Read From Here To Eternity (2004)

What do You think about From Here To Eternity (2004)?

WARNING: Este review incluye cebadura que puede herir su objetividad.Después de leer Moby dick, sentí que tenía que crear una categoría más arriba de la que ocupaban mis libros favoritos. Podía elegirla como mi novela favorita o no, pero lo que me parecía indiscutible es que en volumen me había ofrecido mucho más que cualquier otra anterior. Tenía símbolos tan fuertes que podían usarse de mil maneras, y tan fascinantes que me impulsaban a hacerlo, no una sino varias veces. Me daba la sensación de que la atracción de Melville por la biblia lo había llevado a escribir la suya propia: un libro que no deja de generar sabiduría, que sigue creando significados para nuevas generaciones o diferentes lectores. Es en esa categoría donde ahora quiero enchufar From here to eternity.En las primeras páginas identifiqué a Prewitt como un soldado raso con un perfil muy romántico: un pobretipo, neciamente fiel a su propio código (abandonó el boxeo porque una vez hirió permanentemente a un amigo por accidente), que no termina de pegarla ni profesionalmente ni amorosamente y termina pasando noches de sábado dando vueltas por la base con 20 centavos en el bolsillo... que termina perdiendo en una mano de poker.Hasta ahí creía que Jones simplemente sabía combinar memorias con ciertos mecanismos placenteros de la ficción que habría heredado de algún lado u otro. Pero después empiezan a pasar cosas... eventos que agitan todos los conceptos que estaban establecidos. Y otros nuevos aparecen. Personajes que son una novela en sí, muchísimos capítulos memorables, temas que se multiplican. En algún punto empecé a ver a Jones como un maestro que me estaba dando cátedra de ficción. Cada decisión que tomaba me parecía correcta, y si no, pensaba que el problema era mío.Hay un tema que me parece recurrente, y es el del individuo vs. organización. La mayor contradiccion de Prewitt consiste en amar el ejército y a la vez querer ser uno, manifestar su carácter, mostrar su descontento; en un ámbito donde no se permite nada menos que la obediencia absoluta. Mi sección favorita es la que transcurre en la "empalizada" (una prisión militar): ahí es donde Prewitt encuentra un frente de rebeldía en el ejército, y donde se llevan a cabo los enfrentamientos más espectaculares del libro. Y donde también termina conociendo un personaje todavía más romántico que él: Jack Malloy.La dualidad protagónica es algo que me pareció un gran acierto y algo sobre lo que hay que aprender. Simplemente, el lector nunca siente que le están imponiendo un modelo. Son más bien dos, que forman una dicotomía que sea quizá la gran tensión del libro. Cuando Prewitt expresa su filosofía en una frase seca "if a man don't go his own way, he's nothing"; Warden, el más pragmático, sobreviviente, y una alternativa terrenal al héroe romántico, le responde "Maybe back in the days of the pioneers a man could go his own way, but today you got to play ball". Y al lector le queda debatirse entre ambos.Después viene Pearl Harbor, probablmente la mayor razón por la que muchos hayan leído este libro, que en realidad termina siendo un capítulo insólito y disparatado. Y después del final, siguen volviendo todos esos momentos imborrables: una noche solitaria en que después de perder al poker Prewitt termina buscando algún regocijo ojeando revistas viejas en un hall, el impresionante capítulo del suicidio de Bloom, la descripción de la época dorada de los wooblies (que yo desconocía completamente), el episodio estilo "flujo de conciencia" durante la estadía de Prewitt en el hoyo negro, la euforia y diversión de los soldados disparando durante el bombardeo, las últimas y memorables pinceladas de la historia de Prewitt, esa última imagen de los leis desapareciendo por la borda...Sí, diría que me gustó el libro.
