Wouk Backlash

On ‘The Caine Mutiny’ and the Literature of War

Cecily Brown, Putin’ on the Ritz, 1999-2000, Oil on linen

In 1958, a young and fast-rising political scientist named Samuel Huntington was denied tenure at Harvard because of a book he wrote. Huntington had penned it in the wake of the Korean War, just as Americans were, for the first time in their history, reconciling themselves to the idea of a large peacetime army. For past wars, the country had mustered a large army, then all but disbanded it when the fighting ended. But the emergent Cold War seemed to call for a standing reserve of military might. Nervous Americans, ill-practiced at living in the shadow of a garrison army, wondered what to make of it. How might these peacetime troops be understood? How might these professional officers be controlled? In his book, Huntington aimed to give them an answer. He called it The Soldier and the State.

The book’s argument was simple enough. It counseled Americans against fashioning their garrisons in their own liberal image. Instead, Huntington said, the military ought to exist as a world apart, with a culture more conservative than the society it served. Huntington saw a double wisdom in doing so. Not only were conservative values like loyalty and hierarchy useful to soldiers on the battlefield, but by walling the garrison off, one could ensure the garrison itself did not become a battlefield of the country’s fast-multiplying cultural wars. Huntington rendered his case in always-learned but often indulgent prose. The book famously ends with a lyrical ode to West Point, for its will to withstand the “garish individualism” rampant outside its gates, “a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon.”

The Soldier and the State met at first with a good deal of scorn. It was, by the lights of many, an ambitious failure. Some reviewers called it a polemic disguised as analysis. One quipped that he liked Huntington’s argument better the way Mussolini put it. To duck the controversy, Harvard sent Huntington packing. Still, The Soldier and the State would survive its early trashing to become a landmark in its field. Huntington would return to Cambridge several years later and eventually become a giant of American political science, known both for his provocations and for his uncanny prescience on matters of development, democratization, and conflict.

There is, however, tucked into The Soldier and the State’s tail end, a prediction that has aged rather poorly. One finds it in some overlooked passages of literary criticism. In them, Huntington considers the novels then emerging from the Second World War as a sort of thermometer for American attitudes toward the conservative officer class he sketches. He starts with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. He rightly sees in Mailer’s 1948 bestselling debut a deep hostility toward the military type. The book’s quasi-hero is a Harvard-educated cynic forced into service. Its antihero is a fascistic career officer. Huntington chalks up The Naked and the Dead as the latest addition to the American antimilitary literary tradition, moving on to James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. He finds that somewhat friendlier to the institutional army, but still, in the end, an elegy for the individuals lost to the army’s grinding conformity.

It is in a third novel that Huntington sees a hopeful future for American attitudes toward their military. That novel is Herman Wouk’s 1951 mega-bestseller, The Caine Mutiny, which tells the story of a rusting minesweeper, the U.S.S. Caine, sailing on the periphery of the Pacific War. The Caine is commanded by a career officer named Captain Queeg, a man, much like his vessel, worn out by a lifetime of service that began long before the present war. Serving Queeg are a clutch of young naval officers, many of whom were still at their ivy-clad alma maters when the shooting started, now in uniform only because they must be. The damaged Queeg is tedious always and at times tyrannical. After some 300 pages of his abuse, the reader now having sympathy for the Caine’s crew, a typhoon strikes. Queeg seems no match for the storm, and the young officers mutiny.

At this stage, Wouk wins Huntington’s admiration. For once the officers of the Caine launch their mutiny, Wouk demonstrates by way of a minutely detailed court-martial that they had no grounds to do so. They get off only thanks to a nervous breakdown Queeg suffers on the witness stand, brought about by their defense lawyer, a brilliant Navy JAG named Barney Greenwald. In the novel’s climax, the young officers meet for a champagne-soaked celebration of their acquittal, only for Greenwald to crash it with a withering reprimand of their vain self-righteousness. The gathered, says Greenwald, are guilty, not only of mutiny, but of having brought low an imperfect man on whom they all unthinkingly depended. The lesson of The Caine Mutiny is clear: institutions, however flawed, are necessary vessels of virtue, to be stewarded rather than burned. Huntington nods along approvingly and muses that the book may be a harbinger of a new literary era.

