Realism Without Obscenity

THE CAINE MUTINY (494 pp.)--Herman Wouk--Doubleday ($3.95).

Lieut. Commander Philip Queeg of the U.S.S. Caine, a four-piper destroyer converted to minesweeping, was a phony and misfit skipper. A pallid little man turning to fat, one of the low men in his Annapolis class, he could handle neither his ship, his officers nor his men. He was a martinet, a liar, a petty tyrant, and, when the chips were down in combat, a coward. On escort duty in the Pacific, all this became painfully obvious, even to a raw ensign like Willie Keith. When a typhoon hit the fleet in the Philippine Sea in December 1944, it became plain to all hands that Captain Queeg was not enough of a seaman to save the rusty, 1918-model Caine. When steady Lieut. Maryk, the executive officer, relieved the impotent captain under ticklish Article 184* of Navy Regulations and took over the ship, it seemed to the crew a reprieve from death. But so far as Queeg was concerned, it was mutiny.

In The Caine Mutiny, Novelist Herman Wouk (Aurora Dawn, The City Boy) has tackled a problem of considerably greater moment than those confronted by the personal-gripe, crushed-sensitive-youth school of U.S. war novelists (Norman Mailer, James Jones). What, he asks in effect, is of first consequence: the sprinkling of nasty little Queegs and the irritations suffered by their subordinates, or the good sense and steady drive of the Willie Keiths in the face of pressures they had never expected to meet?

Author Wouk writes with a normal pulse and a sense of humor, but the underlying seriousness is there. His Willie Keith is no tragic hero, but he is recognizably like thousands of civilians turned naval officers who took their lumps, helped win the war and shucked their rancors at the end of it, along with their uniforms.

Wouk himself spent four years in the Navy, part of the time as executive officer of the destroyer-minesweeper Southard. His aboard-ship scenes have a sharp, detailed reality that few of the army novelists have been able to give to their battlefield passages. No prude, he manages to achieve realism without obscenity, is perhaps the first World War II novelist in the U.S. with enough maturity to realize that four-letter words are "good-humored billingsgate . . . and not significant." That Author Wouk has absolute control of the Caine's little world will be granted by anyone who has seen a ship like the Caine at work, or by anyone who has witnessed a court martial like the one in which Maryk wins acquittal.

Had The Caine Mutiny confined itself aboard ship and stuck to its central theme, it might have made port as a small classic. Overlong as it is and hampered by a dreary love story, the best of it is still good reading and fine reporting.

* Says Article 184: "It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary, either by placing him under arrest or on the sick list . . ."

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