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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman

2025-04-08T19:23:23Z

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{{MR04}}{{Byline|last=Gladstein|first=Mimir|abstract=Hemingway and Mailer had many similarities. In the cases of Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer, both writers allowed themselves for imaginative privileges that they did not have in life. Both characterizations are a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses. Whereas life may not have afforded either Hemingway or Mailer the realization of some of their fantasies, as authors, they can,to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld,be “masters of their own domain.”|url=...}}
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{{dc|dc=C|HARACTERIZATIONS OF THE HEMINGWAY/MAILER CONNECTION ARE MANY.}} Hortense Calisher once quipped that Norman mailer was one of those writers who too early got caught up in Hemingway's jockstrap.{{sfn|Wilt|1999}}a. For Peter Swenger, Hemingway and Mailer are catalogued as writers of the School of Virility (133). Jeffrey Meyers names Mailer as Hemingway's "most important disciple" in what he identifies as the "hardboiled" school of writers (570). Indeed, a linking of the two is almost a cliche by this time, the younger Mailer referencing Hemingway often, not only in interviews, but also in his writing. One of mailer's biographers, Carl Rollyson, contends that mailer saw Hemingway as a role model in that he "had shown how a writer could become his own man" (''Lives'' 143). When Gregory Hemingway wrote his remembrance of his father, ''Papa: A Personal Memoir'', mailer wrote the Preface. The connections are numerous and varied. In another sense the relationship could be characterized as an ongoing ''mano a mano'', almost Oedipal contest, as the younger writer attempted to emulate and outdo the master in myriad manners; the creation f a larger-than life celebrity persona, drinking, brawling, and challenging peers to boxing matches both literal and figuratve. Both had war experiences when young and both used those experiences to feed their fiction. Hemingway wrote the quintessential World War I novel, ''A Farewell to Arms''; Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' occupies a similar status as the definitive war novel of World War II. Both married multiple times, Mailer beating Hemingway by two wives. Both became favorite whipping boys for feminist critics, condemned for their misogynistic portrayals of {{pg |288|289}}
women and chauvinistic notions about relationships between the sexes. Kate Millett's ''Sexual Politics'' devotes a chapter to Mailer, whom she characterizes as "a prisoner of the virility cult" (314), one who sees sex as war and war as sexual. Judith Fetterley's ''The Resisting Reader: a Feminist Approach to American Fiction'' includes chapters on both Hemingway and Mailer. And while I do not disagree with much of the criticism, in my appreciation for the major talents of these two writers I must invoke Norris Church Mailer, who comments on the tensions of living with Mailer: "Part of him was this wonderful, sweet, intelligent, terrific, funny guy that I was in love with. And another part, I just couldn't stand"" (qtd. in Newman 128). It is a tension applicable to my situation as a professor of literature, one who recognizes and teaches the brilliance of these men as writers, while never loath to point out some of the less than savory aspects of their personalities and artistic creations.
In keeping with that perspective of appreciating the talents while acknowledging alternative readings, this essay identifies another similarity in the writings of Hemingway and Mailer, one that perhaps springs from an analogous impulse of these two self-absorbed and often ego-maniacal writers-their creation of a certain kind of dream fantasy woman, a projection of autoerotic impulses, by which they allow themselves, imaginatively, privileges that they did not have in life. In their fiction, they create a fulfillment that privileges male satisfaction; man is the subject, woman an object, a means to that end. Whereas life may not have afforded them realization of certain of their fantasies, they can, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, be "masters of their own domain" in writing or following from the egocentric nature of the two, they can accomplish in their writings a fantasy fulfillment, for as Woody Allen quips in ''Annie Hall'': "Don't knock masturbation: it's sex with someone I love" my hypothesis is validated in ''The Spooky Art'' where Mailer makes the connection explicit, noting that "[t]he act of writing is so close to the psychic character of masturbation that if we are going to discuss the world of the writer, then we ought to deal with this as well" (135).
The cases in point for this study are Catherine Barkley for Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe for Mailer. These choices may strike some as an odd pairing, perhaps inappropriate. After all, one is a fictional character and the other was a real woman. Not withstanding that demurrer, in terms of the authors' autoerotic uses of these women, the comparison is justified. Hemingway took the real Agnes Von Kurowsky, the woman who, in the words of Harry, his alter-ego writer of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," was "the first one,{{pg |289|290}}
the one who left him" and formed a fictional daydream who could never get away(48). Various members of Hemingway's family and biographers have written of the traumatic effect on him of Kurowsky's "Dear Ernest" letter. But, while the actual woman may have gotten away in his life, the author captures her forever on the pages of his daydream projection in ''A Farewell to Arms'' On the other hand, Marilyn Monroe was a real woman, but one who recreated herself as a fictional character, a characterization Mailer validates: "Marilyn had been polishing her fables for years" (''Marilyn'' 18). Just as Agnes Von Jurowsky is the one who left Hemingway, who metaphorically got away, Marilyn is one who got away from mailer, as he was never invited to meet her when she and Arthur Miller were his neighbors in Connecticut. In his review of the Marilyn biography, Dean MacCannell theorizes that "Mailer is burned up about this, fantasizing that Miller did not have him over out of fear that he would steal Marilyn" (123). It is a view supported by Mailer, who acknowledges in his introductory chapter that " in all his vanity he thought on one was so well suited to ring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held" (Marilyn 19-20). However, as a skilled writer the older Mailer can rectify the missed opportunity. What did not happen in real life can be played over and over in the reel life of his fictional fantasy.[6]

Generations of critics have analyzed and dissected the character of Catherine Barkley.[7] Their conclusions run the spectrum from the " Catherine is the real hero" minions to those who see Hemingway's female characters as "a convenience and a technique to turn a monologue into a dialogue" contingent (Tharp 191). The latter diagnosis is supportive of my hypothesis that in his creation of Catherine Barkley, Hemingway in addition to turning his monologue into a dialogue, creates an ideal masturbatory fantasy, a technique to allow him to tell himself what he wants to hear; he gets both his say and the opportunity to put satisfactory words into her mouth. Hemingway, as writer, in the assertive role of creation, uses the phallic pen to fulfill his erotic fantasies as his surrogate Frederick lies flat on his back and is ministered to by the "fresh," "young," and "beautiful" Catherine.

Frederick's selfish behavior toward Catherine enhances the connotations of autoeroticism; he is not concerned that she has work to do or may be tired, his satisfaction is all that matters. "Come back to bed" he tells her when she says she has charts to fill, work to do. Although she is on duty the day Doctor Valentini visits him, Frederick implores, "And can you be on night {{pg |290|291}}
duty tonight?" Like the selfish boy that he is, he cajoles, "Yo don't really love me or you'd come back again" (102). The autoerotic state is one of complete self-absorption and Frederick is nothing if not totally self-centered. The narrator (Frederick after the fact) comments on how popular Catherine is with the other nurses "because she would do night duty indefinitely" (108), and she does it indefinitely because of Frederick's demands.

Hemingway, when he distances himself as author, is aware of Frederick's selfishness and to his credit creates a scene where Ferguson reminds him of it. "You might give her just a little rest," she suggests, although doubtful that he will (109). She even reminds him that while he is sleeping, Catherine, after having fulfilled his sexual needs, is still working. Still, lest reality intrude too much on this remonstrance, there is an element of boasting involved; the implication is that he is so potent and insatiable that Catherine never gets to rest. Hemingway does end the scene with Miss Gage coming into the room, having a drink with Frederick and assuring him no less than four times in the space of one page, "I'm your friend," thus providing a modicum of absolution (110). In the end the three nights that Catherine is off duty serve only to add further piquancy to the resumption of their lovemaking and can be read as an Epicurean enhancement to the pure Hedonism of Frederick's self-indulgence. Absence acts to increase the appetite. Holding off is just another way to add potency to the reunion.

Hemingway creates Catherine/Agnes as compliant, docile, and anxious to please. "I'll say just what you wish and I'll do what you wish," says the fantasy woman (105). It is hard to imagine that the twenty-six year old veteran nurse would speak to the nineteen-year-old "kid," as she called him in such a servile manner. [8] Then, having given him an enema and prepared him for surgery, she is summoned back to his bed: "You see," she said. "I do anything you want." The most telling exchange in this scene is when she says: "I want what you want. There isn't any me any more. Just what you want" (106). And, indeed there isn't any woman there, just what the Hemingway's surrogate figure wants. The reality of a masturbatory fantasy is a lone individual, doing just what he wants. His only limitations are those of his imagination.

To further enhance the argument that, at one level of this novel, Hemingway is engaging in an autoerotic fantasy, there is Catherine's insistence that she does not exist as a separate entity. "There isn't any me. I'm you," she insists. "Don't make up a separate me"(115). The oneness of the two is reinforced by Ferguson, "You're two of the same thing," she proclaims, citing {{pg |291|292}}
in particular that they both have no shame and no honor and are equally sneaky (247). Of course, like the good little autoerotic fantasy that she is, Catherine often assures Frederick of her lack of any will separate from his: "I'll go any place any time you wish," which of course she will, since as a creation in Frederick's memory and Hemingway's fantasy, she has no autonomy outside of their needs and minds (252).

In the published photos of Agnes Von Kurowsky during her time in Italy, her hair is very neatly situated under her nurse's cap, so it is difficult to know what it looked like unconfined. In Hemingway's fantasy, however, he makes full use of the erotic resonance of woman's hair in the sexual encounter, hair being a traditional and timeworn symbol of female sexuality. It is not coincidental that Brett Ashley, one of Hemingway's most castrating women, has short hair, hair that her young love Pedro Romero wants her to grow so she will be more womanly.