Huntington was wrong. The Caine Mutiny might have sold well and scored the 1951 Pulitzer Prize, but it did not foretell a shift in American letters toward the institutionalist ethic. It was instead that ethic’s high-water mark. By the time Huntington was writing in 1957, many of the country’s most respected critics had already shellacked The Caine Mutiny or its derivations. In Partisan Review, Harvey Swados sardonically observed that the book’s defense of loyalty “can be — and has been — upheld by fascist as easily as by democratic theorists,” and, by way of explanation for its runaway commercial success, said Wouk “flatters” the middle-class reader “into the belief that he is participating in a thoughtful intellectual experience.” A reviewer in Commentary agreed, lamenting that “at every turn Wouk disappoints the thoughtful reader,” and when Wouk adapted the novel for the stage, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. piled on, declaring it “in essence, dramatic McCarthyism.”

Criticism of Wouk reached a higher pitch with the publication of his 1955 novel Marjorie Morningstar. The novel was a tribute to perhaps the only virtue less in vogue with the Greenwich Village set than loyalty, that being chastity. In anticipation of its release, TIME put Wouk on its cover. The enclosed profile cast Wouk as a critical underdog who “defied recent literary fashion and loosed some real shockers” by daring to praise things like decency, honor, and authority. Such gumption, the profiler pointed out, might lose Wouk fans in literary salons, but it won him legions of fans in Fordist America. (The Caine Mutiny was by then the bestselling American novel since Gone with the Wind.) As for Wouk himself, he was hardly innocent of any of this. TIME found him “cheering long and loud for the American middle class and blasting bohemia and bohemians.”

Well, bohemia blasted back. This time, at Commentary, Norman Podhoretz personally stepped in to torch Wouk’s “rhetorical barbarity,” his “obtrusively doctrinal” moralizing, and his “impoverished and inept” tries at lyricism. And just as The Caine Mutiny had Harvey Swados, what above all annoyed Podhoretz about Marjorie Morningstar was that it gave its readers “a satisfied sense of having grappled with difficult questions,” despite it having done no such thing. Isaac Rosenfeld agreed in a Partisan Review pan. Though more measured than Podhoretz, and for that reason more effective, Rosenfeld too charged Wouk with a “failure to understand the issues he is pretending to raise.” Rather than engage with the issues of the rising middle class, Rosenfeld said Marjorie Morningstar offered its readers only layers of phoniness.

Plenty of successful authors have been panned. What makes Wouk worth our attention is, in part, just how prominently he occupied the minds of those who panned him. For the abuse, deserved or not, did not end with Podhoretz, Swados, Rosenfeld, or Schlesinger. An entire chapter of The Organization Man, William H. Whyte’s theorization of the conformist 1950s, is dedicated to The Caine Mutiny. In it, Whyte offers the novel’s “astounding denial of individual responsibility” as the fictional distillation of his decade’s insipid spirit. The Caine Mutiny’s success, Whyte worried, portended “a landmark in the shift of American values” away from liberal individualism and toward what he called “the System.” Wouk, as Whyte saw him, was that system’s spokesman.

And Whyte was not the only critic to mine Wouk for theoretical material. At the decade’s end, Dwight Macdonald debuted his theory of middle culture, or the “midcult.” In an early expression of the main idea, a 1958 essay he called “By Cozzens Possessed,” Macdonald named The Caine Mutiny as the purest example of a midcult artifact he called the “Novel of Resignation,” wherein “the highest level of enlightenment is to realize how awful the System is and yet to accept it on its own terms.” In Macdonald’s view, that is exactly what Wouk asked of the Caine’s crew and of his readers. By 1960, Macdonald had defined midcult as that intermediate form of art that “pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.” It is hard to miss how faithfully this definition echoed the refrain of The Caine Mutiny’s most bruising reviews.

Note that few of even Wouk’s harshest reviewers disputed that he could write a good story, Podhoretz marking the great exception. Whyte said that The Caine Mutiny was “a rattling good tale.” Harvey Swados called Wouk “an exceptionally good storyteller.” Isaac Rosenfeld conceded that Marjorie Morningstar was “enjoyable and seldom hard to read.” Rather, one gets the sense from such reviews that Wouk’s offense was to sell well and think at the same time, when his critics’ rationalization for their own limited audience was that to do so was impossible. Had he settled for, as one reviewer put it, writing “subway reads,” he would have been a tolerable, even enjoyable feature in the low ground of America’s literary landscape. But Wouk insisted on freighting his stories with ideas, ones his critics found McCarthyist, even possibly fascistic. It is to those ideas that we now turn, as both their content and the reactions they elicited can teach something about literature today.

