James Jones: The Limits of Eternity by Tony J. Williams, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 298 pp. — Google Books – excerpts featured https://books.google.com/books?id=ti6rDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
“‘Why does the world have to be like it is?’ Warden said, letting himself go completely. ‘I don’t know why the world has to be like it is.’” James Jones, From Here to Eternity
Tony J. Williams, professor of English at Southern Illinois University, has produced James Jones: The Limits of Eternity, a new study of the American novelist. It is a serious, thought-provoking book about a serious artist.
Other works by Williams include Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939-1955 (2000), The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead (2003) and Body and Soul: The Cinematic Vision of Robert Aldrich (2004).
Jones (1921-77) is best known for From Here to Eternity (1951), Some Came Running (1957), The Thin Red Line (1962) and the posthumously published Whistle (1978), as well as short stories collected in The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968).
Jones is an intriguing and complicated figure. A contemporary, more or less, of Saul Bellow (born 1915), Norman Mailer (1923) and James Baldwin (1924), Jones wrote a very different kind of book than those three authors: less intellectually and psychologically sophisticated, set in wartime or small-town America, and also capable of delivering energetic and remarkable insights into American class and social relationships of the mid-20th century. At his best, Jones cut through a great deal of establishment mythology and offered, as Tony Williams notes in our conversation below, “some very unpalatable home truths that many people don’t want to hear.”
Born in Robinson, Illinois, a town of a few thousand people near the Indiana border, Jones grew up in a difficult, intense family. Unable to go to college, he enlisted in the US military in 1939 at the age of 17. He was stationed in Honolulu at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and subsequently took part in the bloody Guadalcanal campaign in 1942-43. He was discharged in 1944.
Jones’s first novel, From Here to Eternity, written in the late 1940s, is set on the eve of US entry into World War II. Its central figure, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, is a young career soldier stationed at the Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. The son of a coal miner from Harlan County, Kentucky, Prewitt turned hobo during the Depression before joining the military.
This is the description of his mother’s death: “When the boy Prewitt was in the seventh grade his mother died of the consumption. There was a big strike on that winter and she died in the middle of it. If she had had her choice, she could have picked a better time. Her husband, who was a striker, was in the county jail with two stab wounds in his chest and a fractured skull. And her brother, Uncle John, was dead, having been shot by several deputies.”
Prewitt, labeled a “Bolshevik” by fellow soldiers and superiors, is stubborn and fierce. He gets into trouble with his company’s commanding officer, Captain Dana Holmes, by refusing to join the regimental boxing team (Prewitt once blinded a sparring partner). Despite receiving “The Treatment,” which includes extra duties, abuse, punishment, exhausting physical demands, Prewitt refuses to give in.
First Sergeant Milt Warden effectively runs the company. He has contempt for the officers above him, who are invariably lazy, incompetent and stupid. Warden enters into an affair with Captain Holmes’ wife, Karen, who is bored and unhappy with her life. She sets her sights on Warden becoming an officer, something that makes him distinctly uneasy. (“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every goddam thing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed to do that for you.”)
Prewitt undergoes various difficulties and torments, eventually ending up in the stockade. The prisoners there are routinely beaten and placed in solitary confinement. Prewitt meets Jack Malloy, a charismatic (and not entirely convincing) former member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and now a proponent of Gandhian “Passive Resistance.” Tony Williams argues that Jones views those who find themselves in the stockade “as orphaned heirs of the early socialists and IWW.”
In the book’s most brutal scene, Staff Sergeant “Fatso” Judson, the prison second-in-command, beats a man to death in front of the other prisoners. Prewitt vows to kill Judson, a vow he makes good on once he has been released. He thereupon goes AWOL and into hiding at the home of his girlfriend Alma, a prostitute. After the Japanese attack, Prewitt decides to return to his unit. He is stopped by guards, who prepare to arrest him because he has no identification. Prewitt runs off, and the guards shoot him.
Mailer, whose The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, was based on his experiences in the Philippines campaign during World War II, described Jones’ work as “a big fist of a book with powerful virtues and serious faults, but if the very good is mixed with the sometimes bad, those qualities are inseparable from the author. Jones writes with a wry compassionate anger which is individual and borrows from no writer I know.”