Catherine's is a key component of her attractiveness for him: "She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light" (114). There is a voyeuristic quality to his description of these scenes: "I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side" (258). Watching her brush with the light shining on her hair, he remarks that the sight makes him feel faint. In a particularly sensual image, Frederick remembers taking the pins out of her hair so that it cascades down around the two of them, making him feel as if they are either "inside a tent or behind a falls" (144). A number of scholars have written about Hemingway's hair fetishes and I won't rehearse them here; however, the impact of hair on Frederick's sexual responses is evident in a scene where he watches Catherine having her hair done in a beauty salon. [9] While most men would be annoyed having to wait while a woman gets her hair curled, Frederic finds it "exciting to watch." He finds it so arousing that his "voice was a little thick from being excited" (292). In Hemingway, we must read between the lines and what Hemingway does not make explicit is exactly what the woman who runs the salon sees. But it is obvious that she notices something out of the ordinary and the reader can readily interpret that there must have been evidence of arousal as the salon owner is moved to comment, "Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?" (293). This is followed by a smile, further confirmation that the owner saw something that is not made explicit for the reader. If further {{pg |292|293}}

corroboration of the importance of hair as trigger in Hemingway's autoerotic arsenal is needed, this scene is ample proof.

In still another scene, the sexual connotations of hair are coupled with Catherine's desire to merge with Frederick. She suggests that he grow his hair longer and that she cut hers so "we'd be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark" (299). Though he tells her he likes her hair as it is and does not want her to cut it, she argues for the change so that they would both be alike. "Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too" is the language Hemingway gives her, to which Frederick, making my argument, responds: "You are. We're the same one" (299). Reading the strong autoerotic nature of this recreation of Hemingway's first serious love affair, it is obvious that they are one and the one is Hemingway, indulging his fantasy. Furthermore, Catherine adds, " I don't live at all when I'm not with you," as the Catherine character has no existence outside of Hemingway's self indulgence (300).

Hemingway, as a novelist, has great latitude in his creation of characters. he can use real-life models and situations, and as a fiction writer recreate persons and places to fit his plot and interpretation. Judith Wilt, in explaining the romantic appeal of Ayn Rand's writing, theorizes that a particular allure for the romantic writer of creating a fantasy is being allowed to live in it while one is creating it (173-74). Hemingway's romantic fantasy operates in a similar vein. While ''A Farewell to Arms'' can be lauded for its hard-hitting realism, it is also Romance with a capital R. Hemingway can recreate his love affair with Agnes Von Kurowsky to his liking and live in it while he is creating it. All the elements are there, a love story that prefigures Erich Segal's ''Love Story'' and a war story Hollywood could not resist making and remaking.[10] Furthermore, Wilt suggests, if a writer creates a fantasy and can live in it while writing, it is Romance, and if the writer can live in it after having created it, it is philosophy, creating the "sublime equipoise" (173-4). Hemingway has created the "sublime equipoise" in ''A Farewell To Arms''. The strong stoical contents cushion the fantasy, lifted it beyond the realm of pure autoeroticism. At the same time Hemingway has a philosophical rationalization for killing the "one who left him." Catherine cannot live in the theoretical structural design because she must fulfill Frederick's philosophy of the "biological trap." She is the one who is caught off base, the brave one who may have died many times before her death, but she barely mentions it. Hemingway can recreate his war experiences and love affair, but can, at the same {{pg |293|294}}
time, assuage his wounded pride at having been left by Agnes in the creation of a Catherine who is devoted unto death. [11]

The reader must construct a mental image of Hemingway's dream girl from narrator's description of a "quite tall," blonde with "tawny skin and grey eyes" who Frederick thinks is "very beautiful" (Hemingway, ''Farewell'' 18). Mailer's fantasy woman poses no such problem, for her image is world-famous and she probably served and may well still do duty as an instrument for millions of men in autoerotic contexts. She is so well known that Mailer needs only her first name for the title of his biography. But, in the event that the reader does not have a strong imagination, Mailer is nothing if not generous in that he supplies the visual as well as the verbal tools to implement the fantasy. [12] Marilyn's life-size face, mouth slightly open, eyes in a sleepily half-open position, stares out from the cover, invitingly. Inside there are numerous photos, pictures taken from the time she was an unknown starlet, throughout her career and from her last photo-shoot. In many of them she is posed naked-Marilyn stretched out on red satin, tangled in white sheets, and climbing out of a swimming pool, one leg swung up so that her genital area is probably spread wide where the mind's eye but not the camera can venture.

Mailer gives permission for a wide latitude of readings by calling his work a novel biography, "a ''species'' of novel ready o play by the rules of biography" (Marilyn 20). Quoting Virginia Woolf to the effect that a biography may capture six or seven of a person's selves, where there may be as many as a thousand in the individual's reality, Mailer rationalizes his portrayal. And in his argument that none of the extant biographies of the time had provided a complete and satisfactory portrayal, it is worth nothing that he references Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway (18-9). Mailer underlines his qualification to accomplish this "novel" of Marilyn Monroe by arguing that as a literary man he is best equipped to achieve an imaginative act of appropriation by the exercise of his skill. Appropriation is the telling word here, helping to make my argument about his use of her for his autoerotic fantasy.

That Mailer considers Marilyn an instrument for sexual flights of the imagination is evidenced by the initial images he uses to describe her. In the first paragraph of his book he likens her to a violin, calling her "a very Stradivarius of sex." Continuing the violin metaphor he rhapsodizes, "the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin" (15). Moreover, for those male readers who might shrink from the {{pg |294|295}}
possibility of intercourse with this larger than life icon of sexual appeal, he promises that "even the most mediocre musician would relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin"(15). "Come," his sub-text reads, "any and all, from the sex maven like me to the pimply faced nerd, all are welcome to use this book for their masturbatory stimulation tool. Marilyn is our instrument." In addition, he saw his writing about her as an instrument for erotic attraction, a kind of aphrodisiac. In his inscription of the book to Barbara Davis (Norris Church Mailer) early in their relationship, he confirms that he "he knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me" (Mailer, ''Ticket'' 89).

The facts or factoids, as Mailer calls them, about Norma Jean/Marilyn are mostly culled from Fred Lawrence Guiles, with regular citations from Maurice Zolotow; here and there he does quote from Diane Trilling and Norman Rosten. Mailer is acutely conscious of the impossibility of knowing the "truth" and does not pretend that he will arrive at it, only as Rollyson explains, an attempt to create a whole person, "while a the same time conceding that the search for wholeness is elusive and problematical" (''Marilyn'' 49). For my purposes here, the focus will be those instances in the narrative when Mailer is indulgin his sexual fantasies. [13] In one such instance he imagines a studio executive questioning Marilyn about the nude calendar pose. The questions are salaciously pointed: "Did you spread your legs?"...Is your asshole showing?...Any animals in it with you?" (''Marilyn'' 92).

If, as many reviewers complain, Mailer's ''Marilyn'' is nothing but a thinly disguised commercial maneuver, I would argue that it is not as Robert D. Callahan opines, "wasting square miles of forest in a Brobdingnagian mercantile enterprise" (50). A cursory reading reveals how much fun and personal satisfaction Mailer is getting as he lives in his fantasy. And why shouldn't a writer be allowed his autoerotic daydreams? On the distaff side are those like the ''Booklist'' reviewer who likens Mailer's appropriation to feeding on dead flesh and is disgusted by his "self-satisfied prose" and the reduction of the woman to a "figment in Mailer's stylishly lurid dreams" (363). Hugh Leonard's view is harsher and lends further support to my thesis that Mailer is using Marilyn for his autoerotic pleasure. Leonard detests the book and calls it "an exercise in necrophilia" (80).

Whereas Hemingway sets time limits to his autoerotic fantasy as he is reinventing a particular time period in his life, Mailer gives his wide scope. His being a biography of the whole life of a woman he never met, he can {{pg |295|296}}
give his imagination full range to satisfy any number of his fantasies by recalling scenes from a wide array of Marilyn's sexual experiences, lovers, husbands, and final days. As early as in his description of the sixteen-year-old bride, Mailer indulges his sexual visualizing: "We close our eyes, and see the movement of her hips" (''Marilyn'' 46). He interrupts the presentation of facts to gratify his libidinous daydream, "Her wedding peels off like a stripper kicking a gown" (46) Writing about her activities and weight training, he cannot resist picturing how "[h]er plumped breasts bounce like manifests of the great here!" (49). Ever the sexual combatant, Mailer theorizes that Jim Dougherty, her first husband, was feeling threatened by Marilyn's maturing sexuality, "feeling the natural discomfort of any man when his prize is capable of getting him into murderous fights" (50).

Throughout the text, Mailer makes little attempt to disguise the autoerotic nature of his enterprise. Acknowledging the nature of his imaginings, he writes: "It is not too great a demand on our ''voyeurism'' (emphasis mine) to see a young husband in bed" (53). Inviting the reader along on this escapade of indulgence, he assures us that "we may as well enjoy one more situation where we can have no certainty" (60). His sentences may begin with a "why not assume" or, after a rhapsodic stint of theorizing about how a lie becomes a script for an actor and whether or not Marilyn was telling the truth to one of her early lovers, or just acting a script, acknowledges: "Let us return then to the ''little'' (emphasis mine) of which we can be certain" (58).

In his musings about writing, Mailer acknowledges his understanding of the connection between creation and autoeroticism. In another instance he likens writing to psychic excretion (''Spooky'' 140). Paradoxically, he also inveighs against masturbation, because he claims the "ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity" (137). Nonetheless, it is difficult to take Mailer at his word, for if he rationalizes his stance that masturbation is bad because "everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up the hand" (137), he seems not to mind if it is someone else's hand. Carole Mallory writes of his taking her to a pornographic movie, watching the screen mesmerized and then reaching for her to put in his unzipped pants (171). She comments on her awareness that at that moment she is nothing but an object for his satisfaction.

