una novela de guerra. Es un choque frontal con la vida misma. Y créeme, una vez que te adentres en este mundo, no saldrás igual. No hay forma de que salgas ileso porque cuando el deseo, el dolor y la traición se entrelazan así, te marcan de tal manera que esa huella perdura… de aquí a la eternidad.
April 27, 2019
From 1940 to 1973 all able bodied men in United States army were required to serve in the American military for 2 years. During this 33 period there were 16 years of war and 17 years of peace. The experience of military service spawned many excellent novels reflecting on life in the military and on the military vocation. From Here to Eternity is one of my favourite in the bunch.
Although, From Here to Eternity might be classified as a war novel because the events of the last several chapters take place in Hawaii during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, it is primarily about men who chose to make the military their career vocation.
Being an American not a European, James Jones focusses not on the officers but on the "30 year men" who serve in the enlisted ranks. The two protagonists are from the non-commissioned ranks. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt a simple soul form the hills of Kentucky and First Sgt. Milt Warden is an altogether more worldly individual.
Prewitt is harassed by his superior officer who wants him to box in the internal army competitions. Prewitt however adamantly refuses because having blinded a competitor in an earlier competition no longer wants to box. The officer increases the pressure on Prewitt until he kills one of his tormentors and then flees. When the Japanese attack, Prewitt feels compelled to return to fight with his comrades but is killed by a sentry as he approaches the base.
First Sgt. Warden seduces to the wife of the officer persecuting Prewitt. The wife confides to Prewitt that she cannot have children because of a case of gonorrhea that she received from her husband. She and Warden agree on a plan. She will divorce her husband and he will apply to write the officer's exam so that the two will have a comfortable living. Warden successfully passes the exam but decides that he is not emotionally prepared to cross the line separating officers from enlisted men. He decides to break off the relationship.
Thus our two main protagonists are both profoundly attached to the "30 year" life of the enlisted man. Prewitt dies attempting to return after having deserted. Warden resolutely refuses to switch horses mid-stream choosing to remain in the enlisted ranks to the end.
From Here to Eternity is a very powerful novel that in the 1960s rang very true to me. The picture of the military life as described to me by my father who was in the war time air force and by two uncles who were career or "30 year" enlisted men like Prewitt and Warden corresponds very closely to the army life described in this book.
I recommend anyone interested in this phase of American history to read this wonderful novel.
Although, From Here to Eternity might be classified as a war novel because the events of the last several chapters take place in Hawaii during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, it is primarily about men who chose to make the military their career vocation.
Being an American not a European, James Jones focusses not on the officers but on the "30 year men" who serve in the enlisted ranks. The two protagonists are from the non-commissioned ranks. Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt a simple soul form the hills of Kentucky and First Sgt. Milt Warden is an altogether more worldly individual.
Prewitt is harassed by his superior officer who wants him to box in the internal army competitions. Prewitt however adamantly refuses because having blinded a competitor in an earlier competition no longer wants to box. The officer increases the pressure on Prewitt until he kills one of his tormentors and then flees. When the Japanese attack, Prewitt feels compelled to return to fight with his comrades but is killed by a sentry as he approaches the base.
First Sgt. Warden seduces to the wife of the officer persecuting Prewitt. The wife confides to Prewitt that she cannot have children because of a case of gonorrhea that she received from her husband. She and Warden agree on a plan. She will divorce her husband and he will apply to write the officer's exam so that the two will have a comfortable living. Warden successfully passes the exam but decides that he is not emotionally prepared to cross the line separating officers from enlisted men. He decides to break off the relationship.
Thus our two main protagonists are both profoundly attached to the "30 year" life of the enlisted man. Prewitt dies attempting to return after having deserted. Warden resolutely refuses to switch horses mid-stream choosing to remain in the enlisted ranks to the end.
From Here to Eternity is a very powerful novel that in the 1960s rang very true to me. The picture of the military life as described to me by my father who was in the war time air force and by two uncles who were career or "30 year" enlisted men like Prewitt and Warden corresponds very closely to the army life described in this book.
I recommend anyone interested in this phase of American history to read this wonderful novel.
June 11, 2015
I nowadays rarely read novels but did this one after seeing the film The Thin Red Line and reading various reviews of James Jones novels. I could not put this down. Wonderful story and great writing that had me loving every word and moment.
