From Here to Eternity

By N.S.

Steve Sailer did an item on WWII novels.

From Here to Eternity: I read this the spring I turned 17, and volunteered for the U.S. Regular Army. (“Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”)

I’d already seen the picture at least once. I completely identified with Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt. (“Prew” was also a New York Jew, right?)

James Jones grew up in small-town Illinois, like Hemingway, the son of a dentist (Hemingway’s father was a doctor), and, like Pruitt, enlisted at 17.

There are passages that read like poetry. I started re-reading it in West Germany but never finished it the second time. But for years, I carried around the poem/song, “Re-Enlistment Blues” from the book in my wallet.

Like so many young men of a literary bent of his generation, James Jones was a son of Hemingway.

Not only did Fred Zinnemann and Daniel Taradash make a masterpiece of this “unfilmable” book, in which Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, and Frank Sinatra all did their best work, but Jones and “Prew” exerted tremendous influence on still more writers. “A man’s gotta go his own way, or he’s nothing.” The Sand Pebbles, by China Sailor Richard McKenna (1962), was deeply influenced by Eternity. The protagonist, Jake Holman, played by Steve McQueen in the 1966 picture, was the reincarnation of Robert E. Lee Pruitt.