From Here to Eternity: James Jones, Boxing, and Masculinity
An author looking for love and finding it in unlikely places
James Jones (1921-1977) is remembered for three books about World War II. The first, From Here to Eternity, appeared in 1951. At 850 pages, it achieved a rare level of popular and critical success. The book topped the New York Times best-seller list for several weeks; won the National Book Award in 1952; and in 1953 was adapted as a film that won eight Academy Awards. Jones was 30 in 1951; he had just 26 years to live. The novels that complete Jones’s so-called trilogy are The Thin Red Line (1962) and Whistle (1978, posthumous). He wrote other novels as well.
Unable to attend college because of the Depression, Jones enlisted in the Army in 1939, 18 years old. He was at Pearl Harbor, where the novel is set, when the Japanese attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, and was apparently the only novelist on the scene. As an enlisted man (EM), he saw action in the Pacific and attained the rank of sergeant. Jones had boxed in high school and fought in Golden Gloves tournaments. He was assigned to the U. S. Army’s Hawaiian Division, 27th Infantry, Company E, a unit known as “The Boxing Company.”
Given his background, we might expect Jones’s first novel to connect boxing to the War. But neither boxing nor the War is prominent in the book. The only detailed boxing match takes place in chapter 34 (of 55 chapters), on grass outside a mess hall rather than in a ring. It lasts 90 minutes (pp. 486-89). The attack on Pearl Harbor does not occur until chapter 50 (p. 737; it is alluded to a few pages earlier, p. 710).
For Jones. boxing is a lens on the power structure of Army culture. In the years before the War, boxing and other sports were part of a “jockstrap” system. Commanders whose teams were successful in competition could expect promotions and good assignments. In turn, their athletes were exempt from much-hated standard duties, such as KP, and they were favored for promotion. “This has always been a jockstrap Army, ever since Tunney first started fighting for the Marines in France” [in World War I], an older sergeant says (p. 159).
The “jockstrap” system rested on the belief that competitive athletes made the best soldiers, a venerable cliché of military history (e.g.,“the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”). The link persists. Today the U.S. Army’s website hosts an article claiming that soldiers “should be trained like elite athletes” (go to https://www.army.mil/article/133578/brown_soldiers_should_be_trained_like_ elite_athletes).
The EMs in From Here to Eternity are young, many of them from families that were, like Jones’s own, crushed by the Depression. The book’s central character, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, did not finish seventh grade, as he frequently reminds those around him. After he spent several years “on the bum,” he enlisted and has been a soldier for over five years. He insists that he can “soljer” with the best and intends to make a career of the military, to be “a thirty-year man.”
Prewitt has transferred into a new company that is led by Captain Dana (“Dynamite”) Holmes, who is also the captain of the company’s boxing squad. When Holmes reports to his superior, Colonel Delbert, Delbert says that “every soldier knows . . . that good athletics make for good soldiering.” He adds that the company’s athletic programs have been declining, which is unfortunate, for “its [sic] our athletic programs that keep us before the public’s eye,” especially in Hawaii, where there are “no bigtime sports” (p. 55). Good soldiering is less important than making the unit look good.
Prewitt holds the key to the novel’s themes of boxing and art. He has special talents that bring him to the attention of his superiors. He has boxed at the regimental level, and he is also an outstanding bugle player. But because of his extraordinary independent streak, both talents become sources of contention. Just how adept a fighter we can see in his long match with the company’s star boxer (pp. 486-89). A welterweight with a good record, he refuses to continue his boxing career because he once blinded his opponent.
Prewitt knows he is a very good bugler. Even so, he was passed over for promotion to First Bugler, a position that went to a less talented man who had a sexual relationship with the sergeant in charge. Thereafter Prewitt refused to stay in the bugle corps. (Jones with Montgomery Clift, who plays Prewitt in the film, below.)
Prewitt is punished by being given “the treatment” (harassment, extra duty) that is designed to force him to join the boxing squad. He finds himself engaged in perpetual power struggles with two superiors who stand to benefit from the skills he will not use. They are his First Sergeant, Milt Warden, and Holmes, his captain. These themselves men are in professional and personal competition, since Warden is having an affair with Holmes’s wife.
On a clean-up detail, Prewitt is harassed by a bullying NCO. Prewitt does not mind the abuse until Holmes appears, with Warden hovering behind him (p. 279). Prewitt talks back to the sergeant in front of Holmes and then twice refuses Holmes’s order to apologize to the NCO. Outraged and offended, Holmes sends Prewitt on a 10-mile-roundtrip hike to a mountain pass, with 60 or 70 pounds of gear on his back. When he returns, he again refuses to apologize and is ordered to repeat the trip, which he does. He knows his behavior will eventually get him sent to the stockade.
