a post-Civil Rights era , the book is astonishingly direct on the question of race , and specifically the status of a white musician , like Baker ’ s protagonist Rick Martin , a tormented genius fated to die young . Baker also seemed to find in jazz an aesthetic that suspended the usual binary divisions of male and female , an intriguing thought when considering the “ feminine ” aspects of Chet Baker ’ s playing and singing .
The more particular theme , though , continued to resonate through American culture of this period . Another young man with a horn haunts one of the great American novels of the postwar years . Published in the same year Chet Baker ended his army career and settled on music instead , James Jones ’ s From Here to Eternity is not a war novel in any strict sense , but a book about the crushing of the individual within the social machine of which the army is simply a representation , and of the twin burdens of creativity and love . Though it is fixed in the public mind through a scene in the film version where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss passionately in the Hawaiian surf , the novel takes a subtler and more inflected view of sexuality , particularly between men , and between sex and creativity . Its hero Private Robert E . Lee Prewitt ( significantly named after a – or perhaps the – Civil War general ), is a boxer and bugler who has been transferred out of the Bugle Corps and reduced in rank for protesting about the promotion of a bugler he considered inferior . Prewitt is subject to harsh treatment . Jones later said that the cruelties he describes in the book were his own inventions rather than reflections of his own experience in the military , which seems to have been comradely and emotionally intense . When the novel was filmed , it was Montgomery Clift who was cast as Prewitt , a part that scarcely required acting , so tortured was Clift in his private life . The film is better known , though , for reviving the career of one
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