Editor's Note: See Kenneth's previous posting about Paris during the Jones' years, titled The Humanity of the Machine. Access Kenneth's writings at http://www.amazon.com.
Subject: Something for the web page, as promised Date: Sat, 14 Feb 1998 15:25:25 -0500 From: abra-ken@post4.tele.dk (Tindall, Kenneth)
On the day before Christmas Eve 1959 Tove and I got married at City Hall in Copenhagen. After New Year's we returned to Paris and 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, where Madame Rachou had our room waiting for us. We were attending the Cours de Civilization Français at the Sorbonne, living on my GI Bill checks and Tove's earnings cleaning house for a SHAPE major who called his wife Pickle Puss. I was twenty-two, and Tove was pregnant.
Now and then Tove and I would visit Jim and Gloria Jones. We were always welcome at their apartment during the forenoon, which were Jim's working hours. Gloria was pregnant too, and as she had a tendency to miscarry she was confined to bed. Jim had just crashed his Mercedes 300 SL and was all cuts and bruises. He was writing The Thin Red Line. It was stimulating to see how this famous writer worked. He sat at the typewriter in a bare room for three hours every morning without brooking interruptions or touching drink and wrote finished copy. The door to his workroom was open and he'd sit there looking out at us while we were chatting with Gloria, suddenly turn to the typewriter and write a line or two. Of course I could browse in his typescript. There was no scrimping on the typewriter paper. His pages were triple-spaced and had margins as broad as the Martin Schoengauer etchings you could buy in a bookstore near the Pont des Arts. This was important for me as a young writer, to see the physical setup of Jim's producing fiction on paper. But he was little disposed to talk writing. He liked to talk about life and about himself, and about the Army. He had been a prizefighter, and he told about the time he got big enough to give his old man a licking. I remember the occasion; he went down to buy a bottle of vodka on the Isle de la Cité and the three of us were strolling by the Seine, Tove and me and Jim in his trench coat. Jim was always lavish with his time, and he would even encourage me to read aloud to him from my own novel (The Arboretum). Later, when they were moving into their spread on Isle St. Louis Gloria showed me the mammoth electric hot water heater, and she explained that Jim wanted it because when he was writing From Here to Eternity he lived in a trailer and had never had enough hot water.
Living at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur meant living at close quarters with the Beats, which was stimulating enough, but visiting Jim and Gloria was refreshing. They were a normal couple, with the joys and problems common to all couples. He was this great writer who was an ordinary, normal man who had done military service and seen combat. For me James Jones has always meant the writer, the poet, who is a non-academic man-of-action, as earthy as the American soil he sprang from. In other words James Jones was a hero. Let no one be in doubt of this.
--Kenneth Tindall, http://www.amazon.com