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James
Campbell James Jones From Here To
Eternity 976pp.
Penguin. Paperback, £9.99. 978 0 14 139322
3 Published:
11 September 2013 From
Here to Eternity, directed by Fred
Zinnemann, 1953 I n “Evaluations”, an infamous essay written in 1959,
Norman
Mailer dispatched the current “talent in the room” in a sequence of
pugnacious
deliveries: Saul Bellow “knows words but writes in a style I find
self-willed .
. . . I cannot take him seriously”; Truman Capote “has given no
evidence that
he is serious about the deep resources of the novel”; J. D. Salinger
was “the
greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”; James Baldwin was “too
charming a
writer to be major . . . the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with
perfume”.
Gore Vidal, William Styron and a dozen other contenders were left
seeing stars.
The essay, published in Advertisements for Myself, is remembered for
its
belligerence – though many of Mailer’s verdicts endure – but it
extended the
occasional embrace as well, none more bearish than in its opening
sentence:
“The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than
myself was
James Jones”. Jones was, moreover, “the one writer of my time for whom
I felt
any love”. From Here to Eternity, the first of Jones’s (by then) three
novels
was not only the best book about the experience of being a soldier in
the
Second World War, but seemed to Mailer to be “the best American novel
since the
war . . . it has the force of few novels one could name”. America had
farmed a home-grown War and Peace, it seemed. Jones himself was not
above
marking his achievement at a high value, even before the novel appeared
in
print. “I, personally, believe it will stack up with Stendhal’s
Waterloo or
Tolstoy’s Austerlitz”, he advised his editor at Scribner’s, Burroughs
Mitchell,
on submitting the final chapter – a “tour de force” – in 1949. “That
was what I
was aiming at, and wanted to do, and I think it does it.” At the very
least –
not that the debutant would be satisfied with that – From Here to
Eternity was
a satisfactory response by a member of the younger generation to the
writers
who had seen action in the First World War, Hemingway foremost among
them in
readers’ minds. “We must remember people will be reading this book a
couple
hundred years after I’m dead.” Jones was
only twenty-eight when he gave himself this round of applause, and had
not
reached his thirtieth birthday when the novel was published in January
1951. He
was a scantily educated man’s man – hunting, skin-diving and
poker-playing were
his enduring pastimes, boxing having been set aside – but an
experienced
soldier and an instinctive writer who had the good fortune to be within
shuddering distance of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Jones
was serving in the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and he used the
bombing as
the climax of From Here to Eternity, the event to which nine-tenths of
the
bottled-up, at times practically immobile, action is leading. Later,
Jones was
wounded during fighting against the Japanese on the Pacific island of
Guadalcanal, where he killed at least one enemy soldier in hand-to-hand
combat.
This experience, which was said to have haunted him ever after, comes
into his
second blockbuster war novel, The Thin Red Line (1962), a more mature
book than
From Here to Eternity. “That did him in”, his wife Gloria said in a
television
documentary broadcast in 1985. “He wrote somewhere that bravery was the
most
pernicious of virtues because it forced men to do things that they
might not do
under other circumstances.” From Here to
Eternity may be read in the light of this insight. Its inflatable
machismo
could be burst with a pin but, in the peculiar circumstances of
war-but-not-war, just keeps on growing. Nothing except the outbreak of
hostilities can relieve the pressure. Over the top is the only morally
decent
way to go – the alternative being “over the hill”, desertion. Since the
novel
was being published by Scribner’s, Hemingway’s own publisher, it was
natural
that an advance copy should be mailed to the great man in Cuba,
possibly in the
hope of drawing a usable comment for the massive advertising campaign
that was
to follow. Hemingway is mentioned in From Here to Eternity three times
(as he
noted, proving that he had read it carefully), including the occasion
near the
end where Captain Dana Holmes’s adulterous wife Karen brushes off his
questions
about last night’s whereabouts. “My God, if you surely don’t sound like
a page
out of Hemingway.” Perhaps it was this – a playful remark in the minds
of Jones
and Karen Holmes, but with a disdainful ring – that prompted Hemingway
to speak
his mind to Charles Scribner when responding to the unsolicited arrival
in
March 1951. “It is not great no matter what 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 Harbor day is almost musical