June 7, 2010
After hearing nothing but good things about this book I couldn't wait to read it. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I think it was a New York Times Review that said this book was "The best book to come out of WWII". Obviously they didn't read "Battle Cry" by Leon Uris or "Once An Eagle" by Anton Myrer and a whole host of other books that I found to be much better reads. I'm all about setting the scene and giving the reader a real since of what the character is feeling. But when page after page is devoted solely to, for example, how the sound of a bugle makes a guy feel, it's just too much. What little dialogue there was I enjoyed. It was just so little in between so much, for lack of a better word, crap. I know a lot of people really enjoy and indeed praise such writing as "Candid and Dramatic" and "Powerfully Emotional". Such writers are hailed as genius and given awards: James Jones and especially Norman Mailer. But in my humble opinion their work is nothing but CRAP.
June 15, 2015
Now I know why this story looks so familiar to me: a movie was made based on this booK:
From Here to Eternity (1953) with Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr.
From IMDb:
In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love.
From Here to Eternity (1953) with Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr.
From IMDb:
In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love.
December 6, 2021
In the fall of 2020 I read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead; this fall I read James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. Both are WWII classics, debut novels for their respective authors, and long reads; From Here to Eternity is the longer of the two, but it read much more quickly for me. Whereas the characters in The Naked and the Dead seemed simplistic, at times caricatures, the characters in From Here to Eternity are more multi-dimensional, especially the two protagonists, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Prew) and First Sergeant Milt Warden.
The setting for From Here to Eternity is 1941 in Hawaii leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, so while the novel is a WWII classic, it doesn’t involve any combat. Despite the lack of combat, the novel has a lot to say about army life. Both Prew and Warden are 30-year men, committed to the Army for life, but they both struggle at times due to the Army’s failure to recognize their abilities and commitment. They are frequently confronted with the idiocies of Army procedures and the inconsistent quality of the men with whom they must work and live and on whom they will be dependent in wartime. Prew resists being bullied by his superiors or being forced to do something that goes against his morals. Warden, despite being the best at making things happen and getting things done within the Army, is offended by its inherent inefficiencies and the poor decision-making of his superiors. Both Prew and Warden rebel in their own ways, and while each attempts to do so smartly, the outcomes are very different.
While heavy drinking and prostitution are prevalent, the novel effectively raises more philosophical questions about military life. Why would a man commit to a life in the Army? What type of man would make that commitment? Why would a man who has the opportunity to become an Officer choose to remain in the enlisted ranks? Why does someone in the military look forward to war? How does life in the Army change as peacetime shifts to war? Prew and Warden are both thoughtful men who read extensively to find answers that will help them make sense of their lives.
From Here to Eternity is the first novel in a WWII trilogy by James Jones. The Thin Red Line is the second in the series and Whistle is the third. I have not yet read the rest of the trilogy, but can strongly recommend From Here to Eternity.
The setting for From Here to Eternity is 1941 in Hawaii leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, so while the novel is a WWII classic, it doesn’t involve any combat. Despite the lack of combat, the novel has a lot to say about army life. Both Prew and Warden are 30-year men, committed to the Army for life, but they both struggle at times due to the Army’s failure to recognize their abilities and commitment. They are frequently confronted with the idiocies of Army procedures and the inconsistent quality of the men with whom they must work and live and on whom they will be dependent in wartime. Prew resists being bullied by his superiors or being forced to do something that goes against his morals. Warden, despite being the best at making things happen and getting things done within the Army, is offended by its inherent inefficiencies and the poor decision-making of his superiors. Both Prew and Warden rebel in their own ways, and while each attempts to do so smartly, the outcomes are very different.
While heavy drinking and prostitution are prevalent, the novel effectively raises more philosophical questions about military life. Why would a man commit to a life in the Army? What type of man would make that commitment? Why would a man who has the opportunity to become an Officer choose to remain in the enlisted ranks? Why does someone in the military look forward to war? How does life in the Army change as peacetime shifts to war? Prew and Warden are both thoughtful men who read extensively to find answers that will help them make sense of their lives.
From Here to Eternity is the first novel in a WWII trilogy by James Jones. The Thin Red Line is the second in the series and Whistle is the third. I have not yet read the rest of the trilogy, but can strongly recommend From Here to Eternity.
