The Caine Mutiny
Herman Wouk
1951

Introduction

Herman Wouk's best-selling novel The Caine Mutiny, subtitled A Novel of World War II, remains one of the greatest American novels to come out of World War II. Wouk, himself a WWII veteran who had served aboard minesweepers in the South Pacific, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for this account of a mutiny aboard a fictional minesweeper, the USS Caine. Commercially speaking, Wouk is the most successful writer of his generation. In critical terms, his work is sneered at or altogether ignored. At a time when American ideals were questioned and literature was full of rebellious heroes, Wouk championed conservative morals such as valor, chivalry, patriotism, and loyalty. Almost half a century after its publication, Wouk's morally idealistic novel remains popular.

Author Biography

Wouk was born into a wealthy family on May 27, 1915, in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University in 1934. His first job was writing for radio in New York, and then scripts for Fred Allen from 1936 to 1941. When war broke out, he put his writing talents into the service of the U.S. government and became a "dollar-a-year-man," writing the U.S. Treasury Department's radio plays promoting the sale of war bonds.

In 1942, he joined the U.S. Navy and served aboard the USS Zane and the USS Southard, both minesweepers in the South Pacific. While aboard ship in 1943, Wouk—like the character Tom Keefer—began to write fiction. The experience aboard minesweepers was reflected in The Caine Mutiny. The novel was not autobiographical, except for the shared experience of Navy duty. It was, however, a staunch defense of the American ideals Wouk evokes in all of his work: valor, honor, leadership, patriotism, and chivalric heroism. The public loved Wouk's work. The Caine Mutiny was a best-seller for weeks and almost single-handedly rescued its financially challenged British publisher. Cape Limited, despite owning the rights to Alan Paton's phenomenally successful Cry, the Beloved Country, was saved by Wouk's World War II novel.

Before leaving the Navy, Wouk married Betty Sarah Brown on December 9, 1945. They had three sons: Abraham Isaac, Nathaniel, and Joseph. When he was discharged, Wouk began writing again. His first novel, Aurora Dawn, was published in 1947 and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. In 1949, his play, The Traitor, had a short run on Broadway. Wouk's nonfictional interests include Judaic scholarship and Zionist studies. After the publication of The Caine Mutiny, he was appointed as a visiting professor at Yeshiva University. During the 1960s, he served as a trustee of the College of the Virgin Islands. Returning to the mainland, he served as a member of the board of directors for the Washington National Symphony (1969–71); scholar-in-residence at Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies (1973–74) and then at Kennedy Center Productions (1974–75); and a member of an advisory council, Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange (1981–87).

In addition to these public duties, Wouk wrote a number of other novels including The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. The latter was adapted for television and aired as a popular miniseries.

Plot Summary

The Caine Mutiny opens with a page torn from the book of Navy regulations outlining the articles that will become critical to the plot: the regulations describing the conditions that must be fulfilled in order for a captain to be relieved of his command.

Willie Keith

In a chapter appropriately titled Through the Looking Glass, the novel starts by introducing the reader to the protagonist of the novel, Willie Keith, from whose viewpoint the entire novel is told. Seeking a way to avoid being drafted into the infantry, Willie Keith—an educated, piano-playing dilettante—is joining the U.S. Navy. His days in training are interspersed with a series of flashbacks that introduce us to his former life and to his girlfriend, an Italian-American singer called May Wynn. A rebellious type, Keith immediately gets into trouble, and faces expulsion throughout his training period. He eventually passes, and is assigned to the USS Caine.

The Caine

Keith arrives in San Francisco to report to his ship and amuses some military officers with his piano playing. To his horror, the Caine is a rusty vessel that seems on the verge of collapse, and Keith feels only contempt for it and his superior officer, Captain de Vriess. Keith hears that discipline on the ship is criminally lax and anticipates that the arrival of a new captain will mark a new order onboard the ship. After failing to decode an important message, Keith is given an unsatisfactory fitness report; his life is changed again when Captain Queeg arrives to take over as commander.

Captain Queeg

Queeg arrives early. His habit of rolling steel ball bearings in his palms contributes to the growing belief of his men that something is not quite right. The first time the Caine sets sail, he runs the ship aground and then fails to report the incident. The dangers of his obsessive need for discipline become clear when the ship fails a training exercise and loses expensive Navy equipment because Queeg is lecturing a sailor about his untucked shirt. When the crew is granted shore leave, Queeg browbeats the other officers into giving him their alcohol rations and illegally hoards liquor. Keith finds May and his mother waiting for him in San Francisco and introduces his girlfriend by her given name, Marie Minotti.

Shore Leave

Willie, confused by his feelings after having sex with May for the first time, proposes to her, but she turns him down. He confides his feelings for May to his mother and she suggests he should look for someone of "their sort." Onboard the ship, Maryk is made Executive Officer, and Stilwell, desperate to see his wife, goes AWOL.

The Mutiny

Queeg's behavior grows stranger and even cowardly, and the officers are increasingly disenchanted. Maryk refuses to allow their critical talk whenever he is present. Unknown to everyone else, Maryk records Queeg's aberrant behavior as he believes that Queeg is paranoid and psychotic. Tension escalates when Queeg places a ban on water usage and a container of strawberries is eaten anonymously. Queeg conducts a bizarre search for the culprit. After encouraging Maryk in his concerns about Queeg, Keefer refuses to back him up when Maryk wants to take their concerns to the Admiral.

A typhoon hits. With the ship in bad shape, Maryk decides that the Captain's orders are leading them into certain death, and he takes control of the bridge. He formally relieves Queeg of his authority, supported by Keith and Stilwell, and the section closes with Maryk guiding them all to safety.

The Court-Martial

It is months later, and lawyers for Maryk's defense are being assigned. The only man who will take the case, albeit reluctantly, is Barney Greenwald. After meeting Maryk, Greenwald realizes that Keefer orchestrated the entire situation. The court martial of Maryk begins. Greenwald's strategy is to show that Maryk was justified in his opinion that Queeg had become unfit for duty. To prove this, however, the defense must chronicle Queeg's failures and bizarre behavior in court—a highly controversial strategy. Keefer sells Maryk out a second time, omitting his role in the affair. Against frequent objections from the court, Greenwald brings to light Queeg's illegal acts and wrong-headed decisions, allowing the man to incriminate himself on the stand with a show of his personality collapse under stress. Maryk is acquitted.

A party is thrown to celebrate Keefer's publishing contract and Maryk's acquittal. Greenwald dramatically accuses Keefer of setting the mutiny in motion, tells Maryk that his actions were unjustified, and says that Queeg was in fact the hero—a man who devoted his life to protecting the country and who cracked under the unbearable pressure of the situation.

The Last Captain of the Caine

Onboard the Caine, Keefer has been made captain, and Keith is second in command. During a kamikaze attack, Captain Keefer jumps ship while Keith heroically battles to save it. Keefer is forced to admit to himself that he is no better than Queeg. Shaken by his experience, Keith writes to May asking her to marry him. The war ends, and Keefer is demoted, leaving Keith to become the last captain of the Caine. He and the crew sail back to America, where he is met again by his mother. He has still not heard from May. He tracks her down and finds that she is going by her real name, has bleached her hair, is involved with another man, and doesn't want him in her life anymore. In the final scene, Keith stands in the drifting confetti of the Navy parade, vowing to himself that he will win her back.

Characters

Everett Harold Black

See Horrible

Captain De Vriess

Captain De Vriess is the first commander of the USS Caine, which has seen constant action near the front and, therefore, appears rather bedraggled. His style of command disgusts Keith, who would prefer following Navy regulations, but that is because he is fresh to the war. Still, for all De Vriess' laxness, the crew performs amazing feats of speed for him. They consistently out-drill all the other minesweepers in the fleet. Keith surprises himself when, late in the novel, he speaks of De Vriess with respect.

Ducely

Ducely is Keith's assistant. Soon, however, his mother arranges for his transfer stateside.

Walter Feather

Walter is May Wynn's new boyfriend. He is a great entertainer and has crafted her reputation as a "bombshell."

Bill Gorton

When Keith arrives on the Caine, Bill Gorton is the Chief Executive Officer.

Barney Greenwald

Barney Greenwald is the lawyer who defends Maryk at his court-martial trial. He accepts Maryk's case after meeting him and realizing that Maryk was duped by someone more intelligent: Keefer, the novelist. At Keefer's celebratory dinner, Barney makes a speech when, for the first time, the morality play of the novel is revealed. Barney hopes that his mother will not be a victim of Hitler's "final solution" because of military men like Queeg, though other relatives already have been. In this light, Barney admits he would rather not have seen Maryk acquitted and took the case only because he felt Keefer ought to have been the man on trial.