—Alden Weer

When James Jones died the Army lost one of its own. Here was a soldier, a man with an abiding regard for things military. Many novelists treat war and the Army but only with a passing interest. They write one book and get it out of their systems. For Jones, From Here to Eternity was the start of a lifelong study of what it means to be a soldier. To the day he died he thought like a soldier. Other writers delve into high society or family life or la vie boheme. Jones was at his best when he explored the mind of an enlisted man. He was not career Army but he made the Army his career. It had its name on everything he wrote.The Pineapple Army was what he knew best. The modern, relatively democratized Army was alien to him. He would appreciate the tremendous improvements in the life of the enlisted man. We must look across decades to imagine what his life was like. He himself was an EM. Then, enlisted men were poorly paid, harshly disciplined, often humiliated, and rarely listened to. But the time was the Great Depression and opportunity outside was nil. The Army gave a man three square meals a day and a roof over his head. Jones, like so many others, was a refugee from the bread line.Enlisting in 1939, he left a stormy home life. He could not stand his mother; his father committed suicide. He was at Hickam Field in Honolulu on December 7, 1941. From Here to Eternity contains a memorable account of that day: it is a lazy Sunday morning breakfast until the mess dishes begin to rattle. The men wonder why gunnery practice is so close and so early. The calm sweeps into frenzy. The barracks are raked by diving Zeros. Men running across the quadrant are stitched in their tracks as machine gun bullets walk over them, kicking up dust. Jones survived the Sunday Morning Massacre only to get his in the South Pacific.He was a belly-in-the-mud jungle fighter on Guadalcanal. The Thin Red Line is based on that combat. He vividly describes the white-hot bloody battles for hills with numbers. History has forgotten the numbers. Jones never forgot the courage and the cowardice of men under fire. The novel is almost a textbook of battle. It has remarkably close and accurate descriptions of men at war. Couple this with a precise memory, a keen eye for detail, an acute ear for soldier-speak, and a first-rate style emerges. Most of all, he depicts battle with the intense vision of a man striving to be objective. All is in perspective; no one is blamed. The weaknesses and strengths of men are facts to be accepted.Jones’ men become soldiers only as they face up to death. Seeing dead men all around, they must realize that a bullet will catch up with them, if not on this campaign, then on the next island. If not on the next, then the one after, for the war will last longer than their luck will. Physical agony is all around in The Thin Red Line. A man ripped open, clutching his purple intestines spilling into the dirt beneath him, screams for help, while slowly, too slowly, he dies. Another man, going days without rest, under continual fire, about to break, receives a dear john. His wife tells him that she wants to marry a man she has been bedding.These men, doomed men, are the stuff of Jones’ stories. They are often the outcasts of society but they find dignity on the battlefield. Jones had faith that the average joe will come through, spirit intact. In From Here to Eternity Robert E. Lee Prewitt, or Prew, has left the coal mines of Harlan County, Kentucky. Like so many others during the Depression—and like Jones—he joins the Regular Army. While others wait for the job market to open, he finds his place in the Army. He can find nothing prouder than to be a Thirty Year Man. The Army gives him his dignity. He proves himself a good boxer and a superb bugilist. After a punch blinded his opponent, he turns from boxing to the sense of beauty he can find in the mournful notes of Taps. He finds a calling and is thankful to the Army that his life has purpose. Like his childhood guitar-playing, the bugle makes him feel that “pain might not be pointless” if it can be turned into music. Pain is indeed his lot. Jones shows that the same Army, the Pineapple Army, which gives Prew his music, is pitted against him.The Army becomes symbolic of the machinery of Jones’ 1930s society, which grinds individuals into cogs. Prew must assert his individual worth against social pressure. He refuses to box because he blinded a buddy, Dixie Wells, and he will not bugle because he will not play politics. So he transfers to an infantry outfit. There, he gets “the treatment.” The company commander is also regimental boxing coach. The noncoms, all boxers, relentlessly torment him to join the boxing team. Prew won’t break. He will not play the game. The novel also has another