Soldiers and Whores

There has not been a better book written about soldiers. In recent years, I believe, there have been few better books written. Jones' saga of a Regular Army unit stationed in Hawaii in the months before Pearl Harbor is narrated with great humor and understandind, and with a degree of skill that is startling in a first novel.

Jones is a good writer. From the 860 pages it is not hard to pick out, as some critics have done, lines and pages of expository writing that should have been out because they should have been and others that are derivative and clumsy. But Jones has to his credit one of the rarest of talents: a gift for realistic dialogue that looks convincing in print. Dialogue demands much more than an ear like a tape-recorder; the most carefully-reproduced speech looks contrived and trite unless it is edited and formalized. Jones produces nearly 600 pages of conversation with hardly a false note.

The dialogue is the heart of the book. Soldiers off duty in Hawaii spend their time playing poker and guitars, visiting whorehouses and drinking--but they talk doing all of these things. Much of their talk is obscene. Even more is funny, and a great deal is obscene and funny. The obscenities occur where they belong, and because the words are spelled right and used right they are surprisingly inconspicuous: Expurgated, "From Here to Eternity" would be less convincing, as well as consider ably shorter.

The two chief characters, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt and First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden are both good soldiers, thirty-year men who love the Army. Prewitt suffers from a naive belief that he has retained some individual rights; throughout the book, the Army's dealings with him consist of a vicious, continued assault on his self-respect. After brutal treatment in a disciplinary Stockade, Pewitt kills a guard and goes AWOL; in the end, he is shot by MP's while trying to rejoin his unit after Pearl Harbor.

Both Warden and Prewitt have love affairs in the course of the book, Prewitt with a respectable where and Warden with the wife of his captain. With some cynicism but convincing logie, Jones has them both flee their women when the relationships get too much like marriage.

The novel is weakest in its first two chapters and last section, in which Jones tries to define clearly the relationship of his protagonists to the Army. He never succeeds in explaining convinoingly just why Prewitt and Wardes loved the Army as much as we are told they did. At the end they both make romantic, almost sentimental, gutters of devotion that merely mask Jones' failure.

"From Here to Eternity" avoids emphasis of one important aspect of Army reality: the repetitiousness, monotony and boredom. Since other authors hand pushed that atmosphere to the point of reproducing it, the contantly imaginative writing and reliance on action has more of a virtue than a defect. Certainly these are minor lapses, in a book that gives an extraordinary impression of honesty.