1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium
William Styron
Editor's Note: William Styron, author of Lie Down in Darkness, Sophie’s
Choice, The Confession of Nat Turner and other modern American classics,
began a long-term friendship with Jones beginning in 1951. Styron read this
recollection of Jones at the 1999 JJLS Symposium, held at Long Island University.
While the essay Styron read is essentially an abridged version of his Foreword
to George Hendrick’s To Reach Eternity: the Letters of James Jones
(which also appeared in Esquire magazine in 1989), Styron included
some unique asides.
I’ll tell you, if you could ever
think of a hard act to follow, it’s Norman Mailer. [laughter]. Thank you,
Norman. Also, I wasn’t here this morning, but I hear that Joe Heller and Bud
Schulberg, and who else? Yes, Betty Comden -- all gave these remarkable, impromptu
presentations. I wish I’d been here to experience them. I myself was thinking
of trying to do the same sort of performance; but it occurred to me a number
of years ago that actually I may be the only writer among the people who
have appeared here, who has actually written at some length about my
relationship with Jim Jones.
And so, for my sins (and perhaps for your sins), I’m going
to expose you to a fairly long essay, but I’m not going to do the whole thing.
I will expose you to a part of it because I think it wraps up, as well as
I can, the whole package about me and Jim, so to speak; also about his work.
It would seem to be superfluous (or perhaps even worse) to attempt a kind
of ad-libbed performance when I have this at hand. So, for better or worse,
I’m going to let you have it. And then, as Norman did, throw open the room
to a few questions.
I believe the last question was
about input that Jim had from the actors in From Here to Eternity.
Well I recall, back in the halcyon days that Norman was describing, he, me,
Jim, and of all people, Montgomery Clift all went out into a bar. This was
down near Sheridan Square, and I remember it as a rather rough-neck bar,
and Montgomery Clift was there for the express purpose of being sort of “scoped”
by Jim Jones, who I think really wanted to have Clift in the role, which
of course, he got. All I remember is sitting there in this rough-neck bar,
and this young Italian guy sitting there says:
“Hey Monty, what was it like
to lay Elizabeth Taylor?”
Anyway, Monty didn’t know because
of his preferences – but as it turns out, Clift did get the role. That answers
the question.
From Here to Eternity
was published at a time when I was in the process of completing my own first
novel. I remember reading Eternity while I was living and writing
in a country house in Rockland County, not far from New York City, and as
has so often been the case with books that have made a large impression on
me, I can recall the actual reading -- the mood, the excitement, the surroundings.
I remember the couch I lay on while reading, the room and the wallpaper,
white curtains stirring and flowing in an indolent breeze, and cars that
passed on the road outside. I think that perhaps I read portions of the book
in other parts of the house, but it is the couch I chiefly recollect; and
myself sprawled on it, holding the heavy volume aloft in front of my eyes,
as I remained more or less transfixed through most of the waking hours of
several days in thrall to the story’s power, its immediate narrative authority,
its vigorously peopled barracks and barrooms, its gutsy humor, and its immense,
harrowing sadness.
The book was about the unknown
world of the peace-time army. Even if I hadn’t myself suffered some of the
outrages of military life, I’m sure I would have recognized the book’s stunning
authenticity, its burly artistry, its sheer richness as life. A sense of permanence
attached itself to the pages. This remarkable quality did not arise from
Jones’ language, for it was quickly apparent that the author was not a stylist,
certainly not the stylist of refinement and nuance that we former students
of creative writing classes have been led to emulate.
The genial rhythms and carefully
wrought sentences that English majors had been encouraged to admire were not
on display in Eternity, nor was the writing even vaguely experimental;
it was so conventional, as to be premodern. This was doubtless a blessing.
For here was a writer whose urgent, blunt language with its off-key tonalities
and hulking emphasis on adverbs wholly matched his subject matter. Jones’s
wretched outcasts and the narrative voice he summoned to tell their tale had
achieved a near-perfect synthesis. What also made the book a triumph was
the characters Jones had fashioned-- Prewitt, Warden, Maggio, the officers
and their wives, the Honolulu whores, the brig rats, and all the rest.
There were none of the wan, tentative effigies that had begun to populate
the pages of post-war fiction; but human beings of real size and arresting
presence, believable, and hard to forget.
