Customer Reviews

Delilah: A Novel about a U.S. Navy Destroyer and the Epic Struggles of Her Crew

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Someone, somewhere ought to do justice to Marcus Goodrich and write a biography. The Columbia educated runaway from San Antonio eventually wrote the original treatment (not the screenplay) for "It's a Wonderful Life". (I believe it was his sister, Francis, who actually co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Albert Hackett.) Before that, he had served in both World Wars, his experience in the first, aboard the sunken destroyer U.S.S. Chauncey, having formed the basis for "Delilah", published in January, 1941 to good reviews and high sales among men bound for the Navy. He was married to Olivia DeHavilland for five years, from 1947-1952, before a stormy divorce. That, a harsh experience in World War II, and bitter disillusionment toward Hollywood's insistence on artistic control of screenwriters, led him at the age of 55 to retire to obscurity in Richmond where he eventually died on October 20, 1991 in what once was the Confederate Soldiers' Convalescent Hospital; he was 93. According to the strangest preface ever composed, in the 1965 re-print of "Delilah", despite writing incessantly and finishing the second half of "Delilah", "but not quite", it would likely never be published. (And, indeed, neither it nor his other two incomplete manuscripts, ever have been. The published part ends at the declaration of war by the United States on Germany in April, 1917.) In 1965, Goodrich said: "If I cannot get back to [the second half of "Delilah"] and complete it, I shall probably burn it. I live under pressure." There is more to the book than meets the eye, it being helpful to know some detailed history of the world wars to get the best from it. (Remembering when this book was published, note how Goodrich refers in hostile terms to the Japanese Fleet, an ally in World War I.) Worth a read, especially if you are interested in warships at sea and the first or second world wars. Also check out the glowing review given the book by W.J. Cash, (! author of "The Mind of the South", published in February, 1941), at the very beginning of his commencement address to the University of Texas graduating class on June 2, 1941, (reprinted in "W.J. Cash: Southern Prophet", by Joseph L. Morrison, Knopf, 1967, p. 295). (Cash died strangely a month later in Mexico City and "Delilah" was the last book known to have been read by him.) "Delilah" is a strange, ghostly ride with meandering, gothic prose (or "Henry Jamesian" as one contemporary reviewer put it in 1941), supplying an ample feeling of an oily cacophony of machinery fused with sweat and boiling anger characteristic among sardine-like submariners cramped at sea for weeks; the whole effect is somehow worth it in the end and one questions whether "Delilah" is a ship, a destructive woman, or a violent, crowded age. Read the preface to the 1965 edition slowly, once before and once after reading this curious book. Then, as Goodrich said of his writing, "put it away in the icebox and let it cool awhile", take it out and read parts of "Delilah" again.

Does not rate a 10 only because the 2nd half of the novel was never published. The book describes the actions and characters of the crew of the U.S. Navy Destroyer "Delilah," serving in the Phillipines just prior to the First World War. The writing is extraordinarily sophisticated and fine; small exerpts don't do it justice. The book must be read slowly, for much of its purpose is to describe the subtle relationships between men at work, and considerable effort is given to character and motivation. A solemn, strange, sometimes weirdly funny novel. Beautiful

I did enjoy this book, though I felt it was sloww getting started. I agree with another reviewer, that while reading the last 80 to 100 pages, the book was very hard to put down.

My naval career was a very modest one, but my impression is that this book exudes authenticity for the Navy of its time-period, and echoes of it still exist in the Navy I remember of 1951-1953. Some of the account, when not much was going on in Phillipines (where the Delilah was), were not overly exciting, but the book in its last 70 pages or so is unputdownable. A unique and vital book, and lives up to Good Reading's tout of it as the "One of the most powerful American sea Stories since Moby Dick."

This book won a Pulizter back in, I guess, the 20's. It is an amazing book. Parts of it seem surreal, as when the main characters explore the inside of an ocean-side mountain. But the people in the book are interesting, well-developed, and believable. Goodrich co-wrote the screenplay for "It's A Wonderful Life", but there's no resemblance.

This book's problem is that the central characters -- enlisted sailors in the US Navy aboard a 1917-era destroyer in the Philippines -- are brutal, ignorant, selfish, stupid men who fight and fight endlessly in bar-room brawls, engine-room brawls, etc., and it is impossible to care about them. Goodrich had the makings of a great story here -- a story like Huckleberry Finn, or the Odyssey, of men wandering by water in an alien land, tropical, hot, confusing -- and he so buries it with brainless brawling that it is lost. A key example: he has a naval landing-party, in search of hidden weapons for a nascent rebellion, proceeding along an underground river, in deep darkness in a cavern, into the unknown -- and what is the central incident in this? Greedy stupid sailors arguing over a chunk of chewing tobacco.

