In 1951, Herman Wouk won a Pulitzer prize for The Caine Mutiny. The novel itself was a giant best-seller and along with it came the movie with Humphrey Bogart and also a Broadway play. It was a big 1950s literary event.
It's almost exactly fifty years since I last read the book, and it's obvious why it was such a triumph. The Caine Mutiny is a first-rate popular novel: it’s long but fast-paced, clearly written, literate, suspenseful, timely, and patriotic. The characters are carefully differentiated (although they veer toward stereotypes). It’s memorable. Parts of it were as vivid as if I had read them five months rather than five decades ago. I imagine that anyone who read the book, no matter how long ago, will remember “the strawberry incident,” “old yellowstain” and especially Captain Queeg and the two little steel balls that he rolls in his hand when he is under stress.
The Caine Mutiny is not a novel that requires sophisticated exegesis. Wouk is heavy-handed; he has a few points to inculcate, and he doesn’t allow his readers much wiggle room. Perhaps the lack of ambiguity accounts for the novel's popularity. While the The Caine Mutiny raises important questions about war and authority, it resolves them too easily. Wouk lays on the patriotism with a trowel. Although his navy is a nasty, inefficient place, individuals (at least American individuals) regularly rise above their institutions. Wouk preserves the optimism about war that Tolstoy lost in the Caucasus.
The main action of the novel turns on the mutiny and on the subsequent court-martial. There’s also an engaging secondary story that could have been extracted from a novel by John Marquand. Willis Seward Keith is an upper-class Princetonian whose mother opposes his romance with Marie Minotti. Marie is Italian, Roman Catholic, working-class, unschooled, and a night-club chanteuse to boot, and she may been to bed both with her (gasp!) Jewish agent and with her (horrors!) saxophonist. Is it possible that Willie can free himself from maternal authority and marry her? In the Marquand universe, he would jilt Marie, marry Constantia de Vere Buff-Orpington of the Newport Buff-Orpingtons, and live a respectable bland country-club (and sexless) existence. But Marquand was a proper Bostonian born in the nineteenth century, while Wouk was the son of Jewish immigrants who was born in the twentieth. At first, Willie Keith bows to his mother and puts an end to his romance, but Wouk rescues him. When the U. S. S. Caine is kamikazeed, and Keith thinks he’s going to die, he realizes that he’s made a big mistake. He survives, writes a long, eloquent proposal of marriage, and in the very last pages of the novel seems to have persuaded Marie to come aboard. She's amenable and he's euphoric, but whether or not Willie and Marie can make the marriage work is left very much in doubt.
Is it mere coincidence that my two favorite novels during adolescence were The Caine Mutiny and Mutiny on the Bounty? If it's not coincidental but meaningful, what ever happened to the incipient, budding mutinous spirit?
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