December 11, 2018
My impetus for reading this came via an odd, circuitous route - I was listening to the recently shuttered, flop London musical based on the novel, and read that it, in turn, incorporated material from the uncensored, restored version of the book that had only been published a few years previously. I was intrigued that, among many other emendations, a lot of material about gay activities in the peacetime army had been excised. Not really remembering a lot from the award-winning film (or the subsequent TV miniseries of 1979), I decided to give it a try anyway ... and surprisingly, really, REALLY enjoyed reading it. Sure, there are languid passages of philosophical diatribes that seem anachronistically out of place - and stylistically atrocious, crazy-making things, like Jones' eschewing apostrophes, and stringing together 2 or 3 adverbs, willy-nilly. But he makes up for this with a genuinely exciting plot and characters that one really cares about. It is sad few people read Jones nowadays - he was an American original, and this National Book Award winning novel should be rediscovered, especially in this uncensored version, as Jones originally intended it.
September 16, 2017
I am giving up at 152 pages. Close to 20 pages of a poker game held in the latrine, complete with slang that I don't understand and the clash of male egos, plus nearly a whole chapter lamenting the lack of funds to visit a brothel -- I just can't keep on. Jones' writing is wordy and bloated, even more so than Stephen King's. On to something more to my taste!
Note to self: stop trying to read classics, modern or otherwise, or books on any kind of "must read" list.
Note to self: stop trying to read classics, modern or otherwise, or books on any kind of "must read" list.
August 31, 2020
Gripping novel of the GI's garrison life at Schofield Barracks up to and the attack of Pearl Harbor. As great as the movie is the book is equally as great and somewhat better in the added details of the 1sg, the mess sergeant, and Prewitt and the other characters from the women to the soldiers and the 30 year men. It's no holds barred on the language of the GI's. For a few weeks James Jones took me back to the lush tropics of Wahoo once again.
March 14, 2014
When James Jones died the Army lost one of its own. Here was a soldier, a man with an abiding regard for things military. Many novelists treat war and the Army but only with a passing interest. They write one book and get it out of their systems. For Jones, From Here to Eternity was the start of a lifelong study of what it means to be a soldier. To the day he died he thought like a soldier. Other writers delve into high society or family life or la vie boheme. Jones was at his best when he explored the mind of an enlisted man. He was not career Army but he made the Army his career. It had its name on everything he wrote.
The Pineapple Army was what he knew best. The modern, relatively democratized Army was alien to him. He would appreciate the tremendous improvements in the life of the enlisted man. We must look across decades to imagine what his life was like. He himself was an EM. Then, enlisted men were poorly paid, harshly disciplined, often humiliated, and rarely listened to. But the time was the Great Depression and opportunity outside was nil. The Army gave a man three square meals a day and a roof over his head. Jones, like so many others, was a refugee from the bread line.
Enlisting in 1939, he left a stormy home life. He could not stand his mother; his father committed suicide. He was at Hickam Field in Honolulu on December 7, 1941. From Here to Eternity contains a memorable account of that day: it is a lazy Sunday morning breakfast until the mess dishes begin to rattle. The men wonder why gunnery practice is so close and so early. The calm sweeps into frenzy. The barracks are raked by diving Zeros. Men running across the quadrant are stitched in their tracks as machine gun bullets walk over them, kicking up dust. Jones survived the Sunday Morning Massacre only to get his in the South Pacific.
He was a belly-in-the-mud jungle fighter on Guadalcanal. The Thin Red Line is based on that combat. He vividly describes the white-hot bloody battles for hills with numbers. History has forgotten the numbers. Jones never forgot the courage and the cowardice of men under fire. The novel is almost a textbook of battle. It has remarkably close and accurate descriptions of men at war. Couple this with a precise memory, a keen eye for detail, an acute ear for soldier-speak, and a first-rate style emerges. Most of all, he depicts battle with the intense vision of a man striving to be objective. All is in perspective; no one is blamed. The weaknesses and strengths of men are facts to be accepted.
Jones’ men become soldiers only as they face up to death. Seeing dead men all around, they must realize that a bullet will catch up with them, if not on this campaign, then on the next island. If not on the next, then the one after, for the war will last longer than their luck will. Physical agony is all around in The Thin Red Line. A man ripped open, clutching his purple intestines spilling into the dirt beneath him, screams for help, while slowly, too slowly, he dies. Another man, going days without rest, under continual fire, about to break, receives a dear john. His wife tells him that she wants to marry a man she has been bedding.