Holmes wants Prewitt court-martialed and locked up. Warden reminds him that if Prewitt is in the stockade, he will not be able to box in the company’s smokers. Holmes says he does not care; he wants Prewitt punished, and “fuck the fucking championship.” The NCO times his reply carefully. “‘You don’t mean that, Captain,’ the Warden said softly, in horror,” for surely the Captain doesn't want “to take a chance on losing your championship” (p. 286). Warden manipulates Holmes and enjoys it; he wants “the fun of seeing if [he] could pull it off.” He does. The officer backs down and the First Sergeant sees to it that no charges against Prewitt are filed (p. 287). Warden seems to be speaking like an adult to a child, or like a calm, rational male talking an over-excited woman.
Later, however, Prewitt’s conduct is the focus of a discussion involving Warden, Holmes, and two officers of higher rank, Lt. Colonel Jake Delbert, the regimental commander, and his commander, Brig. Gen. Sam Slater (ch. 23). Very young to be a general and widely seen as a rising star, Slater dominates both Delbert, much his senior in age, and the NCOs, both his seniors in experience.
When Delbert asks Holmes if he has persuaded Prewitt to box for the company, Holmes replies that his NCOs are giving Prewitt “the treatment” (p. 342). Slater emphasizes that fear must be used to break Prewitt. Expounding his views of stable social order, Slater traces the demise of the Victorian world, with its reliance on honor and paternalism—the old social code—and the rise of a new world order based on coercion and fear—the new code (p. 338).
“Social fear is the most tremendous single source of power in existence,” Slater says. In his view, “the secret is to cause every caste to fear its superiors and be contemptuous of its inferiors” (pp. 342-43). However, while asserting the importance of hierarchy, Slater insists that the men drinking with him—all of them his social and military inferiors—call him “Sam.” This ostensible gesture of comradeship is merely another way in which he asserts his control. How to control Prewitt is the problem before them.
Preserving the privileges of rank is what counts, Slater adds, declaring that “the boxing thing itself is unimportant.” Hoping to impress Slater, Delbert orders Holmes to “break” Prewitt, even if it requires cruelty, so long as it is “for the good of the whole.” Slater agrees with Delbert, with “a curiously feminine satisfaction.” Holmes, however, is left “feeling suddenly for no reason like he had been seduced, the way a woman must feel” (p. 345).
Delbert appears to be stronger and crueler—more masculine—than Slater, who, in a woman-like way (as Jones sees it) is satisfied by leaving the dirty work to somebody else, knowing that the dirty work will be done. By contrast, Holmes feels undercut, “the way a woman must feel” when she is made to do something she does not want to do. Both men seem to have become less manly, Slater by getting his way, Holmes by realizing that he is seen as needing Delbert’s power behind him. This new effort will land Prewitt in the stockade.
For a resolutely heterosexual book, packed with men who see women exclusively as objects of sexual convenience, From Here to Eternity makes unexpected comparisons between the sexes, as we see above with Slater and Holmes. The book shows men moving freely between male and female spheres and heterosexual and homosexual worlds.
Prewitt is the best example. He knows about queerness and explains that lots of men in his company are “honest queer-chasers” who go to gay bars. Queers make him feel ashamed, but he does not know why. He reports that “on the bum a lot of good guys went queer, though, because they just wasnt any women” (p. 367). He seems to have been one of these men. Men must have sex; if there are no women, then men will have sex with men. Sex acts are just acts; men and women are interchangeable objects. A line crossed one direction can, of course, be crossed in the other, so something is gained (sex) but nothing lost (heterosexual identity).
Prewitt is smarter and more sophisticated than others take him to be. He quizzes wealthy gay men who pay for sexual favors from soldiers about their sense of sin and guilt. He criticizes a gay man’s French pronunciation (“It sounds like you don’t know French at all,” p. 375). Prewitt is the only one who understands that freedom means freedom from fear. As we have seen, fear stabilizes the book’s hierarchy of power. Without making the connection obvious, Jones shows that Prewitt knows how to neutralize what Lt. Gen. Slater declares to be “the most tremendous single source of power in existence.” When a gay man tells Prewitt “I fear nothing,” Prewitt replies, “Then you’re free” (pp. 384-85). Prewitt marshalls many powers because, I believe, Jones is speaking through him.