The language may have been coarse-grained,
but it had Dreiserian force, and the people were as alive as those of Dostoevski.
One other item, somewhat less significant, but historic nonetheless, caught
my attention; and this is how it had fallen to Jones to make the final breakthrough
in terms of vernacular speech which writers-- and readers-- had been
awaiting for hundreds of years. The dreaded f-word, among several others,
so sedulously proscribed by the guardians of decency that even Norman Mailer
in his admirable The Naked and the Dead only three years before, had
had to fudge the issue with an absurd pseudo-spelling, was now inscribed
on the printed page in the speech pattern of those who normally spoke it.
Now that I’ve got him here on
the premises, so to speak, I’d like to ask Norman Mailer, if it is true or
apocryphal, that when you first met the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead,
she said, “You’re the young man, the young writer who doesn’t know how to
spell fuck!”
Norman Mailer responds:
“The only thing true about that
story is that it was sent to the newspapers by a public relations person working
for Bankhead.”
Styron resumes:
OK, now we got it, now we know
the truth!
It’s been said that writers are
fiercely jealous of each other. Kurt Vonnegut has observed that most writers
display toward one another the edgy mistrust of bears. This may be true, but
I do recall that in those years directly following World War II there seemed
to be a moratorium on envy, and most of the young writers who were heirs
to the Lost Generation developed a camaraderie, or a reasonable imitation
of that, as if there were glory enough to go around for all the novelists
about to try to fit themselves into Apollonian niches alongside those of the
earlier masters: Faulkner, Hemingway, and so on.
Many of us felt lucky to have
survived the war, and the end of the war itself was a convenient point of
reckoning, a moment to attempt comparison. If the Armistice of 1918 had permitted
prodigies such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald to create their collective
myth, wouldn’t our own war produce a constellation just as passionately committed,
as gifted and illustrious? It was a dumb notion, since we’d overlooked the
inevitable duplicity of history, which would never allow reassembly of those
sovereign talents. We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming
ourselves. But there was tremendous excitement about being a young writer
in those days, and I believe Norman alluded to this beautifully: of taking
part in a shared destiny.
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. I wanted to talk to the writer who dealt so eloquently
with these lumpen warriors who had created scenes that tore at the guts. And
then there was that face on the dust jacket, that same face that had glowered
at me from bookstore displays and magazine covers. Was there ever such a
face, with its Beethovenesque brow and lantern jaw and stepped-upon-looking
nose-- a forbidding face until one realized that it only seemed to
glower, since the eyes really projected a skeptical humor that softened the
initial impression of rage. Although, as I later discovered, Jim Jones contained
plenty of good clean American rage.
When I first met Jim, during the fall of that year [1951], Lie Down in
Darkness had recently been published, and we were both subjected to a
considerable amount of not unpleasant lionization. But Jim was a superlion:
his book, after these many months, was still riding high on the best-seller
lists. My book, on a much more modest level, had done well critically and
commercially. In fact, there was a period of several months in 1951, as Mike
Langdon said, that we were on the same list as Catcher in the Rye.
But Jim’s celebrity status was extraordinary, and the nimbus of stardom that
attended his presence as we tripped together from party to party around Manhattan
was testimony to the appeal of his unforgettable looks, but also to something
deeper: the work itself, the power of a novel, to stir the imagination of
countless people, as few books had in years.
Moving about at night with Jim was like keeping company with a Roman emperor.
Indeed, I may have been a little envious, but the man had such raw magnetism,
took such uncomplicated pleasure in his role as the Midwestern hick who was
now the cynosure of such Big Town attention that I couldn’t help being tickled
by the commotion he caused, and by his glory; he’d certainly earned it. It
was a period when whiskey--great quantities of it--was the substance of choice.
We did a prodigious amount of drinking, and there were always flocks of girls
around, but I soon noticed that the hedonist whirl had a way of winding down,
usually late at night, when Jim, who had seemingly depthless stamina, would
head for a secluded corner of a bar, and talk about books.