In one area of the presentation of autoerotic fantasy, at least the published ones, Mailer has considerable advantage over Hemingway. Although he may have fought for the right to use more realistic language, Hemingway wrote {{pg |296|297}}

in an era of strict censorship, coming up with his own clever way of conveying his meaning while still abiding by the strictures of publishing in his day. Since he could not print the obscenity and since much of what his peasant characters in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' say is unprintable, Hemingway devised the cunning stratagem of writing "obscenity" or "unprintable" whenever one of his characters uses a forbidden word. thus his gypsies utter such oddities as "I obscenity in the milk of thy mother" or go "unprint thyself." Only when he has the freedom of writing in Spanish can Hemingway's characters curse openly. Thus Robert Jordan swears at the gypsy, "You ''hijo de la gran puta''!" which can be loosely translated "son of the great whore," equivalent to son of a bitch (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' 274). When Jordan and Pilar hear the planes attacking El Sordo's enclave, Pilar asks Jordan if she thinks Sordo is ''jodido''(298). Hemingway could not have used "fucked," an English equivalent. Hemingway developed this two-prolonged method of surmounting he censorship challenge for his Spanish Civil War book, but, maybe because his characters are both English speakers, or maybe because the context is so different, his language in this earlier book remains within the bounds of propriety in most instances. There is the moment when Frederick returns from the hospital in Milan and Rinaldi is teasing him, offering to take out his liver and replace it with a good Italian liver. Frederick responds, "Go something yourself" (''Farewell'' 169), which while it has the same obvious connotation is not nearly as powerful as "Go obscenity yourself."

In the Caporetto retreat, after they have picked up the two young girls, Hemingway again depends on what is not printed, but suggested by the blank line: _____________. Aymo tries to reassure one, saying "Don't worry...No danger of ____________," (196). In case the reader should miss the implication of the blank, Frederick tells us that Aymo used the vulgar word.

Mailer began his writing career when such strictures were still in place and following in Hemingway's footsteps, he developed his own strategy for conveying the language of the American fighting man in the ''The Naked and the Dead''. Since he could not use the four-letter word that is the mainstay of a soldier's vocabulary, he invented a three-letter word as a substitute. His fighting men use "fug," phonetically similar, but able to pass the censor's inspection. The civil rights movements of the 60s and early 70s also liberated language and by the time he was writing ''Marilyn'',Mailer had wide latitude not only about what he could write, but also in the language he could use to write about it. Gone was the constriction f having to use fug instead of fuck.{{pg |297|298}}
Thus, in describing the allure of Marilyn's publicity stills, Mailer explains, that for a man looking at the pictures it is as if she is whispering, "You can fuck me if you're lucky" (''Marilyn'' 91). In the crudest language he is free to write derisively about Marilyn's having been reputed to be Schenek's or Hyde's girl first; therefore bedding her was not any "glory" to Darryl Zanuck's "sausage." he explains that Zanuck had the reputation of stamping female actresses by putting "his own meat into a star's meat" (90). Mailer can unreservedly write about blowjobs, anal sex, and use any and all obscenities. Hemingway's sexual iceberg is very much seven-eighths under water. When Rinaldi asks Frederick, if he is in love and married, he expresses sympathy, asking "Is she good to you?" When Frederick's positive response comes too easily, Rinaldi clarifies, using a euphemism, "I mean is she good to you practically speaking?" (''Farewell'' 169). We know this is a sexual euphemism because Frederick tells Rinaldi to "shut up." Rather than being explicit, Rinaldi asks, “Does she ——?” (169). Again, Hemingway does not fill in the blank and we can only surmise from Frederick's angry response that he is asking sexually explicit questions. In the exchange that follows, Rinaldi claims not to have any sacred objects, so Frederick asks, "I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?" (170). Once more Hemingway avoids the actual language and evades the censors. Mailer, on the other hand, is so liberated from any restraints to his fantasies and/or language that he even creates his own obscenity. In trying to find a way to describe how physically appealing Monroe looked during the time she was married to Joe Dimaggio, Mailer searches for the appropriate metaphor or adjective. First he writes, "She looks fed on sexual candy" (''Marilyn'' 102). However, that does not satisfy him. Therefore he decides to "examine a verb through its adverb" and resorts to creating the word "fucky" to describe the sexual energy she was emitting. No, he proclaims, never again "will she appear so fucky" (102).

In what each man is allowed or allows himself to write of his autoerotic fantasy, their styles could not be more opposite. Hemingway is controlled, using few adjectives; there are no specific descriptions of either the genitalia or the sex act itself. It would not be until ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' that he created the "earth moved" metaphor to describe orgasm (174).[14] Mailer, ''au contraire'', indulges in florid flights of linguistic high jinks. Everything is explicit. He repeats an apocryphal story about Marilyn's comment when she finally signed a contract with the studio: "Well, that's the last cock I suck" (''Marilyn'' 78) He envisions some of her modeling photos as suggesting, "Take me from"
{{pg |298|299}}
behind" (79). He is even detailed about her gynecological history, speculating on painful periods, many abortions, and whether or not she used a diaphragm (171-3).

It should be noted at this juncture that if both men created desirable and docile fantasy women for their erotic fantasies, their writing is not without their opposites, bitch women, destroyers of male potency, not the women of dreams, but those who inhabit their fictional nightmares. Hemingway's Margot Macomber is a bitch goddess of the first order, turning her husband, the great American boy-man into a whining cuckold before she finally does away with him altogether with the eponymous named Mannlicher rifle.[15] Mailer's consummate bitch is the Jewess of "The Time of Her Time," who if she doesn't turn him into a boy-man, accuses him of being a man who loves boys when she categorizes him as a latent homosexual (503). But that is another article.

A philosopher colleague and I were once discoursing on the differences between men and women in their choices of characteristics for an ideal fantasy partner.[16] Besides the physical and sexual qualities Hall listed, he added that a major component of the ideal fantasy woman's appeal is annoying because the man has to deal with her once his satisfaction has been achieved; she may demand consideration and attention from him. A fantasy woman is all satisfaction and no responsibility. For Hemingway and Mailer, the ultimate disappearance is achieved. They can creatively enjoy their fantasy women with no possibility of the women becoming demanding, because the women deceased, one done away in fiction, the other dead in real life. Hemingway wrote a number of possible endings for ''A Farewell to Arms''. In one both Catherine and the baby survive. In another Catherine survives, but the baby does not; in another the survives but Catherine doesn't. His choice, artistically and autoerotically gratifying is to free Frederick of all responsibility, leaving him with memories of a compliant, devoted Catherine who is on call for instant replay in his memory. Whatever the aesthetic justifications, Hemingway did choose to tell the story as Frederick's recreation of the past. Catherine is dead when he begins the story, but their lovemaking is resurrected at his choice. Let me add here that Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's Catherine model, was far from dead when he rewrote their history. She lived a long full life and seems never to have regretted his loss. Like Frederick's Catherine who is dead before his narration

{{pg |299|300}}
begins, so Mailer's Marilyn is likewise a memory, having been dead a decade when Mailer's rapturous portrait is published.

Sexologists tell us that most human beings fantasies when they are having sexual relations. At sperm banks male clients are given pornographic materials to help them achieve their goal. Writers have a power that most of us do not. They can not only create their own sexual fantasy to please themselves, but they can also sell it to us. My argument here is that on one level that is exactly what Hemingway and Mailer do.

===Notes===
{{notelist}}
a. This was in the context of a review of the lack of women writers in the cannon.

b. Swenger's focus is their fascination with the bullfight.

c. Myers writes that"Mailer was obsessed with Hemingway, fastened onto the son after he had failed to meet the father" (570).

d. Thanks to my colleague Ezra Cappell for reminding of this scene.

e. A longer study could survey a number of their texts interpolating the auto-erotic construction of others of these writers' fantasy women, but for this shorter study, the primary focus will be on one character for each.

f. As a side note, Norris Church Mailer makes an observation about the fantasy connection between Hemingway and Marilyn for Norman Mailer. when they visit the finca in Cuba, she writes: "I was a little sad, seeing Norman poking about in Hemingway's house, wondering what they might have said to each other if they had indeed ever met. Kind of like the phantom affair he might have had with Marilyn Monroe, if they had ever met, which they didn't" (305).

g. Sandra Whipple Spanier catalogues them in "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War."

h. Jean Wyrick, exploring Catherine's credibility as a twentieth-century woman, observes: "Few women, if any, live only to serve, their wish to deny their own personalities and to assume those of their lovers"(43).

i. A key text is Carl Eby's ''Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood.'' Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1999.

j. The first film version was in 1932, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, directed by Frank Borzage. In 1957 Charles Vidor directed Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones. Even a scholarly book on the subject inspired a Hollywood production. Richard Attenborough's ''In Love and War'' was inspired by James Nagel and Henry S. Villard's ''Hemingway in Love and War.''

k. Hemingway's masterful ability to amalgamate his experience, historical data, and fiction are nowhere more in evidence than in the retreat from Caporetto scenes of ''A Farewell to Arms''. See Reynolds, 105-180.

l. I am not unmindful of the fact that the book began with Lawrence Schiller's photographs and Mailer's participation grew as he warmed to the subject. However, I would contend that this strengthens my argument.

m. To that end I will avoid discussion of Mailer's interesting takes on her search for a true self, issues of how her personality was molded by the traumas and privations of her childhood, her survival techniques.

n. It should be noted that the "earth moved" metaphor has maintained a place in the cultural lexicon.

o. I am not unaware of the debate about whether or not Margot killed her husband on purpose or accidentally. For purposes of this study I will take my cue from Hemingway's comment that he saw her as "a bitch for the full course." I developed the characterization more fully in ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck'', 62-64.

p. David Hall and I created and team-taught a course in Sexuality at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of, among other books, ''Eros and Irony''.

==Citations==
{{reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}

*{{cite AV media |people= Allen, Woody (director), Perf. Allen,Woody (actor), Keaton,Diane (actress)|date=1977 |title=Anne Hall|publisher=United Artists |work=film |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Calisher |first= Hortense |date=February 1970 |title= No Important Woman Writer|magazine=''Mademoiselle'' |pp=188+ |ref=harv}}

*{{cite magazine |last=Callahan|first=Robert D. |date=January 1974 |title= Rev. of ''Marilyn'' |magazine=''West Coast Review'' |pages=50-51 |ref=harv}}

*Fetterley, Judith. ''The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction''. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1978. Print.

*Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. ''The Indestructible Woman in Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck''. Ann Arbor:UMI Research Press, 1986. Print.

*Hemingway, Ernest. ''A Farewell to Arms''. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

*———. ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.

*———. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway''. Finca Vigía Ed. New York: Scribner, 2003. 5-28. Print.

*———. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” ''The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway''. Finca Vigía Ed. New York: Scribner, 2003. 39-56. Print.

*Leonard, Hugh. “At the Flicks Again.” Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer. ''Books and Bookmen'' 19.7(1974): 80-82. Print.

*MacCannell, Dean. “Marilyn Monroe Was Not a Man.” Rev. of ''Marilyn'', by Norman Mailer, ''MarilynNorma Jeane'', by Gloria Steinem, ''Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe'', by Anthony Summers, and ''Marilyn in Art'', by Roger G. Taylor. ''Diacritics'' 17.2 (1987): 114-127. Print.

*Mailer, Norman. ''Marilyn''. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., 1973. Print.

*———. ''The Naked and the Dead''. New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1948. Print.

*———. Preface. ''Papa: A Personal Memoir''. By Gregory Hemingway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1976. xi–xiii. Print.

*———. ''The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing''. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.{{pg |301|302}}

*———. “The Time of Her Time.” ''Advertisements for Myself''. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959. 478-503. Print.

*Mailer, Norris Church. ''A Ticket to the Circus''. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

*Mallory, Carole. ''Loving Mailer''. Beverly Hills: Phoenix Books, 2010. Print.

*Meyers, Jeffrey. ''Hemingway: A Biography''. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1999. Print.

*Millett, Kate. ''Sexual Politics''. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1969. Print.

*Newman, Judith. “A Norman Life.” Rev. of ''A Ticket to the Circus'', by Norris Church Mailer. ''O, The Oprah Magazine'' April 2010: 128. Print.

*Rev. of Marilyn, by Norman Mailer. Booklist 70.7 (1973): 363. Print.

*Reynolds, Michael. ''Hemingway’s First War''. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976. Print.

{{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |publisher=Princeton:Princeton UP |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last=Rollyson, Jr. |first=Carl E. |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |location=New York|publisher=Paragon House |ref=harv}}

*———. “''Marilyn'': Mailer’s Novel Biography.” ''Biography'' 1.4 (1978): 49-67. Print.

{{cite book |author-mask=1 |date=1978 |title=Marilyn: Mailer's Novel Biography |pages=49-67 |ref=harv}}

{{cite journal |last=Spanier |first=Sandra Whipple |date=1990 |title=Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War|pages=75-108 |editor-last1=Donladson |editor-first1=Scott |publisher=Cambridge: Cambridge UP |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Schwenger |first=Peter |date=1984 |title=Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth Century Literature |url=https://www.routledge.com/Phallic-Critiques-Routledge-Revivals-Masculinity-and-Twentieth-Century-Literature/Schwenger/p/book/9781138830196 |publisher=London: Routledge and Kegan Paul |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Tharp |first=Willard |date=1960 |title=American Writing in the Twentieth Century |publisher= Cambridge: Harvard UP |ref=harv}}

* {{cite journal |last=Wilt |first= Judith |title= "The Romances of Ayn Rand." |url=https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html |journal=Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand |date=1999 |pages=173-198 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite journal |last=Wyrick |first=Jean |title=Fantasy as Symbol: Another Look at Hemingway's Catherine |journal=Massachusetts Studies in English |volume=4.2 |date=1973 |pages=42-47 |ref=harv}}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-07T18:58:33Z

DCasper79:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Mailer|1950|p=584}}}}

{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}}

{{clr}}

{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors' life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors' first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.

==Two Types of Fiction==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a ‘novel.’ Its characters do indeed wear “their personae or social masks”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms.Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as Mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:

<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.
He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.
He thought these things had become your heritage somewhere along the line. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by renouncing the place they given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>
{{pg|319|320}}
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester's friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will "soljer" and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye's ‘novel’ that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye's ‘drama’ in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience (''Anatomy'' {{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}}
). Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:

<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

"What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.</blockquote>
{{pg|320|321}}
<blockquote>“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call parody, “in a pig’s asshole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well- etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,”Bloom said,in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>
{{pg|321|322}}
Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical ‘dramatic-novelistic’ mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the sta- tus distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to the{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered—and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for ‘soljer’ autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the ‘bad’ writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

===''The Naked and the Dead''===
In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.)

Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep breaking out of ” [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer. {{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or ‘Mannipean satire’ (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).
{{pg|323|324}}
Still, not even evoking the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 The Modern Epic.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=1}}

If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the 'modern epic' is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the 'total world of a nation and epoch' extends to the 'supranational' sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11-14}}

With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the 'modern epic' quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=3}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=715}}

Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch”. {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American ‘every man’.

In place of ''U.S.A.’s'' Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middleclass William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated Left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked’s'' use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.’s'' encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked’s'' cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

Naked’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestic- cally authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

{{pg|325|326}}
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=646}}

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''.{{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=100}} Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, "[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book," and Time that "Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones's] first language".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}} And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a "fatuous pride in being illiterate".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}

On ''Eternity's'' literary quality, Burgess wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: "[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones's ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones's, much less than Mailer's". {{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones's book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann's film Eternity. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction”. {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”.{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.
{{pg|326|327}}
One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” .{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in ‘third person’ fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly italsized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle” place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his un- thinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive”. {{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}}. Clearly, ‘sporty’ is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike). {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a ‘transparent’ mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garrett’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' Some critics found the structure of The Naked and the Dead baggy.{{efn|Dickstein refers to Jones’s The Thin Red Line as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to The Naked and the Dead” and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “clumsily”.}}
In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s ‘modern epic’. Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel.
{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked’s'' narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking ‘dramatic substructures’ to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial'' ''ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic {{pg|330|331}}military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked’s'' narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocre- city and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisen- hower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of Naked's Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti's model of the "modern epic" with its aspirations toward the expression of the "whole breadth" of "the total world of a nation and epoch".{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a ‘modern epic’, ''Naked's'' Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked's'' more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multi-faceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of{{pg|331|332}} ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). Naked's range of literary performances is consistent with the book's genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer's writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked’s'' use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').{{efn|The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso.}}

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with ‘the men” of his platoon’; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show de- velopment, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of Tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}. The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its</blockquote>{{pg|332|333}} <blockquote>mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon's frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh's chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead.''

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to ‘make it new’. In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}}

In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of 'everyman.' They do so via transferring Dos Passos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breathe the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers”.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=55}} This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its 'overspirit' mode, using its use or near use of the 'heroic' line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings”.{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}} Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>
{{pg|334|335}}

<blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}} </blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}

==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|20em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |date= |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title="The Hell with Literature: James Jones's Unvarnished Truths" |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |year=1984 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |page= |pages=18-20 |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Carter |first=Steven R. |url= |title=James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master |date= |publisher=United States: U of Illinois P |year=1998 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |date=2005 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |date= |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |date= |publisher=Hudson Review 2.4 (Winter 1950) |year=2011 |publication-date=7 September 2011 |pages=582-595}}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |url= |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt,1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |date=1951 |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |date=1985 |publisher=New York: Simon, 1985 |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |date=2005 |publisher=Boston: Bedford,2005 |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso, 1996 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |date=2008 |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008 |page= |access-date=}}
{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-07T18:32:09Z

DCasper79: note list

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Mailer|1950|p=584}}}}

{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}}

{{clr}}

{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}, and Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds across the two authors' life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors' first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author’s career.

==Two Types of Fiction==
===''From Here to Eternity''===
In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a ‘novel.’ Its characters do indeed wear “their personae or social masks”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms.Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as Mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:

<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.
He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.
He thought these things had become your heritage somewhere along the line. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by renouncing the place they given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>
{{pg|319|320}}
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester's friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will "soljer" and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye's ‘novel’ that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye's ‘drama’ in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience (''Anatomy'' {{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}}
). Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:

<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

"What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.</blockquote>
{{pg|320|321}}
<blockquote>“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call parody, “in a pig’s asshole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well- etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,”Bloom said,in his customary loud vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>
{{pg|321|322}}
Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical ‘dramatic-novelistic’ mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the sta- tus distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to the{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered—and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for ‘soljer’ autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s ‘treatment’ by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the ‘bad’ writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

===''The Naked and the Dead''===
In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.)

Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity”.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep breaking out of ” [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer. {{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or ‘Mannipean satire’ (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).
{{pg|323|324}}
Still, not even evoking the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 The Modern Epic.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=1}}

If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the 'modern epic' is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the 'total world of a nation and epoch' extends to the 'supranational' sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11-14}}

With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the 'modern epic' quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign.{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=3}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=715}}

Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch”. {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American ‘every man’.

In place of ''U.S.A.’s'' Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middleclass William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated Left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked’s'' use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.’s'' encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked’s'' cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

Naked’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestic- cally authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

{{pg|325|326}}
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=646}}

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''.{{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=100}} Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, "[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book," and Time that "Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones's] first language".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}} And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a "fatuous pride in being illiterate".{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}

On ''Eternity's'' literary quality, Burgess wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: "[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones's ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones's, much less than Mailer's". {{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones's book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann's film Eternity. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction”. {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”.{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}} These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.
{{pg|326|327}}
One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” .{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}} This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in ‘third person’ fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly italsized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle” place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his un- thinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}} Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive”. {{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}}. Clearly, ‘sporty’ is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike). {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}} However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a ‘transparent’ mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”.{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garrett’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' Some critics found the structure of The Naked and the Dead baggy.{{efn|Dickstein refers to Jones’s The Thin Red Line as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to The Naked and the Dead” and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “clumsily”.}}
In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s ‘modern epic’. Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel.
{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked’s'' narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking ‘dramatic substructures’ to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial'' ''ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic {{pg|330|331}}military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked’s'' narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocre- city and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisen- hower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of Naked's Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti's model of the "modern epic" with its aspirations toward the expression of the "whole breadth" of "the total world of a nation and epoch".{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a ‘modern epic’, ''Naked's'' Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked's'' more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multi-faceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of{{pg|331|332}} ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). Naked's range of literary performances is consistent with the book's genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer's writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked’s'' use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with ‘the men” of his platoon’; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show de- velopment, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of Tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}. The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its</blockquote>{{pg|332|333}} <blockquote>mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon's frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh's chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead.''