From Here to Eternity does have serious faults. Jones is prone to abstract psychologizing and soliloquizing that make for a good many tedious passages and even entire chapters (in this book and others). However, those failings are more than compensated for by the insights he provides into American life at the end of the Depression, the military and the nature of modern warfare.
The reader needs to discover this for him or herself, but these are a few examples.
This is Warden, thinking to himself: “Warden had a theory about officers: Being an officer would make a sinner out of Christ himself. No man could swallow so much gaseous privilege and authority without having his guts inflated.… In every war there were two wars, the war for officers and the war of the enlisted man.”
And this is Prewitt: “So that he had gone right on, unable to stop believing that if the Communists were the underdog in Spain then he believed in fighting for the Communists in Spain; but that if the Communists were the top dog back home in Russia and the (what would you call them in Russia? the traitors, I guess) traitors [i.e., the victims of Stalin] were the bottom dog, then he believed in fighting for the traitors and against the Communists. He believed in fighting for the Jews in Germany, and against the Jews in Wall Street and Hollywood. And if the Capitalists were top dog in America and the proletariat the underdog, then he believed in fighting for the proletariat against the Capitalists. This too-ingrained-to-be-forgotten philosophy of life of his had led him, a Southerner, to believe in fighting for the Negroes against the Whites everywhere, because the Negroes were nowhere the top dog, at least as yet.”
This is Warden again, contemplating the approach of war: “If the Government was getting ready for a war in July of 1941, that was not the same as being in one. That it was bound to come eventually did not mean it would be here tomorrow. It would take something pretty big, before the country would be willing to get in; and all the rifles in the world did not make a war-Army until you had talked the people into shooting them.”
Tony Williams insists correctly throughout his book and in our interview that Jones was not merely a “war novelist,” but a commentator on the contradictions of American society and the human condition generally. Significant sections were cut out of From Here to Eternity before its publication, especially those treating sexual behavior and homosexuality in particular. Williams argues that the recent availability of the unexpurgated version of Jones’s first novel “reveals the presence of an author who was a humanitarian and sexual radical combating the psychological and physical manifestations of authoritarianism that extend into our current generations.”
From Here to Eternity is an honest, angry book. It teaches mistrust in the military and every other subdivision of the establishment. It suggests that countries do not go to war for high ideals, including the United States in the “good war,” World War II. (As Warden tells Karen Holmes, “Each country calls it [their national identity] by a different name so they can fight all the other countries that look liable to get too powerful.”) It urges tolerance and compassion, even as it casts a critical eye on its damaged human subjects.
This comment by Jones that Williams cites seems to sum up the novelists’ view: “The meaning of the army for me is one of personal degradation, a degradation that is inescapable once a man is hooked, a degradation rising directly out of the system of caste and privilege and arbitrary authority.”
From Here to Eternity was turned into an award-winning film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and released in 1953.
Some Came Running, Jones’s next novel, opens in 1947 and closes with the onset of the Korean War. It takes place in a fictional Parkman, Indiana, a version of Robinson, Illinois. Williams suggests that the book is “closely aligned with its author’s knowledge of another changed America of the 1950s where conformity and materialism have taken a firmer grip on American consciousness … America is changing and for the worse.”
Dave Hirsch, the novel’s central character, is a cynical World War II veteran and a writer, who returns to Parkman after 16 years. His brother Frank, who owns a jewelry store, is a pillar of respectability, with dreams of suburban shopping malls and interstate highways. The brothers clash. Dave Hirsch hangs around with a crowd of gamblers (above all, Bama Dillert), drinkers and “loose women,” although he falls in love with the virginal Gwen French, a teacher.
There are good things here, and some bad. The conversations in bars, restaurants and poolrooms are convincing and authentic. The picture of postwar economic life and the enrichment of the town’s elite also ring true. The road trips and drinking sprees speak to both the economic optimism of the time and its spiritual confusion and even demoralization. The population will not go back to the terrible years of the Depression, but where is it going?
