Of Herman Wouk and James Jones: A Few Thoughts

One doesn't hear much of the writers Herman Wouk or James Jones these days, and still less comparison of the two. Still, such comparison was once common, and for good reason. Both Wouk and Jones were young men in the Depression era who served in the Pacific campaign in World War II. Both became Big Names at nearly the outset of their careers with novels they published in 1951 that were inspired by their wartime experience (Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, Jones' From Here to Eternity) that were each one of the top two bestsellers of the year (Wouk's book #2, Jones' book #1 on the Publisher's Weekly list for that year), claimed a major literary award (Wouk's getting the Pulitzer, Jones' the National Book Award), and shortly made into an Oscar-winning film classic (in 1953 and 1954, respectively). It may be added that both writers repeatedly returned to the theme of World War II in their writing over the next two decades (Wouk in the epics The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Jones in The Thin Red Line and the unfinished Whistle), which Hollywood adapted for the screen in high-profile fashion, while remaking the films based on their earlier work (New Hollywood star William Friedkin most recently remaking The Caine Mutiny for Showtime). And enduring as their cultural presence was in this way, both writers' admirers thought that their author is less read than he ought to be, in part because he never got his due from the critical elite, partly because they wrote in a fairly straightforward fashion that made them accessible to and popular with a general audience rather than gleefully crapping all over conventional narrative in service to the Great God Unreason in that way so beloved of the middlebrow today.

Still, along with the similarities there were differences, key to which is how each of these writers treated the war, and it might be added, American society, in their first book and those that followed it. Wouk was sufficiently to the right to uphold tribal taboo on principle, sneer at civilians as the moral inferiors of soldiers, and even stand for flat authoritarianism in the key revelatory scene in The Caine Mutiny that left many appalled and bewildered (not least the sociologist William Whyte, who discusses the scene critically in his book The Organization Man as exemplary of what he feared was becoming of post-war American society). By contrast Jones took a far more critical stance toward society, toward the armed forces, toward the war itself.

All of this has had its reflection in just who has felt the authors in question to be underappreciated. It is for the most part neoconservatives like David Frum and John Podhoretz whom one finds celebrating Wouk these days (John, interestingly, going so far as to lengthily apologize in the pages of Commentary for his father's less than flattering review of one of Wouk's books six decades earlier!)-- while if it was less gushingly enthusiastic, the Guardian's obituary for Mr. Wouk was highly respectful. By contrast the Guardian, reviewing a recent musical stage adaptation of From Here to Eternity--some elements of which musical one would expect to have led to a very positive review given the attitude of the Guardian's editors toward such matters--took a dismissive "Why dredge all that up now?" attitude toward the play's critical treatment of the armed forces. As all this goes to show, it is not even in the more "liberal" corners of the mainstream but on the "real," and rather marginalized, left that one finds a really critical attitude toward Wouk, or a more admiring one toward Jones.

Of course, if one is more likely to come across admirers of Wouk than Jones, their laments testify to Wouk as well as Jones being little read today, one can argue that (aside from that fact which cannot be stated enough, that fewer and fewer read much of anything today, let alone books) the view of the war and of life Wouk championed has had its standard-bearers--that even if few read his novels, the books, film, video games created by Steven Spielberg, Tom Brokaw, Stephen Ambrose and the makers of the Call of Duty series, if not directly influenced by Wouk, at least carried forward his broad vision of the conflict as they shaped the understanding of World War II and America today. (One can go so far as to say that with them coming along in the 1990s the job of promulgating such a view had been picked up by younger persons better able to champion it in a culture very different in many ways from what it was in 1951 than Wouk was.) In the process the view of the war, the armed forces and all associated with them espoused by figures like Jones--or Norman Mailer, or Kurt Vonnegut, or Joseph Heller, or any number of others whose experience and painfully won understanding has not fit in with the Greatest Generation/Band of Brothers narrative--has been all but buried so far as the popular consciousness is concerned, a fact likely of considerable consequence in the war-torn twenty-first century.