1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium
Editor's Note: When Joseph Heller finished his comments at the James Jones Literary Society Symposium at the Southampton Campus of Long Island University last June, he said, "All right, I'll see you here next year." But, sadly, the Catch 22 author died Dec. 12. Because it's "all over" for him, Heller's remarks at the 1999 symposium are the first in the series of the distinguished speakers' edited comments to be published:
In talking about James Jones, I remember the remark of Irwin Shaw. They were very close friends for decades, lived in Paris together. I think Shaw induced Jim to break his leg skiing. But this (remark) had to do with toward the end, and the novel was Whistle. Jones had asked Irwin to read it to check the accuracy of events in the military in World War II, I believe, in Europe.
Irwin was talking to me and he said, "You know how Jim is. I told him this episode could not possibly happen the way he did it, in the military. And Jim said to me, hard-headed, "'It could happen because I want it to happen.'"
It is also known that Jim liked his own language, and occasionally he committed an error in grammar, an imperfection, and he would not pay attention to the language. It was the way he thought and the way he talked and the way-it was supposed to be his personal expression.
I was a latecomer to the circle of friends of Jones and Gloria and Kaylie, although our paths did cross a number of times without either one of us realizing it until we'd been out here (Long Island) again and became fairly good friends.
Our paths first crossed back in 1948. It had to do with his first significant published short story and mine. The Atlantic Monthly, in 1948 some time, published a story of mine called Castle of Stone, and they published a story of his called The Temper of Steel. I didn't know about him; he didn't know about me. The Atlantic Monthly at that time would publish two short stories in every issue called Atlantic Firsts. They were ostensibly first very short stories brought by young writers, and mine was chosen to be one. The first story his was. Every six months, The Atlantic Monthly awarded a prize-might have been as much as $1,000 or $1,200-to the Atlantic First story that they thought was best for that period. I didn't win it; he didn't win it. And I'd like to think that whatever author who did win it is unfamiliar to our faces and to everyone here.
Along about that same time, our paths crossed again. He spent the summer in New York City. He attended NYU-New York University. I was a student at the same time, and I studied there for three years. When we met out here and reminisced, he told me about that. He said he thought that it was the loneliest period of his life. He was in New York City, he knew nobody, he was not well-known.
It's New York City. And in case you don't know, it's a very tough city to live in, for men and for women. It's not easy to make friends-it's almost as difficult as making friends in East Hampton. If you don't have them to begin with, you're not going to make any. And I thought when we talked, it's a pity that we hadn't met then because I was very much at home in New York, and I possibly could have made the experience more joyful for him.
It is almost odd that we could have been in the same creative writing class there, because in my three years at NYU, I took a course in creative writing every semester. We could have been in the same class.
But in getting ready to prepare my remarks today, I realized had we met then, we would not have gotten along. He was a very principled model, I would say, an almost puritanical man from the Midwest and I was a shifty opportunist. I was a smart-ass Jew from Coney Island. And I think that was the difference in personality, and even though we became very friendly and talked frankly to each other, I was always aware of the difference in personality and character. In most ways, he had a much better character than I had. I'm being sincere when I say that. Even those two anecdotes I mentioned about with Irwin Shaw and his reluctance to change language would indicate he had a very strong sense of mission and a very strong sense of himself.
We next didn't meet, but I was next aware of James Jones in 1951 with the publication of From Here To Eternity. The success of that is almost incomprehensible to young people. I do not think it could happen again today in literature to an American author, to publish a book, get extremely good reviews, make a lot of money and almost overnight become a national, and then an international, celebrity and personality. It happened to Norman Mailer a few years before. It happened to James Jones. Overnight. People had no idea what he looked like, but everyone was aware of James Jones and the novel, From Here To Eternity.
About '50 or '51, I thought it was time for me to write a novel. I had a few short stories published, I was almost 30-years-old, and I had started writing a novel; and I had a feeling I had very little experience to draw on. So, if I got to write a novel, it should be about my world experience. Also I think, unlike James Jones, I could not see myself spending more than two years writing a novel. If I wrote a novel, I wanted to finish it quickly and have it published quickly.
So I had written 30, 40 or 50 pages of the novel and then I read From Here to Eternity and I said, "No chance of that." This is the true story. I did not have the vocabulary. I didn't have the patience. I didn't have the knowledge. I didn't have the talent. I didn't have the intensity or interest that any respectable novelist would have to have in order to go to work and I threw those pages away. I thought I threw them away, but recently I think somebody had them and gave them away to a library. I'd like to buy them back and destroy them.