These men, doomed men, are the stuff of Jones’ stories. They are often the outcasts of society but they find dignity on the battlefield. Jones had faith that the average joe will come through, spirit intact. In From Here to Eternity Robert E. Lee Prewitt, or Prew, has left the coal mines of Harlan County, Kentucky. Like so many others during the Depression—and like Jones—he joins the Regular Army. While others wait for the job market to open, he finds his place in the Army. He can find nothing prouder than to be a Thirty Year Man. The Army gives him his dignity. He proves himself a good boxer and a superb bugilist. After a punch blinded his opponent, he turns from boxing to the sense of beauty he can find in the mournful notes of Taps. He finds a calling and is thankful to the Army that his life has purpose. Like his childhood guitar-playing, the bugle makes him feel that “pain might not be pointless” if it can be turned into music. Pain is indeed his lot. Jones shows that the same Army, the Pineapple Army, which gives Prew his music, is pitted against him.
The Army becomes symbolic of the machinery of Jones’ 1930s society, which grinds individuals into cogs. Prew must assert his individual worth against social pressure. He refuses to box because he blinded a buddy, Dixie Wells, and he will not bugle because he will not play politics. So he transfers to an infantry outfit. There, he gets “the treatment.” The company commander is also regimental boxing coach. The noncoms, all boxers, relentlessly torment him to join the boxing team. Prew won’t break.
He will not play the game. The novel also has another Thirty Year Man, a decent type who successfully plays the game. First Sergeant Milt Warden and Prewitt understand one another, even warily respect one another, but they can never agree. Warden calls Prewitt a hardhead. To Prewitt the matter is simple. “He had to leave the Bugle Corps because he was a bugler.” Red, a buddy, “did not have to leave it. But he had to leave because most of all he wanted to stay.” This is Prewitt’s kind of integrity. If you do something well, he believes, then you must give it your utmost. There can be no compromise. If politics force compromise, then get out of the Bugle Corps.
Jones himself chose an unconventional life. After recovery time in military hospitals he was mustered out in 1944. But he took the Army home with him and, like Prewitt, remained a Thirty Year Man for the rest of his life. He chose a hard road in civilian life. While in the hospital he decided to become a writer. His first novel was rejected by Scribners in 1945. The next six years were impoverished and difficult until From Here to Eternity. It became an immediate success in 1951. Established as a writer, and royalties flowing in, he wrote other novels, including Some Came Running and The Merry Month of May.
Prewitt played the bugle. Jones wrote his books. Jones sang of valor and tragedy, comradeship and hatred, barbarity and kindness. He pulled no punches. His characters are without halos. Some of them perform unspeakable cruelties in the name of civilization. Nonetheless, Jones shows these men as occasionally noble, heroic, self-sacrificing. They are real-life men, or composites of them—soldiers he fought with, ate with, drank with.
He is gone. His words remain. They are a gift from him to us. He had a poem by Yeats read at his graveside. The poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” has some telling lines in it: “That is no country for old men. The young/ in one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ . . . fish, flesh, and fowl, commend all summer long,/ whatever is begotten, born, and dies . . . And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/ To the holy city of Byzantium.” He has crossed the seas. He wrote much about what men needed for the voyage. They need bravery and dignity. And so he is in Byzantium and we still have our summers and birds in the trees. Now his stories belong to soldiers living and soldiers yet to be born. Hence, he will live on. So long as there is an Army there will always be a James Jones.
The Pineapple Army was what he knew best. The modern, relatively democratized Army was alien to him. He would appreciate the tremendous improvements in the life of the enlisted man. We must look across decades to imagine what his life was like. He himself was an EM. Then, enlisted men were poorly paid, harshly disciplined, often humiliated, and rarely listened to. But the time was the Great Depression and opportunity outside was nil. The Army gave a man three square meals a day and a roof over his head. Jones, like so many others, was a refugee from the bread line.