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been unperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modelled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to ‘make it new’. In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}}

In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of 'everyman.' They do so via transferring Dos Passos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breathe the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers”.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=55}} This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph.{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its 'overspirit' mode, using its use or near use of the 'heroic' line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings”.{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}} Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>
{{pg|334|335}}

<blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}} </blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==

# *Dickstein refers to Jones’s The Thin Red Line as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to The Naked and the Dead” and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “clumsily”.{{sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=25}}
#
# *The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich descriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso. {{sfn|Manso|1985|p=101}}

==Citations==
{{Reflist}}
==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|20em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |date= |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title="The Hell with Literature: James Jones's Unvarnished Truths" |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |year=1984 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |page= |pages=18-20 |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Carter |first=Steven R. |url= |title=James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master |date= |publisher=United States: U of Illinois P |year=1998 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |date=2005 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |date= |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |date= |publisher=Hudson Review 2.4 (Winter 1950) |year=2011 |publication-date=7 September 2011 |pages=582-595}}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |url= |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt,1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |date=1951 |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |date=1985 |publisher=New York: Simon, 1985 |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |date=2005 |publisher=Boston: Bedford,2005 |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso, 1996 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |date=2008 |year=2008 |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008 |page= |access-date=}}
{{refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-02T19:35:25Z

DCasper79: /* Work Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''.}}

{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Mailer|1950|p=584}}}}

{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}}

==Introduction==
'''James Jones was a born novelist, and Norman Mailer was a born writer'''. This distinction holds across the two authors' life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors' first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author's career.

==Two Types of Fiction==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a“novel.”Its characters do indeed wear“their personae or social masks”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}.Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms.Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:

<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.
He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.
He thought these things had become your heritage somewhere along the line. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by renouncing the place they given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>
{{pg|319|320}}
By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester's friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will "soljer" and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye's "novel" that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye's "drama" in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience (''Anatomy'' {{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}}
). Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:

<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

"What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.</blockquote>
{{pg|320|321}}
<blockquote>“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call par- ody, “in a pig’s ass hole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well- etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,”Bloom said,in his customary load vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>
{{pg|321|322}}
Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical “dramatic-novelistic” mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the sta- tus distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to the{{pg|322|323}} abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered—and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “solder” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s “treatment” by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.)

Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep breaking out of ” [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer {{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).
{{pg|323|324}}
Still, not even evoking the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 The Modern Epic{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=1}}.

If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11-14}}.

With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to{{pg|324|325}} be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=3}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=715}}.

Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}. These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American “every man.”

In place of ''U.S.A.’s'' Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middleclass William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated Left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked’s'' use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.’s'' encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked’s'' cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

Naked’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}. As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestic- cally authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

{{pg|325|326}}
Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=646}}.

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''{{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=100}}. Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, "[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book," and Time that "Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones's] first language"{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}. And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a "fatuous pride in being illiterate"{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}.

On ''Eternity's'' literary quality, Burgess wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: "[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones's ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones's, much less than Mailer's" {{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}.

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones's book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann's film Eternity. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction” {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}}. George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}}. These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.
{{pg|326|327}}
One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}}. This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in “third person” fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the pur- pose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly ital-sized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones- gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth {{pg|327|328}}like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle” place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his un- thinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}}. Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive” {{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}}. Clearly, “sporty” is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike) {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}}. However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment {{pg|328|329}}of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a “transparent” mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}.

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garrett’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.{{pg|329|330}}

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' Some critics found the structure of The Naked and the Dead baggy. In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s “modern epic.” Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel
{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}.

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked’s'' narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking “dramatic substructures” to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial'' ''ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic {{pg|330|331}}military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked’s'' narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocre- city and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisen- hower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of Naked's Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti's model of the "modern epic" with its aspirations toward the expression of the "whole breadth" of "the total world of a nation and epoch"{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}.

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a "modern epic," ''Naked's'' Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked's'' more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multi-faceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of{{pg|331|332}} ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). Naked's range of literary performances is consistent with the book's genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer's writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked’s'' use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with “the men” of his platoon; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show de- velopment, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of Tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}. The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its</blockquote>{{pg|332|333}} <blockquote>mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon's frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh's chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead.''

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented- try, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been imperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modeled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to "make it new". In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.{{pg|333|334}}

In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of “everyman.” They do so via transferring Dos Pas- sos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breath the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=55}}. This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its “overspirit” mode, using its use or near use of the “heroic” line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings”{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}}. Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>
{{pg|334|335}}

<blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}} </blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==

*Dickstein refers to Jones’s The Thin Red Line as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to The Naked and the Dead” and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “clumsily”{{sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=25}}.

*The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich de- scriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso {{sfn|Manso|1985|p=101}}.

==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* * {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |date= |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
*
* * {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title="The Hell with Literature: James Jones's Unvarnished Truths" |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |year=1984 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |page= |pages=18-20 |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Carter |first=Steven R. |url= |title=James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master |date= |publisher=United States: U of Illinois P |year=1998 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |date=2005 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
* * {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |date= |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |date= |publisher=Hudson Review 2.4 (Winter 1950) |year=2011 |publication-date=7 September 2011 |pages=582-595}}
* * {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |url= |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt,1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |date=1951 |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |date=1985 |publisher=New York: Simon, 1985 |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |date=2005 |publisher=Boston: Bedford,2005 |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso, 1996 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* * {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |date=2008 |year=2008 |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008 |page= |access-date=}}
{{refend}}

==Citations==

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?

2025-04-02T18:12:49Z

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{byline|last=Hicks|first=Alexander |abstract=A review of ''From Here To Eternity'' and ''The Naked and The Dead''.}}

{{cquote|The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by Revery. However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.|author=Northrop Frye|source=''The Four Forms of Prose Fiction''{{sfn|Mailer|1950|p=584}}}}

{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must be expressed in the breadth of its circumstances and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.|author=Franco Moretti|source=''Modern Epic:The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez’’{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}}}

==Introduction==
'''James Jones was a born novelist, and Norman Mailer was a born writer'''. This distinction holds across the two authors' life work. I illustrate this distinction here for only the authors' first published novels, ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''From Here to Eternity''. However, these illustrations help assess the quality of these two books and each author's career.

==Two Types of Fiction==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' In the classical taxonomic terms of Northrop Frye, From Here to Eternity is very much what Frye means by a“novel.”Its characters do indeed wear“their personae or social masks”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}.Robert E. Lee Prewitt is very much a Private First Class, Milton Anthony Warden a Sergeant, and Ms.Karen Holmes a housewife. (They are vivid and memorable, yet seldom capitalize much on eccentrics as mark such well-remembered Dickens characters as ''David Copperfield’s'' Mr. Macawber or ''Martin Chuzzlewit’s'' Seth Pecksniff.) The book’s stable societal framework is the U.S. Army just preceding World War II. Right at ''Eternity’s'' outset, we are given the novelistic focus on a character in a social context:

<blockquote>When he finished packing, he walked out onto the third-floor porch of the barracks, brushing the dust from his hands. He was a very neat and deceptively slim young man in summer khakis that were still fresh early in the morning.
He leaned his elbows on the porch edge and stood looking down through the screen at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below, with the tiers of porches dark in the face of the three-story concrete barracks fronting the square. He felt a half-familiar affection for this vantage point that he was leaving.
Below him, under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun, the quadrangle gasped defenselessly like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust, a muted orchestra of sounds emerged: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather sling straps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoe soles, and the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.
He thought these things had become your heritage somewhere along the line. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by renouncing the place they given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

By the end of Chapter Two, we know of the principal protagonist, Prewitt, whose place in the Company he is leaving, and we know something about the Kentucky mountains from which he hails. Within a few more chapters, Prewitt is deeply engaged in his new world of Company G: the stern but fatherly Warden, the jokester's friend Pfc. Maggio, company commander Holmes, and the numerous sharply drawn men who will "soljer" and chat and play cards with Prewitt and try to force him to box for the Company or almost make him wish he had, including Anderson, Bloom, Chaote, Kowalski, Leva, Mazzioli, Preem, and Stark.

The dialogue is masterful. Physical and social action is evoked by concrete description and adept use of the empathetic first-person indirect, a vivid and seamlessly shifting point of view on the action and its social circumstance. If there is a mode of writing other than Frye's "novel" that is aptly evoked by ''Eternity'', it is Frye's "drama" in which the author hides from the audience and their direct experience (''Anatomy'' {{sfn|Frye|1957|p=239}}
). Characters jump off the page, as in this early exchange between Prewitt and Maggio:

<blockquote>“If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

"What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

“He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

“Soljerin aint what does it.”

“But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

“Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year
man. I can see it on you a block away.”

“Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you,
but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

“You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.

“I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call par- ody, “in a pig’s ass hole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=127}}</blockquote>

Dramatic conflict arises with great naturalness and force from the well- etched milieu:

<blockquote>Andy was dealing when the saloon doors opened and Pfc Bloom came in, pushing the door back so hard it banged against the wall and the swung back and forth squeaking loudly. Pfc Bloom advanced on the men around the blanket with a heavy, meaty confidence grinning and shaking his flat kinky head, so big the tremendous shoulders seemed to fill the door.
“Quiet, jerk,” Maggio said. “You want the CQ up here and break up the game?”