Harding

Harding arrives aboard the USS Caine at the same time as Keith. At the end of the novel, Harding is Keith's executive officer.

Horrible

Horrible becomes a casualty aboard the ship when he is killed during the kamikaze attack.

Roland Keefer

See Rollo

Tom Keefer

Tom Keefer is intelligent, a writer, and "queer as a three dollar bill" according to Rollo, his half-brother. Keefer reminds Greenwald of his shifty roommate at college. While under the command of De Vriess, Keefer puts minimal effort into his duty but maximum effort into writing his novel. He regards the war as a silly distraction from his literary pursuits. Keefer reveals himself as a coward under pressure: he talks Maryk out of exposing Queeg; he fails to substantiate Keith's and Maryk's story; and he abandons the ship to Keith when they are hit with a kamikaze attack.

Edwin Keggs

A schoolteacher named Keggs is Keith's roommate at midshipman school. He is assigned duty aboard the USS Moulton. His military experience is vastly different from life on the Caine.

Dr. Keith

Dr. Keith is Willie's father. In declining health, he keeps this from his son but finally reveals it in a jarring letter that Keith promises to read only after he is aboard the ship. Due to a mishap, Keith reads it at Pearl Harbor but telegraphs home too late—his father is dead. The message of Dr. Keith's letter is that he is proud of Keith and hopes that, whatever else he does, he will not follow his father's path toward an easy, rich life. Instead, he hopes that Keith will pursue his dreams and the love of his choice.

Mrs. Keith

Mrs. Keith is Willie's mother. She seems to be playing a game of appearances. The Keiths are not as wealthy as they appear to be, and it is only through her cunning that they are able to keep up with the house payments and other necessities. Keith does not know about his mother's work. For her sake, he will give up May Wynn because he suspects that she would not approve. But she surprises him with her response when he comes home and he tells her he wants May. "I wouldn't want to be shut out of your life, whatever you do," she says. And then, to reveal that she understands far more than Keith ever thought possible, she says, "I took her at the value you set on her."

Willie Keith

The protagonist of the story is Willie Keith "because the event turned on his personality as the massive door of a vault turns on a small jewel bearing." That personality, at first, is arrogant and overbearing. The trait that sees Keith through the military is his honesty and his growing sense of patriotism. Keith has difficulty accepting subordinate positions to those persons who would not normally be his superiors in terms of economic class, intelligence, or social standing.

By the end of the novel, Keith has been humbled by the turn of events. He has risen to a position of authority and is a responsible and honorable soldier. He is able to reject the bourgeois standards of his family and hopes to form a meaningful relationship with May Wynn.

Willis Seward Keith

See Willie Keith

Media Adaptations

• Using the screenplay by (Seymour) Michael Blankfort, The Caine Mutiny was filmed by Columbia Pictures in 1954. Humphrey Bogart stars as Captain Queeg, Charles Nolte is Willis Keith, and May Wynn plays herself. The movie received seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay.
• Alvin Rakoff adapted Wouk's story for televission as "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial," first broadcast by BBC-TV, June, 1958.
• Herman Wouk adapted the novel into a staged version of the court-martial trial. Paul Gregory first produced the play in the Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara, California, on October 12, 1953. Several persons of note were in the production, including Henry Fonda as Lt. Barney Greenwald and Charles Nolte as Lt. Willis Seward Keith. In a later production of the play, James Garner made his acting debut.

Steve Maryk

A native San Franciscan, Steve Maryk is a fisherman by trade and upbringing. As he tells Keefer, fishing is not bucolic: "It boils down to making a dollar the hardest way there is…. It's a business for dumb foreigners…. I'm dumb too, but I'm not a foreigner." Maryk, therefore, has both the incentives of a second-generation immigrant: to make it rich in America and to be patriotic. While not as educated as Keefer or Keith, Maryk is not dumb; as a result of his seaman's knowledge, Maryk is immediately recognized by his fellow crewmembers—as well as Captain De Vriess—as the best sailor among them. Consequently, he is relied upon to fulfill his natural leadership role. It is due to Maryk's expertise that the crew is able to set drill-time records that no other minesweeper can approach. Maryk tells Keefer, "I know seamanship, and I'd damn rather put in twenty years for the Navy and get a pension than get arthritis and a sprung back hauling fish out of the water."

After Gorton is transferred, Maryk becomes the USS Caine's executive officer. Having decided that Queeg is not an able skipper, Maryk loses faith in him. At first, Maryk is not mutinous and keeps his distance from the crew when they disparage the Captain. Gradually, he is influenced by Keefer's psychological theories. He begins to keep a logbook on the captain's behavior. In the midst of a typhoon, he decides that the captain has lost his ability to command and assumes the role under Navy articles 184-186. He does save the ship.

The result of his mutiny is the end of a brilliant naval career. Maryk's fate is the most troubling of the book and it results from a false belief in intellectual superiority over skill. He is a tragic hero.

Marie Minotti

See May Wynn

Old Yellowstain

See Captain Queeg

Paynter

Paynter is a V-7 engineer acting as a communications officer aboard the ship. It is Paynter who finds Keith. Paynter leaves soon after bringing his replacement aboard.

Captain Queeg

Queeg replaces De Vriess as captain of the USS Caine. Queeg is a short man with an inferiority complex. He is not very smart but he winds up as captain of his own vessel. His crew finds many of his actions strange and even cowardly, such as the incident in which he dangerously stays ahead of the Marines he is escorting and then flees before bringing them to the appointed drop-off. The incident earns him the nickname "Old Yellowstain." He also refuses to return fire on behalf of an assaulted fellow vessel. Queeg tells his officers that he will run his ship according to Navy codes and regulations, but he fails to follow procedure when the typhoon hits, putting the ship and its men in danger.

Rabbitt

Rabbitt is the OOD into whose arms Keith jumps when arriving on the USS Caine. He manages to get transferred to the USS Oaks.

Rollo

Half-brother to Tom Keefer, he shares a room with Keith in midshipman's school. He is assigned to the USS Montauk, an aircraft carrier. After the executive officer is killed, Rollo takes command of the fire fighting and conning of the ship. He dies from the effort.

Marty Rubin

Keith dislikes May Wynn's agent, Marty Rubin. Rubin, on the other hand, likes Keith and tries to help the young man. This becomes clear, even to Keith, when Rubin brings him to Wynn though she is trying to keep Keith away.

Stilwell

The best steersman on the boat is Stilwell. Queeg blames him for the cut towline. Soon after this, he is court-martialed for reading a comic on duty. He is acquitted but restricted to the ship for six months. He concocts a scheme in order to see his wife and finds himself in more trouble. Due to Queeg's ensuing persecution, he has no qualms about following Maryk in mutiny.

A year of Queeg's persecution coupled with the dangerous typhoon are possible causes of Stil-well's growing mental illness. He soon begins to complain of headaches. Stilwell is unable to testify on Maryk's behalf because he is receiving shock therapy at a mental hospital.

Urban

Urban has the misfortune of being the only other person besides Keith, Stilwell, and Maryk to witness the Captain's behavior during the typhoon. Urban is too terrified to grasp the ramifications of the situation and is unable to help Maryk's case.

Whittaker

The master of the mess is a black man named Whittaker. He announces mealtime with, "Chadan, suh." As involved as he is with serving the officers, there is no interaction with the black sailor.

May Wynn

May Wynn is Keith's love interest from the moment she hands him an arrangement of The Marriage of Figaro for her audition at Club Tahiti where Keith plays the piano. Keith's discovery that she is a poor Italian girl from the Bronx living among other poor immigrants disappoints him. They start working together and dating but Keith attempts to keep a distance. The reason for the distance is that he wants to marry someone from the same class. During the war, they break up. Having matured by the end of the novel, Willie pursues her again.

Themes

Authority

As a moral tract for the 1950s, The Caine Mutiny suggests that a strong authority is all-important for safeguarding the nation. Keith, for both his father and himself, turns down his first vocation—a fun, independent life of playing the piano—to fight for his country. This enables him to become a man in his own mind. His training allows him to put aside his own fear and concerns to take command when Keefer places the ship and its men in danger.

The novel centers on Queeg's inability to embody authority or command respect. Queeg begs for it: "There is such a thing as loyalty upward, and such a thing as loyalty downward. I desire and expect to get absolute loyalty upward." Queeg quotes from the regulation book and constantly reminds his men that he is the author of their fitness reports. Further, he will resort to court-martialing them if he has to. Along with fitness reports, he pays too much attention to issues such as missing strawberries and fixing even the smallest assignments. "You never saw a more fearless wielder of a checklist than Old Yellowstain," says Keefer. The reaction of his crew is predictable. They doubt their Captain.