Prewitt is uneasy about the latitude of his sexual behavior. He does not know what makes him feel ashamed about homosexual men, but I think that the answer seems obvious: it is his own sexual history. “Queer” is, of course, a slur. The queens with whom Prewitt associates wince when he uses the word. When he compares his behavior to theirs, it seems, he winces too.
The bugle, not boxing, reveals who Prewitt is. Anderson is the bugler who, for sexual reasons, was promoted over Prewitt. One evening Prewitt criticizes Andy’s slack performance of Tattoo, the bugle call that sends soldiers to their barracks at the end of the day. It has to be snappy, Prewitt says, and “urgent,” because “you’re telling them to get them goddam lights out” (pp. 214-15). Andy does not argue. He seems to have no sense of how to connect his music to its purpose. Impressed, he offers Prewitt a chance to play Taps at 11 p.m.
Prewitt accepts, but then protests that he is almost too nervous to play—even though he has his mouthpiece with him and seems to carry it with him everywhere. Andy kids him about his unease, and Prewitt says, angrily of course, “You never get nervous, do you?” Andy says he does not. “Then you ain’t got no goddam sensitivity,” Prewitt says, “nor sympathy, nor understanding.”
Prewitt has both. When he plays Taps, his notes “hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding” (p. 216). Aware that, on this night, Taps sounds different, some men step outside to hear it. When the music ends they “filed back inside with lowered eyes, suddenly ashamed of their own emotion, and of seeing a man’s naked soul” (p. 217). Prewitt, we know, is uneasy because he uses music to show his own naked soul to others. The men sense this; one of them knows that the music is Prewitt’s the second he hears it.
Jones’s account of the sympathy and understanding that go into Prewitt’s Taps seems visionary and spiritual, with the bugle’s notes hovering like haloes over sleeping heads. Prewitt is able to crown the sleeping men with his own attributes of sympathy and understanding, and also of humility, modesty, and sensitivity. Those virtues mark an artist who puts his heart—and soul—into his art. Creating “the beauty of sympathy and understanding” is the source of his power. We can see Prewitt as an artist, even as an author.
First Sergeant Warden is another figure with power over others, including those who ostensibly have power over him. His mission is to subvert the wishes of his officers, as we see with his deft manipulation of Holmes. Near the end of the book, when the War has erupted, Warden finds himself working for another over-confident but inexperienced officer. Lt. Ross has made a decision. Warden sets out to get Ross to reverse it. “I don’t know why the hell I let you talk me into these things,” Ross complains. Quiet, god-like, Warden responds, “Because you want to do the right thing.” Ross wonders who is really “in charge of this outfit.” Again remote and god-like, Warden does not reply. Both men know the answer (pp. 794-95). It’s like an argument between man and wife.
Like Prewitt, Warden also has an unexpected, artful side. He goes on a 10-day jaunt with Karen, Holmes’s wife, whom he sometimes speaks to with the same quiet caution he uses to handle her husband. Their trip is too confining, much too much like marriage, for either. The exception is the eighth night, when they go to a tourist luau, where they will know nobody and where hey see the kane hula, a warrior’s dance. The men’s “masculine grace and swift agile angularity, savage and powerful, outshone and dimmed the hip-swinging wahine [women].” (Kane hula dancers seen here.)
Warden has been to many luaus. He strips off his shirt, rolls up his trousers, and joins the kane, tucking a gardenia behind his ear. He makes “quite a sensation” as a white man skilled in the complicated steps of dance. The native dancers step back and give Warden the floor, so to speak. He makes the most of it.
Karen, as surprised as everybody else, asks where he learned to dance. Warden had known the old island family of Tony Paea, once owner of Paea Island, and had learned ancient native songs and dances from him. They were songs “like the ones we use[d] to play at Tony Paea’s family luaus.” If kane hula dancing 1941 was anything like it is today (as seen in videos online)—and we can assume that it was—Warden has a hidden artistic side and is a talented performer. He looks “more savagely Hawaiian” than the natives and can use warrior culture to bridge military and civilian, new and old. An unidentified voice comments, “And he had the figure for it, if I do say so as [one who] shouldn't” (pp. 701-2). These admiring words belong to Jones, and “we” who played at Tony’ house must also include the author.