“To hell with the CQ,”Bloom said,in his customary load vice. “And you too, you little Wop.”

A transformation went over Maggio. He stood up and walked around the blanket, up to the huge Bloom who towered over him.

“Listen,” he said in a contorted voice. “I’m particular who calls me Wop. I aint big and tough, and I aint one of Dynamite’s third rate punchies. But I’m still Maggio to you. I wont mess with you. I work you over, I’ll do it with a chair or a knife.” He stared up at Bloom, his thin face twisted, his eyes blazing.

“Oh yeah?” Bloom said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Maggio said sarcastically. Bloom took a step to- ward him and he leaned his head forward pugnaciously on the thin bony shoulders, and there was the sudden attentive silence that always precedes a fight.

“Lay off, Bloom,” Prew said, surprised at the clear loudness of his voice in the silence. “Come on and sit down, Angelo. Five up to you.”

“I call,” Maggio said without looking around. “Take off, you bum,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. Bloom laughed after him self-confidently and nastily.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=137}}</blockquote>

Though the book does not appear to aspire to any allegorical significance beyond easily generalizable but hardly unusual outsider-insider, self-society, subordinate-superordinate tensions central to its dramatic construction, its typical “dramatic-novelistic” mode of expression incisively and elaborately illustrates insights into the relation of the individual to society within the specifically military hierarchal orders. ''Eternity'' rises eloquently to nice ironies of social aspiration and class, war, and peace, as in the book’s final pages on the sta- tus distortions of Lerene’s recollections of Prewitt’s patriotism and war. Take Karen Holmes and her son on the latter as they leave Honolulu Harbor:

<blockquote>From this far out, if you did not already know it was there you couldnt have seen it.

Behind her, the five boys had swelled to seven and had given up being shuffleboards and taken to shooting at each other with cocked thumbs and explosive “Bohww!”s from behind corners and stanchions.

She took the six flower leis off over her head and dropped them over the side. This was as good a place to drop them over as any. Diamond head, Koko Head, Makapuu Head. Perhaps Koko Head was the best place, really. The six leis fell together and the wind blew them back against the side of the ship and out of sight and she did not see them light on the water.

“Mother,” her son said from behind her. “I’m hungry. When do we eat on this old boat?”

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“Mother, do you think the war will last long enough so I can graduate from the Point and be in it? Jerry Wilcox said it wouldnt.”

“No,” she said, “I dont think it’ll last that long.”

“Well, gee whiz, mother,” her son said, “I want to be in it.”

“Well, cheer up,” Karen said, “and dont let it worry you. You
may miss this one, but you’ll be just the right age for the next one.”

“You really think so, mother?” her son said anxiously.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=858}}</blockquote>

The dramatic arch of the multi-stranded narrative is strong and clear. Prewitt’s refusal to box for the company, Maggio’s mounting resistance to the abuse of military power and class structures, and Warden’s bold consummation of his desire for Karen Holmes provide parallel disequilibria that trigger a narrative of beleaguered—and in Prewitt and Maggio’s cases, doomed quests for “solder” autonomy within a hierarchical social order. These three central narratives cascade outward, rippling across the others: Maggio’s rebellion is intensified by Prewitt’s “treatment” by Holmes and the Company Boxers, and Maggio’s destruction in the Stockade deepens Prewitt’s rebelliousness. Ironic parallels between the Prewitt-Lorene affair and the Warden-Holmes affair cap the book’s conclusion aboard the liner on which Karen Holmes and ''Alma ‘Lorene’ Burke'' leave Honolulu shortly following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor and war provide a second parallel wave of disequilibria that concentrate the book’s action, speeding it to the conclusion: the AWOL Prewitt is shot by a Wartime sentry while seeking to return to his company, and the call of war cancels Warden’s committed involvement with Karen Holmes.

If there are jarring notes in ''Eternity'', they are stylistic. They are mainly comprised of faulty diction and idiosyncratic rhetoric that tends to arise when the writing veers off into an authorial voice distanced from specific characters and found within sociologically detailed dramatic situations. I address instances of the “bad” writing that has tended to conspire against the book’s chances for immortality, especially after eventually falling under the shadow of extensively negative reviews reviling Jones’s style that ''Some Came Running'' cast.

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' In the terms set out by Frye on the novel and romance, Mailer is as much an author of romances as of novels. Many characteristic portions of Mailer’s fiction express the subjectivity of the “psychological archetype” and “[radiate] a glow of subjective intensity”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. This tendency in Mailer’s writing is perhaps most intensely expressed in the first-person narration of ''An American Dream’s'' Steve Rojack and The Executioner’s Song’s polyphony of consciousnesses. (Song is perhaps more a socially wide-ranging chronicle of snatches of consciousness rather than action scenes.)

Although ''Naked'' is hardly a romance, by the ascent of Mt. Anaka, Croft becomes a “psychological archetype” who “radiates a glow of subjective intensity”{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. Indeed, with Croft, “something nihilistic and untamable” seems, in Frye’s words, “to keep breaking out of ” [Mailer’s] pages” as would occur in much subsequent writing by Mailer {{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}}. However, a novelistic romancer, even as a fiction writer, will not suffice in Mailer. His work resonates not only as novel and romance but also as confession (close to the tenor of O’Shaughnessy’s tale) and anatomy or “Mannipean satire” (with Mailer himself in ''The Armies of the Night'' and with the Presidential contenders of Mailer’s presidential campaign chronicles).

Still, not even evoking the full range of Frye’s four fictive modes will suffice to categorize much of Mailer’s work. In particular, The Naked and the Dead evokes Moretti’s reference to the appearance of literary “one-off cases, oddities, anomalies” in his discussion of that variant of the high modernist fiction he terms “the modern epic” in his 1996 The Modern Epic{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=1}}.

If the original epic can be boiled down rather conventionally into a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation, the “modern epic” is a variation of the epic in which the heroic is downplayed and the expression of the “total world of a nation and epoch” extends to the “supranational” sphere, in which we encounter a somewhat incongruous ungainly mix of modes of expression—not only the very novelistic accounts of exchanges among the tale’s principals but the confessional ardor of Ishmael’s voice when he accounts his high spirits, the cataloging of seamen’s conversation during watches, the lessons in cytology, the pseudo-Shakespearean soliloquies of Ahab along on the forecastle{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=2128}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11-14}}.

With the Ahab-like ardor of Croft ascending Mt. Anaka, the social and linguistic cataloging of social types and vernaculars in Time Machine and Chow Line segments, and the epic qualities of the book’s framing and charting, and detailed depiction of the Anopopei campaign and its combat actions; and the fundamental novelistic interactions among the principals, each with members of his immediate sphere—Cummings, Hearn, and Croft, each with his circle of underlings—''The Naked and the Dead'' fits the template of the “modern epic” quite well.

Although ''Naked'' has no individual hero—Croft is arguably an antihero— the action of the Army on Anopopei might be considered heroic. For example, the book begins with a statement about the invading force—the memorable “Nobody could sleep . . . all over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead”—and it ends with a description of the “mop up” or “successful” campaign{{sfn|Meyer|2005|p=3}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=715}}.

Further, ''Naked ’s'' use of its Time Machine segments reaches out toward the “expression” of the “total world of a nation and epoch” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}. These devices democratically apply the model of Dos Passos’s elite biographic profiles of great Americans in the ''U.S.A.'' to the description of the American “every man.”

In place of ''U.S.A.’s'' Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan, we get Hispanic Texans like Julio Martinez; Texan and Virgin- ian rednecks Sam Croft and Woodrow Wilson; Montana miner and hobo Red Velsen; working-class Bostonian Irishman Will Gallagher and working-class Jewish Brooklynite Joey Goldstein; small-town Northeastern/Midwestern middleclass William Brown; Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, Harvard-educated Left intellectual Robert Hearn; and Northeastern/Midwestern, upper-class, West Point-educated Far Right intellectual General Cummings.

Indeed, ''Naked’s'' use of its Time Machine segments extends the ''U.S.A.’s'' encyclopedia of American social types and speech during the second and third decades of the twentieth century to the third and early fourth decades of the century, for the Time Machine profiles deal with the biographies that highlight the preponderantly 1930s and early 1940s adolescence and youth of ''Naked’s'' cast on its principal 1944-ish stage.

Naked’s allegorical structure also contributes to the book’s “expression” of a “total world of a nation and epoch”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}. As an allegory, The Naked and the Dead is dystopian. It is, in part, a dystopia of fascistic foreboding expressed both in terms of General Cumming’s highbrow aspirations of a domestic- cally authoritarian and internationally imperialistic United States and in terms of Sergeant Croft’s thuggish service for Cummings (i.e., his role in the elimination of the annoying Lieutenant Hearn for Cummings).

However, it articulates a more nuanced vision than the sometimes noted dystopian X-ray of fascist undercurrent at War and a possible fascistic post-war. It also voices the vision of the unexpected military victory that the hum-drum and luck Major Dalleson led right under General Cummings’s nose—a triumph of competence and good luck that is a harbinger less of fascist totalitarianism than of managerialism and centrist liberalism fringed by Cold War hysteria of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Mailer closes off not with some extension of Cummings’s subtly maneuvered elimination of the intellectually annoying and faintly insubordinate Liberal Lieutenant Hearn.

Instead, he leaves us with Major Dalleson captivated by the USO poster and PR charm of the emerging, somewhat demilitarized managerial age, thinking with more innocence than is imaginable for Cummings, “He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it”{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=646}}.

==Style, Construction, and Assessment==

'''''From Here to Eternity''''' Jones has been criticized for bad writing. The main site of this criticism and defenses against it is in writing on ''Some Came Running''. However, as we shall see, these criticisms had precursors in responses to ''From Here to Eternity''{{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=100}}. Writing on ''Some Came Running'', Edmund Fuller wrote, "[I]f you like bad grammar...shoddy and befuddled philosophy, ''Some Came Running'' is your book," and Time that "Choctaw rather than English would appear to be [Jones's] first language"{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}. And, J. Donald Adams attributed Jones with having a "fatuous pride in being illiterate"{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=38}}.

