Wouk himself was an officer on the type of ship the Caine was, and he drew his description of Queeg from cast studies, not real life. His two skippers were both decorated for valor.
Wouk's "Tom Keefer" is pretty much himself. The typhoon really happened, and sank three or four elderly destroyers, taking among them a tin can with a Queeg-like skipper. It's in "Down to the Sea," by John Wukovitz, and "Halsey's Typhoon." Halsey blundered by ignoring serious advice to avoid sailing near the storm.
Thank you for sharing this and thank you for reading. Those books both sound as though they’re worth a look. That Keefer is Wouk I think is a brilliant aspect of the novel, and seems lost on the novel's/Wouk's critics.
Yes…Wouk, like Keefer — those scenes are not in the movies, but in the book — probably realized that command is an extremely difficult job, and ridiculing the CO doesn’t make it better.
Read “The Arnheiter Affair,” if you can find a copy, about a truly nuts CO off Vietnam in 1965. His(Arnheiter’s) reckoning came from his superiors, when they found out he was doing crazy things from reports submitted to them, including a fake request for a Silver Star from Arnheiter’s subordinates. Attached was a note saying, “This request is a fake, ordered by Arnheiter.”
The top brass fired Arnheiter after 99 days in command of his tin can.
It must be forty years since I read “The Caine Mutiny.” But I do recall that the character of the ship’s executive officer was much more nuanced than that of the one-time novelist, Keefer.
Didn’t Wouk leave it to the reader to decide whether the actions of the E.O. were justified under the circumstances? If so, wouldn’t that seem to imply Wouk may not have been quite the institutionalist his critics appear to have made him out to be?
Perhaps the critics were right to say the book was “midcult.” I am no literary expert, so I will concede the point. But Wouk as a storyteller in my view brought a bit more complexity to at least one of the three important characters driving the story line than it seems he was given credit.
Says he was about to make the turn that Maryk orders
Begged Maryk to erase the lines in the logbook referring to the mutiny, thus covering it up
My feeling is that the officers of USS Caine did not rally around their skipper, and Keefer set up the mutiny, believing that the stupid and cowardly Queeg was not his intellectual or moral equal. In the book, Keefer becomes skipper of the USS Caine in the last four chapters, and behaves EXACTLY like Queeg, down to the cowardice. He learns that command is not as easy as he thought.
If the officers of Caine has, for example, said, “Let’s use that adrift target as a ‘Man Overboard’ exercise, and haul it in,” Queeg would have had a better day and career with the Caine.
Never would I have assumed to enjoy reading a defense of a book I had never heard of before. So, now I have to go read The Caine Mutiny and hope to find more discussion pop up on here that touch on these well-written points.
When the critics of The Caine Mutiny were writing, being against establishment institutions was left-coded. Today, the institutions that are under attack are the ones that the left successfully captured during the long march through the institutions after 1968. The universities and the government bureaucracies and the legacy media are now under attack from the populist right. They would like to be able to insist on loyalty and deference. But the Boomer-hippie era mockery of institutions lives on, notably among people who have run those institutions for decades, which is an inconsistent absurdity we have accepted as normal. A new Wouk might give us a novel about that tension. And this makes me want to read The Caine Mutiny. Great post.
I have not read Wouk. I did read Bonfire of the Vanities, which was great. We need a "new Wouk" for 2025! Wouk ... Wolfe ... Someone new whose name starts with W!
Certainly Mailer. Possibly the others, but he never discussed with me. Now that you mention it, I have a childhood memory of one of his friends enthusing about Wouk. He ended up involved with Aspen and teaching philosophy, Aristotle mostly, and so when we talked about books, it was usually indisputably Great Ones.
I find it fascinating how you connect Wouk not only to the question of institutions but also to the whole conformity v. individualism theme of the first two postwar decades ("squares" versus "rebels," so to speak). The sociology of that period - Whyte, Vance Packard, Paul Goodman - is still quite interesting. And of course it has its literary counterparts in writers like Yates, Salinger and Sloan Wilson.
Yates' "Revolutionary Road" is a recognized classic, still a great read after all these years, so I'd start there. His numerous short stories plow the same furrow, pretty much. "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" is a good collection. Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" is an important sociological novel - not great literature, but a worthwhile read that tells you something about the time when it was written. I haven't actually read Goodman's most famous work "Growing Up Absurd" but it gets referenced a lot when describing the social scene of the 1950s, so it's probably worth reading.
"Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" I know by the same reputation you just shared. I'll find a copy of "Revolutionary Road" and put it in the queue. Hard to know how much to invest in one area of literature. Thank you for this, Scott.
