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

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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}}. 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}}

''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''===  

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

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:

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.

==Citations==

==Work Cited==

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* {{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 }}

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