Spencer Brown examines Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize novel, The Caine Mutiny, as a study in power and responsibility—a theme which had virtually disappeared from serious American fiction, but, the times being what they are, may perhaps be expected to regain some of its old importance in the coming years.
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Beaten down by the intellectuals, steady lament of “alienation,” the innocent reader of little magazines may sometimes conclude that, intellectually speaking, Ellis Island is more populous than the continent, and nobody ever manages to become a part of the going life of the mainland except a few traitors who end up in the Lucebuilding and a few mavericks like T. S. Eliot, now somehow successful on Broadway.
Yet during World War II many intellectuals suddenly found themselves in possession of power—not absolute power, to be sure, or power in their own line of ideas, but real power of life and death over many other men. In short, they had important jobs in Washington or commissions in the army or navy.
The situation was not wholly unprecedented. During the Cultural Reign of Backbiting in the Red Decade, and during the Spanish Civil War, Communist intellectuals achieved considerable power, but their only problem was to try to hold and extend it. By definition they could not have what anybody else would call moral problems; they were immune to that sort of thing, and have gone on claiming immunity to this very day. The non-Communist intellectual in World War II, on the other hand, if he accepted—and almost all did accept—the necessity of winning the war, and if he snatched a seat in the Pentagon game of musical chairs or became a lieutenant commander in the navy with a destroyer-minesweeper to play with, had to adjust his principles of proud irresponsibility to the moral problems of command and of getting a job done.
These problems are familiar in past literature. Aeneas, Creon, and Henry V are perhaps too ancient to mention; but Conrad and Kipling are full of conflicts of allegiance and more or less explicit moral codes of action. The reason, I think, is fairly clear: Conrad had lived with Nostromo and Lord Jim, Kipling with his bridge-builders and colonial administrators. The modern writer who has been around had done all sorts of odd jobs, no doubt, but subordinate odd jobs. At best he has been in charge of the college paper, and he has spent most of his life among other intellectuals.
Whatever the causes, the modern intellectual’s favorite literary works concerned themselves little, if at all, with problems of responsibility and command. Such problems had been sent downstairs to the literary servants’ quarters, so to speak—to the slick magazines, the pulps, and, of course, the detective story, where the Private Eye concentrated on the Job To Be Done, betraying everything to that end. Except occasionally when a Faulkner, Orwell, or R. P. Warren brought them upstairs, or Cozzens up to the landing, codes of action did not in general intrude on really literary conversation.
This state of affairs Herman Wouk has tried to remedy in The Caine Mutiny; and though it is possible that I may exaggerate the significance of his attempt, it is certain that some intellectuals have minimized it. The Caine Mutiny, while wonderfully whetting the what-comes-next curiosity, has neither the literary skill of Burns’s The Gallery nor the endless rage of Jones’s From Here to Eternity; but they are callow and sophomoric in contrast. Wouk’s huge sales and Pulitzer Prize are due, I am sure, not wholly to his narrative power but partly to his introduction of great moral issues and great spectacles created by man or nature.
In these last, however, he invites damaging comparison. His account of the might of the American fleet humbled by a typhoon is inferior in both descriptive power and irony to Hanson Baldwin’s historical sketch; of the typhoon itself, to Richard Hughes’s novel In Hazard. In his study of cowardice in a crisis, he rushes past the opportunity and fails dismally by the standards of Crane or Conrad or even Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun.
In his treatment of moral issues, Wouk nods toward but does not seriously compete with Billy Budd. Melville deals with wickedness rather than petty malice and incompetence; his good captain must uphold discipline even though absolute good must be destroyed and absolute evil triumph, as if Desdemona were to be hanged for accidentally killing Iago. Wouk narrows Melville’s tremendous gulf between good and evil; Wouk’s Claggart is merely sick, his Budd is merely scared, and nobody gets really hurt; Captain Vere becomes the lawyer who gets the accused off while wishing to convict him. Wouk neither resolves moral issues nor leaves them magnificently insoluble. Instead, he comes up with a navy code of honor, more sophisticated and viable than the schoolboy’s or the disciplinarian’s, more responsible than the intellectual’s, but still too easy an answer to the moral dilemma.