Enlisting in 1939, he left a stormy home life. He could not stand his mother; his father committed suicide. He was at Hickam Field in Honolulu on December 7, 1941. From Here to Eternity contains a memorable account of that day: it is a lazy Sunday morning breakfast until the mess dishes begin to rattle. The men wonder why gunnery practice is so close and so early. The calm sweeps into frenzy. The barracks are raked by diving Zeros. Men running across the quadrant are stitched in their tracks as machine gun bullets walk over them, kicking up dust. Jones survived the Sunday Morning Massacre only to get his in the South Pacific.
He was a belly-in-the-mud jungle fighter on Guadalcanal. The Thin Red Line is based on that combat. He vividly describes the white-hot bloody battles for hills with numbers. History has forgotten the numbers. Jones never forgot the courage and the cowardice of men under fire. The novel is almost a textbook of battle. It has remarkably close and accurate descriptions of men at war. Couple this with a precise memory, a keen eye for detail, an acute ear for soldier-speak, and a first-rate style emerges. Most of all, he depicts battle with the intense vision of a man striving to be objective. All is in perspective; no one is blamed. The weaknesses and strengths of men are facts to be accepted.
Jones’ men become soldiers only as they face up to death. Seeing dead men all around, they must realize that a bullet will catch up with them, if not on this campaign, then on the next island. If not on the next, then the one after, for the war will last longer than their luck will. Physical agony is all around in The Thin Red Line. A man ripped open, clutching his purple intestines spilling into the dirt beneath him, screams for help, while slowly, too slowly, he dies. Another man, going days without rest, under continual fire, about to break, receives a dear john. His wife tells him that she wants to marry a man she has been bedding.
These men, doomed men, are the stuff of Jones’ stories. They are often the outcasts of society but they find dignity on the battlefield. Jones had faith that the average joe will come through, spirit intact. In From Here to Eternity Robert E. Lee Prewitt, or Prew, has left the coal mines of Harlan County, Kentucky. Like so many others during the Depression—and like Jones—he joins the Regular Army. While others wait for the job market to open, he finds his place in the Army. He can find nothing prouder than to be a Thirty Year Man. The Army gives him his dignity. He proves himself a good boxer and a superb bugilist. After a punch blinded his opponent, he turns from boxing to the sense of beauty he can find in the mournful notes of Taps. He finds a calling and is thankful to the Army that his life has purpose. Like his childhood guitar-playing, the bugle makes him feel that “pain might not be pointless” if it can be turned into music. Pain is indeed his lot. Jones shows that the same Army, the Pineapple Army, which gives Prew his music, is pitted against him.
The Army becomes symbolic of the machinery of Jones’ 1930s society, which grinds individuals into cogs. Prew must assert his individual worth against social pressure. He refuses to box because he blinded a buddy, Dixie Wells, and he will not bugle because he will not play politics. So he transfers to an infantry outfit. There, he gets “the treatment.” The company commander is also regimental boxing coach. The noncoms, all boxers, relentlessly torment him to join the boxing team. Prew won’t break.
He will not play the game. The novel also has another Thirty Year Man, a decent type who successfully plays the game. First Sergeant Milt Warden and Prewitt understand one another, even warily respect one another, but they can never agree. Warden calls Prewitt a hardhead. To Prewitt the matter is simple. “He had to leave the Bugle Corps because he was a bugler.” Red, a buddy, “did not have to leave it. But he had to leave because most of all he wanted to stay.” This is Prewitt’s kind of integrity. If you do something well, he believes, then you must give it your utmost. There can be no compromise. If politics force compromise, then get out of the Bugle Corps.
Jones himself chose an unconventional life. After recovery time in military hospitals he was mustered out in 1944. But he took the Army home with him and, like Prewitt, remained a Thirty Year Man for the rest of his life. He chose a hard road in civilian life. While in the hospital he decided to become a writer. His first novel was rejected by Scribners in 1945. The next six years were impoverished and difficult until From Here to Eternity. It became an immediate success in 1951. Established as a writer, and royalties flowing in, he wrote other novels, including Some Came Running and The Merry Month of May.
Prewitt played the bugle. Jones wrote his books. Jones sang of valor and tragedy, comradeship and hatred, barbarity and kindness. He pulled no punches. His characters are without halos. Some of them perform unspeakable cruelties in the name of civilization. Nonetheless, Jones shows these men as occasionally noble, heroic, self-sacrificing. They are real-life men, or composites of them—soldiers he fought with, ate with, drank with.