In one scene, Hirsch observes a “tough,” damaged World War II veteran in a barroom. “There goes all of us, he thought. In Raymond Cold, imbued with an almost classical Greek inevitability of self-destruction and carrying the same sense of tragic fitness. … What a nation we were turning into. It was like living in the last wild days of the Roman Empire. Everybody drinking and discussing and destruction sweeping down in hordes from the north. We will maintain our policy of Business As Usual.”
Jones goes on, keeping up the ancient Roman metaphor: “These were the Plebs, he [Hirsch] thought looking around the booth. The maimed veterans of the Legions, the shopkeepers without shops, the wives without husbands, the whores without cribs. The teeming, life-devouring ant heap of the Forum, living their lives out in the taverns and the occasional circus given them for their vote …”
This is unusual and interesting. Not too many American artists were dealing with the problems and even bleakness of working class lives in 1957.
What Hirsch has to say about his brother Frank, in Williams’s words, “on the way to becoming a millionaire ‘big shot’ as the novel ends … with his succession of mistresses and self-destructive activities,” is also refreshing: “It was like watching some foreign person, a Russian or somebody, about whose strange incomprehensible life you really knew absolutely nothing. He [Frank] really believed all those damn sanctimonious things he spouted. … He really knew no more about life than he did about flying a jet airplane. He was a walking mass of other humans’ ill-considered, un-thought-out opinions, which he had accepted, something hed read, something hed heard, something hed been told. And he believed he was right.” [Jones’s punctuation.]
Other sections of the books, especially those involving Hirsch and Gwen French, are far less insightful and intriguing. The breathless talk about sex, or the lack of it, owes something at times to the “soap opera” novels of the time. It is not effective, and Jones at his weakest.
Williams writes early on in his study that “Jones sees twentieth-century society as a battleground between the forces of Eros [Love] and Thanatos [Death] with American institutional Puritanism fully subscribed to supporting the latter against the former.” Kaylie Jones, the novelist’s daughter, once commented that the “subject” that angered her father the most was “the American Puritan ethic and sexual repression, which he fervently believed was at the root of most of America’s problems. He wanted to blow the lid off the whole thing.”
Jones’s attitude was a very commonly held one in the 1950s and 1960s, when the class struggle and economic questions seemed to many intellectuals and artists to have dropped off the map. What remained, it appeared to them, were the psycho-sexual issues, irrationalism, alienation, “aloneness,” manifestations of human angst and so forth. Williams observes in his introduction that “the messianic promises of socialism, and the IWW were no longer feasible in postwar America.” Whether the promises of socialism in the earlier part of the 20th century were “messianic” or not (and, in our view, they were not), the situation had certainly changed—but the contradictions of capitalism had not disappeared.
Indeed, the resurgence of conformism and the propagation of straight-laced, ultra-conventional morality in the postwar era had everything to do with the fraught economic and political state of affairs. It was not the resurrection of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The American ruling elite, now presiding over the leading capitalist economy and in the process of absorbing into itself all the contradictions of the global social order, had a more desperate need than ever to inoculate the mass of the population against any hint of radical or left-wing thought. It was not a sign of enduring health. Official piety and sanctimoniousness went hand in hand with the quasi-state religion of anti-communism, intended to subordinate the working class through the Democratic Party and the trade unions to the status quo. As the Russian Marxist Plekhanov once argued, “at the basis of all this complex dialectic of psychological phenomena there were facts of a social nature.”
Vincente Minnelli directed a film version of Some Came Running, released in 1958.
James Jones’s next novel, The Thin Red Line (leaving aside The Pistol [1959], which is something of a novella) is considered the second work in his war trilogy. It treats the landing of US forces—whose first taste of battle this is—on a Japanese-held island during World War II and the bloody, ferocious campaign to oust the enemy troops.
Jones’s experiences at the Battle of Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse, and the Sea Horse during World War II’s Guadalcanal Campaign weigh heavily on the novel. Several of the characters in From Here to Eternity reappear here and later in Whistle, with different names in each book. Warden, for example, becomes Welsh in the second part of the trilogy and Winch in the third, while Prewitt comes back as Witt and, later, Prell.
