Everyone has seen that film clip in black and white, the Hawaiian surf rolling in over a glamorous couple making love on a beach. One of the most iconic images from old Hollywood is that sundrenched snapshot showing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr lying entwined in their private paradise. When I stumbled across the book, I thought it would be a quick beach read: a fun, glamorous potboiler that the director and cinematographer had turned into a better movie. Wrong on all counts! Knocked out in the first round!

James Jones’s From Here to Eternity is a masterpiece of its era. When I discovered it had won the National Book Award I was not surprised. I was just amazed that I had not heard more about it in the media or through various classes I have taken. Its story pulses with the hearts of ordinary soldiers doing their time and waiting for Roosevelt to declare war. In the meantime, they strike up camaraderie in their companies, go out drinking and gambling and screwing around on pay day, fighting and making enemies and friends in the process. Many enjoy the comfort of their fraternity, no matter what penalties they have to endure. Some have joined to get a job in the Depression, but for others, there is a bone-deep honor and purpose in being a dogface soldier, a thirty-year-man.

When the stubborn Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt is transferred to G Company, he meets with First Sergeant Warden, a highly efficient and inscrutable leader, and Captain Dana Holmes, their self-satisfied officer who badly wants his men to win the intramural boxing champion that year. When known bantamweight Prewitt refuses to fight, he commits his first act of unofficial insubordination, is put on KP and generally given “The Treatment” by his fellow soldiers in the company. Both the cool 1st Sgt. Warden and heated Pvt. Prewitt are distracted from their chores or miseries, however, when they meet two very different women. Warden seduces his Commander’s wife, Karen, when she stops by to pay a visit to the office, and Prewitt falls for Lorene, an elegant and calculating prostitute at Mrs. Kipfer’s, a bawdy house downtown. They fall in love against their wishes and in seemingly impossible situations. Warden could get court-martialed for sleeping with an officer’s wife and the impulsive Prewitt is often in danger of spending all his money and going AWOL to enjoy his beautiful obsession.

The men’s edginess from knowing that the enemy is coming threads through this story. More than anything, however, this book depicts the love of men for the company of other men and the common purpose that binds them. They refer to their company as The Company, as if it were a brotherhood they would not want to leave, and at the same time view most officers above them with disrespect, seeing them as cowards and good-for-nothings.

From Here to Eternity reads as a spot-on portrayal of the army in that time and place. The characters’ thoughts and conversations ring true as they talk freely of their histories, backgrounds, racial prejudices, dreams, and boredom with their routines. This may be the most unabashedly macho book I have ever read, describing the deep stirrings of lust, anger, and fear in these men on the brink of war. When Prewitt is unfairly sent for a stint in the Stockade, he eventually joins his friend Angelo Maggio in Barrack Number Two. All the soldiers in Barrack Number Two land there by displaying insubordination within the Stockade. There they discuss philosophy with Jack Malloy, a brilliant, dreamy-eyed autodidact who had been informally educated by members of the Industrial Workers of the World, an international union also known as the Wobblies. In Malloy the author introduces a character who embodies intellectual subversion, calling everyone “citizen” and encouraging everyone to think for themselves. “They were proud men in Number Two. They were the toughest of the tough. They were the cream. They wore their barracks number like a medal of honor and guarded its bestowal as jealously as any Masonic Lodge or Midwestern Country Club ever guarded theirs.”

From Here to Eternity is somewhat flawed in its relentlessness, but it is brilliantly flawed and completely human. It has a depth and complexity that made me feel as if I knew what it was to be tattooed for life as a soldier with a self-imposed sentence, a bored, snarling, and complicated soldier waiting for war. As 1st Sgt. Warden and Pvt. Prewitt react to the attack on Pearl Harbor in very different ways, they become inevitable friends and recognize each other as men married to the U.S. Army, men who love their place within The Company, which could be any Army company. In this world, lust for women, while apparent everywhere, cannot compete with that deep and fundamental attachment to an Army that may treat them well or horribly, but in the end, takes them back as the father takes back the prodigal son.

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