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James Jones (1921-1977) |
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American author, who in many novels described war and military life. James Jones's best-known work is From Here to Eternity (1951), a story of the pre-World War II army. The book was adapted for the screen by Fred Zinnemann, receiving an Academy Award for best picture in 1953. The Thin Red Line (1962), which followed the experiences of an Army Rifle company called C-for-Charlie, had basically the same characters as From Here to Eternity, only the names were changed. Terrence Malick's film version from 1998 was criticized for its lack of dramatic focus, but praised for its photography. It was queer, he thought, how a man was always being forced to decide these things. You decided one thing right, with much effort, and then you thought you'd coast a while. But tomorrow you had to decide another thing. And as long as you decided the way you know was right you had to right on deciding. Every day a Millennium, he thought. And on the other hand was Red, and those kids over there, who because they decided wrong just once were free from any more deciding. Red placed his bet on Comfort out of Security by Comfort. As usual, Comfort won. (From Here to Eternity by James Jones, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951, p. 7) James
Jones was born in Robinson, Illinois, the son Ramon
Jones, a
dentist, and Ada Blessing Jones. His grandfather, George Jones, was a
wealthy man: oil had been discovered on his farm. He owned one of the
oldest and biggest houses on East Main Street. Ramon
Jones had
problems with alcohol; he had a reputation as the town drunk, and he failed in his profession as a dentist. But there
was a strong affection between the father and the son. During the Great
Depression, Ramon and Ada lost their house. James was a shy
child with glasses, not athletic at all. A voracious reader, he
borrowed books from the local Carnegie Library. Jones's drinking began when he was a teenager. At high school he found he was a fair boxer, though he went down in his second fight. He boxed as a welterweight in Golden Gloves tournaments. Jones completed his high school education in Illinois, and expected to go to college. However, due to the family's financial situation, he couldn't continue studies. While Jones was in Hawaii, his mother died, and a year later in 1942 his father committed suicide with a pistol; he shot himself two times in the head. He had tried to volunteer for a commisson in the Infantry, as a lieutenant, but the army had turned him down. Jones's mother died of diabetes. During World War II Jones served in the US army as a sergeant (1939-44). He was often in the guardhouse or mopped floors and peeled potatoes in the mess hall. He also went AWOL. While in Hawaii he became friends with Army rebels, who had been sent to Schofield Barracks' infamous Stockade Prison. During this period he wrote several letters to his brother Jeff, who shared his literary aspirations – the letters were later published in To Reach Eternity (edited by George Hendrick, 1989). Jones was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked; on Guadalcanal he was injured in a combat, and received the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Jones was given a medical discharge in July 1944. To make up for his lack of higher education, Jones attended
the
University of Hawaii for a short time in 1942 while stationed on Oahu.
His first reading of Thomas Wolfe convinced Jones that he wanted to
write, too. In 1945 he attended New York University. They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones's first,
unpublished novel, was largely
autobiographical. Jones's wartime experiences in Hawaii formed the background for From Here to Eternity, which depicted life in an Army base at the time of Pearl Harbour. Its title came from 'The Whiffenpoof Song': "Gentlemen songsters off on a spree / Damned from here to eternity / God have mercy on such as we. / Baa! Baa! Baa!" Jones spent six years writing the book. The beauty and power of the narrative gained acclaim among critics and readers. It became a Book of the Month Club selection and received the National Book Award for fiction in 1951. The central character of the story is Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a recruit from Kentucky, known as Prew to his friends. He is a man with a high personal integrity, who has no other choice in his life but the army. He has given up boxing because of the damage he did in the ring to another fighter. However, his individuality leads to a conflict with the system itself. He refuses to join the boxing squad and Captain Holmes warns him: "You're not a recruit and you should know that in the Army its not the individual that counts." (Ibid., p. 43) Holmes attempts to break his spirit. Prewitt becomes involved with a bargirl. When his friend Angelo Maggio is badly beaten in the Hickam Field Stockade by the sadistic Sgt. James R. "Fatso" Judson, Prewitt kills him with a knife, and is killed when he tries to return to his unit. Milt Warden, the highly competent Top Sergeant, has an affair with the wife of Captain Holmes, and cannot help Prewitt. Most of the story takes place before the Japanese surprise attack. With Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) the novel is among the best works depicting the American army in the Pacific during World War II. Jones's own boxing career gave much authentic flavor to the fight scenes. With the money he earned from his bestseller, Jones purchased
and furnished a house in Marshall, Illinois, and established a writers'
colony with the assistance of Lowney Handy; she was also Jones's
mistress and introduced him to her library of Eastern philosophy. They
had met in 1943 in his home town of Robinson. She was married to Harry
E. Handy, superintendent of the Ohio Oil Company's refinery, and devoted
herself to helping Jones in his writing aspirations. Noteworthy, she
never disapproved of his use of barracks-room language. "If Jim had
suggested using those stupid blank spaces," she once said, "I'd have
hit him." ('James Jones and His Angel' by A.B.C.