Sex Roles

A subplot of the novel concerns the relationship between Wynn and Keith. Their courtship is wrought with all the societal tensions surrounding the roles of the sexes. One of these tensions is employment. At that time, society determined that women should stay at home to raise children into good citizens. But Wynn was forced to work for financial reasons. On top of this, but not touched on in the novel, women from all economic classes during World War II were encouraged through propaganda to work in the munitions factories. Later in the 1940s, as the men returned from the war, the roles reverted and women were encouraged to stay home again. Wouk reflects these attitudes when Keith fantasizes about saving Wynn and making her a properly domesticated woman. Keith's resolve to save her gets stronger when he sees her, ill, living in a seedy hotel, and trying hard to make it as "Broadway's Beloved Bombshell."

Topics for Further Study

• Pick one of the novels referenced by Wouk in Pick one of the novels referenced by Wouk in the story. Read that novel and compare it to The Caine Mutiny. How does the constant referencing of other novels enrich Wouk's work?
• Given the environmental concerns of the late 1990s, reflect on the prescience of the following: "Willie thought it was curious that with the coming of the Americans, the once-charming tropical islands had taken on the look of vacant lots in Los Angeles."
• There is a passing reference to Native American legal battles through the person of Barney Greenwald. Do some research on the legal battles of Indian tribes in America. What possible relevance does this have to the novel's theme of authority?
• Discover what happened to Japanese-American citizens domestically. A good account of this experience is contained in Joy Kogawa's 1981 novel, Obasan. Why were the citizens of Japanese descent interred?

Wynn is a hardened, independent woman; she has had to be because of her background. She considers men like "hogs" at the trough. Yet she has romantic notions of Keith as a prince who will whisk her away to a suburban castle. However, Keith's "matter-of-fact courtship was no part of love and marriage as she had vaguely imagined it." She knows that his mother does not like her, and she is a proud woman. She tells him, "Let's get one thing straight. If you're starting a little home for fallen women, I'm not interested. I don't want you to marry me because you're sorry for me, or because you want to do the manly thing by me, or anything like that."

Race and Class

Wouk summarizes American economic, racial, and social tensions during WWII. He also foreshadows the future; for example, at one point in the novel the lawyer Barney Greenwald states that Native American tribes are regaining their sovereignty in federal courts. Native Americans, for their part, were heavily involved in World War II. They thought that by fighting for the United States they could gain some respect from white Americans. Therefore, they were willing coding experts in the European theater as well as excellent soldiers. The same is true of African-American soldiers. They enlisted hoping that their contribution to the war effort would lessen racial barriers. Instead, in the novel, African Americans are depicted as the men who eat the last of the strawberries. Finally, Keith's hesitation to commit to May originates in his belief, fostered by his mother, that she is of a lower social and ethnic class than himself. By the end of the novel, he rejects the bourgeois standards of his family and hopes for a reunion with her, no matter the circumstances.

Coming of Age

Willie Keith "had risen from his fumbling, incompetent beginnings as Midshipman Keith to the command of a United States warship." The boy who became Captain of the USS Caine is certainly different from the one who played "If you knew what the Gnu knew" and entered the wardroom with an "unfortunate sign of immaturity," sucking his thumb. From his attempt to leave his mother in the opening scene without looking back—"his old identity was hauled away to camphor balls"—to his return (after "a year in the wilderness") to his mother as a full-uniformed captain, the novel is a bildungsroman: the story of Keith's education in the ways of man.

Style

Narration

Wouk's narrative technique is perhaps the most interesting yet problematic aspect of the novel. There is evidence of almost every form of narration, although it remains third-person omniscient. It is full of overt fictional references as well as subtle allusions, especially to the classic American novel Moby-Dick. The constant reference to other works of fiction and near mimicry of famous tales makes the novel a self-conscious work.

The narration can also be suspected of being unreliable. Most commentators dismiss Barney's spin on events aboard the ship. However, if Barney's speech is accepted, then the entire narration is suspect of duplicity. This possibility makes the work even richer in its thematic import.

Realism

Wouk considered himself a realist, like authors such as Theodore Dreiser and W. D. Howells who attempted objective positions, realistic descriptions, and accurate observation of human behavior. Realist writing is bereft of philosophy, judgment, or propaganda. Such writing by Wouk stands in marked contrast to John Steinbeck's overt socialism, Albert Camus' existentialism, and James Farrell's and Ralph Ellison's cynicism. Given these contemporaries and their rejection of the value system of Wouk's martial characters, it is little wonder that critics dismissed Wouk or that no person of American letters claims to have been influenced by him.

The elements of Wouk's novel that make it realistic cover everything from opening with the articles under which an officer can take over command of a vessel to the exact descriptions of the boat that only an experienced Navy officer could provide—including standing orders, course work, and drawings. The action of the book itself is rather routine—practice drills, sitting around waiting for orders, and the otherwise predictable life aboard a ship. This depiction of everyday life in the Navy is exciting in its minutiae, especially as it is being reflected in Maryk's log.

Irony

Irony, a self-aware moment of incongruity, is an important part of Wouk's technique. Perhaps the greatest irony in the novel concerns the court-martial of an executive officer aboard an old minesweeper while the grandest war ever fought on earth is mere background noise; "It amused Willie to consider, as he struggled to dress in his galloping room, that the issue of the morning had dwindled so quickly from life-or-death to a question of the wardroom's breakfast." In another instance, "There was an unsettling contrast between himself eating ice cream, and marines on Namur a few thousand yards away, being blown up. He was not sufficiently unsettled to stop eating ice cream."

Historical Context

World War II—The South Pacific

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese plan to deliver a declaration of war to President Roosevelt just moments before a pre-dawn raid on America's naval base in Pearl Harbor. Instead, the message is an hour late and the act becomes "the day of infamy" which rouses America into the dominant military and industrial complex it remains today.

The Pacific fleet is not entirely destroyed and Japan hurries to gain advantage before America can build more ships. Along with industrial might, the crucial element of success in the war of the South Pacific is American interception of Japanese communications. The first such interception reveals that Japan is going to attack and remove Australia from the war. Australia and America meet Japan in the Coral Sea in the summer of 1942 at Port Moresby in New Guinea. Militarily, the battle is a draw, but the attack on Australia is checked.

Compare & Contrast

• WWII: After Japan's surrender, America occupies Japan.
  
  1950s: On September 8, 1951, the United States and Japan sign a security pact that permits U.S. troops to remain on Japanese soil while any other nation must have U.S. permission to enter Japan.
  
  Today: In response to missile tests by North Korea, Japan and the United States invest in the deployment of Strategic Defense Initiatives, also known as Star Wars.
• WWII: The United States is the first nation to use a nuclear bomb in war.
  
  1950s: In 1951, the United States stages the first military maneuvers involving troops and nuclear bombs.
  
  Today: The United States has been unwilling to deter the spread of nuclear weapons and has made it nearly impossible for Russia to ratify SALT II, a treaty that massively reduces the number of armed nuclear missiles.
• WWII: America's productive capacity makes the United States the greatest military power in the world.
  
  1950s: Truman's 1951 budget contains the largest military expenditure to date.
  
  Today: President Clinton reverses the decline in military spending that began in 1985. Under his tenure, an eighth Nimitz-class carrier joins the fleet, the USS Harry S Truman. Also, America commits to deploying Star Wars by 2001.
• WWII: At the war's end, America insists on a proactive United Nations where nations can peaceably resolve disputes.
  
  1950s: America begins a tradition of using the United Nations as a cover for its foreign policies.
  
  Today: The United States won't pay its United Nations dues. Though it retains its permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, the United States currently has no speaking rights and risks losing sitting rights in the U.N. General Assembly.
• WWII: The United States and the Soviet Union are allies against Germany and Japan.
  
  1950s: The two superpowers are immersed in a Cold War and support opposing sides in the Korean War.
  
  Today: The de-militarized zone (DMZ) still exists at the 38th parallel. The United States is still unable to resolve the dispute.

Japan decides to attack Midway, an American base. America again intercepts communications and is ready. Japan overestimates the damage given to U.S. carriers and believes the USS Yorktown is out of commission. Japan expects an easy victory in June. Instead, the USS Yorktown is the only American carrier lost while Japan loses four of its eight carriers. From this point on, Japan retreats and the ferocious combat to take back each and every island is underway.

Korea

The sudden Japanese surrender that ends World War II leaves Japanese troops in possession of Korea. The Soviet Union allows Japanese troops to leave Korea. Eventually, an American-supported state under Syngman Rhee exists in the south and a Soviet-subsidized state under Kim Sung II exists in the north. Both leaders dream of ruling a united Korea.

