By Greg Randle
Editor's Note: Randle received an M.A. in English from Sangamon State University. He was awarded the English Program's Best Thesis Award for "James Jones' First Romance: An Examination of They Shall Inherit the Laughter." A native of Hutsonville, Illinois, in Jones' Crawford County, Randle now lives in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He is director of Hope Community Support Program, which assists people with serious mental illnesses in community living. This article appeared in the Fall 1996 newsletter of The James Jones Literary Society.
They Shall Inherit the Laughter, James Jones' apprentice novel about American soldiers returning home from World War II combat, lies obscurely in the background of his prolific writing career. As Jones' immediate reaction to the war, however, the novel itself is far from obscure. The autobiographical Laughter sheds fresh lights on Jones' development as a writer by providing a very personal view of his thoughts and emotions as he launched his career as a writer and made his first serious attempt to express his own vision. In a December 31, 1945, letter to Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Charles Scribners Sons, Jones makes this fact exceptionally clear. Announcing that he was ready to submit the 788-page manuscript of Laughter for publication, the young and unpublished author wrote, "Everything I've ever seen or heard or felt has gone into the writing of this book."
Despite Jones' "unshakable" confidence in Laughter, it was never published (excerpts were published in The James Jones Reader, 1991). Among criticism leveled at the novel were that it lacked "technique" and contained "too much self-pity and bitterness." Urged by Perkins and his $500 advance, and buoyed by Scribners' editor John Hall Wheelock's comment that Laughter was "a serious attempt to do a big piece of work," Jones began, somewhat begrudgingly, on From Here to Eternity, which propelled him to fame in 1951.
They Shall Inherit the Laughter describes the overwhelming spiritual and emotional crises of young soldiers returning from the trauma of overseas combat to a United States overrun by materialism and shallow self-preserving patriotism, a country whose citizens don't even try to understand their problems. If focuses primarily upon Johnny Carter, clearly based upon Jones, who returns AWOL to his hometown in southwestern Indiana.
Although Carter's intense anger and bitterness, manifested by continually drunkeness and pugnacity, threaten to envelop and destroy him throughout much of the novel, he progresses toward a spiritual awakening largely because of nurturance from an older woman named Corny Marion. Corny, clearly modeled on Lowney Handy, Jones' literary adviser, financial supporter and lover during the apprentice novel's composition, follows an Emersonian philosophy of simply living and faith in human potential to bring about social change. This philosophy is the foundation from which she ministers to Johnny as he struggles to find his own peace after the dehumanizing experierience of war.
Essentially, the spiritual progression that Corny encourages and that Johnny experiences, follows Ralph Waldo Emerson's teachings. In some instances, Jones' writing is patterned directly on Emerson's, even using his imagery. As Johnny progresses slowly from disillusionment to optimism, following what Emerson calls "invisible steps of thought," the significant changes he undergoes come about through his gaining the knowledge needed to perceive himself and the world around him in a very different way than he does at the beginning of the novel. At novel's end, Johnny has tremendous faith in his own power as an individual and expresses his dream to work and fight for his ideals and against social injustice.
In another letter to Perkins written late in 1945, Jones recalled Perkins' complaint from an earlier submission of the novel that his manuscript "lacked resolution." Jones wrote, "In searching for resolution for the book, I also found a great deal of resolution for myself." When the editor again rejected the novel, writing that it needed "perspective," he knew that Jones was much too close to the circumstances of his own life. His anger was much too fresh, giving most of the novel a shrill tone, and his "resolution" was too recent to come off as highly sentimental. But this period in Jones' life was critical to his future development. If it had not been for the emotional release that virtually spills out onto the pages of Laughter, Jones might not have developed the stamina and the will that he generated in his struggle to write, especially his very next nove, From Here to Eternity.
Although Jones abandoned work on Laughter early in his career, the novel was the foundation for all of his literary work, especially the war trilogy, From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line (1962), and Whistle (1978). In the trilogy, Jones returned to the unpublished novel's major theme of the individual's struggle for meaning and significance in an increasingly technological and bureaucratic world. Although Jones tempered his Emersonian optimism regarding social change, Emerson's belief in looking within the individual for Truth, and in uniting the human body and soul through spiritual wareness, continued to guide Jones in writing his fictional accounts of the changes forced upon individual soldiers in combat. These changes are seen most notably in Jones' concept of "combat numbness," and more estensively in the trilogy's unifying element, "the evolution of a soldier."
As the harbinger of Jones' literary aspirations, They Shall Inherit the Laughter should rise from obscurity. The fresh perspective that it brings to Jones' body of work further illuminates the author as an intelligent, talented and sensitive writer whose deepest, most enduring concern was for the individual human spirit.