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

2025-04-29T02:49:26Z

THarrell: undid grammar adjustments

{{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''. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05hic}}
{{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, and, However conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable will likely break out of his pages.{{sfn|Frye|1950|p=584}} }}

{{cquote|The epic requires as its object the occurrence of an action, which must achieve expression in the whole breadth of its circumstance and relations as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch.{{sfn|Moretti|1996|p=11}} }}

{{dc|dc=J|ames Jones was a born novelist}}. Norman Mailer was a born writer. This distinction holds, I believe, 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, I believe these illustrations help assess not only the quality of these two books and each author’s career.{{pg|318|319}}
==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.

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 renouncing the place that they have 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 clearly 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.{{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 status 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{{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 break-{{pg|323|324}}ing 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 evocation of 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''. 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|pp=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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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 middle-class 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 domestically 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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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 slapping 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.”{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking 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 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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|2005}} 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 mediocrity 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 Eisenhower, 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 multifaceted 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 {{harvtxt|Manso|1985}}.}}

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 development, 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|pp=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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=3-858|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=86-88|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=11-14|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title=”Mailers Rhythm” The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=10|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:From Here to Eternity and The Naked and the Dead: Premiere to Eternity?}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-17T03:20:47Z

THarrell: updated Citation #5

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Brand|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Scribner|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Vintage|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Vintage|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-17T03:15:44Z

THarrell: fixed citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}} 
{{byline
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| url = ...
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=356}} }}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea, imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece, “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J. Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan, {{sfn|Lennon|2008|pp=515-517}} but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan is only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying, “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement, but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.”{{sfn|Kehoe|1961}} They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges”. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=1}} The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''”.{{sfn|Mailer|2004|p=182}} In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=517}}

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932.{{sfn|Scribner|1932}} That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”,{{sfn|Vintage|1997|p=353}} which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will”.{{sfn|Vintage|1997|p=352}}

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence.{{sfn|Mailer|1967}} In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”). {{sfn|Buckley|1958}}

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater?{{sfn|Brand|2004}} These are not idle questions, and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.”{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)”.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=286}}

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, and intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss”(3-4)?{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd”(4-5).{{sfn|Kinnamon|2004}} Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans, or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate, and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So, not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance, they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile, and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amuse the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

== Citations ==
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
* {{cite book |last=Brand |first=Anthony |date=2004 |title=A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher=Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| title = Bullfight
| publisher = Bonanza Books
| date = 1958
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| title = "My Life Inside"
| publisher = Esquire
| date = September 1988
| isbn = }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1987 |title= "Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1932 |title= "Death in the Afternoon" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1941 |title= "For Whom the Bell Tolls" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kehoe |first=Vincent J-R |date=1961 |title="Wine, Women & Toros" |url= |location=New York |publisher= Hastings House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kinnamon |first=Keneth |date=2004 |title= "The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's |url= |location=Rochester, NY |publisher= Camden House |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2008 |title="Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007"|url= |location= |publisher= The Mailer Review 2.1 |pages=515-517 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text |url= |location=New York |publisher=CBS Records/Macmillan |pages=1 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1997 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |pages= |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-09T04:32:59Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-09T04:31:16Z

THarrell: responded

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the {{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}.

I have gone line by line with a rule to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.

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

2025-04-09T04:26:58Z

THarrell: updated sfn pp

{{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|Frye|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.{{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 status 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.

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|pp=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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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 middle-class 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 domestically 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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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 slapping 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”.{{sfn|Jones|1951|pp=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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 mediocrity 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 Eisenhower, 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 multifaceted 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 development, 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|pp=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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=3-858|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=86-88|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=11-14|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=10|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-09T04:21:57Z

THarrell: updated text

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{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|Frye|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}}}}

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{{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.{{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 status 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.

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|pp=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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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 middle-class 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 domestically 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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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 slapping 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”.{{sfn|Jones|1951|p=410-411}} This refers to fears that Prewitt thinks his unthinking 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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 mediocrity 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 Eisenhower, 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 multifaceted 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 development, 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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=3-858|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=86-88|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=11-14|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=10|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-09T04:00:33Z

THarrell: UPDATED TEXT

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{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|Frye|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}}}}

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{{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.{{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 status 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.

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|pp=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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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 middle-class 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 domestically 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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=3-858|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=86-88|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=11-14|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=10|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T22:54:45Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T22:51:01Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T01:47:39Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited.

[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T01:46:11Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited.

[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner

== Completed Remediation ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T01:45:47Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited.

[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner

== Completed Remediation ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-08T01:44:52Z

THarrell: /* Completed Remediation */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited.

[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner

== Completed Remediation ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?

Have a great day.