In order to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula as well as to focus on Europe, the Soviets and the Americans withdraw their armies. In January 1950, President Truman delivers a speech reassuring all involved that America has no imperial interest in the area or in aiding Chaing Kai Shek. Further, America will only safeguard the perimeter it freed from Japan—a line stretching from the Aleutians, around Japan, and to the Philippines—but no mention is made of Korea. In June, with a green light from the Soviet Union, North Korea attacks the south and pushes U.N. troops into a tiny perimeter at the southern tip of the peninsula, starting what is now known as the Korean War.

Race Relations

The days of Jim Crow are numbered but the brightest of Americans, like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, refuse to wait. They find the atmosphere of America so oppressive that they prefer self-imposed exile in Paris. In Baldwin's case, he is young and still honing his talents. Richard Wright is haunted by his communist past. Meanwhile, the preeminent legal thinker of the day, Thurgood Marshall, brings important cases regarding civil rights before the Supreme Court—a distinguished court that he is soon to join.

While gathering evidence for his civil rights report on racial integration in the military, Marshall interviews General Douglas MacArthur. Marshall asks MacArthur why there is not one "Negro" on his entire headquarters staff or in his personal guard. MacArthur responds that there is not one qualified black man. Marshall tells him about one obvious legendary war hero. Then, Marshall asks why there is not one black in "that big beautiful band playing at the ceremony." And before the General can answer, Marshall says, "Now, General, just between you and me, goddammit, don't you tell me that there is no Negro that can play a horn."

Critical Overview

Despite his status as a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author, most literary critics do not like the work of Herman Wouk. As an anonymous reviewer in Time noted, Wouk "spearheads a mutiny against the literary stereotypes of rebel-lion—against three decades of U.S. fiction dominated by skeptical criticism, sexual emancipation, social protest, and psychoanalytic sermonizing." The Wouk hero is not the outlaw gunslinger of the dime-store novel, the migrant worker of Steinbeck, or the bongo-thumping poets of the gathering Beat Generation. Moreover, Wouk intentionally refuses to give in to pop-psychology, Freudianism, or the fascination with sociopaths. Instead he prefers to tell realistic tales in which the hero is a true patriot upholding American ideals. Such a story was considered anachronistic and derivative at the time.

Frederic I. Carpenter, in "Herman Wouk and the Wisdom of Disillusion," was very specific in his disfavor. Wouk, while engaging, is too moralistic, and the anagnorisis, or moment of character self-realization leading to self-growth, of his characters is too unbelievable. Carpenter says that The Caine Mutiny continues the attempt to tell a story in a "straightforward manner" that Wouk had begun in Marjorie Morningstar. Both novels used the "traditional techniques of allegorical implication and conversational realism." Both indict the "irresponsible romantic" (the Tom Keefer figure) as being culpable for the brief straying of the young and naive. Further, asserts Carpenter, Wouk's plot device has a continual failing, whether in The Traitor or The Caine Mutiny. That failing is evinced in Keith's ability to be a responsible captain simply by the assumption of authority, which is very difficult to believe. Still, says Carpenter, "The Caine Mutiny remains the best of Wouk's novels because it is the least moralistic."

Summing up the problem more than reflecting on the novel itself, Edmund Fuller wrote it this way in his Man and Modern Fiction, 1958: "It seems to me that Mr. Wouk has been the victim of an unusual amount of unfair criticism. I think much of this is due to [Caine Mutiny's] considerable contrast to the view of life and behavior reflected in [Norman Mailer's] The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity, which have been accepted far too readily as valid or normative views of the behavior and attitudes of man particularly within the framework of the military experience…."

But Fuller is rather exceptional in his charitable defense. In the same year, Maxwell Geismer judges Wouk, in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, saying, "The novels of Herman Wouk lie in a curious realm between art and entertainment." By the early 1960s, however, David Dempsey was able to admit that there was something else troubling people about Wouk. In "It Didn't Pay to Strike It Rich," Dempsey hints that there may be money involved in the negative reviews. Wouk, he says, is the "most commercially successful writer of his generation." Leslie A. Fiedler also noted the monetary connection, saying, in his Love and Death in the American Novel, that "writers like Dreiser, ironically enough, made it possible to write … the pure bourgeois novel." Wouk's realism is a cover for the presentation of one class' moral myth: the rebellious youth who matures through war to want nothing more than a suburban tract house and a beautiful wife.

Alhough The Caine Mutiny remains his best work by critical consensus, Wouk did not fare any better over time. "Like Sinclair, he writes journalese, and he never rises far above that level…. His characters are never living human beings," says Granville Hicks in a 1971 New York Times Book Review. In fact, Wouk's continued popularity and his continued use of anachronistic ideals led critics to charge him with pandering to the populace. As Pearl K. Bell states for a 1978 review in Commentary, Wouk is "an unembarrassed believer in such 'discredited' forms of commitment as valor, gallantry, leadership, patriotism." Be that as it may, Wouk remained on the bestseller charts with The Caine Mutiny and The Winds of War even during the Vietnam era.

In 1997, Chris Godat commented on Wouk's staying power in Contemporary Popular Writers. He said that Wouk had not sacrificed "his moral integrity. Wouk perceives himself as a realist in the tradition of Cooper, Howells, and Dreiser, and like his predecessors he addresses his fiction to a popular, rather than critical, audience."

Theater critics have been more forgiving and it is fair to notice the reserved praise bestowed on the stage adaptation of the novel. Eric Bentley, for example, in "Captain Bligh's Revenge," appreciates the novelist's "crisp dialogue." Further, says Bentley, Wouk "has an excellent story." That is until one realizes that Wouk's story is not a thriller but a "tract for the times" that says we should "respect authority: mutiny is unjustified." It is not as important to "save a particular ship but to preserve the authority of commanders; for they win wars while we sit reading Proust." Finally, Bentley asks a prescient question for the late 1990s: How mad would a commander have to be before he could be relieved according to Wouk? "The answer seems to be plumb crazy, raving, stark, staring mad."

Criticism

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd

Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. In the following essay, she analyzes Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny as a 'hostile text'—a novel that resists critical and analytic interpretive strategies.

The Caine Mutiny opens with a textual arti-fact—a page torn from the book of Navy Regulations which contains the articles relating to relief of a commanding officer. It closes with another—the "torn paper" of parade confetti which "brushed the face of the last captain of the Caine." Between these ripped paper bookends lies a densely inter-textual work which is layered with deliberate echoes of a multitude of canonical texts—the most obvious being The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Moby-Dick, and the book of Genesis—and contains scattered references to dozens of others. Though this would seem, at first glance, to mark it as a novel that invites literary interpretation, nothing could be more wrong.

The Caine Mutiny is in fact a novel that is aware of interpretation and resists it—providing obvious entry points for literary critique only to turn them back on the reader and undermine the analytic process. The ways in which the author deflects interpretation and expectation are many. The book proclaims itself to be a novel about World War II, but the action almost exclusively concerns non-combat life. It performs a narrative about-face four-fifths of the way through, forcing an abrupt shift in sympathies for all of the characters involved. It is shot through with morally ambiguous characters who spot the literary and symbolic references just as the reader has begun to, and thus draw us into uneasy complicity with them, making us question the very validity of textual interpretation. In the final analysis, The Caine Mutiny is a novel about the ethics of reading, about the moral implications of overlaying reality with literary meaning. The torn paper of the novel's last line is both a summation of the plot's resolution and an explicit injunction to do likewise—to tear up textual meaning.

From the title of the novel onwards, an analytic reader is predisposed to perform certain kinds of interpretation. Caine, of course, would seem to refer to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, the mutiny fitting in as an analog for the famous verse, "Cain rose up and slew his brother Abel." Analytic assumptions follow logically from this easy literary clue: that the ship and its crew will be outcasts, the mutiny will be couched in the language of family, honor and sin, and that the novel will conform to an easy series of symbolic devices. Several chapters into The Caine Mutiny however, this entire reading is defeated in a masterly sleight of hand. Not for the first or the last time, we as readers have been encouraged to congratulate ourselves on our reading skills, only to find that the narrative is quite aware of the interpretation that we have begun to give it. In a critical discussion during an Officers' meal, Tom Keefer—"the novelist"—tips our hand when he explains to the other officers the symbolic order that we too are using. As he says:

"This ship is an outcast, manned by outcasts, and named for the greatest outcast of mankind."

Their replies deflate both his reading and our own:

"That's the literary mind for you. I never thought of the Caine being a symbolic name—" "It seems to me, Mr. Keefer … that you can twist any ship's name into a symbolic meaning…."