The Thin Red Line follows C-for-Charlie Company as it is thrown into the brutal and dehumanizing reality of combat. Jones’s fierce desire to demythologize war, the military and every leading institution is evident early in the book. Private Doll, for example, we read, “had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was if everybody made up a fictional story about himself, and then just pretended to everybody that that was what he was.”
Sergeant Welsh takes a clear-eyed view of the war and America’s reasons for being in it. He keeps muttering to himself, “Property. Property. All for property.” The novel continues: “Because that was what it was; what it was all about. One man’s property, or another man’s. One nation’s, or another nation’s. It had all been done, and was being done, for property. One nation wanted, felt it needed, probably did need, more property; and the only way to get it was to take it away from those other nations who had already laid claim to it. There just wasn’t any more unclaimed property on this planet, that was all. And that was all it was.” Welsh (and Jones) likes the phrase about “property” so much, he repeats it four more times in the book.
Terrible things go on in the novel. The American troops disinter a Japanese corpse for sport. They execute soldiers trying to surrender. They extract gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. There are also moments of tenderness and expressions of sexual love among the soldiers.
When Private Doll kills a man, he has this revelation: “Doll felt guilty. He couldn’t help it. He had killed a human being, a man. He had done the most horrible thing a human could do, worse than rape even. And nobody in the whole damned world could say anything to him about it.”
Jones maintains a calm, objective tone throughout, at times perhaps almost too calm, verging on the slightly cynical. Nonetheless, as Tony Williams suggests, Jones places the overall blame for the atrocities on circumstances within which the soldiers find themselves. As Jones writes about an individual member of Company C, the troops as a whole are “trapped in every direction,” no matter where they turn.
There are extraordinary revelations and insights in The Thin Red Line (filmed twice, in 1964 and 1998)—as there are in Whistle, based on Jones’s time in a veteran’s hospital back in the United States during World War II.
Considering the civilian and military authorities, one wounded veteran in Whistle thinks to himself: “It was not because they were insane. He had suspected that before, from the beginning. It was not that modern war itself was insane. He had known that, too. It was not even that in ten years these same men battling down there, those who survived, would be making trade agreements with each other, signing mutual business deals for mutual profit, while the dumb luckless dead ones moldered in some hole. Landers had been cynically aware of all that, long before. It was that, seeing it, it was all so foolish, so abysmally stupid and ridiculous and savage, he could not consider himself a part of it.”
Jones told an interviewer in 1958, “modern war … isn’t even war anymore, as far as that goes. It’s an industry, a big business complex.”
Jones’s short stories are also worth mentioning. Tony Williams spends some time on The Ice-Cream Headache, set in a Midwestern town in 1935. Its central character is adolescent Tom Dylan, whose family history is painful and blighted. His grandfather, a tough sheriff, produced four sons, all “drunken weaklings.”
The Great Depression and the boom in the auto industry have impoverished the family (the sons were directed by their father to become veterinarians, but horses, of course, were put “out of business” by automobiles). Tom has vague sexual designs on his sister and a friend of hers. His date with the two girls, with its disturbing overtones, never comes to pass because he is overcome by a strange illness as he enters his grandfather’s house. The story brings together many of Jones’s concerns in an unusually concise and dramatic fashion.
Jones, at his best, represented something radical, raw and honest in American letters. He underwent bitter experiences that he did not run away from. He attempted, to the best of his ability, to bring out the truth of his life and times for the benefit of others.
One of the more remarkable comments about Jones was written by his granddaughter, Eyrna Jones Heisler, then a high school student, in a 2012 essay. She argued that the most devastating event in her grandfather’s life was the “hand-to-hand combat” in which “he took the life of a Japanese soldier. The man was in his very early twenties, a poor farm-boy, with nothing in his wallet but a few pictures of young women, no money, and a membership card for a soldier’s club in the Philippines. Discovering that his enemy was his counterpart changed my grandfather’s view of war forever. He kept the Japanese soldier’s wallet with him for the rest of his life. …
“Pearl Harbor spurred my grandfather to take action. He spent his life writing about the experience of war and warfare. He wrote novels that were controversial because they did not describe the war as ‘good’ or the soldiers as heroic. His main goal as a writer, he always said, was to ‘tell the truth.’ Historians and novelists portraying Americans as morally correct heroes enraged him.”