Jim was serious about fiction in a way that now seems a little old-fashioned
and ingenuous. He saw it as a sacred mission, as icon, as Grail. Like so many
American writers of distinction, he’d not been granted the benison of a formal
education, but like these drop-outs he’d done a vast amount of reading. Thus,
while there were gaps in his literary background that college boys like me
had filled, he had absorbed an impressive amount of writing for a man whose
school-house had been at home or in barracks. He’d been, and still was, a
hungry reader, and it was fascinating in those dawn sessions, to hear this
fellow built like a welter-weight boxer (which he’d occasionally been) speak
in his gravelly drill sergeant’s voice about a few of his more recherché
loves--imagine Virginia Woolf, and Edith Wharton.
He had stubborn prejudices, though -- a blind spot, I thought, about Hemingway.
He grudgingly allowed that Hemingway had possessed lyric power in his early
stories, but most of his later work he deemed phony to the core. It filled
him with that rage I mentioned, and I would watch in wonder as his face darkened
with a scowl as grim as Caliban’s, and he’d denounce Papa as a despicable
fraud and poseur. (Of course I might add parenthetically, as anyone who knows
the personal diaries of Hemingway, that Hemingway wrote some of the most atrocious
personal things about Jim Jones that any writer has ever written about another.)
But it sounded like over-kill. Was this some irrational, competitive
obsession I wonder? I soon realized that in analyzing his judgments about
Hemingway, I had to set purely literary considerations aside, and understand
that a fierce, and by no means aimless or envy-inspired indignation energized
his view. Basically, it had to do with men at war. For Jim had been to war,
he had been wounded on Guadalcanal, had seen men die, had been sickened and
traumatized by the experience. Hemingway had been to war too, and had been
wounded, but despite the gloss of misery and disenchantment that overlaid
his work, Jim maintained, Hemingway was at heart a war-lover, a macho contriver
of romantic effects, and to all but the gullible and wishful the lie showed
glaringly through the fabric of his books and in his life. He therefore had
committed the artist’s chief sin by betraying the truth. Jim’s opinion of
Hemingway was less significant than what it revealed about his own view of
existence; which at its most penetrating, as in From Here to Eternity,
and The Thin Red Line, was always seen through the soldier’s eye,
in a hallucination where the circumstances of military life caused men to
behave mostly like beasts, and where human dignity, while welcome and often
redemptive, is not a general rule.
Jones was among the best anatomists of warfare in our time, and in his bleak,
extremely professional vision, he continued to insist that war was a congenital
and chronic illness from which we would never be fully delivered. War rarely
ennobled men, and usually degraded them. Cowardice and heroism were both celluloid
figments, generally interchangeable, and such grandeur as could be salvaged
from the mess lay at best in pathos; in the haplessness of men’s mental and
physical suffering. Living or dying in war had nothing to do with valor;
it had to do with luck. Jim had endured very nearly the worst; he had seen
death face to face. At least partially as a result of this he was quite secure
in his masculinity, and better able than anyone else I’ve known to detect
muscle-bound pretense and empty bravado. It’s fortunate that he didn’t live
to witness Rambo, or our high-level infatuation with military violence. It
would have brought out the assassin in him.
I went to Europe soon after this and was married, and when we got together
again in New York during the waning 1950s, he too was married, and he had
settled in Paris. We saw each other on his frequent trips to the U.S., but
my trips to Paris were even more frequent during the next fifteen years or
so, and it is in Paris, nearly always Paris, where I locate Jim and where
I conjure him up in memory. Year in and year out, I came to roost in the Jones’s
marvelous lodgings over-looking the Seine, often free-loading (à
l’anglaise, observed Gloria, in her dim view of the British) so long
that I acquired the status of the semi-permanent guest.
My clearest and still most splendid image, is of that huge, vaulted living
room, and the ceiling-high doors that gave out onto the river with its hypnotic,
incessant flow of barge traffic, moving eastward past the stately ecclesiastic
rump of Notre Dame. The room is lined with books, and the entire wall was
dominated by nearly 100 thickly hulking, drably-bound volumes of the official
United States government history of the Civil War. The very thought of shipping
that library across the Atlantic was numbing. What Jim sometimes called Our
Great Fraternal Massacre was his enduring preoccupation, and he had an immense
store of knowledge about its politics, strategies, and battles. Somehow in
the lofty room the dour Victorian tomes didn’t really obtrude, yet they were
a vaguely spectral presence, and always reminded me of how exquisitely American
Jim was destined to remain during the years in Paris. War and its surreal
lunacy would he his central obsession to the end, and would be that aspect
of human experience he wrote best about.