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

2025-04-08T01:23:22Z

THarrell: added page numbers to ref

{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=3-858|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=86-88|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=11-14|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=10|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-08T00:44:54Z

THarrell: updated references

{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |url= |journal= Hudson Review |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |date= |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-08T00:34:22Z

THarrell: updated misspelled sf

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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{{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|Frye|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}}}}

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{{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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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|1948|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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction Hudson Review |url= |journal= |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |date= |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-08T00:30:42Z

THarrell: updated ref

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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|1948|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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction Hudson Review |url= |journal= |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |date= |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston|isbn= |location= |publication-date=1948 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-08T00:20:52Z

THarrell: updated spelling garret

{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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|Garret|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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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 Garret 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, Garret 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|Garret|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 Garret’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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction Hudson Review |url= |journal= |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |date= |pages=582-598 |date=1950 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P.|title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt |isbn= |edition= |location= |pages=100 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-07T23:55:59Z

THarrell: add more |pages=|ref=harv }} to references page

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{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|Frye|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}}}}

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{{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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Frye |first=Northrop |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction Hudson Review |url= |journal= |volume= 2 |issue= 4 |date= |pages=582-598 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Garret |first=George P. |url= |title=James Jones |date=1984 |publisher=New York: Harcourt,1984 |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=James |url= |title=From Here to Eternity |publisher=New York: Scribner, 1951 |year=1951 |isbn= |location= ||pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |title=The Naked and the Dead |date= |publisher=New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |year=1985 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1985 |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Meyer |first=Michael |url= |title=The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |pages=|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |isbn= |edition=Keynote Speaker |location=Provincetown, MA |publication-date=2008|pages=|ref=harv }}
{{refend}}

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

2025-04-07T23:39:08Z

THarrell: updated ref

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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{{sfn|Burgess|1984}} 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”.}}{{sfn|Dickstein|2005}}
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 |publisher=New York: Summit |year=1984 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{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 |isbn= |edition=1st |location= |pages=18-20 |ref=harv }}
* {{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= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |url= |title=Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970 |publisher=Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages=25 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |author=Frye |first=Northrop |url= |title=Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. |publisher=Princeton: Princeton UP |year=1957 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=The Four Forms of Prose Fiction |date= |publisher=Hudson Review 2.4 (Winter 1950) |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 |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 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |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 |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |page= 2128|ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |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?

2025-04-07T23:26:19Z

THarrell: trying to fix error message, added |pages= |ref=harv }}

{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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 |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 |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 |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. |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) |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 |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 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |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 |publisher=Boston: Bedford |year=2005 |isbn= |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Moretti |first=Franco |title=Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez |date=1996 |publisher=London: Verso |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |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?

2025-04-07T23:20:11Z

THarrell:

{{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|Frye|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.

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}}{{sfn|Moretti|1996}}

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}}

==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 |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 |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 |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. |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) |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 |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 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |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 |publisher=Boston: Bedford |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 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |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?

2025-04-07T19:09:38Z

THarrell: updated references

{{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 |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 |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 |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. |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) |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 |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 |isbn= |location= |publication-date=1984 |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |url= |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |publisher=New York: Simon |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 |publisher=Boston: Bedford |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 |isbn= |location= |page= |access-date=}}
* {{cite book |last=Ricks |first=Christopher |title="Mailers Rhythm" The Norman Mailer Society Conference |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?

2025-04-07T18:39:23Z

THarrell: added EFN notes

{{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 |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?

2025-04-07T18:23:52Z

THarrell: added EFN

{{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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T02:02:14Z

THarrell: updated citations

{{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. 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T01:51:20Z

THarrell: updated citations and typos

{{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. 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 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 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T01:26:30Z

THarrell: updated citations and grammar

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{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}}}}

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{{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. 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 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 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T01:15:20Z

THarrell: updated citations

{{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 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, 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 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 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T01:09:22Z

THarrell: updated grammar, typos and citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
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{{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}}}}

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{{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 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, 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 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 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T00:56:58Z

THarrell: updated grammar and typos

{{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 “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, 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 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 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}}

==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?

2025-04-07T00:51:25Z

THarrell: updated grammar and typos

{{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}}}}

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{{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 “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, 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 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 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 de- scriptions from Wolfe,” said Mailer to interviewer Peter Manso {{sfn|Manso|1985|p=101}}.

==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 |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?

2025-04-07T00:33:57Z

THarrell: updated quotations and grammar

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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{{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 “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}}.

==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 |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?

2025-04-07T00:32:08Z

THarrell: updated quotations and grammar

{{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 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}}.

==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 |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?

2025-04-03T00:06:13Z

THarrell: fixed spacing in intro

{{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==
{{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 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?

2025-04-03T00:05:23Z

THarrell: fixed work cited numbers and spacing in intro

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{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==
{{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 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?

2025-04-02T23:56:30Z

THarrell: updated work cited, and citation numbers and intro

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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==
{{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 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?

2025-04-02T19:13:36Z

THarrell: fixed page numbers

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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?

2025-04-02T19:06:35Z

THarrell: added page number

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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.
{{pg|320|321}}
“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{{pg|332|333}} 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?

2025-04-02T19:04:02Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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.

“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{{pg|332|333}} 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?

2025-04-02T19:01:34Z

THarrell: added page numbers and work cited and citations

{{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.

“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{{pg|332|333}} 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?

2025-04-02T18:52:15Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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.

“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.

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= |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?

2025-04-02T18:43:51Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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.

“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 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= |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?

2025-04-02T18:38:05Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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= |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?

2025-04-02T18:37:00Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{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=}}
* {{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?

2025-04-02T18:06:22Z

THarrell:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''From Here to Eternity'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'': Premiere to Eternity?}}
{{Working}}
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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==