David Walsh Interviews Tony Williams November 2016
David Walsh: To the matter at hand. It’s a very interesting book about a very interesting guy. I am curious to know how you developed the interest in James Jones.
TW: Back in the latter part of the 1980s, I was involved with a Vietnam Generation group that used to meet at the Popular Culture Association, and one of the key figures was Kali Tal, author of Worlds of Hurt, about Vietnam veterans, along with rape and incest survivors. Our interest also extended to earlier conflicts like World War II and the American Civil War. The name of James Jones cropped up in conversation, and in 1989 I picked up a paperback copy of From Here to Eternity and read it from cover to cover.
I developed from there. I read all of Jones’s work, and decided I was going to write a book on him. I visited the Harry Ransom archives in Austin, Texas where Jones’s work is located, including letters and so forth. It took me about 25 years to complete the book.
DW: Do you feel that Jones is underappreciated in academic circles? And if so, why?
TW: He’s not appreciated because he’s not a postmodernist, flamboyant writer. He’s writing about people’s everyday lives in a particular historical context, telling some very unpalatable home truths that many people don’t want to hear. So if Jones crops up in academia it’s merely as a “war novelist.” Many figures are pigeon-holed in that fashion so they can be easily discussed, and misinterpreted.
DW: Your book is obviously an intense study of his writings, not a biography, but for the benefit of our readers could you give some general overview of his life?
TW: James Jones was born in 1921 in Robinson, Illinois, a small town in what is regarded as southeastern Illinois. His father was a dentist and his family suffered downward mobility, as well as a high degree of dysfunction. He had a cherished younger sister, Mary Ann, who eventually died of a brain tumor. His mother died of diabetes, and his father committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, both deaths occurring while Jones was in the military.
In the 1930s, he couldn’t go to university because his family had lost its money, so the only choice he had was to go into the military, just like many of the other victims in From Here to Eternity. He was in Hawaii, at the Schofield Barracks, during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought in the Pacific campaign at Guadalcanal and other battles. He not only suffered physical injuries, but PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], which wasn’t defined at that time.
When he returned to Robinson, he was really angered at and appalled by the superficiality of the country club set. He also became an alcoholic. It was Lowney Handy, who established a writers’ colony in nearby Marshall, Illinois, who basically adopted him and helped him on the path to becoming a writer, which led to From Here to Eternity. Jones remained in Robinson after that book. He helped fund the writers colony in Marshall, but he had outgrown that area. So when the opportunity arose to relocate to Paris, in 1958, he did so. As in the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others, Paris was the place to be.
So he remained in France for about fifteen years, until the exchange rate made it difficult for him to remain. He returned to America and first taught creative writing at Florida International University in Miami. And eventually he settled down in Long Island, New York. Throughout all this time he remained a very critical commentator on the American scene and world politics, although he played his cards very close to his chest. You have to remember this was the period of the Cold War and McCarthyism. Lingering elements of that atmosphere were still in the air and ready to tarnish any writer.
He wrote in a particular manner to make evident to anyone who read his work seriously and in depth what his real subject matter was all about. To those who read him and wrote to him, if Jones felt they were on the right wavelength, he would reply in detail and go into an elaborate discussion by letter about the ideas in his books.
He suffered from congestive heart failure that he inherited from his family. He died in May 1977 in hospital, one year before his final novel, Whistle, was posthumously published.
DW: Did he make a living as a writer in the 1950s?
TW: Yes, he did. He was also—particularly when he and his wife Gloria moved to Paris—doing screenplays on the side. His widow told me that he regarded it simply as a way of making money in between writing his books. He worked with American directors like Nicholas Ray and John Berry, who was blacklisted. Some of his film work, I think, had an element of seriousness and was not just done for money. He was more or less living on his royalties as a writer, which you could do in France at that time.