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The novel deals with the officers and crew of the destroyer-minesweeper Caine during the war with Japan. The Caine is commanded first by Captain DeVriess, who sacrifices tidiness and navy regulations to efficiency under fire; then by Captain Queeg, a frightened, incompetent paranoid who sacrifices everything to “the book,” to his comfort, and to his pleasure in inflicting indignities on subordinates. Other chief characters are Stilwell, a competent helmsman hounded to insanity by Queeg; Executive Officer Maryk, honest and unsophisticated, the best seaman on the ship; Lieutenant Keefer, a brilliant bohemian and novelist; and Lieutenant Willie Keith, a bright, normal Princeton boy with a rich and doting mother.
In a crudely sentimental passage, Willie receives from his dying father a Bible with the marked verse: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Willie accepts this as his guiding maxim at the beginning, and throughout the novel the other characters struggle for his and the reader’s conversion to their various principles. (Wouk’s evident intention of telling the story as the education of Willie is, I think, imperfectly fulfilled: Willie is too vacuous to be a hero, too active to be an observer.)
After a series of successful encounters with the Japanese and unsuccessful encounters with Queeg, the officers and men of the ship are caught in the great typhoon of December 1944 off the Philippines. Queeg’s rigid stupidity threatens disaster, and Maryk, who has been prodded toward just such a step by Keefer, deposes Queeg in accordance with navy regulations on the ground that Queeg is insane. Maryk saves the ship but must undergo court-martial. He is acquitted through the skill of Greenwald, a Jewish lawyer and navy pilot, but his naval career is ruined; Willie supports him in his trial; Keefer backs down. Later Keefer, in command of the ship when it is hit by a Kamikaze, jumps overboard, thinking all is lost; Willie stays aboard and puts out the fire. After the war it is Willie who commands the Caine in its last trip, to the boneyard. He wins the Navy Cross and will no doubt win back May, the girl whom he ditched because of his mother’s disapproval of her but whom he suddenly, during the Kamikaze episode, realizes he loves and must marry.
For almost two-thirds of its length the novel is a mixture of excellent adventure, a love affair about as exciting as tapioca with Scott Fitzgerald sauce, and a campaign against a nasty skipper—a campaign reminiscent of Mister Roberts, with more depth and complexity and much less humor. The last third, however, Wouk devotes essentially to his skillful though incomplete study of codes of honor; and it is these that I propose to analyze.
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The most primitive of these codes—the one that all the characters are on some level familiar with and influenced by—is, essentially, the code of the American high-school boy. If this code is ever made explicit, it will go something like this:
- Never rat on anybody.
- Adults (the rules and those who administer them) are irrational. Evade them if possible; if not, gripe about them.
- Do not take an adult (or superior) into your full confidence except to attack another adult.
- Nevertheless, in a severe crisis, find and follow a father-figure.
- Evade responsibility: do not be your brother’s keeper.
- Never, even if you are a leader, go far ahead of the crowd’s morality.
- Otherwise, act for the good of the school.
This statement the reader will wish to extend and modify, but it is probably accurate in the main; and certainly the acts of the subordinate officers in both Mister Roberts and The Cctine Mutiny fit into it. Wouk’s purpose goes beyond comedy, but for large sections of his novel the officers and crew follow very much the same schoolboy code as in Mister Roberts. Captain DeVriess is both sloppy and tyrannical; Willie and the jest resent and ridicule him; but in battle and seamanship they look up to him, and on his leaving the ship they present him with a strictly unregulation wristwatch. They should have deposed Captain Queeg on the occasions of his cowardice in battle; yet battle is no longer much of a terror to them—they bear charmed lives. Instead, they endure his irrationality up to his cowardice in the typhoon, of which they also are mortally afraid. Then Willie finds his father-figure in Maryk, who alone can save them all, and supports him in his “mutiny.”
However, The Cctine Mutiny presents and analyzes at least three additional points of view. The first is that of Captain Queeg, no dummy sadist but a careful study, to whom Wouk gives pathological mannerisms without tediously tracing their origin in early traumata. The mainspring of Queeg’s trouble is his partly conscious inadequacy in managing either men or ships. It is no trick for the lawyer Greenwald or the brilliant Keefer to prove him insane, nor is it hard for the reader to formulate his fears into an authoritarian bureaucrat’s code of action that goes as follows:
- Follow the book and evade responsibility—the “book” is the best available evasion.
