From Here to Eternity and the American Experience

From Here to Eternity and the American Experience Robert Lacy (bio) I first read James Jones's From Here to Eternity in the summer of 1954 while getting ready to attend college on a football scholarship. Actually it was a junior college and a half scholarship. I was seventeen at the time, and Jones's novel had been published three years earlier. I don't remember where I came across it, but it was probably downtown at one of the drugstore paperback racks I used to haunt in Marshall, Texas, where I grew up. At eight hundred-plus pages, the novel must have been a "paperback giant," as they were termed in those days, and it may have cost me thirty-five cents instead of the usual quarter. It had a drawing of a bugle on its black cover. I read three big military novels that summer. The other two were Battle Cry by Leon Uris and The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. Battle Cry, which dealt with the Marines in World War II, was execrably written and extremely gung ho. The Cruel Sea concerned the British Navy in the North Sea, also during World War II, and I found it a bit alien but fairly well written. I enjoyed all three novels—I was heavily into things military at the time—but it was From Here to Eternity that stuck with me. Now there, I told myself at seventeen, was a book. My near contemporary and fellow Texan Larry McMurtry must have felt much the same way. When he wrote his first novel, Horseman, Pass By (which Hollywood would call Hud), several years later, what was it he had his point-of-view character, the sixteen-year-old Lonnie, reading? It was From Here to Eternity, of course. This was back in the days when teenage boys still read novels, quaint as that now seems. The second time I read From Here to Eternity was in the fall of 1964 at [End Page 641] the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It was one of the ten or so novels that Richard Yates, our instructor, had chosen for study in his writing class. A novelist himself, Yates was a great admirer of the Jones novel, which by 1964, on the lip of the Vietnam era, had lost much of its popular luster. (Its critical luster had never been very bright.) In speaking to us earlier in the semester of The Great Gatsby, another of the novels he had assigned, Yates had memorably described it as a little book "that gains range as it gathers momentum." And he described Jones's behemoth in a similar vein as having "the narrative pull of a locomotive." I have always liked that. Yates had a way of making things stick in your mind. What accounts for this strong narrative pull? How was it that a first-time novelist like James Jones was able to pile all those pages one atop the other like that—the manuscript must have stood waist high to a small boy—and still give them enough force to impel us right through? After all it's a story about the U.S. Army in Hawaii in peacetime. Lots of boozing and whoring and male bonding. Lots of sentimental twaddle about boxing and bugling and West Virginia coal mining. Lots of bad writing. So how did Jones pull it off? The truly brilliant thing he did was to shape his story toward a big payoff—and then have the wisdom and the courage to postpone it for nearly seven hundred and fifty pages. "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait," Yates used to say. Those were his three keys to writing the successful novel. And Jones employed them to perfection in From Here to Eternity. The coming attack on Pearl Harbor—the day that would live in infamy—hangs over the story from the very beginning. We as readers approach the book with the historical fact of it in the backs of our minds. We know it's coming; therefore it colors our perception of everything we read, lending an air of foreboding to even the most mundane events: a visit...

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