comedy.” Sixty-two
years on – if not a couple of hundred – few serious readers would care
to
argue. Mailer was right to exalt Jones’s talent, and From Here to
Eternity has
fine qualities in abundance, particularly in the evocation of the
seemingly
endless waiting for an event that is certain to happen: the entry of
the United
States into the war. No novel had so vividly – and shockingly, to a
civilian
readership – conveyed the brutality of peacetime army life. Bravery,
duty,
honour, fidelity, patriotism; these are worthless coin at Schofield
Barracks,
Hawaii, which is both the fictional location of G Company and the real
setting
of Jones’s own military service. Petty bribery, corrupt
decision-making,
alcoholism, racism – mostly of the old-fashioned Wops and Jews variety,
but
reaching out to Chinks and niggers, too – are everyday currency. Men
who
profess fellow feeling for one another converse like hoodlums working
up to a
brawl, which is often the outcome, and perhaps the one socially
sanctioned way
of expressing their need for physical contact. (Non-sanctioned
man-to-man
contact features here and there in the novel, under the twin covers of
darkness
and alcohol.) They are “Gentlemen-rankers out on a spree, / Damned from
here to
Eternity”, only without the gentlemanly part. More in keeping with the
novel’s
moral tone is Kipling’s refrain: “Baa! Yah! Bah!” (Jones used the verse
from
the poem “Gentlemen-Rankers” as an epigraph, but in the new Penguin
Modern
Classic, as in the 1959 paperback on my shelf, the “Baa” is given as
“Ba”, thus
losing the intended element of “poor little lambs who’ve lost their
way”.) The book’s
good qualities struggle, however, against greater faults –
increasingly, as
the story trundles aimlessly on and one set piece is piled on top of
another.
The human behaviour depicted in G Company is one-sidedly primitive, and
Jones’s
attempts to reflect the other side – through loyalty and love – are
callow and
sentimental, when not risible. If by “bitching”, Hemingway meant
repetitive
conversations in an unvaryingly argumentative key, then “too much” is
hardly
the phrase. There is too much fighting – how resistant to punching and
kicking
can a man’s skull be? how many teeth does he have to lose? – too much
liver-coroding drinking and, paradoxically, too much sexually directed
action
for a discriminating modern readership, especially one that
discriminates
against governance by sexual politics of the Only Good For Two Things
variety.
Dialogue that would have been dispatched in a few lines by the
minimalist
master of In Our Time is allowed to range unsupervised over a dozen
pages or
more by Jones and his permissive editors, who appear to have been
concerned
only about unprintable words. There are passages near the beginning of
a book
that was several years in the making, whose author grew in confidence
as he
typed his 1,400 manuscript pages, that sound excessively like a page
out of
Hemingway, and surely irritated the older writer for that reason. “The spring
rainy season would be breaking soon now, but until it did it would be
hot and
parched in February, just as it was hot and parched in December, and
then when
the rainy season broke it would be very damp, and chilly in the night,
and the
saddlesoap would be out and fighting desperately against the mould on
all the
leather . . . . Now he was smoking a cigarette in laziness, watching
the
Company go out because he was glad he did not go out . . . .” Jones’s hero
is Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the nearest there is in G Company to
a man in
whom the ordinary human equilibrium of selflessness and selfishness,
decency
and indecency, prevails. Prewitt is gifted both artistically and
athletically,
in a disadvantaged Tough of the Track style. He promises to be the
greatest
bugler who ever raised a mouthpiece to his lips – his Taps is capable
of
reducing the toughest soldier to tears – and is a fearsome welterweight
into
the bargain: “really very fast . . . with that punch, all out of
proportion to
his size”. These are attributes which could see Prewitt far, in an
environment
where the bugle echoes the sound of the soldier’s heart and success in
the ring
leads to preferment in the scramble for rank and status. The trouble
with Prewitt is he refuses to blow or to box, to be a cringer or a
climber. He
once killed a man in the ring, and made a promise to his mother on her
deathbed
that he “wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you
jist
have to do it”. Consequently, he has withdrawn from the sport. In the
Army,
however, it is the officer, not the enlisted man, who says what is
voluntary
and what not, and Prewitt is heading for trouble. Compounding the
offence of
refusing to box, he has requested a transfer from A Company, Bugle
Corps, to G,
in order to be relieved of bugler duties, to the bafflement of his
superiors.