- Be a good fellow to your officers as long as things go right, or if you need allies in a campaign.
- If anything goes wrong, first clear yourself and then throw the whole book at the offender.
- Never admit ignorance or a mistake; there are always enough regulations to cover you up.
- Where you see a head, strike.
- Insist on minutiae: if all little regulations are kept, no great occasion will arise and no decision need be made that the book will not make for you.
- Do not be afraid to chisel on regulations if the chiseling is standard officers’ prerogative (the episode of the case of liquor).
- Otherwise, act for the good of the navy.
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So Long as Queeg’s disciplinarian, school-marm code clashes only with the schoolboy’s, the result is mainly comedy. Early in the novel, the Caine is on target-towing duty; Queeg, absorbed in chewing out a seaman for a flapping shirttail, steers in a full circle and cuts his own towline. The crew is vastly delighted; but officers intent on doing a good job—Veblen’s instinct of workmanship edging out the schoolboy code—see an omen of serious trouble. Unfortunately for Queeg, in war there are great occasions and great decisions. Sooner or later he must sink the ship or be deposed by the competent.
To these complications is added another in the satiric observations of a highly intelligent person, Lieutenant Keefer. Keefer is fully drawn and amusing. A promising young novelist, he takes malicious pleasure in composing reports in navy prose complete to the last foggy repetition and conscientiously split infinitive, “like a concert pianist improvising on Chopsticks.“ His intellectual’s code is less a constellation of imperatives than a series of exasperated sneers:
- The bureaucrat and the system are always wrong and contemptible.
- The intellectual, the wit, is always admirable and has the right to put himself first. The intellectual can do in a few minutes the work piled up through months of weary negligence.
- “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses to be executed by idiots.” The intellectual never uses the navy way; instead, he invents a filing system even more cumbersome and inaccurate.
- Facility with words will take care of any situation.
Willie and the reader see in Keefer the revolt of the sensitive against the military. Reefer’s novel thus becomes the naval From Here to Eternity, and he is part of the bohemian tradition of defiance of tradition and authority. He is the musician in Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers; he is Greenwich Village in uniform.
Wouk, however, is also interested in what happens to the Navy when the intellectual is in a tight spot. Though a clever officer who knows his Conrad, Keefer does a Lord Jim jump when the Kamikaze hits, and his facility with words will never erase this memory. Like Lord Jim’s, his great funk is not single: he has flubbed Maryk’s trial too—fortunately for Maryk and Willie, since the defense counsel has correctly foreseen that Maryk’s action, if taken on his own responsibility, on the instinct of workmanship, is more convincing than as part of an embittered officers’ revolt. And Reefer’s failure is melodramatically underlined when his brother, the despised product of a military school, dies heroically in saving his carrier. Without Reefer’s saturnine and half-hearted rebellion, however, and without his intelligence and reading in psychiatry, Maryk would not have taken the initiative in relieving Queeg of command. The intellectual pushes the innocent craftsman into taking over and then jumps back himself.
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So Far, in Willie’s and the reader’s eyes, Queeg is all wrong, the others right in varying degrees. But here Wouk introduces his deus ex machina, Greenwald, apparently the one man in the Navy able to get Maryk off, unimpeachable in courage as a wounded Navy flier and indisputably brilliant as a lawyer—and a Jew. Greenwald wins the case ostensibly by proving Queeg insane, actually by proving him a coward, and then with a flag flourish declaiming that no naval officer could be a coward unless insane. At the celebration after the trial Greenwald, illuminated by alcohol, makes an unlikely speech outlining his code almost syllogistically:
- Maryk is guilty, though Greenwald has defended him and got him off. Maryk is deservedly a dead duck.
- Reefer and his code are abhorrent, since he runs out on his friend and the code does not protect the nation from approaching danger.
- The Jew is disliked by the navy (and, by inference, the nation), but the navy is fair to him. “In the corridor, Greenwald lounged against the wall and remarked to Maryk, ‘Captain Blakely doesn’t like Jews. Intonations on the name “Greenwald.” I have absolute pitch for those harmonies.’
“‘Jesus,’ said Maryk miserably.