He is gone. His words remain. They are a gift from him to us. He had a poem by Yeats read at his graveside. The poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” has some telling lines in it: “That is no country for old men. The young/ in one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ . . . fish, flesh, and fowl, commend all summer long,/ whatever is begotten, born, and dies . . . And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/ To the holy city of Byzantium.” He has crossed the seas. He wrote much about what men needed for the voyage. They need bravery and dignity. And so he is in Byzantium and we still have our summers and birds in the trees. Now his stories belong to soldiers living and soldiers yet to be born. Hence, he will live on. So long as there is an Army there will always be a James Jones.
May 30, 2008
How can a book about war, with no war in it, be so damned compelling? This is a total masterpiece.
September 10, 2012
Originally published by Scribner in 1951, James Jones' novel was heavily edited to, purportedly, get it past the censors of the time. To present a more tasteful image of life in the military. Now, thanks to Jones' family and OpenRoad Media, we can read the book as it was written.
In the wake of the Depression, military service was the only option for many young men in America. Men who were poor, poorly educated, or poor of spirit had few choices in the early 20th century.
On an Army base in Hawaii, in the early weeks of 1941, Robert E Lee 'Prew' Prewitt is a helluva fighter and the "best bugler in the Regment [sic]." Although only twenty-one, he had lived 'on the bum' for years. Seeking to improve his lot in life, Prew chose The Profession.
At his first post with the 27th, Prew became a boxer. After a bout that nearly killed a man, he gave up fighting. Constant harassment and abuse, designed to force him back in the ring, instead sent Prew to 'A' Company, home of the bugle corps.
Now, as the novel begins, Prew has been passed over for promotion to First Bugler in favor of a company 'pet.' There are rumors that Prew rejected his commander's advances; he isn't saying. But, once again, he is transferred.
His new home, 'G' Company, is regular infantry with a commander more focused on boxing than war. Since Prew refuses to fight, conflict is inevitable. And, with the help of his second-in-command, Captain Dana E. 'Dynamite' Holmes is determined to teach Prew the error of his ways.
What follows is a portrait of military life on Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, and the shocked and shocking days that came after. A portrait of men just trying to survive the politics, the discrimination, and the brutality of the few who held power over the many. Written by a man who lived it.
*****
I have never read the 1951 version of this novel and it's been many, many years since I saw the 1953 movie. Therefore, when I chose to read the restored edition, I had a vague Army-on-Hawaii-before-Pearl expectation of the book's content. Which is a bit like saying Moby Dick is about a guy and a big fish.
What grabbed me, and stays with me as I write this, is the language. Not the F-bombs and C-word, expunged in the 50s and common today, but the way that language was used sixty years ago. Language molded in the mind of a remarkable writer.
(A brilliant example can be found - here - at the James Jones Literary Society site.)
It would take days, and skills I simply lack, to describe even a portion of this work. There are people and places that you can see, and hear, and smell, and feel. The voices and lives of Schofield Barracks will live with you long after you close your e-reader.
Why not carve out a couple of weeks, pick up the ebook, and lose yourself?
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary electronic galley of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com professional readers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
In the wake of the Depression, military service was the only option for many young men in America. Men who were poor, poorly educated, or poor of spirit had few choices in the early 20th century.
On an Army base in Hawaii, in the early weeks of 1941, Robert E Lee 'Prew' Prewitt is a helluva fighter and the "best bugler in the Regment [sic]." Although only twenty-one, he had lived 'on the bum' for years. Seeking to improve his lot in life, Prew chose The Profession.
At his first post with the 27th, Prew became a boxer. After a bout that nearly killed a man, he gave up fighting. Constant harassment and abuse, designed to force him back in the ring, instead sent Prew to 'A' Company, home of the bugle corps.
Now, as the novel begins, Prew has been passed over for promotion to First Bugler in favor of a company 'pet.' There are rumors that Prew rejected his commander's advances; he isn't saying. But, once again, he is transferred.
His new home, 'G' Company, is regular infantry with a commander more focused on boxing than war. Since Prew refuses to fight, conflict is inevitable. And, with the help of his second-in-command, Captain Dana E. 'Dynamite' Holmes is determined to teach Prew the error of his ways.
What follows is a portrait of military life on Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, and the shocked and shocking days that came after. A portrait of men just trying to survive the politics, the discrimination, and the brutality of the few who held power over the many. Written by a man who lived it.