Whipple, Time, May 7, 1951) The Handys built him a study on the back of their house and bought a trailer so he could travel when bored. After leaving Lowney Handy, Jones married Gloria Mosolino, who was a disorganized housekeeper, but filled their home with laughter. She had taught dancing, played saxophone, and had been Eva Marie Saint's and Marilyn Monroe's stand-in in some movies. When Norman Mailer was at the Handy Colony in Illinois in 1953, he had a
conversation
about the ideas of Karma with Jones. "That's the only thing that makes sense," Jones
argued for Mailer's surprise. (Norman Mailer: A Double Life by Michael J. Lennon, London: Simon & Schuster, 2013, p. 191)
After gaining financial independence,
Jones was very generous to his fellow writers, and at one point he paid
the poet Delmore Schwartz's hospital bills. Mailer's attitude toward
Jones became strained, Mary McCarthy called Jones ''intelligent'' and
''uneducated,'' but William Styron became his long-time friend. "The
genial rhythms and carefully wrought sentences that English majors had
been encouraged to admire were not on display in Eternity,
nor was the writing even vaguely experimental; it was so conventional
as to be premodern. This was doubtless a blessing. For here was a
writer whose urgent, blunt language with its off-key tonalities and
hulking emphasis on adverbs wholly matched his subject matter. Jones's
wretched outcasts and the narrative voice he had summoned to tell their
tale had achieved a near-perfect synthesis." (My Generation: Collected Nonfiction by William Styron, edited by James L. W. West, foreword by Tom Brokaw, New York: Random House, 2015, p. 473) Ernest Hemingway, whose style influenced Jones, wrote in May 1951 about Eternity
to their mutual publisher,
Charles Scribner: ''It is not great no matter they tell you. It has
fine qualities and greater faults. It is much too long and much too
bitching and his one fight, against the planes, at Pearl Harbour day is
almost musical comedy. . . . I hope he kills himself as soon as it does
not
damage his or your sales.'' (Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters: 1917-1961, edited by Carlos Baker, New York: Scribner, 1981, p.721) Jones was very sensitive to criticism about his work and
worked for seven years before his second book, Some Came Running (1957), appeared. Jones dedicated the novel to his younger sister,
Mary Ann, who died of a brain tumor. The story drew on his own life
after the war. Jones's biographer Frank MacShane wrote that the author
"wanted to show how the citizens of Parkman, Illinois, imitating the
man in the Gospel according to Saint Mark who runs after Jesus in order
to find the kingdom of heaven, take up their cross and run after
romantic love, imagining it will answer all their problems." (Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer by Frank MacShane, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985, p. 165) Shocked by the critical reception of the work, Jones moved with his wife to France. From 1958 until 1975 the couple lived in Paris, where their apartment on the Quai d'Orleans became a meeting place for writers, artists and actors. Their guests included the authors James Baldwin, Romain Gary, Mary McCarthy, Henry Miller, Françoise Sagan, William Styron, and Kurt Vonnegut, and the actors Lauren Bacall, Peter Lawford and Jean Seberg. Gloria was a legendary hostess. Irwin Shaw said of her: "She was the candle that kept the house alight." (Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer, p. 235) Jones bought
eventually three floors in the house. His critical novel about the
Paris student riots of 1968, The
Merry Month of May (1970), was particularly praised for its
description of Paris and its ambience. Jones's other works include Pistol (1958), a story of an army
private who obtains a .45 caliber automatic pistol on the day of the
Pearl Harbor attack. Wearing it on his hip gives him a sense of
security and makes him feel a connection with the Army of the days of