There was nothing I could add to war literature that was not in From Here To Eternity and had not been produced before by Norman Mailer and a very excellent novel-and it's been forgotten now-by John Horne Burns, The Gallery, about the European war. If I am going to write it and have something to say and something to do, I had to have something that was distinctively my own. So whatever novel that was I put away. I read From Here to Eternity. I read it a second time as soon as I finished. The characters are outstanding. It is a monumental work.
Next time Jones and I got together-we still hadn't met, but we got together-was some time in late summer or early fall 1961. I finished the novel, Catch 22. It was going to be probably published that October. Unbeknownst to me-I couldn't have done it anyway-the publicity people at Simon & Schuster sent a copy of the galleys to Europe. And to their amazement a telegram came back after a few weeks saying-it was signed by Art Buchwald, and he said, "I liked the book very much," in more extravagant words than that, "and so does James Jones and Irwin Shaw."
Well, publicity people being publicity people-and that I think is one of the things that contributes to depression and difficulty of successful writers is that their success is publicized so widely that everyone expects another work that is even better than the first- they contacted Jones and Irwin Shaw to see if they would write a statement which could be used in the lining of the book, and Jim Jones came back with a great statement which immediately caused them to redesign the jacket of Catch 22 and put the part from James Jones on it. So if for no other reason, I would be eternally attached to and devoted to James Jones. My experience taught me a few things. My impression is that American novelists are generally very generous to each other. At least when a new novelist comes along with a first novel. ... .
About a year or two after that, we met for the first time. And that was in Paris, and it was coincidental. I was there doing something with a foreign publication. I ran into another novelist who was better-known than I at the time. His name was John Phillips. Probably you don't know the name now. He was the son of John Marquand, and he published a novel that was a best seller under the pseudonym of John Phillips because he wished to avoid comparison with his father. And John said to me, "What are you doing tonight?" I said, "Nothing. I am alone in this city. I don't know anybody, and I'd like to meet someone like Marilyn Monroe." (A joking reference to Budd Schulberg's anecdote earlier about Jones in New York City describing the woman he'd like to meet just before Budd introduced him to Gloria Mossolino) He said, "Well listen, I am going for drinks with James Jones and Gloria. Why don't you come along with us?" I said, "I haven't been invited." He said, "That doesn't matter with them." So he picked me up and, coincidentally, a man I went to college with, who was something like 40 years older than I. He was a man who was a well-known song writer, lyricist, made a lot of money, decided when he was 60 or so that he wanted a college education. His name was Mitchell Parish. He wrote the lyrics for "Stardust" and "Deep Purple" and many other things. Good money. He was a very fussy old man, too. Very much unlike me and unlike the crowd he found himself with that night.
So John Marquand Jr. took us over to the Jones' establishment, which was on the Ile St- Louis apparently. And I walked in and I was introduced and welcomed right away and expressed my gratitude to Jim ... and started drinking. I don't know who else came in. And not till six or seven o'clock the next morning did I find myself back at my hotel with the 60-year-old man, Mitchell Parish. It was a fantastic evening that I don't think I'll ever forget.
From (the Joneses)-I don't know how it happened-from there, I was in a cab going from one night club restaurant to another. In one of them, we met Hazel Scott, who was a very good friend of Budd (Schulberg). We met a women who was a very famous French actress who was married to Yves Montand-Simone Signoret. She walked in, there were introductions. ... Everybody liked to talk. ... I'm drinking and Jim is drinking, and at one point a record came on-I think it was Billie Holiday, "God Bless the Child"-and Jim began to cry. I don't know why, but it was an indication of this great emotional ocean that was inside him. That calmed down. Then about six in the morning, I'm in a part of Paris, Les Halles. The truckers were bringing food in, and I was in a taxi with Gloria and Mitchell Parish. We get there, Jim is there with a few other people and it looks like a big fight is about to break out, which it was. Truckers were there with their hooks and Jim-they were muttering to each other ominously. What had happened, he had come earlier with Hazel Scott,who was very beautiful and black, and the French-not knowing they spoke English-made uncomplimentary remarks about them. And Jim is not a person you would take on.
I remember something Norman Mailer had written-I forget where-but he said if he ever came to a fight in a barroom, the one he would like to have on his side would be James Jones. As this went on, I nudged James and reminded him that when it comes to a fight, I'm not going to be much help. And neither is Mitchell Parish. He laughed at that and then things calmed down, and we wound up at my hotel at seven in the morning. I decided I'm never going to their house again.
A year or two after that, we were in New York City and both on the same television program. It was an afternoon program, two other people there. He was very nervous. He said he hated doing that, which was probably true. He didn't know if he'd be able to speak or do what. I said, "I'll speak for you. I'm pretty good at talking." And I said, "Let's go have a few drinks, we got some time.' So we went to a bar and we had a few drinks. We got on the program; nobody else could get a word in. And we're still virtual strangers to each other.