On ''Eternity's'' literary quality, Burgess wrote the following in ''The Caine Mutiny'' section of his 99 Novels: "[Mutiny] stands somewhere between Mailer's ''The Naked and the Dead'' . . . and James Jones's ''From Here to Eternity''. It has some literary distinction, far more than Jones's, much less than Mailer's" {{sfn|Carter|1998|p=56}}.

Similarly, I recall a 1960s episode of ''The David Susskind Show'' in which Gore Vidal dismissed Jones's book for bad writing after praising Fred Zin-Neumann's film Eternity. Although I am both a Jones and a Bloom fan, I was not surprised when I realized that Jones was entirely unmentioned in the extensive critical works of the stylistically finicky Harold Bloom.

Defenders of Jones’s style cast light on its positive and negative criticism. For example, Tom Carson writes, “[A]t its crowded, vernacular best [the prose] does just what he wanted to do, involve you in the events, and put you inside the characters’ heads with striking veracity and conviction” {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}}. George Garrett writes that “Jones, as he wrote ''Running'', was involved in an experiment with language, a kind of discovery . . . he calls it working with ‘colloquial forms’ by which he means not merely the free and easy use of the living, spoken American language on dialogue or first-person narration but an attempt to carry it into the narrative itself, into third-person narration”{{sfn|Carson|1984|p=116}}. These defenses focus on that aspect of Jones’s writing that his critics seem to stress as his weakest attribute: his writing style.

One concentration of stylistic criticism seems to focus on Jones’s attempts to put readers “inside the characters’ heads” {{sfn|Carson|1984|p=19}}. This mainly consists of the use of the first-person indirect and free indirect, in which movement between a third-person mimicry of a character’s consciousness approaching stream of consciousness and authorial comment on characters’ consciousness or simple third person occurs, for Jones seldom lapses into the first person in “third person” fictions like ''Eternity'' and ''Running''. This second paragraph of the book’s first page, already quoted above, illustrates the sort of writing:

<blockquote>Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel wheeled carts bouncing over the brick, the slap- ping of oiled leather slingstraps.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

So does the third paragraph of ''Eternity’s'' opening:

<blockquote>Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them without denying with them the pur- pose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them by denying the place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=3}}</blockquote>

A second concentration of stylistic criticism refers to instances of straightforward third-person narration, a voice mainly confined to the tellingly ital-sized introductory pages to “Book Four: The Stockade.”

Examples of the first sort of faulted writing mainly occur when Jones- gages in extended attempts at first-person indirect and free indirect, and his language grows either too arcane to ring true as a plausible voice of the character overheard or too oddly vernacular to work as a shift into authorial voice. Even writing in a tone ostensibly close to a character, Jones may move into an oddly eccentric rhetoric that manages to violate the standards of verisimilitude in the mimicry of a character’s use of language required of the first-person indirect or the standards of good authorial rhetoric, or both standards at once. An example of a double violation arises in the early pages of “Book Four: The Stockade” where Jones describes Prewitt’s thoughts or feelings regarding “a great conflict of fear” that “lay rises flapping from the depth like a giant manta ray, looming larger and bigger, looming huge, up out of the green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arch down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and ego caught square in the middle” place they have given you.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his un- thinking candor precipitates in the minds of others (in this case fears of homosexuality in the mind of Maggio).

Examples of the second sort of blemished writing arise in “Book Four: The Stockade” when we shift into an authorial voice far from that dramatic mode in which the book’s style approximates a dramatic mode in which the audience experiences content directly. In the straight-out italics with which “The Stockade” opens, Jones writes, “''He was held in confinement at the Stockade as a general prisoner while he waited for trial''”{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=405}}. Clearly, “awaited” is the appropriate word. Later, still writing in a straight-forward third-person narrator (or omniscient narrator) voice, Jones describes the “many officers, officers’ wives and officers’ children” near Honolulu’s “tennis courts, golf course, and bridle paths as all are looking very tanned and sportive” {{sfn|Jones|1951|p=409}}. Clearly, “sporty” is the appropriate word.

In defense of Jones’s prose, Garrett refers to innovations with “colloquial forms” by Faulkner and O’Hara, and Carter extends this line of defense with a few brief evocations (e.g., of Bellow and Updike) {{sfn|Garrett|1984|p=116}}{{sfn|Carter|1998|p=39}}. However, I do not find these lines of defense persuasive. Where I see no lapse in an author’s use of the first-person and free indirect (e.g., for O’Hara, Faulkner, and Bellow), the defense does not seem worth extended comment in the time and space available. (I think that Faulkner, O’Hara, and Bellow employ idiomatic English more adeptly in using the free indirect).

I see such a lapse when Updike lapses into language too literary (e.g., too metaphorically ornate) to credibly reflect a character’s consciousness, which, compared to the stylistically masterful Updike, seems inappropriate, despite Updike’s lapses. Although I see some dubious use of idiomatic language in straightforward third-person narration divorced from the first-person indirect and free indirect in the work of William Faulkner, the comparison again seems generally inappropriate (i.e., too much a matter of an idiosyncratic syntax), as well as rather too complex for this effort.

The digression of the pros and cons of Jones’s possible stylistic shortcomings, where they turn up in Jones’s writing, seems less relevant to the assessment of that writing—''Eternity'', in particular—and seems less important than my defense of Jones. This focuses on how infrequently they turn up and how peripheral they are when they do turn up—most especially in ''From Here to Eternity''. In brief, the instances of poor writing that Jones’s stylistic critics have targeted tend to address occasional divergences from Jones’s best and most characteristic writing. This is a “transparent” mode of writing focused on dialogue backed by incisive descriptions of action and setting backed up by preponderantly adept excursions into the first-person indirect and divorced—mostly divorced—from overt authorial voice.

That mode of writing resembles Frye’s dramatic mode in which the author is hidden from the audience, and the audience “experiences content directly”{{sfn|Frye|1957|p=229}}.

This mode provides almost all of the words of ''From Here to Eternity'' and ''Whistle''. It provides enough of Some Came Running to constitute nearly all of Jones’s 1958 Signet abridgment of Running. It perhaps does not apply well to ''The Thin Red Line'' because, in that novel, Jones is far more involved in using the free indirect, in which he shifts between dialogue and physical description. The first-person-son-indirect variant of stream of consciousness jumps so frequently and swiftly from consciousness to consciousness to virtually create a collective consciousness of ''Thin Red Line’s'' GIs.

''From Here to Eternity'' can only receive glancing blows from the criticisms of Jones’s writing for that book because these are largely irrelevant to most of the book’s writing. The same can be said for ''The Thin Red Line'' and ''Whistle''. ''Some Came Running'' may be another story. (For convenience, I ignore all of Jones’s books, but only the four that were mentioned.) On the one hand, the power of its underlying narrative, documentary scope and cogency, and rich characterization seems to compare to that of ''From Here to Eternity''. (Here we have aspects of Jones’s creativity perhaps even more effectively expressed by Minnelli’s 1958 film than by Zinnemann’s excellent 1953 one.) Moreover, Jones scholars have claimed with great zeal thematic and spiritual merits for the voluminous stretches of writing in ''Running'' that do not conform to the model of transparent writing and drama-like novelistic presentation described here for ''Running''. Alas, with ''Running'', critics of Jones’s style have a large target. Perhaps champions of Jones might devise defenses for his literary style—say via elaboration of Garrett’s claim that what looks awkward about the style of ''Running'' has an unappreciated idiomatic grace. However, such a defense seems to me no more than sketched.

'''''The Naked and the Dead''''' Some critics found the structure of The Naked and the Dead baggy. In particular, they have charged that its narrative is encumbered and diffused by the Time Machine profiles of principal characters and by a late usurpation of the protagonist’s role by Sergeant Croft. Here, I dispute these criticisms partly because they are put in a new, more accurate light that is more favorable to ''Naked'' when this is considered an instance of Moretti’s “modern epic.” Regarding the sometimes imputed ungainliness of the Time Machine segments, critics have overlooked the function of the Time Machine segments—not as a plot element in a well-structured novelistic narrative, but as a kind of post-Crash extension of the 1910-1930 sociological and linguistic profile of the U.S.A. provided by the social disparate cast of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. In doing this, they fail to judge ''Naked'' as a “modern epic” with stress on “a summation of a social and cultural totality” and as no simple traditional war novel
{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}}.

Further, critics have tended to overlook the sheer propulsive vigor of ''Naked’s'' narrative, which belies technical claims against this narrative’s construction.

Regarding the coherence of ''Naked'', this is quite remarkable considering the book’s social reach as a social chronicle, political allegory, and combat narrative. Suppose some of the book’s coherence rests on traditional nov- elastic foundations. In that case, some derive from the book’s ambitious modernist (i.e., modernist epic) reach for the expression of a capacious social world. The central cumulating dramas of the book’s Anopopei narrative are key to this coherence. To my mind, four interlocking “dramatic substructures” to the Anopopei narrative cohere into one visionary drama. One drama consists of the ''top-down fascistic reach'' of Cummings’s creation of the patrol as an attempted solution to his failures to either effectively assert the dominance of his authoritarian intellectual vision about the left-liberal Hearn or to advance his high career aspirations via his direction of the battle for Anopopei.

The second consists of the ''bottom-up fascistic reach'' of Croft’s attempted assertion of his will to power over Hearn by maneuvering his death and over his squad by pitting it against the symbolic and practical challenge of Mt Anaka. The third consists of the ''heroically solidaristic al-truism'' (and ''resistance'') entailed by Goldstein and Ridges’ attempted assertion of soldier solidarity and group survival in the face of Croft’s assertion of his will to power. The fourth and final drama consists of the ''managerial'' ''ascendance'' of Dalleson’s competently assisted usurpation of immediate pragmatic military success on Anopopei due to a nicely Tolstoyan combination of managerial competence and sheer chance.

