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

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.

<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>

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.

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.

 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.

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.

''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.

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.

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:

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 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.