Into that beautiful room with its flood of pastel Parisian light, with its
sound of Dave Brubeck or Brahms, there would come during the sixties and early
seventies a throng of admirable and infamous characters, ordinary and glamorous
and weird people-- writers and painters and movie stars, starving Algerian
poets, drug addicts, Ivy League scholars, junketing U.S. Senators, thieves,
jockeys, restaurateurs, big names from the American media (fidgety and morose
in their sudden vacuum of anonymity), tycoons and paupers. It was said that
even a couple of Japanese tourists made their confused way there, en-route
to the Louvre.
No domicile ever attracted such a steady stream of visitors, no host ever
extended uncomplainingly so much largesse to the deserving and worthless alike.
It was not a rowdy place-- Jim was too soldierly to fail to maintain reasonable
decorum--but like the Abbey of Thélème of Rabelais, in which
visitors were politely bidden to do what they liked, guests at the house
at 10, Quai d’Orleans were phenomenally relaxed, sometimes to the extent of
causing the Joneses to be victimized by the very waifs they had befriended.
A great deal of antique silver disappeared over the years, and someone quite
close to Jim once told me that he reckoned he had lost tens of thousands
of dollars in bad debts to smooth, white-collar pan-handlers. If generosity
can be a benign form of pathology, Jim and Gloria were afflicted by it, and
their trustingness extended to their most disreputable servants, who were
constantly ripping them off. One of them, an insolent Pakistani house-man,
whom Gloria had longed to fire but had hesitated to do so out of tender-heartedness;
brought her finally to her senses when she glimpsed him one evening across
the floor of a tony night club, be-wigged and stunningly garbed in one of
her newly-bought Dior gowns. Episodes like that were commonplace chez
Jones in the tumultuous sixties.
There were literary journalists of the period who enjoyed pointing to a
certain decadence in the Jones’s life-style, and wrote reproachful monographs
about the way that Jim and Gloria (now parents of two children) comported
themselves. Dinners at Maxime’s, after-dinner with the fat squabs at hangouts
like Castel’s, vacations in Deauville and Biarritz; yachting in Greece; the
races at Longchamps, the oiled and pampered sloth of Americans in moneyed
exile. Much the same had been written about Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The
tortured Puritanism that causes Americans to mistrust their serious artists
and writers, and regards it as appropriate when they are underpaid, evokes
even greater mistrust when they are paid rather well, and to boot, hobnob
with the Europeans. Material success is still not easily forgiven, in a country
that ignored Poe and abandoned Melville. There was also the complaint that
in moving to France for such a long sojourn, Jim had cut off his roots, thus
depriving himself of a rich fodder of American experience necessary to produce
worthwhile work. But this would seem to be a hollow objection, quite aside
from the kind of judgmental chauvinism that it expresses. Most writers have
stored up by their mid-twenties emotional and intellectual baggage that will
supply the needs of their future work; and the various environments into
which they settle, while obviously not negligible as sources of material
and stimulation, they don’t really count for all that much. Jim wrote some
exceedingly inferior work during his Paris years. Go to the Widow-Maker,
which dealt mainly with under-water adventure--a chaotic novel of immeasurable
length, filled with plywood characters and so on, spun me into despondency
when I read it. There were, to be sure, some spectacular underwater scenes,
but in general the work was a disappointment, lacking both grace and cohesion.
But it’s important to point out that although Go to the Widow-Maker
was written in Paris, so was The Thin Red Line. This would strongly
suggest that the iniquitous life that Jim Jones had reputedly led in Paris,
the years of complacent unengaged exile, bore little relation to his work
than that if he had stayed at home. The motivations that impelled him in
a particular literary direction and that shaped his creative commitments
probably would have remained much the same. Jim loved the good life; he would
have richly enjoyed himself anywhere, and would have, as always, worked like
hell. But a common failing of many writers is they often choose their themes
and address their subject matter as poorly as they often choose wives or
houses. What is really significant is that while a book like Go to the
Widow-Maker represents one of those misshapen artifacts that virtually
every good writer, in the sad and lonely misguidedness of his calling, comes
up with sooner or later, The Thin Red Line is a brilliant example
of what happens when a novelist summons strength from the deepest wellsprings
of his inspiration. In the book, Jim obeyed his better instincts by attending
to that forlorn figure whom in all the world he cared for most and understood
better than any other writer: the common foot soldier, the grungy enlisted
man.