''Naked’s'' narrative elements cumulate well. The Cummings narrative ends powerfully with the death of Hearn and the trumping of Cummings’s Mt. Anaka strategy by Dalleson’s sea strategy. The Croft story ends with powerful irony with the failure of the Mt. Anaka expedition, especially in the wake of the boldness of the Hearn offing and the strength shown by Croft in the initial attempt at the crossing. The heroic tale of Goldstein and Ridges serves as a nice dramatic and thematic counterpoint to the high and low fascist authoritarianism of Cummings and Croft and the softer, friendlier managerial authoritarianism of Dalleson. The Dalleson tale resolves itself and all the others with the resolution of fascistic and humanistic strains of narrative in the triumph of a managerial competence marked by some mediocre- city and much good luck. The range of narrative strands—and their wrap-up with the Dalleson strand—offset the somewhat disproportionate force of the Croft strand, at least as we finish reading, if not necessarily in longer-term memory.

If ''Naked'' allegory helps provide a strong focus, so does the integrative cumulative force of the book’s narrative. This is not merely some incoherent—or coherent—near apotheosis of Croft’s vivid psychopathy but a symmetrical dystopia of fascist foreboding high (as with Cummings) and low (as with Croft). Moreover, it is not merely the often noted dystopian vision of fascist undercurrent at War and possible fascist post-war as well that is conceived of as a harbinger of the dangers and restraints of an age of Eisen- hower, managerialism, and centrist liberalism, surface success, and contentment and underlying antagonisms as one can imagine.

The social-documentary scope of Naked's Time Machines segments and the reach and focus of its allegory fits Moretti's model of the "modern epic" with its aspirations toward the expression of the "whole breadth" of "the total world of a nation and epoch"{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}.

This modernistic epic character of ''Naked'' vitiates much of the force of arguments against ''Naked'' as a loosely constructed attempt at a traditional novel. Within the context of a "modern epic," ''Naked's'' Time Machines segments and allegorical anatomy function as social visions with literary standing in their own right. That they take little or nothing from the effectiveness of ''Naked's'' more conventional narrative and novelistic pleasures only enhances ''Naked'' as a multi-faceted modern epic as much as the novelistic character of ''Eternity'' is consistent with the type of writing that Jones does best (and does almost exclusively in his first fiction). Naked's range of literary performances is consistent with the book's genre, variegated skills, and modes of Mailer's writing.

This is not to say that the conceptualization of ''Naked'' as a modern epic provides any defense of criticisms of ''Naked’s'' use of language in a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph literary style. Much of Mailer’s style shows the limitations of its reliance on a simple combination of dialogue, transparent physical description of the speakers and their settings, and the use of first-person indirect (after the models of James T. Farrell’s ''Studs Lonegan'' and Tolstoy’s ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'').

However, I would argue that this style is very serviceable for expressing the characters and character interactions at the center of much of the book. The characters are memorable, with several—at least Hearn, Cummings, and Croft— drawn with depth and dynamism. For example, we see Hearn’s intellectual confidence with Cummings and insecurity with “the men” of his platoon; we see Cummings both as aloof intellectual and commander, as schemer maneuvering Hearn into the dangerous patrol, and as the deflated figure who must acknowledge Dalleson’s credit as victor of the Anopopei campaign; and we see Croft as not just a hard and capable commander of men but as one in the throes of a mythic conflict with Mt. Anaka that resonates with Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick.

More generally, lesser characters like Martinez and Goldstein show de- velopment, and the dialogue and accounts of soldiering ring forcefully true. Indeed, the physical action of men in battle with the Japanese and with na- ture is often eloquent. For example, the opening rises to the level of Tolstoy in his epic descriptive mode on Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Here it is: “Nobody could sleep. When the morning came, assault craft would be low- ered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach of Anapopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead” {{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=3}}. The description of a storm hitting base camp is especially memorable:

<blockquote>The wind tore through the bivouac area like a great scythe, slashing the palm fronds from the coconut trees, blasting the rain before it. As they looked, they saw a tent jerk upward from its mooring, steam away in the wind, flapping like a terrified bird...
A tremendous gust of wind bellied under the tent blew it out like a balloon, and then the ridgepole snapped, tearing a rent in the poncho. The tent fell upon the four men like a wet sheet . . . . “Where are you?” he shouted, and then the folds of the tent filled out again like a sail, ripped loose altogether, and went eddying and twisting through the air . . . . All the tents were down in the bivouac area, and here and there a soldier would go skittering through the mud, staggering from the force of the wind with the odd jerking motions of a man walking in a motion picture when the film is unwinding too rapidly.{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=86-88}}</blockquote>

The descriptions of the platoon's frequent physical exhaustion achieve a visceral force:

<blockquote>Their ears filled with the quick, frenetic rustling of insects and animals, the thin screeching rage of mosquitoes, and the raucous babbling of monkeys and parakeets . . . . Slowly, inevitably, the men felt the water soak through the greased waterproofing of their shoes and slosh up to their knees whenever they had to wade through a deeper portion of the stream{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=398}}</blockquote>

Those descriptions of the platoon on patrol winding through the Kunai grass formed a pictorial beauty that would become one of Walsh's chief inspirations in his film version of ''The Naked and the Dead.''

Turning to the stylistic merits of the Time Machine segments—and not just their proclaimed obtrusiveness as excessively flashy, overly documented- try, philosophically deterministic baggage for an effective war novel and campaign narrative—critics have been imperceptive. They have also dismissed the Time Machine segments as overly derivative—as too closely modeled after Dos Passos's telegraphed biographies of national elites in the ''U.S.A.'' However, in making this criticism, critics have overlooked how Mailer's use of the Time Machine devices follows Pound's modernist injunction to "make it new". In particular, they have missed how thoroughly democratic and sometimes playful Mailer's Time Machines are.

In contrast with Dos Passos’s use of his profiles to telegraph the life of important national figures in shaping the world, where he situates his cast of rather everyday fictional characters, Mailer’s Time Machine bios file numerous faces of “everyman.” They do so via transferring Dos Pas- sos’s elite-oriented device to a popular subject matter. As Mailer writes in the first Time Machine, which profiles Julio Martinez, “Mexican boys also breath the American Fables, also want to be heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers”{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=55}}. This is to say that they also want to be figures like those of the ''U.S.A.'' biographers, heroes like Jack Reed and TR, aviators like the Wright Brothers, lovers like Rudolph Valentino, and financiers like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They have also failed to notice such playful touches as we find in Mailer’s Woodrow Wilson Time Machine episode.

This evokes Dos Passos’s Meester Veelson biography of President Woodrow Wilson in ''The 42nd Parallel'' in more than title. At the outset of his profile of the white-trash Wilson, Mailer presents him in “''a pair of round, silver-rimmed glasses''” reminiscent of those that appeared on the patrician Southern President in the photograph{{sfn|Mailer|1984|p=326}}

In addition, Mailer’s prose sometimes attains a roiling power and dignity, most especially in its “overspirit” mode, using its use or near use of the “heroic” line: “Ahead, ahead, ahead, ahead, moving” catches the cadence of this pentameter, splendidly detailed for Mailer’s writings by Christopher Ricks. For example, “The moon was out, limning the deck housings”{{sfn|Ricks|2008|p=10}}. Returning to Mailer on the movement of that 77mm artillery piece, we have a final phrase that begins with the heroic line:

<blockquote>Once or twice, a flare filtered a wan and delicate bluish light over them, the light almost lost in the dense foliage through which it had to pass. In the brief moment it lasted, they were caught at their guns in classic straining motions with the form and beauty of a frieze. The water and the dark slime of the trail twice blackened their uniforms. Moreover, the light shone on them instantly, and their faces stood out, white and contorted. Even the guns had a slender articulated beauty like an insect reared back on its wire haunches. Then darkness swirled about them again, and they ground the guns forward mindlessly, a line of ants dragging their burden back to their hole.{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}}</blockquote>

<blockquote>That is, we have, with some intriguing mix of heroic irony, Mailer’s dignification of the routine derided as the “heroic” beat of “a line of ants dragging their burden back”{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=116}} </blockquote>

Neither ''The Naked and the Dead'' nor ''From Here to Eternity'' is remarkable for such stylistic innovation or sustained eloquence as we find, say, in ''The Sun Also Rises'', ''The Sound and the Fury'', ''Invisible Man'', A''ugie Marsh'', or ''Pale Fire''. Each, however, is masterful in realizing its basic fictional design. ''From Here to Eternity'' dramatizes a social milieu unexcelled in American writing. ''The Naked and the Dead'' provides a vision of the U.S.A. combat in the Pacific theater of World War II and during the preceding decade, plus a look into the future. Stylistically, ''From Here to Eternity'' frequently attains the peculiar eloquence of great drama in which the audience witnesses intense action directly. ''The Naked and the Dead'' rises intermittently to a level of stylistic eloquence above and beyond the call of its particular fictional duty.

==Notes==

*Dickstein refers to Jones’s The Thin Red Line as “a tighter, more disciplined rejoinder to The Naked and the Dead” and charges Mailer with filling in his characters’ backgrounds “clumsily”{{sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=25}}.

*The atmosphere of The Naked and the Dead, the overspirit, is Tolstoyan; the rococo comes out of Dos Passos; the fundamental slogging style from Farrell, and the occasional overrich de- scriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso {{sfn|Manso|1985|p=101}}.

==Work Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |location= |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |url= |title=99 Novels: The Best English Novels Since 1939 |date= |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}

* {{cite book |last=Carson |first=Tom |url= |title="The Hell with Literature: James Jones's Unvarnished Truths" |date=28 September 1984 |publisher=Village Voice Literary Supplement |year=1984 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |page= |pages=18-20 |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |url-status=}}
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{{refend}}

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