“‘It won’t make any difference. You’re not supposed to love Jews necessarily, just to give them a fair shake. I’ve always had a fair shake in the navy, and I’ll get it from Blakely too, despite the eyebrows.’”
- Much of navy routine is silly, but it is the regulars, the professionals, the Queegs, who have kept Greenwald’s mother from being melted down to soap by the Nazis while the Greenwalds were just learning to fly.
- Therefore, the professionals, the navy, even the Queegs, are somehow admirable. Their system should be upheld over the bodies of the nice, competent, but misguided Maryks and especially the Keefers. (At this point we seem to hear the voice of A. E. Housman offstage, stoically intoning his “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”)
At the conclusion of his speech Greenwald throws his wine in Reefer’s face and leaves, saying that he will be waiting in the lobby (“You’ll probably lick me. I’m a lousy fighter”). But the intellectual feels himself too much in the wrong to accept the challenge of slightly tipsy honor. Willie and Maryk by their silent embarrassment concede that Greenwald has won the moral victory.
In the end even Keefer comes to respect the navy and the military school for producing heroes and to realize the loneliness of command. “‘You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes. At any moment you can commit a hundred manslaughters. . . . Exec is nothing. It’s command, command.’” Bohemia produces only Lord Jims. Willie, of course, has been convinced long before. Though he cannot stomach Queeg’s cowardice, he learns through his own heroism that a tradition of unquestioning loyalty alone can save the nation of Reefers and Willies. He sees in his rival for May’s hand the same weakness he has seen in Keefer, and he can therefore look forward to victory in love as in war. His late-discovered loyalty to May will be rewarded; but he deserves his official reprimand along with his Navy Cross.
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There Wouk leaves us. I have an uneasy suspicion that he may be suggesting that only a citizen army and navy, ready at all times, can both defend us and remove our guilt, for we are all guilty of condemning Queeg. It would be so much neater if more captains were like DeVriess, skillful seamen, understanding of people and careless of spit-and-polish. But there aren’t enough DeVriesses to go around. Wouk seems to praise conformity at all levels. It is not simple optimism: he does not say that whatever is Queeg is right. It is pessimism: he implies that civilization is threatened by barbarism and must be barbarously ready to repel attack, with the navy book and even Queeg as the price of survival.
Reluctantly Wouk offers us a concept of the navy as a kind of priesthood. As in the Catholic Church, the sacraments of duty and the defense of the nation acquire their virtue ex of ere operate. The immorality of a priest does not invalidate a Mass or an Absolution; if he ought to be unfrocked, the Church will not interrupt a sacrament to do so. Queeg, however, is a coward and cannot carry out the defense of the nation. Fact here vitiates miracle, and there remains only the illogical consolation that, though some naval commanders are spiteful martinets, they are statistically effective because there are so few Queegs. The good man, Willie, succeeds in the navy through sheer persistence, yet he is to leave the navy at the end of the war. Are we being left with the injunction to respect authority as such, no matter what its nature?
At every turn Wouk disappoints the thoughtful reader, who nevertheless must be grateful for so much genuine stuff instead of mere slickness or the talented wails of over-age adolescence. Speculation on the reasons for his comparative failure may come simply to the tame conclusion that Wouk is not a great writer. But certain paradoxes remain:
If The Came. Mutiny is read only as an apology for the professional, Wouk undermines that reading with more complex and profound possibilities. His acceptance of Greenwald’s code is dictated either by his ready appreciation of the Job To Be Done (the war), or by his unwillingness to move too far ahead of readers accustomed to an all-sufficient code, or by both. But he is uneasy about offering so simple a solution. And his uneasiness indicates both the central shortcoming of the novel and his awareness of the magnitude of the moral problem that he has raised but not successfully solved.
One more suggestion: the intellectual, in spite of his splendidly wretched alienation, does from time to time participate in the intoxication and the pangs of power, and will probably participate more and more in the coming years. He cannot have failed to notice that power has its own moral problems and that it may require a “code of honor” even in the middle of the 20th century; but he is not yet studying the question, and he is not writing his novels about it. In this respect if in no other, The Came Mutiny, for all its huge sales and its Pulitzer Prize an attempt at serious fiction, is ahead of the intellectuals. If it cannot teach them their own business, it at least points to where an important part of their present business lies.
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