I've been thinking about Jim a fair amount the past couple of days. I remember that the first time I heard about From Here to Eternity I was living up in Vermont -- Putney, Vermont -- and it was a couple of years after The Naked and the Dead came out, and I was having a terrible time with my second novel. It was called Barbary Shore. I just never knew whether I was writing it or if some occult force had taken possession of me and was writing it, or whether I was under the complete influence of a dear friend named Jean Malaquais, an old-line Marxist who was filling my head with raging Marxist thought (and I hardly will call it ideology because he hated ideology).

Anyway, I will give you a sense of it: I was in a marriage that wasn't doing too well, and I was in a peculiar sort of feverish high from having a novel come out that was successful which -- as I once said in a conversation with Mike Lennon -- was like being shot out of a cannon. And a long time before they talked about identity problems, I had one, and I didn't quite know what it was. But I had the funny feeling that there was a well-known person out there named Norman Mailer and that to meet him, he had to meet me first. And I felt as if I were a secretary or an assistant to myself. I had my new self, and I hated it, I was totally unprepared for it.

One of the things you learn about writing as you write is that you very often know things you didn't know you knew, so that relatively innocent people can write relatively sophisticated books because there's all the knowledge that you didn't express verbally, that you don't talk about with your friends, that comes out in a most astonishing form. You find yourself writing things, making sentences that are just incredible. You sort of say to yourself: "I never knew I knew that." And then you think about it, and ask, "Is it true?" and think "It seems true." It's as if it came from someone else. And you go on with it and live with it and you keep referring to maybe twenty lines that you wrote over forty years ago.

All of this is a preface to tell you my mood at the time, which was one of great uneasiness and uncertainty about myself, and who I was, and where I was, and how I had written that book, and whether I could write any more books - when word came to me that there was a book at Scribner's. This was in 1951 (or late in 1950) and Scribner's was saying, "We have a book that's gonna wipe The Naked and the Dead off the map"! And I thought - oooh! Then came a very nice letter from Jones's editor, Burroughs Mitchell, which said we have the pleasure to send this book to you, and we hope you like it, and hope you'll send us a blurb and I said, "Yeah I'll read it, I'll give them a blurb!"

And so the book came -- you know in those days many writers were succeeding earlier in life. Bill Styron succeeded early; Jones did; and I did. We almost thought of ourselves more as talented athletes than writers. We probably would have preferred to be talented athletes, but there we were. We had that same fundamental love of competitiveness. We were drawn to our fellow competitors, but -- there was no question -- we each had to be the best.

So I sat down and read this book and I want to tell you, I truly suffered. I suffered because it was too damn good. I was very happy whenever I came across somewhere I could say, "Oh, I could do that better." On the other hand, there were any number of things where I thought "Oh, he knows more about that than I do." So it was an extraordinary experience reading that book. I remember at a certain point I thought, "Yes, he probably read The Naked and the Dead and is saying a lot to me." For instance, he had a poker game in From Here to Eternity, that was much better and more detailed and much richer than the poker game in The Naked and the Dead, which is one way authors have of speaking to one another.

So I read it and, it's hard to say, I loved it, I hated it. I finally sent a blurb, and I recall it went something like this: "It's a big fist of a book, with powerful virtues and serious faults," and then something something something, which with everything said, was "It is a major work." And they printed it between two blurbs, Scribner's did, I remember this, one of which said, "From Here to Eternity is the finest war novel to come out." And the other blurb said, "Get out!" So it was my introduction to mass media in a new way. Those guys can cut off your fingernails, your knuckles, your fingers, your wrist, they can take it off up to here; it depends how badly they want to get you--but they can get you.

In the meantime, Jones had this huge success when the book came out, and I was envious in a visceral way, because he knew how to use success, he enjoyed it, he was flamboyant. I didn't know anything about him, I hadn't met him: but he wasn't afraid to be photographed in the Indian silver with blue stones (he loved that), and he was macho, he was a boxer, he was tough. I thought to myself: "He's tougher than I am (grrr)!" I was absolutely locked on him.

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.

So I'll give you another setting: my wife broke up with me. We broke up with each other. I think that's the gentlemanly (and ladylike) way to put it. And there I was in New York, about a year later, in a cold water flat, which had had heat added very recently, way over on the Lower East Side, a grim little place. One day I got a call from Vance Bourjaily. And he said, "Would you like to Meet James Jones? Jim is in town." And I said, sure.