This latter comment is especially significant. As Keith says, Keefer is an "endless treasury of plays on words," and his identification of the Caine with Cain is just one instance of his intellectual games and—increasingly—his clear moral relativism. Wouk has deliberately staged his narrative to encourage us to make the exact identifications that Keefer does, and in debunking Keefer he debunks us too.

This way of reading—as a search for literary "clues" that can be made to form a coherent pattern—comes consistently under attack throughout the novel, first encouraged, then identified and finally exploded. To an astute reader on the lookout for such clues, the "rotting hull" of the Caine is a clear reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the water-ban episode reinforces the identification. Almost as if it is anticipating the comments that we are about to write in the margin, the narrative again forestalls us:

"The bodies stirred, and rose, and began to move through chores with leaden limbs, like the crew of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

In pointing out the connections we are in the process of making, we are yoked into the viewpoint of characters like Keith and Keefer, who "read" in exactly the same way that we do. Keefer's analysis of Queeg and his steel balls is as predictable as ours—"the man's a Freudian delight. He crawls with clues," while Keith's way of understanding the crew is entrenched in our shared comparative literary methods:

"They reminded him of incidents in novels about men on long sea voyages, and there was a not quite pleasant amusement in seeing the classic symptoms popping out…."

Nor is this all. The novel does not seek only to reflect our reading process back on itself; it also serves as a moral judgment on us. The identification of literary methods with morally ambiguous characters is the first way in which this begins. The "strawberry episode" reinforces it, with Queeg's insane search for clues and his obsessive gathering of keys being a clear analogy for critical analysis. However, it is after the mutiny that this theme becomes openly vicious—when Barney Greenwald, arguably the moral center of the novel, realizes that Tom Keefer's literary games lie at the heart of the whole affair. As he says to Maryk after hearing the narrative of events, "Your sensitive novelist is the villain of this foul-up."

What Do I Read Next?

• Herman Melville wrote a brilliantly and symbolically charged novella in 1797. It focuses on the experiences of a family member of Melville's who presided over the court-martial and execution of a sailor. Though written in 1891, Billy Budd, Foretopman or Billy Budd, Sailor was first published posthumously in 1924. Coincidentally, the English composer Edward Benjamin Britten, aided by E. M. Forster's libretto, made Billy Budd into an opera in 1951.
• A romantic novel by Charles Nordhoff describes what has become the archetypal story of mutiny. His 1932 novel, Mutiny on the Bounty, is based on the actual mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty in 1789 as narrated by Roger Byam.
• In the 1970s, Wouk returned to World War II as a setting for a novel with a two-volume historical novel The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). The first novel tells of the heroic Lt. Henry and the plight of Jews in Poland. The second novel is the translations of a Nazis' private papers near the end of the war. Both novels have been praised for their historical accuracy.
• The other great American novel to come out of World War II in 1948 is Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead. The novel chronicles the experiences of a platoon on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei in the Pacific.
• After the war was over, most just wanted to forget the horrors of the camps. Elie Wiesel, however, refused to let the experience be swept under the rug. He wrote a 1956 novel called Night that described some of his own experiences in concentration camps during World War II. Wiesel then began a lifelong quest to talk about the camps and do whatever he could to prevent them from ever happening again.

The shared celebration for Maryk's victory and Keefer's literary contract underscore the insistent suggestion that there are two novels for which Keefer must take credit. Not only is his half-finished work Multitudes, Multitudes being published, but also his most triumphantly authored work, The Caine Mutiny itself. Even as we begin to recognize this parallel, however, Wouk outplays us again, taking the analysis from us and putting it in the mouth of Barney Greenwald. As the lawyer says of Keefer shortly before throwing a drink in his face, "He was the author of the Caine mutiny among his other works." Through the drunken speeches of Greenwald, the fundamental truths of the war are elaborated for the first and only time in the novel, and act as a series of narrative about-turns that utterly destabilize the reading of the situation that we have been encouraged to accept. To the shocked party-goers he elaborates that the war is about the Holocaust; that enlisted officers like Queeg have devoted their lives to standing between America and such horrors; that Maryk is indeed guilty of making a mutiny; and that the hero of the piece should have been Captain Queeg himself.

Accepting Greenwald's interpretation leads to a series of uneasy realizations about our own complicity in the case, the chief being that we, like the deluded crew, have accepted the romance of the tale and ignored the reality. Just as Keith "had whispered to himself, "'the Caine mutiny, the Caine mutiny,' savoring the ring of the phrase," so we have read the mutiny as an adventure tale, ignoring the narrative injunction at the novel's opening:

"It was not a mutiny in the old-time sense, of course, with flashings of cutlasses, a captain in chains, and desperate sailors turning outlaws."

This is, of course, precisely the way that the Mutiny section has been crafted, and the way in which it is interpreted by the novel's civilians, May Wynn and Keith's mother. The purpose of Wouk's layers of literary reference become clearer—they are there to show us that the reality of war is outside literary craft and that our understanding of it is immorally confused by our reading matter. If we are to disassociate ourselves from Keefer—the critic and coward who is "stained yellow" for-ever—we must reject criticism and interpretation. By the end of the novel Keefer has himself realized his own nature, and is still unable to extract it from literary conceit. His cowardice is linked in his mind with Lord Jim and he tells Willie that he will be "Lord Tom" from this point onwards. It is highly appropriate that he damns himself with reference to a seafaring novel, since he has begun the whole mutiny with his allusion to another. As he said to Maryk early in the escalating tension, "Ever read Billy Budd, by Melville? Read it. That's the whole story."

Of course this is not the whole story, and Maryk tells him so, relating the actual causes behind Queeg's dislike of Stilwell. He points out the real reasons for the hostility, and comments, "I don't have any theories. I'm a dumb comic-book reader." In fact, "dumb" comic-book reading, in which word and image have a direct and uncomplicated relationship, turns out to be the only kind of reading that doesn't morally incriminate the reader. In a truly shocking moment, the scenes at the celebration party have revealed to us that everything before them has been word-play—a literary game stylistically embodied by Keefer's favorite novel, Finnegan's Wake. The version of The Caine Mutiny that we have been reading is no more or less than Keefer's novel, wearily assessed by Greenwald as a book which:

"exposes this war in all its grim futility and waste, and shows up the military men for the stupid, Fascist-minded sadists they are."

If we accept Barney's insistence that this is not true, that it is Queeg who should have been the tragic hero of the tale, then the purpose of the torn page of regulations at the frontispiece comes into retrospective focus. The articles contained therein are the facts—the elements by which we should have judged the action of the novel. It has, in fact, been a trial, and Barney Greenwald is telling us that we too have made a false judgment, and have been found wanting. We are just as gullible as Maryk and, like him, should have stuck to comic books.

Source: Tabitha McIntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Ricardo J. Quinones

In the following excerpt, Quinones argues that The Caine Mutiny is "deeply flawed," but that this flaw lends literary interest to the work and also invites analysis of the story from a historical perspective.

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Source: Ricardo J. Quinones, "The New American Cain: East of Eden and Other Works of Post-World War II America," in his The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 135-52.

Robert Bierstedt

In the following excerpt, Bierstedt faults "the conclusions to which the author of The Caine Mutiny felt constrained to come at the end of his book."

The Caine Mutiny was published on March 19, 1951. After a somewhat sluggish start it found its way to the best-seller list of the New York Times and to the surprise of almost everyone, including a publisher who had rejected the manuscript, it remained there for one hundred twenty-three weeks. Domestic sales in various editions are well over the three million mark. It has been translated into sixteen foreign languages; it has been syndicated in forty-one American newspapers; it has been distributed by no less than four book clubs; and its author has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, a play prepared by the author himself, opened on Broadway in January of 1954 and is still [November, 1954] playing to capacity audiences. The movie opened at the Capitol Theater in New York on June 24, and by now it is impossible to estimate the number of millions of people who have joined the crew of the Caine and who have participated, however vicariously, in one of the best advertized "mutinies" in history.

We have here a phenomenon which has one set of implications for Madison Avenue, however, and quite another for this quiet seminary on Morningside Heights [The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, where the chapter was originally presented as a lecture]. For The Caine Mutiny, whatever one thinks of it as a publishing success, is a work of considerable literary merit. It is a book, moreover, which introduces an interesting moral issue. This, of course, is one of the functions of literature, and the greater the literature, as this entire series exemplifies, the more imposing the moral problem. Although the rank of the book as a work of art does not directly concern us, we should be disposed to argue that a moral flaw in its structure, if such it be, is relevant to an esthetic judgment. That the novel does contain a moral flaw is the case I want to propose and this in spite of a personal admiration for Herman Wouk which is both wholehearted and humble. The flaw is one which no amount of admiration can altogether subdue, no casuistry wholly conceal.