Romain Gary, who wrote beautifully about Jim, wasn’t far off. There was
a certain grandeur in Jones’s vision of the soldier. Other writers had written
of outcasts in a way that had rendered one God-forsaken group or another into
archetypes of suffering--Dickens’s underworld, Zola’s whores, Jean Genet’s
thieves, Steinbeck’s migrant workers, Agee’s white Southern sharecroppers,
Richard Wright’s black southern immigrants, and on and on --the list is honorable
and long. Jones’s soldiers were at the end of an ancestral line of fiction
characters who were misfits, the misbegotten who always got the short end
of the stick. But they never dissolved into social or political blur. The
individuality that he gave to his people and the stature he endowed them with,
came I believe, from a clear-eyed view of their humanness, which included
their ugliness or meanness. Sympathetic as he was to his enlisted men, he
never lowered himself to the temptations of an agitprop that would limn them
as mere victims. Many of his soldiers were creeps, others were outright swine,
and there were enough good guys among the officers to be consonant with reality.
At least part of the reason he was able to pull all this off so successfully
without illusions or sentimentality, was his sense of history, along with
his familiarity with the chronicles of war, they were embedded in world literature.
He had read Thucydides early, and he once commented to me that no one could
write well about warfare without him. He also linked his own emotions with
those of Tolstoy’s peasant soldiers. But the shades of the departed with whom
he most closely identified, were the martyrs of the American Civil War. That
pitiless and aching slaughter, which included some of his forbears, haunted
him throughout his life, and provided one of the chief goads to his imagination.
To be a Civil War buff was not to be an admirer of the technology of battle,
although campaign strategy fascinated him; it was to try to plumb the mystery
and the folly of war itself.
In 1962 during one of his visits to America, I traveled with Jim to Washington.
Among other things, an influential official with whom I was friendly, and
who was on President Kennedy’s staff, had invited the two of us to take a
special tour of the White House. Oddly, for such a well-traveled person, Jim
had never been to Washington, and the trip offered him a chance to visit the
near by battlefields. He had never seen any of the Civil War encampments.
Jim went up to Antietam in Maryland, after which we planned to go to the Lincoln
Memorial before driving up over to the White House. When he met me at our
hotel just after the Antietam visit, Jim was exceptionally somber. Something
at the battlefield had resonated in a special, troubling way within him.
He seemed abstracted and out of sorts. It had been, he told me finally, a
part of the battleground called the Bloody Lane that had so affected him when
he’d seen it. He’d read so much about the sector and the engagement, and
had always wondered how the terrain would appear when he viewed it firsthand.
A rather innocuous-looking place now, he said, a mere declivity in the landscape,
sheltered by a few trees. But there, almost a century before, some of the
most horrible carnage in the history of warfare had taken place, thousands
of men on both sides dead within a few hours. The awful shambles was serene
now, but the ghosts were still there, swarming; and it had really shaken him
up.
Soon after this at the Lincoln Memorial, I realized that the cavernous vault,
with its hushed and austere shadows, its soft footfalls and requiem whispers,
might not have been the best place to take a man in such a delicate mood.
Jim’s face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we
stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address, engraved against one lofty
wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation
and brotherhood dreamed by a fellow Illinoisan whom Jim venerated, as almost
everyone does, for transcendental reasons that needed not to be analyzed or
explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting a conventional
response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded
with savage bitterness, and for an instant was hard to absorb. “Its all just
beautiful bullshit,” he blurted. “They all died in vain, and they always will!”
His eyes were moist with fury and grief; we left abruptly, and it required
some minutes of emotional readjustment before the storm had blown away. Then
he regained his composure, apologizing quickly, then returning with good
cheer and jokes to more normal concerns.
Many years went by before I happened to reflect on that day, and to consider
this: that in the secret cellars of the White House, in whose corridors we
were soon being shepherded around pleasantly, the ancient mischief was newly
germinating. There were doubtless all sorts of precursory activities taking
place which someday would confirm Jim’s fierce prophecy: heavy cable traffic
to Saigon, directives beefing up advisory and support groups, ominous memos
on Diem and the Nhus, orders to units of the Green Berets. The shadow of Antietam
and of all those other blind upheavals was falling on our own times. Jim
Jones would be the last to be surprised.