Yesterday was Armed Forces Day, so what better opportunity could there be to visit the censored parts of the novel from which the film
From Here to Eternity was made? Here's Kaylie Jones on
what Scribner's left out of James Jones' manuscript because of the minefield of McCarthy-era prosecutions of publishers of "immoral" or "obscene" books.
My father was told to cut the homosexual scenes in the novel, and he
refused to eliminate them [but Scribners did anyway—AKSARBENT] because he felt this would be unfaithful to
reality he witnessed. (The original manuscript of
From Here to Eternity resides in the rare books library at the
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana...)
How courageous was my father’s stand? Only five years before the publication of
From Here to Eternity, Doubleday published Edmund Wilson’s novel,
Memoirs of Hecate County. The New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice raided Doubleday bookstores in Manhattan and seized
130 copies of the book due to its explicit depiction of heterosexual
sex...
 |
Another official U.S. Navy photograph from WWII: "PBY
Air-Sea rescue plane picks up Robert A Schaeffer, badly
burned USMC F-4-U pilot of Dayton, Ohio, shot down in
St. Georges Channel near Rabaul. Gunner who helped
bring in pilot is back at station." April 1944; St. Georges
Channel; Horace Bristol: 80-G-473978"
Obviously the gunner above was keenly aware of the fact
that Japanese Zero drivers weren't going to wait for him
to put his flight suit back on after his dive into the Pacific.
This man, if still alive, would be in his 90s now. |
...The soldiers in Hawaii were dead broke, barely one step
up from homeless. They joined the Army during the Great Depression
because they had nowhere else to go. And they were treated almost as
badly as the homeless by the civilians that populated Oahu...
One character,
Maggio makes extra bucks by hanging out with older, rich gay men who
live in Honolulu, who pay good money for his company. The original
manuscript goes into great detail about what kind of sexual favors
soldiers like Maggio are willing to provide. The soldiers act as if it’s
simply their company that these older men are paying for, but there’s
an underlying, secret understanding that many of them will provide sex.
Maggio sees nothing wrong with this at all, since it is a means to an
end – a way to make quick money so he can go back and hang out with the
whores. Maggio never questions his own sexuality. The number of soldiers
who can be found hanging out in the gay bars is also staggering; in
fact, there are so many of them that the Army launches a (very quiet)
investigation. One soldier, Bloom, realizes he enjoys sex with men, and
is so terrified and ashamed of being gay and of being called on it, that
he commits suicide. The sin and the shame, it seems, are not associated
with the act itself or even in getting paid for it, but in whether or
not a soldier enjoys it. My father saw the total hypocrisy and
ridiculousness of this and Bloom’s death is portrayed as a tragedy,
absurd and unnecessary.
By 1962, when Jones published
The Thin Red Line, censorship had faded; his daughter recounted the relationship her dad wrote about between privates Bead and Fife and what Fife agreed to do when Fife
got shot in the head.
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