In 1974, I found myself down here in Bridgehampton for the summer. In 1981, I moved here permanently and have been here ever since. Shortly after that, the Joneses left Paris and came here. They rented a house in Sagaponack. Gloria, James, Kaylie and their son, Jamie. And as soon as they moved here, it was just like Paris. It seems to me every afternoon and every night they had an open house for anybody they knew. I don't think either one of them ever knew how many people would be sleeping over at their house. Somebody showed up and said, "Where can I sleep?" They said, "OK upstairs, downstairs or what." And their lunches and dinners and parties!
It was then that Jim and I became fairly good friends. We're approximately the same age. He would confide certain things to me. I would confide certain things to him, and we would go to cocktail parties together. Gradually he stopped coming and then he told me why. He had had some kind of heart trouble, evidently a heart attack and that became one of the reasons for moving back here. I think the drinking was something he was warned not to do. And he said, which I found to be true, "If you are not drinking, cocktail parties are impossible." And being with people who are drinking is impossible. The pace of conversation is different, the levels of hilarity are different. You'll smile at something, they were already laughing. I was still drinking, so I still enjoyed them.
I remember one conversation, and I liked it so well that I put it into my biography I published a year ago. He was telling me about his father and his mother was suffering heart troubles. It seemed to be something genetic in the family. Eventually, he had, I think, congestive heart failure, and his mother had it, too. And at a certain point, he said to me, "How are your parents?" And I said, "Mine have been dead awhile." Very grimly he said to me, "You're lucky." And very grimly I nodded and I said, "I know what you mean." And I think everybody here who has had that experience of watching a parent decline in health will know it's a very painful spot. And I did put that in to the book because again it showed a level of understanding between the two of us.
I have no idea how Jim felt politically, but my sense is he and I would disagree completely if we had ever had a talk about things. I think on the subject of race, we would coincide. I can't imagine he would be bigoted against black people, but other than that, I think he would be without sentiment and without sentimentality.
The last memory I have of my experience with James Jones was out here at Bridgehampton. It was a memorial service for James. He had died. He died of congestive heart failure. Irwin Shaw had come from Europe to be with him, with others. I remember one piece of conversation: Irwin walked in and Jim looked at him and said, "Irwin, you look worse than I do." He was in the hospital. And Irwin said, "Well, I've been drinking and you haven't."
And another thing-I was told this-dur-ing his last days in the hospital he started drinking because he knew, he knew he was to pass. He was going to pass anyway, he might as well do something he enjoyed doing very much. The memorial service was held in Bridgehampton, the big church there. It was a day as hot as this one is going to be. There were hundreds of people there, including myself and my first wife. It was the most touching memorial service I'd ever been to. I confess I have not been to many; I try to avoid them.
Willie Morris, another very close and old friend of Jim Jones, a Southerner, a gentleman, a very gentle gentleman came. He and Jim Jones, they would go off on trips visiting Civil War battlefields. He had arranged for the government to send the official bugler from Arlington Cemetery to come there and play taps at the service.
Irwin Shaw gave a speech, and of course in his speech, his voice was choked up so awful you know he was holding back sighs. And then what I remember most was William Styron, also a very, very close and long friend who came here. There was a period that I would read about when William Styron and James Jones and Norman Mailer were very close friends, and one of them said to another, "Isn't it wonderful that we're together? We're the three best young novelists in the country." And I would not disagree with that. Nobody else would disagree at that time.
But Styron was there, and I remember the way he began his speech. The first words, and this I will never forget because when I die I think it is what I want someone to say at my memorial service, I'd like to begin that way. It began this way, "Well, Jim, it's all over." And then he gave his speech about their relationship and about Jones' literary career and was extremely, extremely moving and very touching. I think you'll hear William Styron speak this afternoon; he is one of the most eloquent speakers I've ever heard in my lifetime. "Well, it's all over, Jim," has to do with Jim as a physical being. It's not all over for James Jones. The fact that we're here today. . .
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. Stephen Crane was not in the Civil War. A host of others. Kurt Vonnegut was in combat for maybe five or six days and most of his war experience has to do with being a prisoner of war. My experience overseas was nine or 10 months in combat, coming and going before being replaced, and then I was back in the States and out of the Army before the war in Japan was even over.
I read no war literature like (Jones') until the literature of Vietnam, fiction and non-fiction, books written by people who were there and very gifted writers who were extraordinary, and it is unlike the fiction of World War I and unlike the fiction of World War II. Just to make From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line made war literature unlike what we were used to.
My most recent and tacit memory of James Jones will be today, on this occasion. I'm very happy to be here.