The extraordinary popularity of The Caine Mutiny, in book and play and movie, renders unnecessary a recapitulation of the plot. As an aid to recollection, however, we may reintroduce the cast of characters so that the problems they severally and individually confront can claim our attention.

The protagonist of the novel is Willie Keith, a Princeton man and sometime singer in night clubs who aspires to a professorship in Romance languages. (It is, we are encouraged to believe, a genteel profession and one well suited to the otherwise idle rich.) In the course of his tour of naval duty Willie greatly matures and as we leave him at the book's end we suspect, with some apprehension, that he may turn out to be a professor after all. In the book, however, Willie serves an important purpose. It is his eyes through which we observe the mutiny on the Caine and further, as Wouk says, "the event turned on his personality as the massive door of a vault turns on a small jewel bearing." When, at the height of the storm, the two officers of the Caine, the captain and the executive officer, give contradictory orders to the helmsman, the latter, Stilwell, appeals in real fear to Willie, then on duty as Officer of the Deck. It is apparent that if Willie, at this tense moment, had supported the captain instead of the executive officer, the latter's attempt to relieve his skipper would have failed. In this sense, the author is saying, Willie is essential to the plot; this is his raison d'être.

The importance of a single individual in the causation of a complex event in human affairs is always open to question, as Tolstoy has so supremely taught us. Given the circumstances, it may be argued that the result was inevitable and that Willie had no more to do with it—and no less—than any other member of the fated company. But historiography and fiction are two different enterprises. The novelist's art requires him to accept a theory which a sociologist is ordinarily tempted to reject, that is, the heroic (or diabolic) theory of history. We may readily concede to Wouk, therefore, that Willie was not only important but essential to the mutiny of the Caine. At the same time we ought to note, perhaps, that all of the officers of the Caine supported Maryk in his relief of Queeg, and this without further question or controversy.

The second officer to engage our attention is Philip Spencer Queeg, named no doubt after Midshipman Philip Spencer, one of three men actually hanged for mutiny in 1842, the only mutiny recorded in the naval history of the United States, and that, too, incidentally, a dubious one. Lieutenant Commander Queeg is the captain of the Caine. He is also "regular Navy" and the Articles for the Government of the Navy are his only Bible and his only Law. He is more than a disciplinarian; he is a martinet. He possesses that combination of qualities which usually makes for success in any bureaucracy and for failure everywhere else. While martinets and myrmidons may be conspicuous in military organizations, they can be found, of course, in all the organizations of society. Wouk need not apologize therefore to the Navy for drawing this kind of portrait of one of its officers, although his compunction to do so is unaccountably clear. The normal curve of probability has ends as well as a middle, and in any group as large as the Navy some persons will find their places at the extremities of the curve.

We learn very early that as a ship's handler Queeg is clumsy and inept. His seamanship is not only faulty; it is often dangerous. At the time of the typhoon it is clear, although Wouk later tries to compromise the picture, that he is doing everything wrong. His refusal to come into the wind, to ballast his tanks, and to turn the depth charges on "Safe" all increase the hazards to his ship. He fails to do what a reasonably prudent and capable seaman would do on the ground that standing orders are still standing and that not even a typhoon justifies the slightest departure, or exercise of initiative.

But Queeg is not, in other circumstances, a "book-officer" at all. He illegally transports back to the States a consignment of liquor for his own personal use and then extorts the cost of it from Willie when, because of his own mistakes, it is lost overboard. On several occasions he submits to his superiors reports which stray rather considerably from the truth in the direction of self-justification, and he offers, in the instance of the "mutiny" itself, to erase and rewrite the rough logs of the ship. This last, for obvious reasons, is an exceedingly serious offense against naval regulations.

The issue of cowardice as affecting Queeg is one which the author treats with insight and skill. The captain never stays on the exposed side of the bridge when the ship is under fire. In one case he fails to return enemy fire when he has an opportunity to do so, and instead moves the Caine out of range as rapidly as possible. In escorting assault boats to the beach at Kwajalein he runs far ahead of them, drops a dyemarker indicating the line of departure, and then hastily runs again for safety. This last incident wins him the name "Old Yellowstain" among his subordinate officers, and the "Yellow," of course, stands for more than the color of the dye. For the reader at least, Wouk clearly, steadily, and consistently establishes, beyond any lingering possibility of skepticism, that Queeg is a coward.

Queeg, however, is not on trial, and the charge of cowardice which Willie Keith's testimony so clearly implies has no legal stature. The defense attorney, Greenwald, denies that Queeg is guilty of cowardice, on the ground that no man certified by the Navy as qualified for command could possibly be guilty of so heinous a charge. On the contrary, if Queeg's actions seem to suggest cowardice, they must instead be attributed to a mental affliction. The testimony of three psychiatrists that Queeg's condition is not disabling suffers heavily under cross-examination and particularly when Greenwald maintains that the court is better qualified than a board of medical examiners to estimate the stresses of command.

Finally, of course, Queeg convicts himself by going to pieces on the witness stand, repeating tiresome trivialities over and over to the point of echolalia and clicking his little steel balls together as his case disintegrates. The captain and his creator together have convinced us all that the "mutiny" was justified and that Maryk, the executive officer, is innocent even of the lesser charge of "conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline." It is a dramatic, colorful, and exciting story, and at the climax, as throughout, only one conclusion is possible.

Lieutenant Stephen Maryk, who relieves Queeg and who thus becomes the defendant in the court-martial action, is not so fully rounded nor so richly detailed as the other officers. A fisherman before the war who now aspires to transfer to the Regular Navy, he is an extraordinarily able seaman. He is more than that. He is a decent, honest, and courageous citizen. As executive officer under Queeg he is caught between the parlous captain and the reluctant crew, and he performs the duties of this trying and essentially ambivalent position with distinction, retaining both the trust of his subordinates and the confidence of the skipper. As the situation is constructed this would seem to be an impossible task, but Maryk somehow manages to accomplish it. He relieves Queeg only after he is convinced that the ship is in its last extremity and that the captain, in panic, has lost touch with the reality of the raging seas.

Maryk is not stupid, however, and to suggest that he is the mere pawn of Keefer, cowed by Keefer's superior intellect and supposedly superior insight into the dark recesses of the human mind, is to do him a disservice. Maryk may not know the technical language of psychoanalysis, but he knows an incompetent mariner when he sees one, and Wouk leaves no doubt that he does see one on the bridge of the Caine at the height of the typhoon. Maryk acts throughout—and especially in the action for which he is court-martialed—with vigor and decision. To suggest that he is at any time motivated by disloyalty, is to distort the image of a character which the author has carefully, if briefly, constructed.

Lieutenant Thomas Keefer, of course, is the Cassius of the Caine. An intellectual and a writer, Keefer induces Maryk to keep a medical log on the captain and explains the captain's symptoms as they appear. It is Keefer who is always somewhere else when unpleasant decisions have to be made; it is Keefer who displays both moral and physical cowardice; and it is Keefer finally who betrays his friend Maryk on the witness stand. Keefer is conscious of his weaknesses, however, and with a curious candor even confesses to them. At least one critic—Granville Hicks—has regarded Wouk's treatment of Keefer as an assault upon intellectuals and as one more indication of the anti-intellectualism of our time. This is a complaint which we shall consider in the sequel.

We come finally to Lieutenant Barney Greenwald, the only one of the five officers who was not a member of the Caine's company and who serves instead as Maryk's counsel. He appears first as a quiet but arrogant individual who thinks, on the one hand, that Steve Maryk and Willie Keith "deserve to get slugged" and, on the other, that only a "halfway intelligent defense" will suffice to get them off. He hesitates at first to take the case and then expresses himself so dogmatically against his own prospective clients that one might question the wisdom of his superior in permitting him to do so. "I just don't want to defend these Caine people," he says. "Captain Queeg obviously is not crazy. The psychiatrist's report proves it. These fools find a paragraph in Navy Regs that gives them ideas, and they gang up on a skipper who's mean and stupid—as a lot of skippers are—and make jackasses of themselves, and put a ship out of action. I'm a damn good lawyer and a very expensive one, and I don't see contributing my services to get them acquitted."

This speech attracts our attention for several reasons. In the first place the reader by this time has thoroughly identified himself with the defendants and like them he is desperately in need of an adequate defense against the recommended charge of mutiny. It comes as a disappointment therefore that the attorney who will serve in this capacity has so enthusiastically prejudged the case. His pre-judgment might possibly be excused on the ground that he is talking only to two other lawyers, but, on the other hand, one of them, Challee, is scheduled, as judge advocate, to be his opponent at the trial. But even worse, it is a prejudgment which stems from ignorance. When Greenwald makes this remark he knows nothing whatever about the events which occurred on the Caine and has no warrant for assuming that it is merely a case of discontented men "ganging up" on a "mean and stupid skipper."

