The Lowest Depths

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (861 pp.)--James Jones--Scribner ($4.50).

An important American novel hit the bookstores this week. It was written by a 29-year-old veteran whose schooling ended in an Illinois high school and who enlisted in the Regular Army at 18, was busted twice from noncom to private, and was later wounded on Guadalcanal.

From Here to Eternity is a massive report on Regular Army life in pre-Pearl Harbor Hawaii. Venomously hostile to everything military, it is a complete anthology of sorehead gripes. It is repetitious, sloppily constructed and strewn with obscenities. But it has one major virtue: no U.S. writer has ever before put down so many appalling details of the seamy undersides of Army life as James Jones, Robinson (Ill.) High School, '39.

Here is the story of barracks boredom and latrine crap games; of the caste war between officers and enlisted men; of brothel parties and drinking bouts; of goldbricking and rank-pulling; of soldier loneliness and misery and, sometimes, consecration.

James Jones ranges over most of the Army's social levels, but his heart goes out only to the tonguetied misfits and hopeless rebels who settle to the bottom. Of them he writes with an exasperated but compassionate affection.

"The Treatment." Author Jones focuses on two central characters: Private Robert Prewitt, who destroys himself by trying to remain an individualist in the Army, and First Sergeant Milton Warden, who is too tough to be destroyed by anything. Prewitt, Kentucky-born, small, proud, is an excellent boxer and a bugler who plays with the sweetness of the born artist. Warden is a professional soldier, a specimen of the kind of first sergeant whose character is a blend of savagery and sentiment, meanness and decency.

Because he has blinded a man in the ring, and because later, in the Army, he feels he has been cheated out of a promotion, Prewitt abandons boxing and bugling in turn. He transfers to Warden's ragged and quarrelsome infantry outfit, G Company. Prewitt is welcomed at first, but when he refuses to go out for the regimental boxing team, he gets "The Treatment" --a process of physical and psychological torment.

Inevitably, Prewitt blows up and takes a swing at a noncom. His sentence: three months in the stockade. Here, in a series of shabby scenes, he watches men shamefully humiliated, and ruthlessly beaten with hoe handles.* Prewitt murders the worst of the guards and is shot to death himself. Sergeant Warden explains Prewitt's trouble: too much idealism. "'He loved the Army the way most men love their wives. Anybody who loves the Army that much is nuts.' "

The Shame of It. Into his story Novelist Jones threads two highly unkempt romances--Prewitt and a prostitute, Sergeant Warden and the company captain's wife--which are painfully soapy and unconvincing. But the book picks up whenever Jones gets back to his snapshots of Company G: two Southerners laboriously discussing when a "nigra" is good or bad; men so purposeless that they welcome a fist fight with a surge of happiness; a dull mess sergeant who rises to dedicated passion in running his kitchen efficiently; Prewitt and Warden going off on a glorious drunk that leaves them asleep on a road at 2 a.m. What binds these men together more than anything else is their contempt, and fear, of officers. Talking about officers' children, Prewitt says:

' 'You reckon ... all them cute little kids will all grow up to be officers?'

" Probly,' Warden said. 'A shame, ain't it?' "

Thanks to subject and obscenities, From Here to Eternity is bound to be compared with Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. The difference is a deep one. Mailer wrote of battle agony from the viewpoint of a certified left-wing intellectual. Jones, no intellectual, writes of barracks misery like an angry, discontented natural man dredging his memories and finding them intolerable.

*"Certain of the Stockade scenes," says Author Jones in an introductory note, "did happen . . . at a post within the United States at which the author served, and they are true scenes of which the author had first-hand knowledge and personal experience."

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