Thirty Year Man, a decent type who successfully plays the game. First Sergeant Milt Warden and Prewitt understand one another, even warily respect one another, but they can never agree. Warden calls Prewitt a hardhead. To Prewitt the matter is simple. “He had to leave the Bugle Corps because he was a bugler.” Red, a buddy, “did not have to leave it. But he had to leave because most of all he wanted to stay.” This is Prewitt’s kind of integrity. If you do something well, he believes, then you must give it your utmost. There can be no compromise. If politics force compromise, then get out of the Bugle Corps.Jones himself chose an unconventional life. After recovery time in military hospitals he was mustered out in 1944. But he took the Army home with him and, like Prewitt, remained a Thirty Year Man for the rest of his life. He chose a hard road in civilian life. While in the hospital he decided to become a writer. His first novel was rejected by Scribners in 1945. The next six years were impoverished and difficult until From Here to Eternity. It became an immediate success in 1951. Established as a writer, and royalties flowing in, he wrote other novels, including Some Came Running and The Merry Month of May.Prewitt played the bugle. Jones wrote his books. Jones sang of valor and tragedy, comradeship and hatred, barbarity and kindness. He pulled no punches. His characters are without halos. Some of them perform unspeakable cruelties in the name of civilization. Nonetheless, Jones shows these men as occasionally noble, heroic, self-sacrificing. They are real-life men, or composites of them—soldiers he fought with, ate with, drank with.He is gone. His words remain. They are a gift from him to us. He had a poem by Yeats read at his graveside. The poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” has some telling lines in it: “That is no country for old men. The young/ in one another’s arms, birds in the trees,/ . . . fish, flesh, and fowl, commend all summer long,/ whatever is begotten, born, and dies . . . And therefore I have sailed the seas and come/ To the holy city of Byzantium.” He has crossed the seas. He wrote much about what men needed for the voyage. They need bravery and dignity. And so he is in Byzantium and we still have our summers and birds in the trees. Now his stories belong to soldiers living and soldiers yet to be born. Hence, he will live on. So long as there is an Army there will always be a James Jones.
—John Alt

Society can be considered a fabric that surrounds us. It’s a warm blanket that has been pieced together to suit our way of life and our collective needs. Society, keeps us safe, wards off isolation, and also defines the possibilities of our success. But society is not tailor-made. It is lumpy where it’s been stretched and binding in the places that have never been touched. Regardless of who we are, however, we must live with the fit that society affords us or suffer the consequences of living without its collective warmth.From Here to Eternity use the world of the Army as it existed pre-draft, pre-WWII, to recreate a small, deeply personalize model of society. The Army, with all of its politics, vices, egotistical influences, and rules interacts with the two main characters in ways that echo our modern-day interactions with society. And it’s this miniaturization effect that intensifies this theme and brings the irregular fit of their blanket into a modern-day context.The two main characters serve to illustrate the two extremes of human-societal interactions. On one side of the extreme, Sgt. Warden exemplifies the rewards that society bestows upon those that adhere to its rules while also depicting the parts of our humanity that we must give up (or have taken away) while achieving society’s expectations.Pvt. Prewitt exemplifies the other extreme. Prewitt is driven by his personal need to be true to himself regardless of expectations. Rather than try to pull the lumpy parts of the blanket over him to create a better fit, he simply throws the blanket off, accepts the consequences, and lives true to his convictions. Prewitt exemplifies the punishment that society doles out to its non-conformists.Warden and Prewitt; both men know instinctively who they are. Not only do they suffer their individual fates but they also suffer their desires to be more like each other. Prewitt desires the collective warmth but cannot deny his true self. Warden desires to live as his true self but cannot give up the rewards that society has bestowed upon him. By the end of the book, you are left to evaluate the suffering that both men endure and you are left to wonder if we, as individuals, will ever be at peace amongst our collective selves.And so it goes for all of us, from here to the end of time.
—Daniel Villines