NOTE: The following article was first published in The Tecumseh Review,
which is the literary annual published at Vincennes (IN) University, and
is used with permission by the author and publication.
"...[T]he facts of my father's army days had become intricately connected with the fiction he had created." --Kaylie Jones
The landscape along Illinois 33 can not have changed much since the 1940s and 1950s when big Indians and Harleys roared its narrow confines. Then as now a highway promised freedom, endless road trips with stops at concrete block roadhouses for beers and catfish steaks. In the 1990s you see the buildings near Russellville, Palestine, Robinson, Marshall, either broken glass weedy rejects or well-painted gas-and-video stores, staffed with ruddy-faced teenage girls or seventysomething women still in the rhinestone glasses of their youth. Did she sell him a beer to wash away the road grime, another biker with an attitude home from mythic Guadalcanal, not a big man actually, but wide shouldered, intense, focused?
** ** **
"He was intensely interested in people. When you talked with him you were the only person there. He made no judgements. He treated everyone the same, whether he was talking to a small child or anyone."
Barbara Moody was a friend of James Jones from the old days. He ate meals at her home. He bought his first car from Barbara's auto-dealer husband. Now a librarian at Robinson, Barbara was a college professor in California for many years before returning home to this clean, progressive Illinois community of about 7,000. She is a defender of Jones in a town that is only now coming to terms with its most famous native son.
"People didn't understand him well. He lived on the edge."
** ** **
Chicago Tribune, July 24, 1992: "A town forgives its least-favorite son," reads the headline. Jones was a drinker and brawler who even got kicked out of the Robinson Elks Club, an achievement thought to be impossible. Jones put Robinson on the map when From Here to Eternity (1951) brought him fame, wealth, and notoriety in this expose of aspects of army life perhaps not discussed in a DAR meeting. His second novel, Some Came Running (1958), "dragged Robinson through the mud," as the Tribune put it, by portraying the town as a "sordid den of drunks, gamblers, hypocrites, carousers and window-peepers."
Barbara Moody discussed the Tribune article: "In Some Came Running an awful lot of people in Robinson recognized themselves. I told him people wanted to sue him here. He laughed. Of course, no one else would know who they [people mentioned in the book] were."
Still, 34 years have passed since Some Came Running was published, and amends are being made. Two years ago an eclectic blend of community members and renowned scholars started The James Jones Society, which claims at least 145 members from 20 states and Puerto Rico. Jones's boyhood home is being restored as a tourist attraction, and a $2000 fellowship will be conferred annually to an unpublished writer.
** ** **
The life of James Jones is archetypal American myth. Born in 1921, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1939, was wounded in World War II, went AWOL for a time from a Memphis military hospital, and returned to his Illinois hometown an embittered, angry man. He wrote. From Here to Eternity topped the bestseller list in 1951. Other books followed, some great (like The Thin Red Line) and some not well received (such as Some Came Running), and for the first time in his life Jones had real money and fame. He helped bankroll a writers colony (for people who wanted to become writers) in Marshall, Illinois, some 15 miles north of Robinson. This colony (which existed from about 1949 to 1964) was a cherished dream of Jones's mentor, Lowney Handy, a Robinson intellectual and free spirit. Jones continued writing novels and short stories, and built a dream-house batchler pad (which cost $85,000 in fat 1950s dollars). He frequently travelled, especially to New York City, the literary mecca of the 1950s, where he quickly made friends with literary figures such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Budd Schulberg, among others. Through circumstances as legendary as other events in his life, Jones met, married, and stayed married (in a profession notorious for marital discord) to a beautiful, fiery, and enigmatic woman. James and Gloria Jones moved to Paris, where they became part of the second generation of American Expatriots. Writers, artists, and other intellectuals from throughout the world visited the Joneses when in Paris. Jones died in Long Island in 1977. He had become one of the most significant writers of his time.
** ** **
New York: Styron, Jones, and Mailer were on the town, a night walking in Greenwich Village; as they paused for a stoplight, Styron threw his arms around both companions and made the legendary statement: "Here we are, the three best writers of our generation, and we're all together!"
Paris: The Joneses hung out in the St-Germain section of the Left Bank, "full of all kinds of artistic ferment--painters, writers, poets, playwrights, many of whom are Americans," he wrote a friend in 1959. They lived a lifestyle of which any member of the Beat Generation would be envious. They bought paintings, "nothing expensive, but all of them things which we both like very much and which might one day be valuable," he wrote. Jim and Gloria were in love. They had two children. They travelled to Italy, Jamaica, and Haiti. They went scuba-diving and had adventures. Above all, Jones continued to write books, usually Big ones.
** ** **
A major question may be: How did he do it? How did that motorcycling, brawling Jones boy from Illinois move right into the New York literary scene, on to Paris and international fame?