DW: You explain a number of times that in your view Jones is not merely a “war novelist,” but a writer dealing with American society and its contradictions and dilemmas in the 20th century, someone who treated the “historical and material aspects of American society” and the “oppressive mechanisms thwarting the full development of human personality.” Could you elaborate on that a bit?
TW: As I mentioned earlier, it’s very convenient to categorize Jones as a war novelist and limit him to that particular tradition. But he was a commentator on the American experience and From Here to Eternity has as much to do with the oppression of human beings in the 1930s and 1940s as it does with war. Novels like Some Came Running, which was slammed by the critics after the success of From Here to Eternity, dealt with the postwar era, from 1947 to the beginning of the Korean War.
And what Jones was doing in Some Came Running was to criticize American society and its social and personal rigidity, a society in the pursuit of material wealth, a society that regarded the less well-off, the working class, as disposable. It was a society that operated within a strict system of sexual and religious morality, designed as a form of social manipulation.
His novels in one way or another tried to reveal the mechanisms which instilled mental and intellectual conformity into people and got them to follow the status quo, even though it was against their best interest and caused a lot of emotional damage.
DW: You mention that Some Came Running was greeted with hostility in 1957. I have to say I think it’s a very uneven book. I think there are wonderful passages and some far less than wonderful passages. Overall, why do you think it was treated so harshly?
TW: First of all, there is the American habit of attacking someone who’s had a successful first book or film. Look at Michael Cimino, and what happened to him after The Deer Hunter [1978], when he tried to make Heaven’s Gate [1980]. Heaven’s Gate is a Western critical of the status quo.
I would agree that Some Came Running is uneven, it’s a mammoth book. Critics jumped on him because he didn’t use any apostrophes or any kind of academic grammar. He was trying to reproduce everyday speech as it was performed by ordinary people, as well as revealing the total hypocrisy of small-town American society in the fictional milieu of Parkman, Indiana, which was really Robinson, Illinois. It’s an attack in part on the world of Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver, and the type of bland movies that were coming out in the mid-1950s.
DW: There’s a remarkable comment from Dewey Cole in Some Came Running, one of the young guys in the bar: “My folks was always too busy fighting. What do they give my generation to believe in: A happy home. A happy home, a union to increase my wage, a new car, and an automatic washing machine. We’re not even a lost generation, my generation. We’re an unfound generation. The ‘Unfound Generation’ of the ‘Forties.’”
TW: He is one of the young veterans and he’s commenting on their status. A particular disposable, non-affluent generation. It is a remarkable comment. It’s based on feelings Jones had and those of many of the people he associated with. He was a writer who did not treat the working class and ordinary people with disdain. He understood their feelings, frustrations and hopes, and never stereotyped them.
DW: I want to speak a minute about Jones’s literary influences. He has his central character in Some Came Running carry around the novels of the “big five,” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe. Do you think that Jones felt those were the biggest American influences on his own writing?
TW: At the time, yes. In his later letters, he speaks about the influence of Stendhal, The Red and the Black, and of course Stendhal’s treatise on love, the demolition of romantic love. And also Dostoyevsky.
DW: And you mention Jack London. Was that an unconscious influence?
TW: I think he’s there consciously, because the end of Whistle is pretty much a reproduction of the end of Jack London’s Martin Eden. Prewitt also discovers London’s political works in Alma’s apartment in the later chapters of From Here to Eternity.
DW: He never mentions Theodore Dreiser, who came from nearby Terre Haute, Indiana. Why do you think that is?
TW: Dreiser is one of the absences. But I think you have to look at the time he was writing. Dreiser had joined the Communist Party toward the end of his life and Jones knew very well about HUAC and the Red Scare, and the general attack on radicalism. He knew that if he wanted to be recognized as a writer and not labeled as a political writer, he had to be very careful about how he referred to certain people in certain things. It was only in the complete manuscript of From Here to Eternity that you find references to “monsters” like John Rankin [ultra-right Congressman from Mississippi] and others. The editor asked him to remove a lot from that manuscript and I think many of the revisions went out for political reasons.
