Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [274]
A fill-in on news (though I can’t tell you where I am or anything like that, of course). You can see already that I’m not in the brig serving time for mutiny. Maryk was acquitted, mainly by legal trickery, and so my case was dropped. That poor sailor Stilwell went crazy-driven crazy, I guess, by Queeg, whom I now feel as sorry for as I do for Stilwell, they’re both a couple of victims of war, no more and no less. Last I heard Stilwell had pretty well gotten over it after some shock therapy and was on the beach doing some kind of limited duty. Queeg was relieved by a marvelous Academy man who straightened out the ship in four months and then handed it over to Keefer. So we have a novelist for a captain now, quite a privilege.
I now see pretty clearly that the “mutiny” was mostly Keefer’s doing-though I have to take a lot of the blame and so does Maryk-and I see that we were in the wrong. We transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs who tore us off the beach and imprisoned us on a wallowing old ship for years. Our disloyalty made things twice as tough for Queeg and for ourselves; drove him to his worst outrages and made him a complete psychological mess. And then Keefer put the idea of Article 184 into Steve’s head, and the rest of the horror followed. Queeg conned the Caine for fifteen months, which somebody had to do, and none of us could have done. As to the typhoon, I don’t know whether it was best to go north or south, and I never will know. But I don’t think Maryk had to relieve the captain. Either Queeg would have come north by himself when things got bad enough, or Maryk would have done it and Queeg would have strung along after some beefing and there would have been no damned court-martial. And the Caine would have stayed in action instead of holing up in San Francisco during the biggest actions of the war. The idea is, once you get an incompetent ass of a skipper-and it’s a chance of war-there’s nothing to do but serve him as though he were the wisest and the best, cover his mistakes, keep the ship going, and bear up. So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up. I don’t think Keefer feels this way and I don’t know if he ever will. He’s too clever to be wise, if that makes any sense. Very little of what I’m saying is original, I got it from Maryk’s defense counsel, an amazing Jew named Greenwald, a fighter pilot, probably the queerest duck I’ve ever known.
Keefer broke down and showed me some of his novel, finally. I guess you don’t know that he sold the incomplete manuscript to Chapman House and they gave him a thousand dollars’ advance. We had a dinner to celebrate, which turned into quite a horror for reasons which I’ll tell you another time. Anyway, I read some chapters tonight, and I regret to say it looks awfully good to me. It doesn’t seem very original in thought or style-sort of a jumble of Dos Passos and Joyce and Hemingway and Faulkner-but it’s smooth, and some of the scenes are brilliant. It takes place on a carrier, but there are a lot of flashbacks to the beach, with some of the most hair-raising sex scenes I’ve ever read. It’ll sell like hotcakes, I’m sure. The name is Multitudes, Multitudes.
Though what you care about all this I’m sure I don’t know. I just read back over what I’ve written and I guess it’s the most idiotic and disjointed marriage proposal that’s ever been composed. I guess I’m writing a little faster than I can think, but what does that matter? The thinking’s all over so far as my wanting to marry you goes. There’s nothing left but the suspense, and it will be considerable suspense, of waiting to hear from you. Darling, don’t think I’m drunk, or writing on a crazy impulse. This is it. If I live to be 107 years old, and whether you come back to me or not, I will never feel any differently about you. You are the wife that God