the west and Custer's Cavalry. The Thin Red Line, about raw recruits, who land on Guadalcanal, demonstrated the author's ability to create dramatic episodes, which illuminate the spiritual evolution and karma of his characters. In a letter to his editor at the publishing firm of Charles Scribner's Sons Jones once spoke of an unsevered thread that will run continuously through everything he writes. This book formed the basis for Terence Malick's three-hour drama (1998). Unlike the more successful war film from the same year, Steven Spielberg's Oscar winner Saving Private Ryan, Malick avoided all hero worship. There is no single hero in the story, although the characters of Witt, Welsh, and Storm have similarities with Prewitt, Warden, and Stark. This was war? There was no superior test of strength here, no superb swordsmanship, no bellowing Viking heroism, no expert marksmanship. This was only numbers. He was being killed for numbers. Why oh why had he not found and taken to himself that clerkish deskjob far in the rear which he could have had? (from The Thin Red Line, New York: Delta, 1998, pp. 260-261) Jones's last novel, Whistle (1978),
was published posthumously. He began the actual work on the book in
1968. Originally he planned to write it immeditely after he had
finished The Thin Red Line but other things, other novels got in the way. The story concerned a group of wounded
soldiers sent home and their attempts to adjust to normal life. The
four central characters appearing in the novel are the same personae –
with different names – that appeared in From Here to Eternity
and The Thin Red Line,
illustrating the various kinds of roles of a soldier. In The Thin Red Line 1st/Sgt Warden became 1st/Sgt Welsh, Pvt Prewitt became Pvt Witt, Mess/Sgt Stark became Mess/Sgt Storm, and in Whiste Welsh becomes Mart Winch, Witt becomes Bobby Prell, and Storm becomes John Strange. Jones did not
finish the last three chapters. They were completed by his friend
Willie Morris,
who used the author's notes and conversations with him. Whistle
ended Jones's great World War II trilogy. Jones's intention was that each novel should stand by itself as work alone. In 1974 Jones was offered a teaching position at Florida
International University in Miami. At the end of the 1976 school year,
the Joneses moved to Southampton, New York. He died in the hospital in Southhampton, Long Island, on
May 9, 1977, of congestive heart failure. James Ivory's film A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998), starring Kris Kristofferson, was largely based on the autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of James Jones. During his lifetime, Jones was largely considered a good minor writer by critics. After his death his work has received several book-length scholarly examinations. Steven R. Carter has remarked that Jones's "tough, masculine voice spoke out against the insensitivity and foolhardiness of the Hemingway code of manhood and sought to replace it with restraint, compassion, and adult love." (James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998, p. 1) For further information: When Cowboys Come Home: Veterans, Authenticity, and Manhood in Post-World War II America by Aaron George (2024); Star-Crossed Lovers: James Jones, Lowney Handy, and the Birth of "From Here to Eternity" by M. J. Moore (2023); James Jones: The Limits of Eternity by Tony J. Williams (2016); James Jones and the Handy Writers' Colony by George Hendrick, Helen Howe, and Don Sackrider (2001); 'Jones, James,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Volume 2, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist Master by Steven R. Carter (1998); Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer by Frank MacShane (1985); James Jones by George Garrett (1984); James Jones by James R. Giles (1981); James Jones: A Friedship by Willie Morris (1978) Selected bibliography:
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