DW: When were they editing that?
TW: Toward the end of the late 1940s and at the beginning of the 1950s. The first editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, and then someone else took over. The publishing house could see the writing on the wall in terms of what they could publish in a period of reaction in America.
DW: How did Jones get his feeling, which you refer to, for the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] and the early Socialist Party?
TW: Of course, he grew up in the Great Depression and there were political influences from that period. I also have a feeling that he learned about socialism and radicalism from his fellow enlisted men in the army, many of whom had joined up to escape the Depression and several of whom had been involved politically during that time. He tapped into a particular oral tradition which was still alive.
Jones was very alert to what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time and he mentions the decline of Marxism as a result of Stalinism. I think he basically gained his knowledge from working class men in the army or outside, as well as having a very deep interest in world affairs.
DW: Are there any references in his correspondence to his following events in the Soviet Union? Of course there are references in From Here to Eternity.
TW: His letters do refer to what’s happening in the Soviet Union, the failure of the Communist experiment there and the search for a much freer form of existence. But like certain other writers he despaired of political systems because he felt they became rigid ideologies.
DW: There’s a passage in From Here to Eternity where Prewitt the “Bolshevik” is speaking about his sympathy for the underdogs and his identification with those being persecuted by Stalin. Prewitt says if he were asked by a House Committee what his views were, he would reply that he was “a sort of super arch-revolutionary, the kind that made the Revolution in Russia and that the Communists are killing now, a sort of perfect criminal type, very dangerous, a mad dog that loves underdogs.”
TW: He definitely knew what was going on in his historical epoch. He was never blinkered into denial.
DW: Jones is unlike most (or all) present writers in expressing skepticism about the motives for war, even the “good war,” World War II. He is angry and mistrustful about those who are making war.
TW: Yes, he poured cold water on the “Greatest Generation” nonsense and the notion of the self-sacrificing home front in Whistle in particular.
DW: You cite him, “In every war there were two wars, the war of the officers and the war of the enlisted men.” Such a view is practically unheard of today, even in the best writing on Iraq and Afghanistan, even Vietnam. And you have the line of Sgt. Welsh in The Thin Red Line: “Property. Property. All for property”?
TW: And if Jones were around and writing about the Iraq war, you’d have another sergeant saying, “Oil, oil, all for oil.” He is very clear-eyed and almost Marxist without naming the philosophy behind that perception.
DW: At the same time I think also it reflects the fact that even within the military at the time there was a far higher social consciousness. There was a far more critical view of the war than is presented 50 years later. The soldiers had come out of the Depression and they had no reason to be in love with the American ruling class.
This is typical of Jones: “They are sons of bitches, but the fault is not theirs. The fault belongs to the society, the system under which they live—not just the economic system, but the moral system of righteousness.” That insight is largely lost today …
TW: This gives Jones’s war novels the necessarily wider context within which they really should be read, not just according to narrow generic classification.
DW: It’s not prettification, that comment. People do some pretty awful things, but why do they do these awful things?
TW: Exactly, and he was onto the mechanisms that made them do these awful things.
DW: And he was present in some of the places where the worst things were done. I would like to refer to the first piece you deal with in your book, a short story, The Ice–Cream Headache. It’s a beautiful story, one of the most perfectly composed of his works.
TW: That’s why I chose to deal with it in the opening chapter. It really is the key to understanding what Jones’s work in all its variations is really about.
DW: Because it brings together a number of themes and elements in a convincing fashion. Both the economic issues—the Wall Street crash, the auto industry boom and all that—and the presence of the grandfather, the oppressive authority, the law, the state, the military, the repressive psychic structure of American capitalism. It also gives a very concrete feeling of small-town America.
TW: Definitely, he understands it, he’s from it, he knows its faults, but he’s not condescending. He’s critical in the best sense of the word without putting people down, people who often are acting badly for no real inner fault of their own.
DW: What do you make of the incestuous element in that story?