The Caine Mutiny is a defense of institutions. The institution of which it tells is the U.S. Navy, but nearly any institution would do. Every day, the Navy teaches many what precious few men know, and that is how to sail a warship. The Navy can do so because institutions are vessels of wisdom, wisdom accrued over many years and many lives. The rules that govern life aboard a ship, the authority vested in its captain, the traditions and duties that make up the daily life of a sailor, these are all expressions of that wisdom. For the wisdom and purpose institutions dispense, their members pay in freedoms conceded. Among the freedoms a member must concede is often his individual judgment. That is because the wisdom the institution purports to preserve is not always auditable by individual judgment, even if it is sound. In such cases, one must take the wisdom on faith. That is the way institutions are. After all, if one could always judge what was wise for himself, he would hardly need an institution at all.

This matters because, like a ship, institutions take many years and many men to build, but only a moment and a man to sink. To guard against sinking, of the literal or metaphorical sort, the threshold for when one is permitted to exercise his individual judgment in dissent from his institution is rather high. But even in those peacetime institutions that, for most of history, have given life its form, the wisdom itself is high enough a stake. No war is needed to make things existential. In each unthinking practice of a given ritual is an unspoken acknowledgement that we cannot always know the good reason why we do things.

Which leaves one to wonder: What moments meet the threshold for dissent? What is it like to dissent? What happens when we get it wrong? Those are the questions The Caine Mutiny considers, and in the dressing down the mutineers take from their defense counsel, Wouk gives his answer. Captain Queeg’s failures, in the typhoon that precipitates the mutiny or in the months before, do not excuse the officers of disloyalty to the Caine.

But what if blind loyalty is what sinks the vessel? That was William H. Whyte’s retort. As he saw it, the crew of the Caine’s choice was to mutiny to save the ship, becoming bad institutionalists, or let the ship sink in a typhoon and die good institutionalists. “A damn silly dilemma,” dismissed Whyte. That he would say so is not surprising. He literally coined the term groupthink. And Whyte cannot be dismissed as a mere sociologist, quibbling with a world-weary Wouk from the safe remove of an ivory tower, for Whyte saw the war as a U.S. Marine, survived Guadalcanal, and spent years in his institution’s guts at Quantico teaching fellow Marines. Macdonald, who for his part passed the war as a conscientious objector, said much the same thing two years later:

Wouk’s moral is that it is better to obey a lunatic, cowardly Captain Queeg, even if the result is disaster, than to follow the sensible advice of an officer of lower grade (who is pictured as a smooth-talking, destructive, cynical, irresponsible conniver — in short, an intellectual) and save the ship. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any U.S. Navy. (If there were many Captain Queegs, there wouldn’t be a Navy either, a complication Mr. Wouk seems not aware of.) In short, the conventional world, the System, is confused with Life.

That I can find, Wouk responded to neither Whyte nor Macdonald; he seems to have largely ignored his critics, which may not have won them over. But an honest read of The Caine Mutiny suggests that, for all Wouk’s critics claims about his didactic moralizing, it is they who draw the cartoon, and Wouk who deals in nuance. As the novel’s well-rendered court-martial scenes and attendant private conversations make clear, the officers of the Caine had options well short of mutiny that might have saved the ship, and the environment of perfect information which both Macdonald and Whyte suppose in their respective takedowns simply did not exist in the typhoon. In the story, it was not known to the crew that the ship would go down or that a mutiny would save it. In one of the novel’s best passages, an exonerated mutineer, having finally experienced ship command himself, reflects on the brutal ambiguity inherent in leadership. There is no obvious answer, and that is ultimately a credit to The Caine Mutiny.

