At What Has Been Called 'The Symposium of the Century,'
the James Jones Literary Society Gathered in 1999
to Hear the 20th Century's Top Literary Figures...


Introductory Article:
"Some of America's greatest living authors came together to recall, to analyze and to praise James Jones when the Society held its 1999 Symposium on Long Island, N.Y., the last weekend in June."

James Jones at home in Marshall, Illinois, 1955


(Click on the authors' names below to read their Symposium comments about the impact of James Jones on their lives and works)

JOSEPH HELLER:

"James Jones is an established literary figure. He's a monumental figure, a novelist. I remember him best for From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line-among the best war literature of Americans. Probably for this reason: I think it is one of the few war books written by somebody who was there, in the military and in combat. Most of our other war books are not." --See Wikipedia entry on Joseph Heller.
BUDD SCHULBERG:

"After the party, we went out to dinner together and we kept talking and then we went back to my apartment and we talked all through the night. One thing that affected me was that Jim had just come to town with his second novel, and the second novel was still in manuscript. And it was the biggest I've seen-I've had a lot of friend authors in my life, but this was the thickest manuscript I have ever seen. It took a strong man to carry this thing. I mean it was about like this, literally two Manhattan telephone books, and it was called Some Came Running. Jim said he had been working on it for six years." --See Wikipedia entry on Joseph Heller. 



BETTY COMDEN:

"I think a lot of people had the impression that Jim was pugilistic and war-like and tough. And he was. And he was tough-talking and heavy-drinking, and he did fight a lot. But that wasn't all he was. He had a very poetic nature and a deeply sympathetic and empathetic one. I remember one night, Steve and I, and Adolph Green, my partner, and his wife, we took the Joneses to Brooklyn to see Judy Garland, who was trying to make one of her numerous comebacks. She had done that and then she had slipped again and so she was in a big night club way out in Brooklyn and we went there and we were friends of hers. We sat down and she came out and started to sing and stopped. And she couldn't go on. She just broke down and left the stage, and it was just frightening and sad. So we went back with Jim and Gloria, and Jim was so upset about Judy and what had happened to her, he ran out to the car and he got a copy of The Pistol. He had a copy of his manuscript in the car and he wanted to do something for her. He brought that back in and he signed it and gave it to Judy, and she was thrilled to have it and it kind of helped her evening, helped to get through and helped her feel more like a person again. Jim was so sympathetic, he couldn't bear to see her suffering." --See Wikipedia entry on Betty Comden.


NORMAN MAILER:

"I learned a lot about the play of emotion. There was a part of me that whistled in the dark, and said, 'It's all right, he wrote a very good book; it's probably better than The Naked and the Dead.' I must tell you now, in this point of my literary existence, I think it was better than The Naked and the Dead, because it went into the taproot of Army experience. I had learned a lot in the Army from a couple of years in it, and it had had a huge effect on me, and I'd been able to write a pretty good novel with it. But it hadn't been my life in the way it had been for Jones. He hadn't had a successful career life as an adolescent and a young man, so he went into that Regular Army. That was going to be his life; that was going to be his existence. It wasn't something he was going to get out of necessarily. And so his book, I felt, went deeper into the nature of what it was like to be a soldier. So I thought, yes, it was a better book than I had written. And going back to that word 'competitive,' I thought, well, I've got to do better than him, I'll do better than him yet. But I was whistling in the dark, because there I was stuck on my second novel. "-- See Wikipedia entry on Norman Mailer.

WILLIAM STYRON:

"When I finished reading From Here to Eternity, I felt no jealousy at all, only a desire to meet this man, just four years older than I, who had inflicted on me such emotional turmoil in the act of telling me authentic truths about an underside of American life I barely knew existed." -- See Wikipedia entry on William Styron.


PETER MATTHIESSEN:

"He wanted to go very deep..., but he was not a stylist at all. Sometimes his efforts to go deep seemed superficially very clumsy. But consider the effect that the book From Here to Eternity had on everybody I knew – on writers, on fans -- and myself included. It just knocked me absolutely cold. We didn’t care about the style; I
mean, who could care about the style? You were just tremendously moved. I think Prewitt became the prototype for all the laconic, quiet, mysterious, basically tragic heroes populating almost every novel there is now." --See Wikipedia entry on Peter Matthiessen.