TW: At the time, he was a deep reader of Sigmund Freud, he also read the Kinsey Report. He was concerned with the complex motivations within the human personality, good, bad and destructive. I think the critic Robin Wood once pointed out that the closeness and rigid conformity of the family system often operate in such a manner as to bring those incestuous feelings out. It is a disturbing story. He brings out the negative aspects in many of his writings of the American personality in that period.
DW: Jones was not immune to the pressures of the times. How did he resist the Cold War propaganda barrage, and how did he accommodate himself to it?
TW: I think he resisted it in terms of his fiction. He never participated in any demonstrations or protests, he never followed any crowd of any description. Basically, I think he isolated himself during this period from the official barrage, if only to preserve his identity as a writer living an independent existence.
Jones was a product of a dysfunctional family and an equally dysfunctional society. Then he was in the military, in which the institution owns you, body and soul. I think he was very concerned to preserve his freedom of expression and not be too outspoken in that era. So in the sense of accommodation, that’s how I would define it. But I would define that in terms of the goal of personal survival and not for any selfish or careerist reasons.
DW: I’m struck by the numerous references in Jones’s work to “the next war.” He is always predicting that the present war or the present peace is a mere interlude. Where did that understanding come from?
TW: That sentiment is not confined to Jones in the postwar period. The play Fragile Fox [Norman Brooks], which is the basis for Robert Aldrich’s film Attack [1956], ends with two stretcher bearers talking about the next war. In the film noir Crossfire [1947], the dubious individual played by Paul Kelly speaks about enlisting soon in “the next war” and making some money.
The film I ran in my [filmmaker] Anthony Mann class here last night, Men in War [1957], has Robert Ryan’s Lieut. Benson say to Sgt. Montana [Aldo Ray], “I think this war is going to last a long time.” It’s a Korean War film. One of the screenwriters, who was not credited because he was blacklisted, was Ben Maddow. The name on the screenplay is Philip Yordan, but he was well known to be a front for many blacklisted writers. So I think that that feeling about “the next war” was a common one among radical thinkers and writers in the postwar era.
DW: This is from Whistle, his last novel: “It was not because they were insane. He had suspected that before, from the beginning. It was not that modern war itself was insane. He had known that, too. It was not even that in ten years these same men battling down there, those who survived, would be making trade agreements with each other, signing mutual business deals for mutual profit, while the dumb luckless dead ones moldered in some hole.”
TW: Doesn’t this fit in with what the WSWS says about the state of perpetual war? Jones is really farsighted in making that statement.
DW: What do you think of the various films that were made from his books?
TW: Well, Jones basically disliked [Fred Zinnemann’s] From Here to Eternity [1953]. He came around to seeing why it had to be adapted. He always hated Some Came Running. That film works well as a Vincente Minnelli melodrama, if you’ve never read the novel. But once you’ve read the novel, you can’t look at the film in the same way. Again, the film was made immediately after the publication of the book. It’s a commercial product of its time.
There is an earlier version of The Thin Red Line by [Hungarian-born director] Andrew Marton released in 1964, made by the same company that did Men in War and God’s Little Acre [1958], two films directed by Anthony Mann with Robert Ryan. The Marton film I think is more interesting in some ways than the transcendentalism that Terrence Malick chose to focus on in his later remake [1998]. I would say the film versions to one degree or another have always been unsatisfactory, because Jones’s ideas contain too much dynamite for a Hollywood film, which aims to please the audience and make money.
DW: Malick did keep the Welsh line, or a version of it: “Property! Whole fuckin’ thing’s about property.” Minnelli’s Some Came Running is a much narrower work than the book, but it does capture something about the disillusionment or disappointment with postwar America.
TW: Jones praised the performance of Dean Martin as Bama Dillert. He is something of the salt-of-the-earth, charismatic American. The central character idolizes him very much like Prewitt in From Here to Eternity idolizes the Wobbly [IWW member] in the stockade. But in both cases the characters are found to have feet of clay.
DW: All in all, Jones was an interesting figure and certainly someone who deserves to be read. You would obviously encourage people to read his books.
TW: Yes, I would.
Concluded
xenagoguevicene 