*****
I have never read the 1951 version of this novel and it's been many, many years since I saw the 1953 movie. Therefore, when I chose to read the restored edition, I had a vague Army-on-Hawaii-before-Pearl expectation of the book's content. Which is a bit like saying Moby Dick is about a guy and a big fish.
What grabbed me, and stays with me as I write this, is the language. Not the F-bombs and C-word, expunged in the 50s and common today, but the way that language was used sixty years ago. Language molded in the mind of a remarkable writer.
(A brilliant example can be found - here - at the James Jones Literary Society site.)
It would take days, and skills I simply lack, to describe even a portion of this work. There are people and places that you can see, and hear, and smell, and feel. The voices and lives of Schofield Barracks will live with you long after you close your e-reader.
Why not carve out a couple of weeks, pick up the ebook, and lose yourself?
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary electronic galley of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com professional readers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
September 6, 2017
Many veterans who have read Mr. Jones's novel assert it was an accurate portrayal of the times in the Army. I'll take their word for it. The closest I ever came to serving in the military was joining the Cub Scouts and playing with my G.I. Joe action figure (a.k.a. doll) when I was a kid. The novel revolves two major characters, Robert E. Lee Prewitt and Milton Anthony Warden. There are other notable individuals such as Angelo Maggio, Dana Holmes, and the cook Maylon Stark. The two major women characters Karen Holmes and Alma "Lorene" Schmidt are well developed but take a back seat to Prewitt's and Warden's stories. 'From Here to Eternity' exudes masculinity in all its glory, violence, sexuality, and imbecility. It is a story about men obsessed with manliness and status. Petty politics reins supreme. The government-sanction frat club continually fight boredom and sexual frustration during peace time. I had to keep reminding myself that most of them were young immature men.
The novel was published in 1951. It was understandable that the publishers originally edited out some of the more unseemly material because of the American market's more puritanical sensibilities. Fortunately, 'From Here to Eternity' has been restored to the author's original intent. The racy material would not even meet up to the standard of erotica in today's society. Maybe it got the blood rushing and heart pounding while reading it in the 1950s but today it's meh. What I did find shocking, considering when it was published, is the laissez-faire attitude towards homosexuality. It sometimes is depicted as predatory and other times as consensual. Also, be warned, racist jargon is peppered throughout the work. African-Americans, Jews, and Italians are especially targeted. Also, alcohol was apparently one of the major food groups.
It is a brutal book but not gloomy. 'From Here to Eternity' is loaded with irony and thoughtful discussions about a variety of human conditions. It occurs during a time when women had limited options and Jim Crow was still very much alive. Information was easily manipulated for patriotic reasons and military culture was insular. Mr. Jones's impressive novel is to be savored. It is not some swaggering John Wayne-like comic book but a grown-up's work. For nearly three decades, I avoided reading 'From Here to Eternity' because of the movie poster famously showing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach. I've never seen the film and assumed the book was some kind of military Harlequin Romance drivel. Boy, was I ever wrong.
The novel was published in 1951. It was understandable that the publishers originally edited out some of the more unseemly material because of the American market's more puritanical sensibilities. Fortunately, 'From Here to Eternity' has been restored to the author's original intent. The racy material would not even meet up to the standard of erotica in today's society. Maybe it got the blood rushing and heart pounding while reading it in the 1950s but today it's meh. What I did find shocking, considering when it was published, is the laissez-faire attitude towards homosexuality. It sometimes is depicted as predatory and other times as consensual. Also, be warned, racist jargon is peppered throughout the work. African-Americans, Jews, and Italians are especially targeted. Also, alcohol was apparently one of the major food groups.
It is a brutal book but not gloomy. 'From Here to Eternity' is loaded with irony and thoughtful discussions about a variety of human conditions. It occurs during a time when women had limited options and Jim Crow was still very much alive. Information was easily manipulated for patriotic reasons and military culture was insular. Mr. Jones's impressive novel is to be savored. It is not some swaggering John Wayne-like comic book but a grown-up's work. For nearly three decades, I avoided reading 'From Here to Eternity' because of the movie poster famously showing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach. I've never seen the film and assumed the book was some kind of military Harlequin Romance drivel. Boy, was I ever wrong.
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