RR is a heavy hitter; heard various famous writers mention it as one of their "cult books" 30 years ago in a top MFA program. Possibly because of that, it's gotten an increasingly wide readership since.
Every good writer has a few cult books that shaped them. James Salter wrote a lot of them. Military folk might take a look at Cassada, The Hunters, and/or Burning the Days. Before throwing over his commission, he was a fighter pilot with two kills in the Korean War.
It's also a little awe-inspiring to learn that Wouk published his last novel in 2012 at the age of 97. He lived another six years, apparently writing all the while.
My father took me to see the film in 1954. I have been thinking about it a lot in recent days watching Captain Queeg in the White House. Your excellent essay has stimulated many ideas. Thank you.
This is genuinely one of the best essays I’ve read in a while, I’ve recommended it to all of my family and friends. It’s odd because our modern democrat party is simultaneously pro-establishment and anti-institution, they uphold a moral less, people less establishment while condemning the institution(which has the connotation of a unified group of people, outside of just an established system of governance).
An excellent essay. As someone with decades of service in the Big Green Machine, your thoughts about institutions, and how they are portrayed (or just ignored) by writers, has set me to thinking about those same questions. And now that I am among the furloughed, your essay has also inspired me to finally start on Cozzen's Guard of Honor. I purchased it at a used book store after reading Terry Teachout's essay about the novel, but it drifted to the bottom of my to-read pile. Teachout's essay is here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2009/10/05/truth-without-bullets/. Another good discussion of the novel is here: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=24.
Good article. I happen to have recently listened to Mutiny on the Bounty and while researching the history/ geography found that the fight to frame the mutiny – justified, or an attack on civilization? --was still going on well into the 1970s and 80s. Hollywood may have weighed in on the side of the mutineers but many many sources were/are still defending Bligh and the institution of the Royal Navy.
As for Macdonald-- I remember reading George Steiner when I was a kid and in his discussion of what a critic is for he admitted that he was haunted by the specter of the eunuch's shadow when he looked at his own occupation. But reading him convinced me that a critic who inspires new understanding, new authors, new art had a very important role. Whether trashing bad books was part of that I wasn't sure – why not focus on what you love, teach your readers to recognize beauty? Then again I once read that in Japan there were no critics (too polite) and so everything was published, from dreck to masterpieces. I thought well that's bad.
But when I read your account of these attacks on Wouk-- or look at a story like this: "PULSE Prose - The Price of Fame: Two Instructive Accounts" (an account of the critics' destruction of Cozzens and Brautigan) I wonder if there isn't a certain sort of sadistic personality who, fearing the zero state inside, loves to the fill the role of critic. William Golding's lazy second rate thinkers.
These types have obviously been enabled by the Internet (and joined by a new phenomenon, fan psychosis-- fans of authors and genres who don't create themselves but study the analytical jargon, eg "ret con" etc., and put amazing amounts of negative energy into criticizing and making authors' lives hell online) but also defanged for the most part... defanged, diluted, ignored... because "nobody" cares about books anymore. Anyway, from the reviews I've read so far I'd say your Metropolitan Review project is more Steiner than McDonald so keep it up!
Edward, thank you. I need to read the Steiner piece you mention. The Cozzens-MacDonald story I haven't yet studied except to prepare for this piece. I am curious about Cozzens's Guard of Honor. As for criticism, I do not know what I am doing. Seems to me though we all stand to gain from good critics.
I’d say it is ambiguous in the novel, which I suppose is how it would be most of the time in real life (and as @kiwiwriter47 noted in another comment, Wouk would’ve known as much from his time in service which included several typhoons). If you end up reading it let me know what you think.
Wouk and Huntington were both apologists for empire, a supremacist empire. Their politics live on with a vengeance in the form of Trump/Vance and Biden/Harris and every other President. MacDonald's words quoted here are elitist and foolish at best, completely bankrupt, a traditional refrain among establishment liberals, even if MacDonald himself did not identify as a liberal.
There exist other far more humane, far more human, far more popular options for literature, politics, and life.
Wouk himself was an officer on the type of ship the Caine was, and he drew his description of Queeg from cast studies, not real life. His two skippers were both decorated for valor.
Wouk's "Tom Keefer" is pretty much himself. The typhoon really happened, and sank three or four elderly destroyers, taking among them a tin can with a Queeg-like skipper. It's in "Down to the Sea," by John Wukovitz, and "Halsey's Typhoon." Halsey blundered by ignoring serious advice to avoid sailing near the storm.
Thank you for sharing this and thank you for reading. Those books both sound as though they’re worth a look. That Keefer is Wouk I think is a brilliant aspect of the novel, and seems lost on the novel's/Wouk's critics.