Greenwald is also wrong in his anticipation of the character of Maryk. The person he expects to see is the college radical of the thirties—thin, dark, sensitive, intellectual, antimilitary in general and anti-Navy in particular, possibly even a Commu-nist. Maryk, of course, is none of these things, and so Greenwald receives his first surprise.

Finally we learn—in the book but not in the movie—that Greenwald is a Jew, and we are informed that he therefore has an especial reason to appreciate the United States Navy. In the movie Greenwald is merely a loyal American who supports, as "intellectuals" apparently do not, the importance of the peacetime Navy.

This, then, is the cast of characters. To this cast we may now add Herman Wouk, the man who wrote the book. Wouk sees the action which occurred on the Caine as a rebellion against authority, a rebellion he first considers justified and then, inconsistently and unaccountably, unjustified. Mutiny, of course, is rebellion of a high order since it is a challenge to the authority of a captain of a ship at sea. We are prepared to concede that such authority is and must be almost absolute. Indeed, it has been remarked that a captain on his bridge is the closest a civilized society ever comes to an absolute monarch. It is a situation in which only monarchy can work. Obedience to such authority must be instantaneous and unquestioned; it is an authority recognized, protected, and supported both by naval law and by long maritime tradition. The perils of the sea require special vigilance, and special rules, in consequence, have arisen to cope with them.

Now as Wouk tells us himself, there was no genuine mutiny on the Caine. We have here no "flashing of cutlasses, no captain in chains," no criminal sailors seizing the ship in order to pursue their own designs. After Maryk relieves the captain the structure of authority remains precisely what it was before. The functions of the crew remain the same and so also does the mission of the ship. Particular individuals no longer occupy the same places in the structure, but the authority itself is both intact and unchallenged.

Nor is it a mutiny in another sense. As Greenwald immediately recognizes, "There's no question of force or violence or disrespect." Maryk even apologizes to Queeg at the moment of relief, using the following formula, "Captain, I'm sorry, sir, you're a sick man. I am temporarily relieving you of command of this ship, under Article 184 of Navy Regulations." Article 184 reads as follows:

It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary, either by placing him under arrest or on the sick list; but such action shall never be taken without the approval of the Navy Department or other appropriate higher authority, except when reference to such higher authority is undoubtedly impracticable because of the delay involved or for other clearly obvious reason. Such reference must set forth all facts in the case, and the reasons for the recommendation, with particular regard to the degree of urgency involved.

Article 185 says in addition, and in part:

In order that a subordinate officer, acting upon his own initiative, may be vindicated for relieving a commanding officer from duty, the situation must be obvious and clear, and must admit of the single conclusion that the retention of command by such commanding officer will seriously and irretrievably prejudice the public interests.

These passages indicate that the authority to relieve a commanding officer under certain conditions is clearly present in naval law and that Maryk's action is therefore no challenge to authority. Indeed, Maryk invokes the relevant authority at the moment of relief. In all that has preceded, Wouk has demonstrated that the situation is "obvious and clear" and admits of the single conclusion "which a reasonable, prudent, and experienced officer would regard as a necessary consequence from the facts thus determined to exist." The notion that Maryk's action is somehow a rebellion against authority, is one which is susceptible to serious question. The action must, of course, be justified and this is the task to which Greenwald devotes himself, with the unwitting assistance of Queeg himself, in the famous trial scenes. We all rejoice therefore when a sensible verdict is sensibly reached. From the facts which the author has given us, not only in court but during the long cruise of the Caine itself, acquittal is the only possible conclusion.

So now the trial is over, the case concluded, the novel finished. Maryk's acquittal in the confusion and tumult of war is itself a potent compliment to the Navy. We can take pride in a military organization in which the exercise of authority is not unaccompanied by compassion. The Navy we see in Wouk's book is no Prussian organization, placing discipline above all other considerations, including the safety of its ships and the lives of its men. Our suspense during the trial is sustained by our suspicion of the Navy; now we discover with relief that the suspicion is unjustified, that the Navy, too, can take account of human frailty and human need. The dinner party to celebrate the verdict and to pay tribute to Greenwald for his defense of Maryk promises to be an anticlimax. For us, the readers, justice has triumphed—as we were afraid it would not—and right has prevailed.

But now something happens which alters the complexion of the book and reverses its thesis. The victory party does not finish the novel but instead destroys the consistency of the plot and mars the moral integrity of the author's achievement. Something happens which we are induced to call the tergiversation of Herman Wouk.

The scene is the victory dinner, called and paid for by Keefer as a double celebration, first for the acquittal and second for the acceptance of his novel by a publishing house. In the midst of the alcoholic gaiety Greenwald stumbles drunkenly into the room and, as the hero of the trial, is called upon to speak. In response he asks first about Keefer's book, a war novel, and then—incredibly—says, "It suddenly seems to me that if I wrote a war novel I'd try to make a hero out of Old Yellowstain." He is quite serious. To explain the reason for making Queeg a hero he invokes his little old Jewish mother. When the "Germans started running out of soap and figured, well it's time to come over and melt down old Mrs. Greenwald—who's gonna stop them? Not her boy Barney. Can't stop a Nazi with a lawbook. So I dropped the lawbooks and ran to learn how to fly. Stout fellow. Meantime, and it took a year and a half before I was any good, who was keeping Mama out of the soap dish? Captain Queeg."

In this maudlin scene we are suddenly asked to believe that Queeg, in contrast to everything we have known of him before, is a hero; that Keefer, who gets the champagne in his face, is a villain; and that Maryk, in relieving the captain, has committed an unforgivable crime. Here is transvaluation with a vengeance! Why has Wouk done this? For many pages we have followed him in good faith, believing that Queeg was indeed afflicted with a mental aberration (remember, for example, the strawberry incident), believing that he was at bottom a coward who preferred not to face the enemy, believing, finally, that he was wholly incapacitated by fear at the height of the typhoon and unable in consequence to save his ship. We believe that Maryk is the savior of the Caine and of the lives of the men, because Wouk, with a superior artistry, has convinced us that this is so. We have given him our total attention throughout and now, without warning, he is telling us that he has deceived us, that Maryk and the other officers are guilty, that Queeg is to be praised for having joined the peacetime Navy, and that authority ought to be upheld in any cause however ignoble and in any person however cowardly, crazy, or incompetent. The story for him has become as simple as the assertion in the Book of Luke (7:8), "For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another Come, and he cometh."

Wouk is telling us in addition that he is sorry he has written the story the way he has and that he, too, deserves an appropriate punishment. He will now do penance and write the remainder of his book from an opposite point of view. This opposition, amounting to a contradiction, is expressed in the words of the reviewing authority, which disapproves the acquittal of Maryk, which "believes the specification proved beyond a reasonable doubt," and which continues:

There is in this case a miscarriage of justice whereby an officer escapes punishment for a serious offense and a dangerous precedent has been established. The fact that the ship was in hazard does not mitigate, but rather intensifies the responsibility of the accused. It is at times of hazard most of all that the line of naval discipline should be held rigidly, especially by senior officers on a ship…. A ship can have only one commanding officer, appointed by the government, and to remove him in an irregular manner without referring the matter to the highest available authority is an act exceeding the powers of a second-in-command. This doctrine is emphasized, not weakened, by the description in Articles 184, 185, and 186 of the exceedingly rare circumstances in which exception may be made, and the intentions of the Navy Department to this effect are therein expressed with the utmost clarity and vigor.

Finally, Willie himself accepts the thesis that Maryk was acquitted by legal trickery. In a letter to May Wynn he accuses himself and Maryk of disloyalty and suggests that they transferred to Queeg the hatred they should have felt for Hitler and the Japanese. The reverse rationalization of the letter concludes with the following remarkable recommendation to serve authority with a blind obedience: "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." And when he reads the words of the reviewing authority he says, "Well, I concur too. That makes it unanimous."

But Willie is wrong. The verdict is not unanimous. It is for us, the readers, to render judgment and most of us, I suspect, will support the court against the author's belated change of mind. We need no legal trickery, no courtroom prestidigitation, to show that the novelist has now done us—and himself—a disservice, and that his final phi-losophy of authority requires reexamination and rejection.

