From Here to Eternity
by James Jones
Delta Fiction

In literature, it's fair to say that the higher the aim, and the greater the prize, the greater the risks, and the harder the task. Critics love deflating pompous failed novelists — it's like stepping on a roach, only cleaner, and more humorous.

Is it any wonder that most writers try their hands at light tasks before throwing themselves at the book that might ruin their reputation? For every "Infinite Jest," the postmodern world has coughed up a dozen little "High Fidelities" — enjoyable novels that take an inspired stab at one of life's shins and then take a proud bow.

The giants are few and far between.

Works like Dante's "Inferno," Joyce's "Ulysses," Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" all represent the output of men who have stood toe-to-toe with life and tried, through the telling of one enormous, ambitious tale, to tell the full story of humanity.

"From Here to Eternity" is, in many ways, a mostly forgotten member of this thinly populated but towering tribe.

"Eternity," recently re-issued in paperback by Delta Fiction, is dedicated to The United States Army. With no substantial digressions, it is about the Army that author James Jones writes, spilling forth 850 pages of text that hand down the chronicle of G Company, a unit stationed in Hawaii before and during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mr. Jones's work sugarcoats nothing. It's true that his love for the service comes through, telegraphed by his vivid depictions of the men who have been thrust into it. But it's an ode intertwined with a viper — "Eternity" aggressively explores and riffs upon the very essence of the Army — the relationship between the officer and the enlisted man, between the favored and the despised.

"When he arrived in Schofield Barracks he was still very bitter about the bugle. It was this that made him go back to fighting, here in the Pineapple Army …" More ›.

Two strong, angry soldiers stand at the center of Jones's work: Robert E. Lee Prewitt, and Milton Anthony Warden. Prewitt is a brilliant bugler and talented boxer who wants neither to bugle, nor box. Warden is a frustrated Sergeant who begins an affair with his commanding officer's wife in order to find vengeance, but ends up entangled with a woman who is in every way his equal.

And so it comes to pass that Warden must buy into the Army's system in order to keep what he loves, while Prewitt fights against the manifold and terrible cruelties inflicted upon him by a clique of officers determined to make him break.

Finding comparable books is difficult. "All the King's Men" comes to mind — it has a scope and honesty that is deep and vast as "Eternity," although Robert Penn Warren finds delight in the tangled threads of politics and history, where Jones seems to find only variations of the same sad lie.

"Eternity" is an old-fashioned book, in some ways. Its prose is hard-working and clean. Its characters are lean, earnest and beaten down by the world they dig, sweat and die in. Its dialogue is clipped, and its passions are bottled up behind the brittle, sliding plates of mental and emotional armor that make up Jones's interpretation of the male psyche. And by heavily concentrating on the camp life of the pre-war period, Jones avoids many of the tired combat cliches and overblown piles of heroism under fire that mar so many other novels about war.

"Eternity" is also a timeless book. Its author does not pull punches. The men of G Company swear with color and furor, fight each other viciously for stupid reasons, get the clap, pine away for destructive women and waste themselves away. Men bleed internally, get sick, hate each other for stupid reasons, and do noble things for those they respect. When relationships pull apart and snap under the tension of camp life, the reader understands every frayed strand, and every newton of pressure.

With its scope, "Eternity" is more lived than read. It assumes a comfortable, confident hold on its reader — its characters touch each other and lash out at one another with a modest, dusty realism that renders Jones's accomplishment in a way that could never be duplicated or usurped by a writer with a more aggressive, showboating style. With the exception of the occaisional breathless passage of vivid description, Jones writes only what he needs to in order to tell the story — which means that his 850 pages feel like a world.

If the mark of a truly great author is the hewing of a new cosmos from the insubstantial dross of the imagination, James Jones is among the best we've seen.