[Back in December 2024, I dedicated a weeklong series to histories from our 50th state. This week, in honor of the 75th anniversary of James Jones’s debut novel From Here to Eternity, I’ll offer a complementary series on Hawaiian stories!]
On what wasn’t in the classic novel, what was, and what the book can tell us about Hawaii.
I already knew that James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) was significantly more explicit in both language/style and content than its Oscar-winning 1953 film adaptation, but it turns out that Jones’s original manuscript was even more explicit still. A couple decades ago his daughter Kaylie (herself an author, best known for the autobiographical novel A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries [1990]) revealed that her father’s version had featured, among other elements censored by the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons, explicit gay sex scenes (Jones himself was bisexual and apparently had an intimate relationship of some sort with the film’s young star Montgomery Clift among others). Thanks to Kaylie’s advocacy a restored edition was subsequently published, first as an e-book in 2011 and then as part of Penguin’s Modern Classics Collection in 2013. Sexuality is a huge part of both the book and the film, and it’s important to recognize that in 1951—as well as in the story’s 1941 setting—that meant the spectrum of sexual preferences and identities.
Even with those frustrating cuts, however, it’s fair to say that the 1951 published version of Eternity (which won one of the first U.S. National Book Awards in 1952) offers a strikingly frank portrayal of life for its company of soldiers training and living in pre-Pearl Harbor Hawaii, a community of which 19 year old Jones had been a part. So frank, in fact, that there was upon its release and has been since significant debate among Jones’s fellow soldiers about whether that depiction was accurate—responses that have run the gamut from vets arguing that it is “80 or 90 percent true” to those like Joseph A. Maggio (known as Angelo Maggio in the novel and famously played by a young Frank Sinatra in the film) who sued both Jones and Columbia Pictures for defamation after seeing the film. I can’t possibly adjudicate that dispute, but I will note that since Jones would go on to include very similar characters in his other two WWII novels, The Thin Red Line (1962) and Whistle (1978), it at least seems clear that Eternity’s depiction of this place and time felt accurate to its author.
I can’t include the novel in this weeklong series on Hawaiian stories without asking a similar but differently focused question, though: is the novel accurate to that setting? Or more exactly, since I once again can’t particularly assess that angle in detail (I’ve never been to Hawaii), what does it help us to see about the place in any case? Of course there’s the power of the surf on the island’s beaches, which at least in the film Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr experience first-hand (among other body parts). But I would argue that the more telling Hawaiian detail is just how much the islands had by the mid-20th century come to be associated (and remain so to this day) with the military. That can connect us to some of the place’s most painful histories, like the role of the military in the initial illegal 1893 annexation into the U.S. And it also helps us better remember one of its, and to my mind America’s, most inspiring communities, the Chinese American college students who after Pearl Harbor and their dismissal from the Hawaii Territorial Guard formed the Varsity Victory Volunteers. Yet another compelling story from our 50th state!
Next series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Hawaiian texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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