What is clear is that when William H. Whyte mournfully predicted in 1956 that The Caine Mutiny was a signal of conformist literature to come, and Samuel Huntington cheerily predicted in 1957 that it was a sign of institutionalist literature to come, both were wrong. The Caine Mutiny, in retrospect, looks very much to be the height of both critical and commercial success for novels of its sort, however you might label them. To the extent that any party’s hopes were fulfilled, they were those of Dwight Macdonald, who sought to steer American literary aspirations toward a rarified “high culture” above the sort of popular-with-pretensions fare he thought Wouk peddled. “Let the majority eavesdrop if they wish,” Macdonald told a Harvard audience in 1959, “but their tastes in art should be ignored.”

Many serious-minded American writers heeded Macdonald’s call. In the 1960s, they began to ignore the tastes of the majority, and, as it turns out, the majority did not care to eavesdrop on whatever “high culture” followed. As a result, and as others have observed, today the high literary scene consists of a few writers writing for each other. Their scene matriculated from the Greenwich Village streets that Macdonald and Swados knew on to university fine arts programs. The world that encloses that scene can seem at times far from the average American, whose gaze is decidedly elsewhere. The sales numbers achieved by Wouk, or even Mailer, are, for all but the rarest runaway, the stuff of laughable fantasy. All the while, the promised bounty of truly fine art has not materialized — or, if it has, it moves among us unrecognized. That is not to say there are not excellent writers writing today. Rather, they seem no more numerous than they were before Dwight Macdonald called for a literary rejection of all that Wouk represented.

This is also not to say that the likes of Macdonald had no cause to squint at novels valorizing institutional loyalty. Those were the years of McCarthyism, after all. Such critics might be forgiven for thinking Wouk’s message was hardly what Americans needed at the time. The country’s great institutions must have then seemed, from the vantage of Partisan Review, positively hegemonic, rather than brittle. The idea that their literary culture might, by some contrarian turn, pose any meaningful threat to such institutions was likely a remote one, if not amusing.

What one can say is that there are few if any new novels today that espouse the virtues of the institution. This too must be counted as a win for Macdonald, for the matter of institutions appears to be a point of cleavage for him and the likes of Huntington. In what I imagine is a remarkable coincidence, Macdonald names, at the start of his essay “By Cozzens Possessed,” just seven bestsellers from 1935 to 1955 that he “would call in any way ‘serious.’” Two of the seven are Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. These are, as you may recall, exactly the two good novels Samuel Huntington said fell short of the institutionalist ethic. The Caine Mutiny and the values it espouses sit at precisely the point Huntington would like literature to start, and past which Macdonald cannot go. Today, perhaps none of the three are read. But Mailer is often recalled, whereas Wouk, that decade-defining juggernaut who so captured the critical imagination, is, among our small reading public, save in some Jewish circles, almost entirely forgotten.

It is time for American literature to turn its eyes back to the institution. For, if 1950s America suffered from overbearing institutions, today it seems a matter of consensus that America suffers desperately from a lack of any institutions at all. Books abound documenting those institutions’ catastrophic collapse. Technocratic bloggers and charismatic preachers alike know that these days, Americans bowl alone. Publications and podcasts overflow with wonder at the atomization, purposelessness, lost men, cognitive fragmentation, and unmoored extremism that swirl in the vacuums found where institutions once stood. It cannot be said that a few lively essays by Dwight Macdonald caused this. Then again, it also cannot be said that his concerns for Wouk ring half as true as they might have in 1960. Looking back, it seems at times as if the postwar literary establishment burned down institutionalist fiction, and today’s critics stand in the rubble, confounded by contemporary novels’ failure to offer the sort of positive vision that many need to sustain their soul.

A final sign that literature’s turn away from institutions explains Wouk’s decline is that his work lives on in the institution The Caine Mutiny chose to defend: the U.S. military. In the early 1970s, the United States ended the draft. In an ironic twist, the military became much more like that walled-off garrison Huntington imagined in The Soldier and the State. As he hoped, it developed a separate culture with separate literary needs. Novels like Anton Myrer’s Once an Eagle and Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny enjoy continued readership among those in uniform long after wider American literature has moved on, precisely because these novels speak to the institutional ethos the military always needed but American literature for a time decided it did no longer. Next year marks The Caine Mutiny’s 75^th anniversary. It is worth considering whether wider society needs to revisit it.

Theo Lipsky is an active-duty captain in the U.S. Army. One can find his writing in War on the Rocks, The Point Magazine, Military Review, Modern War Institute, and his newsletter, Garrison Notes. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of War.