His central "thoughtful" character, a sailor named Warrington, reports aboard Delilah with his standard sea-bag -- basically a big duffel-bag -- and we are told a little later that he is so obsessed with the life of the mind that in packing it, he left out all of his required uniforms and clothes, and filled it with books -- a fact supposedly not apparent to the crew until after he is aboard and has put the books in his locker, whereupon he is assigned new clothes and his pay docked to cover the cost. But wait a moment: anyone who has had to move a bunch of books in a bag, as I have, knows instantly two things. First, they are much, much heavier than clothes, so lifting and carrying such a large bag so full of books as to displace ALL the clothes would be very difficult, and thus very obvious to anyone watching him struggle aboard. Second, books are rectangular: their corners poke-out all around the soft cloth bag, revealing instantly that books, not clothes, are inside. You simply cannot hoist a sea-bag of books on your shoulder the way you can a sea-bag full of clothes: the weight is too great and the sharp corners cut into your muscles.

When we are not being bored to death with pointless brawls, we get a lot of uninteresting philosophizing, or long digressions into side-issues. A coded telegram arrives that will send the ship on a radically different goal, and pages and pages go by before we are told, almost as an aside, what the telegrammed-orders were. This may be how sailors, rather than officers, experience life aboard ship, but to play-down these directives in this fashion is like playing-down the actions of the Gods in Homer. It is a mistake. There is some good stuff in here, but it is buried under too much that isn't worth anything.

The 1965 Time Reading Program Special Edition of Delilah includes an Editor's Preface in which the author, Goodrich, explains why he never finished part 2 of this novel, nor any other book. Goodrich, who before going to college had been a sailor in the Pre-World War I US Navy, and in World War I, spent the 1920s and 1930s writing part 1, which he published in 1941 just as World War II was starting. He returned to Naval service, this time as an officer, and fought throughout World War II.

His World War II experience is what derailed his writing -- but not because of shell-shock or war damage. In his own words: "The Second World War was a traumatic experience for me. ... I was first astonished and then troubled by a fundamental change in the men I found there compared with the kind of men I knew in Delilah. The change was so deep and so remarkable that it has made the men of Delilah obsolete."

Goodrich is correct: his characters are obsolete. The same reasons that caused him to abandon part 2 of the novel are reasons why we should abandon part 1. A good novel could be written about such characters -- in fact, one was: The Sand Pebbles. That novel covers the same time-period, the same Navy, the same beat-up kind of ship in the same kind of foreign land (China in the 1930s), but with far greater human understanding.

In the same 1965 Time edition is an introduction by US Navy Capt. Edward Beach, author of Run Silent, Run Deep. He too sees change in the sailors of 1965 versus 1917: "Most of Delilah's crew would not have known what to do with a family [a wife and children back in the US] if they had one, whereas in today's Navy most of them would be doing their best to maintain a normal family relationship .... Better educated, possessed of higher personal standards, today's destroyer crew has nevertheless one great point of similarity with those rough and ready crews of [Goodrich's Delilah]: integrity."

Goodrich continues: "I came to know it was not a passing change. I saw it again in the Korean War. And my urge, literally my obsession, is to find out why this change has come about."

Goodrich never did figure out an answer, but I suggest it is the following. Up until the 1880s, the US Navy was essentially a corps of officers, but not a corps of sailors. Sailors were recruited from the merchant ships when war arose. Warships were basically the same technology as merchant ships, only with rows of cannons added aboard alongside the broadsides. But in the 1880s, we began to develop all-steel warships with mounted gun-turrets on the main decks. Naval ships diverged from merchant ships so much so that they no longer could be effectively manned by crews recruited on short notice. The US Navy in the Spanish-American war (1898 period) possessed the first real corps of career military sailors -- which Teddy Roosevelt took advantage of in creating and manning the Great White Fleet that sailed around the world in 1907-1909.

But in those days before long-range aircraft, the only way to get men from the far-flung ships back to the US was by sea. It cost time and money. The Navy would do it for officers, but not for sailors. And thus being a professional career US Navy sailor meant a life away from the US for many years. Under such conditions, maintaining family back in the US was impossible. So the US Navy attracted as its professional sailors men who had no great desire to maintain a family, or plan to return to a life in the US. The kind of personality who would find this life attractive are the kind of men Goodrich served with. They are the kind he portrays.

In World War II, a vast flood of men came into the US Navy to be sailors, men who had no intention of making the Navy their career. And after the war, commercial air-travel, and military long-range cargo and manpower aircraft, developed. Now it was no longer just the officers who could get back home again fairly frequently -- the sailors could too. Moreover, our presence in China ended with the communist victory in 1949; the Philippines became independent in 1946; Japan achieved renewed independence in 1950. No longer were American naval ships involved in maintaining overseas possessions across islands and up rivers. Simultaneously, the conditions that called-forth men like Delilah's crew (long years of isolation from home, due to lack of air-travel) disappeared, and the duties of such men in foreign lands (policing the US territory the Philippines across thousands of islands, and up the rivers of China to protect places of interest) also disappeared.

This is why Delilah's men became "obsolete." Perhaps Goodrich was too close to the events as they happened to realize their significance, but he ought to have.