Add to it all the fact that he is that rare ingredient in a foul stew –
a man of
integrity – and you have the basic recipe for the action of From Here
to
Eternity. Captain Holmes, the man who sounded to his wife like bad
Hemingway,
resolves to break him. “I have a damned fine smoothrunning outfit. I do
not
allow anything to bitch it up”, he tells Prewitt.” Karen Holmes,
frustrated
with her husband and bored with being an Army wife, is on course to
bitch
things up in a different way. She is the object of desire for a
sizeable
portion of G Company. “Warden
watched the tall lean blonde woman get out of the car . . . . The woman
moved
on up the walk, the faces of her breasts always falling slightly under
the
purple sweater. Warden looked at them closely and decided she was not
wearing a
brassiere, they moved too much and were too pointed.” Sergeant
Warden, Prewitt’s immediate superior, decides to take revenge on his
superior,
Captain Holmes, by seducing her. Her willing submission, their moonlit
trysts,
and the ambushing by love of what was meant to be just another type of
sparring, provide the second strand of the action. The
company’s patronage of Mrs Kipfer’s whorehouse in the nearby town leads
to plot
device No 3, and a less convincing love affair than that between Warden
and Mrs
Holmes. It is here that Prewitt meets Lorene, aka Alma Schmidt, a
prostitute
who could pass for a movie star – “She looked remarkably like Hedy
Lamarr” –
and who has accumulated wealth to match. Not only does Lorene live in
the
Beverly Hills of Hawaii, but she sends money home to provide for her
unsuspecting mother. Within a year, she tells Prewitt, she expects to
have “a
pile of bills big enough to choke a steer. And then I will be set up
for life”.
She is the principal performer in Mrs Kipfer’s assembly, sometimes
accommodating several soldiers before she and Prew curl up together for
heart-to-heart talks and planning for the future; and yes, she does
have a
heart of gold. The vivid
presentation of G Company and the embroidering of these time-tested
narrative
devices are sufficient to carry the reader into the heart of Jones’s
darkness.
But Hemingway’s complaint reverberates down the decades: “It is much
too long”.
The author’s comparisons of himself to Tolstoy and Stendhal can be put
down to
immaturity, but they have roots in the American habit of sportive
boastfulness,
fuelling a major–minor, Who’s No 1?, size-matters approach to
literature, novel
writing in particular, of which Mailer was the main proponent. (His
comments
about Jones in “Evaluations” and elsewhere are nevertheless more
perceptive
than most.) Now, From
Here to Eternity is even longer. The new, unexpurgated edition is
edited by
George Hendrick (though he is nowhere credited as editor, being listed
only as
having written an afterword). He explains his restorative surgery,
based on an
examination of the edited manuscript: “Just over
170 pages have changes and deletions. [They] were made by pencil marks,
and the
original word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or entire page are legible.
Jones
often wrote in the margin of the manuscript pages his objections to
deletions:
“I hate to lose this”, and “only for profanity”. When he made such
objections,
I have restored that passage . . . . Jones wanted such words as “fuck”,
“fucking”, “cocksucker”, “asshole”, and “cunt” left in the text, and I
have
restored them wherever they were omitted. The huge penis is once again
rampant.” Mr Hendrick
believes that “Jones wrote a better novel than the one published by
Scribner’s
in 1951”. It is a defiant statement on behalf of his own labours but,
while the
modern sensibility expects to see the quaint “f––” dispensed with, and
while it
does justice to the authentic language of soldiers to speak of
“cuntpictures”
instead of “shunt-pictures” (goodness knows what early readers thought
they
were), it is hard to care much nowadays about the reintroduction of
graphic
wet-dream and masturbation sequences. Censorship mattered to a
true-to-life
author in 1950, when the works of Henry Miller were forced to reproduce
underground. Comparisons are simply not tenable with the situation
today, when
some might feel that the huge penis is all too rampant. (What on earth
did Mr
Hendrick have in mind when he added that flourish?) In any case, those
who are
interested for one reason or another will have to do their own forensic
work,
reading new and old editions side by side, since Hendrick offers no
specific
documentation to back up his rhetorical defence of the emendations he
has made
to the established text. One passage
excised from the original manuscript offered a justification for the
language
used in it: “You really