A number of reasons weigh in the balance and encourage this conclusion. The first of these is that not even so competent a writer as Herman Wouk is able to refute in roughly fifty pages a point of view he has taken four hundred and fifty pages to advance. What he has done he cannot now undo. Having convinced us at length that Queeg is guilty of both incompetence and cowardice, he cannot now convince us in so short a space that Queeg, on the contrary, is a hero who is motivated throughout only by his own conceptions of what is good for the Navy and that these conceptions are valid. Such a transformation does not square with the yellowstain incident, the extortion for the lost liquor, the case of the missing strawberries, or the captain's paralysis during the storm.

Similarly, Maryk, limned for us throughout as an able and decent citizen, stands now accused of stupidity and of conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline. After observing him for many, many pages and many, many months at sea it is simply not possible to concur in this opinion. Our author, however, is adamant, and therefore has to punish Maryk. He may be only half-guilty, as Greenwald tells him in the climactic scene, but, on the other hand, he is only half-acquitted, too. His chances of transfer to the Regular Navy are now forfeit and he is in fact demoted to the command of an LCI (Landing Craft, Infantry). Willie, by the way, who is equally guilty, becomes the last captain of the Caine. The quick twist, in short, requires Wouk to punish Maryk and to reward Willie for what was roughly the same offense.

But even more serious is what the tergiversation does to Greenwald, whom Wouk has obviously chosen to represent his new point of view. Greenwald now assures us, in his party speech, that he got Maryk off by "phony legal tricks." Taking him at his word, is it proper for an attorney to resort to trickery in order to save a man who is at least "half-guilty" and in the process destroy another man (Queeg) to whom he now says he owes a favor? Instead of a St. George in shining armor we now have an attorney who takes a case in which he does not believe and which he wins through conscious trickery rather than conviction. By his own admission he owes a favor to Queeg but he is nevertheless responsible for consigning Queeg to the oblivion of a naval supply depot in Stuber City, Iowa. Greenwald, whom we were prepared to acclaim not only as the savior of Maryk but also as a servant of justice, now convicts himself of hypocrisy, with only the thin excuse that the wrong man was on trial. His morbid speech robs us of our respect for him. If we still have sympathy it is because we see that he, like Queeg, has symptoms of a mental affliction. The notion that Queeg, because he joined the Navy in peacetime, somehow prevented Goering from making soap out of Greenwald's mother, is about as far out of touch with reality as Queeg's search for the nonexistent key in the strawberry incident. We regretfully conclude that Greenwald has his little steel balls, too, and that they are clicking around in his head as incessantly as Queeg's click in his hand.

Wouk's change of mind involves more than a transformation in his characters. It involves in addition an incomprehensible logic. The movie critic of the New Yorker, John McCarten, remarks impatiently about Wouk's "odd notion that it was somehow heroic to have joined the Navy in the nineteen-thirties, as the befuddled captain did, while civilians were out making fortunes on the W.P.A." But Queeg is more than befuddled; he is wholly bereft of ideas. There is no evidence that he has ever made a commitment to a political or philosophical position. It is difficult to see him as a champion of democracy, or of any other political philosophy. It is all very well for Wouk to defend the importance of a peacetime Navy but it is a little extravagant to contend that those who manned it did so because they were opponents of totalitarianism or enemies of antisemitism. Indeed, men like Queeg are wholly innocent of political preferences and predilections. Wouk does not seem to have noticed that Queeg would have served equally well and with equal attention to discipline in the German Navy. His superior might as easily have been Admiral Doenitz as Admiral Halsey. Nothing matters to him except the shirttails of his sailors.

Our next charge against Wouk is that he does the United States Navy a disservice in implying now that it is an organization incapable of handling the extremities of the normal probability curve, that in personnel problems it can see only black and white and none of the shades between, that it is permanently and inflexibly an authoritarian organization. Articles 184, 185, and 186 are to be found in Navy Regulations and we may presume at least, Wouk now to the contrary notwithstanding, that they were put there for a purpose. What that purpose might be, Wouk himself devotes the greater part of his book to explaining. It is again incomprehensible therefore that he should turn his back upon his own explanation and imply that these ar-ticles ought not to be used, that it is somehow degrading to the Navy even to suggest that an occasion could arise on which they might properly be invoked. I should hazard the guess that most of us would rather serve in Maryk's Navy than in Greenwald's, in the Navy represented by the officers who acquitted Maryk than in the Navy whose officers disapproved the verdict.

A final question remains. As mentioned earlier, Granville Hicks in The New Leader has suggested that Wouk's treatment of Lieutenant Keefer is an assault upon intellectuals and must therefore be regarded as one more sign of the anti-intellectualism of the times. One would like to register a dissent from this view and to defend the author against the indictment. If intellectuals occasionally stray from the canons of a strict morality, this implies merely that they share the defects and imperfections of other men. Wouk may portray Keefer's perfidy, but there is no reason for supposing that it is the perfidy of a class. Nor does Wouk maintain that there is a higher incidence of dishonesty among intellectuals than in other groups. The villains of literature come in all colors and shapes and sizes, represent every nationality, religion, and vocation, and belong to every social group.

Unfortunately, however, Wouk cannot be so easily absolved. Upon further reflection it is clear that he is objecting to Keefer not because Keefer is perfidious but because he is thoughtful. He deprecates Keefer not because of his betrayal of Maryk but because of his inclination to think. There is the clear conclusion now that if no one had done any thinking the "mutiny" would never have occurred and that Keefer, as the leading thinker, is largely to blame for the unfortunate history of the Caine. Here is an author telling us that blind obedience to authority is preferable to its rational acceptance. And this, I submit, is dangerous doctrine. An obedience which is blind is an obedience ill-equipped to match the menaces of our century. This kind of obedience is the antithesis of responsible social action and ultimately the denial of an adult morality.

In these remarks I have been critical of the conclusions to which the author of The Caine Mutiny felt constrained to come at the end of his book. These criticisms, while relevant to both an esthetic and a moral judgment, do not detract from the esteem in which I hold both the author and his book. Nor do they reduce, in any respect but one, the distinction of Wouk's achievement. Criticism, after all, is easy, creation difficult. If my remarks are cogent they imply only that The Caine Mutiny, which is a very good book, could have been a much better one. They suggest that consistency is not only a canon of logic and a requirement of literature—it is also a moral virtue. And they assert without equivocation that authority differs from authoritarianism in that it always makes some attempt, however small, to satisfy the criterion of reason.

Source: Robert Bierstedt, "The Tergiversation of Herman Wouk," in Great Moral Dilemmas in Literature, Past and Present, edited by R. M. MacIver, Harper & Brothers, 1956, pp. 1-14.

Sources

Pearl K. Bell, in Commentary, December, 1978.

Eric Bentley, "Captain Bligh's Revenge," in his The Dramatic Event: An American Chronicle, Horizon Press, 1954, pp. 191-94.

Frederic I. Carpenter, "Herman Wouk and the Wisdom of Disillusion," in English Journal, Vol. XLV, No. 1, January, 1956, pp. 1-6, 32.

David Dempsey, "It Didn't Pay to Strike It Rich," in The New York Times Book Review, May 20, 1962, pp. 1, 38.

Edmund Fuller, in Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary American Writing, Random House, 1958.

Maxwell Geismar, in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, Hill and Wang, 1958, p. 38.

Chris Godat, Contemporary Popular Writers, edited by Dave Mote, St. James Press, 1997.

Granville Hicks, in New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1971, pp. 4-5.

Time, April 9, 1951.

Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, Times Books, 1999, 459 p.

For Further Study

Samuel Beckett, Watt, Grove Press, 1970.

For a stark contrast to Wouk, there is this work of the Irishman who fought for the French resistance when Germany occupied France in World War II, Samuel Beckett. His absurdist novel of 1953 features a protagonist named Watt who wanders around searching for meaning.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Everyman's Library, 1993.

Recounts Marlow's journey into the Congo to retrieve Mr. Kurtz.

Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Doubleday, 1983.

Ehrenreich examines some of the reasons and motivations behind a male revolt against reverence for the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood. She draws her evidence from pop cultural developments ranging from the rise of Playboy to the gray flannel suit.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Penguin, 1991.

This novel became the bible of a whole generation of disillusioned beatniks. His philosophy and images provide a vivid contrast to Wouk's.

Matthew Klam, "The Pilot's Tale: At Sea with 90,000 Tons of Diplomacy," in Harpers, February, 1999, pp. 33-48.

Describes the nuclear power of today's ships as well as the technical brilliance of their features and their planes.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Penguin, 1992.

Wouks' story contains many subtle references to this 1851 American classic. This is the original story of the mad captain and his obsession with the capture of a great white whale.

James A. Michener, Tales of the South Pacific, Fawcett Books, 1989.

Another great American novel of World War II, this novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and became the material for the Rogers and Hammerstein musical. The novel is a romantic story of a Marine who falls in love with a Tonkinese girl.