These are not Jones’s only self-referential moments. A few pages earler Prewitt, who has been wounded in a knife-fight, is being cared for by two prostitutes who become “maternal, solicitous, very happy, infinitely protective,” so much so that Prewitt feels in danger of drowning “in the soft bosoms of matriarchy.” He thinks of these women as “two whores who finally found something to mother.” Jones continues Prewitt’s thought: “A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair to Maternity. It would probly be a very long book” (p. 684). From Here to Eternity is “a very long book.” This curious and unexplained pun on the title of the novel (what has hair to do with anything?) points to the connection between Prewitt and the author, too obvious to be coincidental.
The expected combat contexts, both boxing and the War, do not dominate From Here to Eternity because they are overwhelmingly male and, for that reason, resist that side of Jones that is heavily invested in ambiguous differences between male and female. We get another valuable clue about Jones from the film made from the novel.
The actor chosen to play Prewitt was Montgomery Clift. During filming, Jones caroused with Clift and with Frank Sinatra, who won an Oscar for his supporting role. Clift spent four days with Jones in Arizona talking about Prewitt’s character and his actions and speech. This suggests that Prewitt was based on Jones himself. Clift was known to be gay. There were rumors that he had an affair with Jones. Asked about it, Jones “flabbergasted the prurient gossips by declaring: ‘I would have had an affair with him, but he never asked me!’” (M. J. Moore, “RETRO: Monty, Sinatra & Jones in Eternity, Honeysuckle Magazine, 2017 (https://honeysucklemag.com/retro-monty-sinatra-jones-eternity/).
Years ago, when I first read Jones’s books and taught them in seminars on war and masculinity, I was struck by his unexpected references to sex. In The Thin Red Line, for example, soldiers come across the dead body of an infantryman. They regard it with “a peculiar tone of sexual excitement, sexual morbidity” in their voices, “almost as if they were voyeurs behind a mirror watching a man in the act of coitus.” It is as if by looking “at the evidence of this unknown man’s pain and fear they were unwillingly perhaps but nonetheless uncontrollably seducing him” (p. 66). Unusual thoughts.
I did not at first think Jones as bisexual. His biography in Wiki reports that he was “open” about his same-sex experiences, as his comment above about Clift suggests. Jones imagined many men who walked the line between heterosexual and homosexual. Some of these men are invested with thoughts, even longings, that seem outside their range, but not outside the author’s. Jones seems to be matter-of-fact, a gritty realist. He was also a fantasist, longing for something more than what was before him—boxing, war, male, female—and sensitive, in the same way Prewitt is, to subtext, sexual and otherwise, and to unfixed, often-changing feelings.
Transformation is a subtle theme in From Here to Eternity. The book details grossness of every kind, but the prose sometimes takes lyrical flight. Jones’s alchemy is realized in the bugle passage and also in the book’s surprising last pages. It requires sympathy and understanding to register, as the book does—now and then, at least—the difference between sex and love, and to describe the artful way in which men at odds with the world, men like Warden and Prewitt, can use their experience and intelligence—again, if only now and then— to create moments of shared psychological and emotional satisfaction: to create love. For Jones, boxing and war are doorways, but only doorways, to those moments.
In the picture with Sinatra and Clift, Jones is looking at the camera. Sitting between the movie’s stars in jacket and tie, they in their movie-set shirts, their hands on his shoulders, James Jones is one happy man.
Great read, Allen. I hate to detract from a complex article with so much to say on gender, art and human sensitivities, but the following caught my attention:
"Slater traces the demise of the Victorian world, with its reliance on honor and paternalism—the old social code—and the rise of a new world order based on coercion and fear—the new code"
The honour and loyalty of paternalistic order are never discussed, which is unfortunate since such discussion is paramount in a world that still seems to insist that hard work and the merits of your achievements will stand you in good stead. Meanwhile, this system has been replaced by certification and the obedience requisite to purchase (rather than earn) said certification. Indeed the new code is coercion and fear brought about through social (intersectional) hierarchy and threats to one's livelihood if one doesn't comply with disruptive policies that often run counter to paternalistic ethics. We no longer have to earn our way into society through hard knocks and proof of our mettle, but via sycophantic strategies that demonstrate a readiness to jump through bureaucratic hoops without rocking any boats. And this whole approach is meant to turn workplaces into communities of fear and surveillance without humour or love. And from the educational facility, the workplace, and via social media, this unethical new ethics radiates like a dirty bomb, poisoning all of society. Not a great moment for those who value inner development and personal responsibility.
Great post Allen. To me, this read like a novel. You painted a great picture of the story and from that the characters came alive. Really enjoyable and of course, thought provoking. Thanks!