fucked her?” Warden asked, then felt ashamed, because he used that word
which
was a good word, one of the best words, strong and powerful and coming
straight
from life into the language, like all the best words come; but still a
word
that was also private, intimate, a word to be whispered at the right
time and
in the right ear; but not a word he should have used, here and now,
with Stark. Hendrick has
restored this passage, and the predictable reaction is to think he is
right to
have done so. But then, how do we know? Jones might have cringed,
sixty-odd
years on, as some new readers will now, to be reminded of yet one more
page out
of Hemingway. Would he perhaps have preferred to leave it on the
cutting-room
floor? Neither Hendrick nor Jones’s daughter Kaylie, who has sanctioned
the
restored edition, can say. The question of whether editors and
inheritors have
the right to tinker with an established text, after the author’s death,
has
been insufficiently debated. In 1949–50,
Jones was understandably unhappy at losing certain words and passages,
as any
author would be, but his letters – edited by Hendrick as To Reach
Eternity
(1989) – suggest a complex reaction, and give no evidence of
everlasting
resentment. “I was disappointed, of course”, he wrote to his brother
Jeff in
October 1950, after a lengthy session with the Scribner blue pencil;
“but then
this is a practical problem, not an artistic one which, if it were, I
should
balk on; but it isn’t.” After receiving the copy-edited manuscript from
Burroughs Mitchell, he wrote back, referring first to an earlier
communication: Your letter
had made me more than usually amenable to the cuts. After seeing them,
I guess
I am not quite so amenable, though still, I think, fair. There are some
I agree
with entirely; others I agree with partly; some I do not agree with at
all . .
. . Now as to the sex cuts. I agree with you in principle. Both the
part of the
selling, and also the part of accustoming the reader gradually. Still,
I feel
you have perhaps leaned over backwards in your accustoming. The
amendment that would have made From Here to Eternity a better book is
the
uncountenanceable one: further cuts. Not for reasons of propriety but
to
improve pace and fortify succinctness. Set pieces abound, many of them
very
good in themselves: about payday, about visits to Mrs Kipfer’s; about
cooks and
cooking. The section called “The Stockade”, in which Prewitt is
imprisoned and
subjected to The Treatment, is itself a tour de force. It is the length
of an
ordinary novel, yet it advances the overall movement of the story
scarcely at
all. Without it,
of course, the reader would be deprived of an acreage of highly
effective
textural detail – and From Here to Eternity is all texture. It is not
difficult
to understand why a readership that had recently experienced war, even
if not
at close range, bought the book in the hundreds of thousands, remaining
happily
immersed for weeks. The film adaptation by Fred Zinnemann (1953),
starring
Montgomery Clift as Prewitt, Frank Sinatra as the “gnomelike” Italian
mischief-maker Maggio, and Deborah Kerr as Karen Holmes, made Jones a
well-off
first novelist. More financial success arrived with Some Came Running
in 1957,
a novel that Mailer said should have been one-third of the length,
which was
also turned into a film with Sinatra, in the leading role. By the time
of The
Thin Red Line (first film version by Andrew Marton, 1964; remade by
Terrence
Malick, 1998), Jones was living the life of a wealthy exile in Paris,
in a
house on the Île Saint-Louis that was, according to Rose Styron,
“endless fun .
. . Jim’s weapons and swords . . . . He would always go straight to the
bar and
ply everyone with drinks. By the end of the evening there’d be
ambassadors,
poets, people playing poker”. Or so it
seemed in happy retrospect. Jones was an outsider in Paris, unable to
learn the
language, cut off from his natural sporting-life habitat, just as he
became an
outsider in the team of writers in which he was once a first-team
player,
perhaps even the star. Mailer thought he had “sold out” by 1959, when
Jones was
still in his thirties. But From Here to Eternity does not deserve to
languish
in the doldrums – a trip to a British bookshop before the present
reissue would
bring the browser face to face with half-a-dozen Joneses, but not James
– and
it would sit even more comfortably on the shelf beside its natural
partner, The
Thin Red Line. James
Campbell is the author of a biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the
Gates,
and a history of anglophone literary life in Paris after the Second
World War,
Paris Interzone.
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