This is the one time today I'm going to read from something, because about three weeks ago, in relation to something else, I wrote a small memoir about one moment with Vance Bourjaily, and in the course of that, I realized I was writing about James Jones as well. And it covers that period. So I will read that one section about how I met Jim Jones, through Vance Bourjaily:

"Vance had such smooth, pleasant features that I was always surprised how many sides there were to him. I promise you he could be classy, conniving, generous, gutsy, efficient, or romantic. He was a roulette of possibilities, and probably is still. Variety lasts in those who are lucky enough to have it. So I could tell you a dozen stories, but will restrict myself to one. Back around 1952, when my generation was still getting to know each other, I had the next thing to a cold water flat, down on Pitt Street in the Lower East Side of New York. And one afternoon Vance called, and said he was with James Jones, who had just hit town, and would I like to meet him. They came over.

"In those days Jones was an avatar of energy. The success of From Here to Eternity had given him huge stuff. His presence could certainly fill any small room. The variety of his small-town personality was not only canny and overbearing, but also as warm as your best buddy. It felt like a great new kid had just moved onto the block. How rich was his simplicity. His was the wisdom of - a serious redneck. No doubt about it, he made Vance and me feel pale, establishmentarian, and much too modest by comparison.

"But we all got drunk. That equaled us out. By twilight we were the best of friends. And on the rise of this good musketeer spirit, three good writers ready to tackle all the ugly asinine powers above, we got candid with each other. Jones asked, 'Vance, did you ever cheat on your wife?' Now you have to know how cool Vance was in those days. He never showed his hand. I had known him for over a year, but would never have dreamed of asking such a question. His wife Tina was beautiful, remote in a lovely way, and about as inscrutable as Vance.

"We had, however, forged a mood. Vance's belief in those days, and it may still be active, was that there were few things as unattractive and disturbing as being the man to kill a good mood. So he looked up, and a glint of divine or diabolical light came into his eye, and he said: 'Yes! Whenever and wherever I can!' And this being the lost years of rampant male authority (it feels like a millennium ago), we all roared, and hit another belt of booze, and felt for a goodly half-hour like the swashbucklers we were not. Not quite. 'Thanks. I was wondering,' said Jim Jones, 'how I'd feel if I was married.'"

So that was how I met him. And we took to each other. I can't speak for Jim, but I liked him much more than I thought I would. I sort of half-loved the guy as a buddy. It was a funny thing, but it just seemed to make everything better that I liked him that much.

Time went on. About a year later - or maybe it was the same year - I went out to visit the Colony with Adele Morales, with whom I was living. And I had an extraordinary time there because the Colony was - how to put it? - was such a production. There was so much going on at the Colony. There was Jones who was now kind of like the pirate captain of a renegade company. And then there was Lowney Handy, who was the worst and toughest drill sergeant-major you could ever hope to encounter. She had all the kids all reading, and the only thing they had to do was to copy for an hour from other authors, which a lot of people outside the Colony sneered at. They said it was a ridiculous way to become a writer.

But I wasn't convinced, because I remember Nelson Algren saying to me when I complained that one of the students had copied Hemingway too much, Algren said, "No, no, no, you know when they're beginning they really have to come under a powerful influence, and if they're good enough they grow through the influence, and learn a lot from the influence, and go on to do their own stuff. But sometimes in the beginning they really need to have that influence." Anyway, Lowney absolutely believed in that and she insisted on it. And she made all the kids who were there do it -- the men, I should say. They were, as I recall, from 20 to 30, maybe some as old as 35. Generally, they were young, and they had a marvelous relationship with Jones, because he was their leader. But at the same time, they were young and they were very competitive with him.

And Jones had this intense relation with Lowney that consisted mainly of incredible, prodigious fights. When they disagreed, they were like two animals. It wasn't sexual, it wasn't carnal, it was mental. "How dare you have an idea that's different from my idea!" The were two extraordinarily powerful people always fighting each other all the time, all the time.

And in the quieter moments, I remember just two things about the Colony. One is that there was a wonderful trampoline there. I remember getting drunk and getting on that trampoline for the first time in my life. And I was bouncing up and down, up and down like a two-year-old - I'd discovered a new type of Nirvana. And of course Jones, who was pretty athletic, was doing all sorts of somersaults and backflips and what have you.

And the only other thing about the Colony I remember, particularly, is Jones saying to me once: "You know, I'm beginning to have a new feeling about officers. I always used to hate them, but now I'm giving them a hand. It's not that easy to be an officer. I'm like one here now, and I just tell you, there's more to it than we give them credit for." And that was that.