A Change of Pace

As some of you noticed, the movie entries have slowed down. The reason: I'm on hiatus from the hyperbaric chamber and so am no longer a daily prisoner for three or so hours with nothing to do but watch great movies. Sure, I could sit at home and do it, but I thought it might be fun to get outside more, maybe rid myself of this pallor and breathe some non-hyperoxygenated air for a change. Oh, I'll still write about movies, just not one a day.
So, since I read a lot, I thought I might add books to the mix. The premise is similar to the movies: I'll read books I've always wanted to get to but never did. The list is alarmingly long. And the first entry is below.

Book Break: “To Have and Have Not”

Author: Ernest Hemingway 1937
The great director Howard Hawks once boasted to Hemingway that he could make a terrific movie out of Hemingway’s worst book. Papa asked Hawks what work that would be. Hawks’s reply: “To Have and Have Not.” Hemingway did not disagree.
I bought my copy of the book in 1987 during a trip to Key West, the setting of much of the novel. It sat unread on the bookshelf ever since.
Last week, I took it down and read it over two nights. “To Have and Have Not” probably is Hemingway’s weakest book up to 1937 (far worse was to follow), but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. There are wonderful descriptive passages of fishing and boating and hanging out at a bucket-o-blood named Freddy’s. Harry Morgan, the fatalistic hero, is a complex, interesting character. There’s plenty of cinematic-like action, including a doozy of an opening scene (does anybody use the word “doozy” anymore? I should do a Nexis search).
Unfortunately, there’s also stuff showing the rich for what some of them can be: arrogant, self-centered, conniving, dishonest—in other words, nothing really new. But “THAHN” was written during the Depression, and Hemingway’s social conscience was awakening. The result was the inclusion of this obvious material juxtaposed with the violent last act of Harry Morgan’s life. So the novel is seriously flawed, but it’s a fast read, and it’s Hemingway.
Hawks did make a terrific movie, although its resemblance to the novel is slight. Jules Furthman wrote many drafts that kept the settings of Cuba and Key West. But the United States government feared angering its ally, Cuba (this was during World War II), so the setting had to be changed. Hawks brought in William Faulkner, who in a few weeks tightened Furthman’s script and moved the action to Martinique. There are Vichy French and French Resistance fighters and, of course, Bogart and Bacall. It’s all great hokum. It’s also a semi-remake of “Casablanca,” but so what? Also, as far as I know, it’s the only movie involving two Nobel Prize winners, Faulkner (1949) and Hemingway (1954). Rent the movie. Read the book. You could do a lot worse.

Day 64: "From Here to Eternity"

Director: Fred Zinnemann 1953
James Jones’s three best novels—“From Here to Eternity,” “The Thin Red Line” and “Whistle”—remain in print, according to Amazon.com. That’s good news, for Jones’s World War II trilogy is a real literary achievement, filled with vivid characters and realistic depictions of combat seen from the grunt point of view. Although main characters die, they reappear in subsequent books. Prewitt, the boxing bugler played by Montgomery Clift in the movie version of “Eternity,” becomes Witt in “The Thin Red Line,” and Prell in “Whistle.” You can follow these men as they evolve from peacetime soldiers to hardened vets to convalescing short-timers. The books are well worth reading, perhaps more so today as grunts continue to die in Iraq.
Jones was part of that post Hemingway generation that went to war and dreamed of coming back and writing the Great American Novel, a time when people genuinely cared about such ambitions. Along with Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead”), Irwin Shaw (“The Young Lions”), William Styron (“The Long March”), Gore Vidal (“Williwaw”), Joseph Heller (“Catch 22”) and countless, forgotten others, Jones returned to the states from the Pacific theater with a burning need to write about his experiences (he also returned with a Purple Heart). After several false starts, he drew the attention of Hemingway’s masterful editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, and “Eternity” was born (sadly, Perkins died before the novel was finished).
The result was a long, compelling, and roughly told story describing the Army in Hawaii in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Jones recreates a completely believable world. While Jones’s style could be less than polished, his passion and talent were so big that “Eternity” and the other books in the trilogy deserve to remain in print as long as people read novels (how long exactly that will be is anybody’s guess).
Mailer, never known for going out of his way to praise a fellow writer, once wrote that, “The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones . . . I felt then and can still say now [circa 1959] that “From Here to Eternity” has been the best American novel since the war . . . “
Jones’s daughter, Kaylie, wrote an excellent novel about her life with her father, mother, brother and their ex-pat experiences (the Joneses lived in Paris for many years). In 1998, the book, “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries,” was turned into a movie directed by James Ivory. Kris Kristofferson played the character inspired by Jones. It’s an underappreciated film, worth renting.
Which finally brings us to the movie version of Jones’s first book. “From Here to Eternity” remains a terrific film, filled with great acting (Burt Lancaster, Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra, who copped a supporting actor Oscar and resurrected his career—without “Eternity” it’s unlikely we’d ever have those classic Capitol albums from Sinatra). While the damn Production Code toned things down a bit (Reed’s character, a prostitute, morphs into a dance hall hostess), Kerr and Lancaster still conduct an adulterous affair, and several major characters do not survive. A solid movie (and far superior to that bloated Michael Bey film, “Pearl Harbor.” Ben Affleck is no Burt Lancaster, Senator.).
James Jones died in 1977. He was only fifty-five. Luckily, we have his books.