Delilah

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."

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 re

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.

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