Yes…Wouk, like Keefer — those scenes are not in the movies, but in the book — probably realized that command is an extremely difficult job, and ridiculing the CO doesn’t make it better.
Read “The Arnheiter Affair,” if you can find a copy, about a truly nuts CO off Vietnam in 1965. His(Arnheiter’s) reckoning came from his superiors, when they found out he was doing crazy things from reports submitted to them, including a fake request for a Silver Star from Arnheiter’s subordinates. Attached was a note saying, “This request is a fake, ordered by Arnheiter.”
The top brass fired Arnheiter after 99 days in command of his tin can.
I will write about that soon.
It must be forty years since I read “The Caine Mutiny.” But I do recall that the character of the ship’s executive officer was much more nuanced than that of the one-time novelist, Keefer.
Didn’t Wouk leave it to the reader to decide whether the actions of the E.O. were justified under the circumstances? If so, wouldn’t that seem to imply Wouk may not have been quite the institutionalist his critics appear to have made him out to be?
Perhaps the critics were right to say the book was “midcult.” I am no literary expert, so I will concede the point. But Wouk as a storyteller in my view brought a bit more complexity to at least one of the three important characters driving the story line than it seems he was given credit.
Wouk indicates that Queeg, after being relieved
Says he was about to make the turn that Maryk orders
Begged Maryk to erase the lines in the logbook referring to the mutiny, thus covering it up
My feeling is that the officers of USS Caine did not rally around their skipper, and Keefer set up the mutiny, believing that the stupid and cowardly Queeg was not his intellectual or moral equal. In the book, Keefer becomes skipper of the USS Caine in the last four chapters, and behaves EXACTLY like Queeg, down to the cowardice. He learns that command is not as easy as he thought.
If the officers of Caine has, for example, said, “Let’s use that adrift target as a ‘Man Overboard’ exercise, and haul it in,” Queeg would have had a better day and career with the Caine.
Never would I have assumed to enjoy reading a defense of a book I had never heard of before. So, now I have to go read The Caine Mutiny and hope to find more discussion pop up on here that touch on these well-written points.
And thank you for reading the piece despite your not having heard of The Caine Mutiny. Eager to hear what you think once/if you get through it.
When the critics of The Caine Mutiny were writing, being against establishment institutions was left-coded. Today, the institutions that are under attack are the ones that the left successfully captured during the long march through the institutions after 1968. The universities and the government bureaucracies and the legacy media are now under attack from the populist right. They would like to be able to insist on loyalty and deference. But the Boomer-hippie era mockery of institutions lives on, notably among people who have run those institutions for decades, which is an inconsistent absurdity we have accepted as normal. A new Wouk might give us a novel about that tension. And this makes me want to read The Caine Mutiny. Great post.
The new Wouk was Tom Wolfe, especially once he began writing novels.
I have not read Wouk. I did read Bonfire of the Vanities, which was great. We need a "new Wouk" for 2025! Wouk ... Wolfe ... Someone new whose name starts with W!
This is very good indeed. Thank you. Will share with my father, USMA '63.
Thank you for reading and for saying so. Go Army. Do you recall your father reading Mailer or Wouk or Jones?
Certainly Mailer. Possibly the others, but he never discussed with me. Now that you mention it, I have a childhood memory of one of his friends enthusing about Wouk. He ended up involved with Aspen and teaching philosophy, Aristotle mostly, and so when we talked about books, it was usually indisputably Great Ones.
I find it fascinating how you connect Wouk not only to the question of institutions but also to the whole conformity v. individualism theme of the first two postwar decades ("squares" versus "rebels," so to speak). The sociology of that period - Whyte, Vance Packard, Paul Goodman - is still quite interesting. And of course it has its literary counterparts in writers like Yates, Salinger and Sloan Wilson.
Thank you for reading the piece. Any Goodman, Yates or Wilson you strongly recommend?
Yates' "Revolutionary Road" is a recognized classic, still a great read after all these years, so I'd start there. His numerous short stories plow the same furrow, pretty much. "Eleven Kinds of Loneliness" is a good collection. Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" is an important sociological novel - not great literature, but a worthwhile read that tells you something about the time when it was written. I haven't actually read Goodman's most famous work "Growing Up Absurd" but it gets referenced a lot when describing the social scene of the 1950s, so it's probably worth reading.
"Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" I know by the same reputation you just shared. I'll find a copy of "Revolutionary Road" and put it in the queue. Hard to know how much to invest in one area of literature. Thank you for this, Scott.
I second on Revolutionary Road !
RR is a heavy hitter; heard various famous writers mention it as one of their "cult books" 30 years ago in a top MFA program. Possibly because of that, it's gotten an increasingly wide readership since.
Every good writer has a few cult books that shaped them. James Salter wrote a lot of them. Military folk might take a look at Cassada, The Hunters, and/or Burning the Days. Before throwing over his commission, he was a fighter pilot with two kills in the Korean War.
The Hunters is legend. I will read. Thank you TW.
I’m quite partial to Light Years. James Salter was a very interesting character.
It's also a little awe-inspiring to learn that Wouk published his last novel in 2012 at the age of 97. He lived another six years, apparently writing all the while.
My father took me to see the film in 1954. I have been thinking about it a lot in recent days watching Captain Queeg in the White House. Your excellent essay has stimulated many ideas. Thank you.
I am so incredibly grateful that TMR reposted this
This is genuinely one of the best essays I’ve read in a while, I’ve recommended it to all of my family and friends. It’s odd because our modern democrat party is simultaneously pro-establishment and anti-institution, they uphold a moral less, people less establishment while condemning the institution(which has the connotation of a unified group of people, outside of just an established system of governance).
Important, pertinent literary history...thank you!
An excellent essay. As someone with decades of service in the Big Green Machine, your thoughts about institutions, and how they are portrayed (or just ignored) by writers, has set me to thinking about those same questions. And now that I am among the furloughed, your essay has also inspired me to finally start on Cozzen's Guard of Honor. I purchased it at a used book store after reading Terry Teachout's essay about the novel, but it drifted to the bottom of my to-read pile. Teachout's essay is here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2009/10/05/truth-without-bullets/. Another good discussion of the novel is here: https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=24.
Mr. Donnelly, thank you as always for your comment. Your own historical writing is a great service to your institution.
Good article. I happen to have recently listened to Mutiny on the Bounty and while researching the history/ geography found that the fight to frame the mutiny – justified, or an attack on civilization? --was still going on well into the 1970s and 80s. Hollywood may have weighed in on the side of the mutineers but many many sources were/are still defending Bligh and the institution of the Royal Navy.
As for Macdonald-- I remember reading George Steiner when I was a kid and in his discussion of what a critic is for he admitted that he was haunted by the specter of the eunuch's shadow when he looked at his own occupation. But reading him convinced me that a critic who inspires new understanding, new authors, new art had a very important role. Whether trashing bad books was part of that I wasn't sure – why not focus on what you love, teach your readers to recognize beauty? Then again I once read that in Japan there were no critics (too polite) and so everything was published, from dreck to masterpieces. I thought well that's bad.
But when I read your account of these attacks on Wouk-- or look at a story like this: "PULSE Prose - The Price of Fame: Two Instructive Accounts" (an account of the critics' destruction of Cozzens and Brautigan) I wonder if there isn't a certain sort of sadistic personality who, fearing the zero state inside, loves to the fill the role of critic. William Golding's lazy second rate thinkers.
These types have obviously been enabled by the Internet (and joined by a new phenomenon, fan psychosis-- fans of authors and genres who don't create themselves but study the analytical jargon, eg "ret con" etc., and put amazing amounts of negative energy into criticizing and making authors' lives hell online) but also defanged for the most part... defanged, diluted, ignored... because "nobody" cares about books anymore. Anyway, from the reviews I've read so far I'd say your Metropolitan Review project is more Steiner than McDonald so keep it up!
Edward, thank you. I need to read the Steiner piece you mention. The Cozzens-MacDonald story I haven't yet studied except to prepare for this piece. I am curious about Cozzens's Guard of Honor. As for criticism, I do not know what I am doing. Seems to me though we all stand to gain from good critics.
A thoughtful and thought-provoking article. Thanks indeed for the interesting read.
Great essay!
Glad you think so. Thank you for reading it.
Great summary of a literary episode with which I was previously entirely unaware. Thanks.
Is the novel ambiguous about whether the mutiny saved the ship? From this summary I am uncertain on that point.
I’d say it is ambiguous in the novel, which I suppose is how it would be most of the time in real life (and as @kiwiwriter47 noted in another comment, Wouk would’ve known as much from his time in service which included several typhoons). If you end up reading it let me know what you think.
Speaking of typhoons, Gore Vidal’s Williwaw, also set during WWII, is an account of sailing thru a hurricane in Alaskan waters.
Don’t worry. Pete Hegseth will find out what happened to those strawberries.
Wouk and Huntington were both apologists for empire, a supremacist empire. Their politics live on with a vengeance in the form of Trump/Vance and Biden/Harris and every other President. MacDonald's words quoted here are elitist and foolish at best, completely bankrupt, a traditional refrain among establishment liberals, even if MacDonald himself did not identify as a liberal.
There exist other far more humane, far more human, far more popular options for literature, politics, and life.