Barbara Moody believes the answer lies somewhere in Jones's drive to become a great writer. He "had a strong feeling of self-worth. He was very determined," and people, no matter how mighty, responded to this desire to succeed. Mailer, Montgomery Clift, Styron, Frank Sinatra, Kurt Vonnegut, New York editors and publishers, women. "He just did it. He worked that hard at writing," Barbara said.
** ** **
Although Jones wrote many books, he gained immediate fame after publication of From Here to Eternity. This work has been acknowledged as the best book to come out of World War II (ironically, it really isn't about the war, ending as it does with the bombing of Pearl Harbor). Eternity is an epic that conjures up mystical feelings of appreciation from people who have read it, such as Joan Didion. When Didion visited Schofield Barracks (the home of Jones's 25th Division) in 1977, she talked with soldiers about Jones and viewed the sites described in Eternity (D Quad, the old stockade, the stone quarry, Kolekole Pass). She thought about Jones's characters: Prewitt, Maggio, Warden, and others. She overheard a soldier say, "I read this book From Here to Eternity, and they still got the same little games around here." She wrote in The White Album (1979),
I thought about barracks rats and I thought about Prewitt and Maggio and I thought about Army hatred and it seemed to me that night in Honolulu that only the details had changed, that James Jones had known a great simple truth: the Army was nothing more or less than life itself. I wish I could tell you that on the day in May when James Jones died someone had played a taps for him at Schofield Barracks, but I think this is not the way life goes.
Jones's daughter, Kaylie, herself the author of at least three novels, visited Hawaii to research an article (published in Travel Holiday, March 1990) and to learn about her father. She sought
to find out what was fact and what was fiction in his books. I wanted to confirm my father as the hero I hoped he was by figuring out how much of him there was in the proud, noble Robert E. Lee Prewitt. I wanted to find out who my father was by confronting the young soldier he had once been.
The pilgrimage was an emotional experience.
I put my face down on my arms and began to cry for the first time since I'd arrived. I cried for my father as a lonely young man, and then I cried for him because he hadn't lived long enough to know me as a grown-up. But I suppose I cried mostly for myself, and the loneliness I felt at the loss of my father.
** ** **
Eternity (Jones's greatest, most legendary work) contains smells, noises, weather, and tastes of army life. The reader vividly lives with the sounds of the slap of leather gunslings, the scrape of boots on concrete, the smells of sweat, tobacco and coffee in the days preceding the Pearl Harbor attack. Eternity contains numerous minor epiphanies, such as the illuminating dialog between two young women as they board a ship for the Mainland after Pearl (which is an example of Jone's prose style at its finest). A new dimension of the Girl in Black, formerly known to the reader as a prostitute, is revealed.
When she looked back the young Air Corps Lt/Col was
gone. She was alone at the rail except for a small slight
girl dressed all in black....
"...Its all very lovely, isn't it?" the girl in black
said from down the rail.
"Yes. It is," Karen smiled. "Very."
The girl took a couple of polite steps nearer her
along the rail, and then stopped....
"One rather hates to leave it," she said softly.
"Yes," Karen smiled, her communion broken. She had
noticed the girl before. She wondered momentarily, now,
from her poise and carriage, if the girl was not perhaps
a movie star caught over here on vacation by the blitz
and unable to get home any sooner. Dressed all in such
very simple, almost severe, but quite expensive black
like that. She looked remarkably like Hedy Lamarr.
"No one would know there was a war, from out there,"
the girl said.
"It looks very peaceful," Karen smiled; out of the
corner of her eye she looked at her jewels, the single
ring on her right hand and the necklace, both pearls,
that unobtrusively carried out the exquisite perfection
of the simplicity. The pearls did not look like cultured
pearls, either. And such flawless simplicity as that did
not come simply. Karen had spent that time once herself,
but not anymore. It required either the services of a
couple of maids, or else painstaking hours of hard work.
Before the evidence of it now, enviously she felt almost
frowsy. A woman with a small child could not compete in
the league this girl played in....
...She turned and smiled at Karen slowly out of the
lovely childlike face, pale white, hardly touched by the
sun, and framed starkly by the shoulderlength raven-black
hair parted in the middle.
She has a face like a Madonna, Karen thought
exquisitely. Watching her was like being in an art
gallery.
** ** **
If you talk with anyone in the Robinson/Marshall area you will always find a few Jones stories. Someone remembers how as a little boy Jones would ride his tricycle around the sidewalks to the Robinson library. When he was a little older, a librarian would allow him to read books from the forbidden adult section. Young beer-drinkers in a downtown tavern repeat the legends (true or not) about how Jones hung out in the place several decades ago, how he fought (once fleeing in self-abhorrence as he discovered himself pounding another man's head into the concrete floor). A woman who went to high school with him remembers watching him buying a soft drink from a machine and thinking, "he doesn't look like the sort of person I'd like to date."
A woman in Marshall remembers when her husband used to ride motorcycles with Jones. A Marshall man relates a motorcycle story, noting that Jones was considered "eccentric" by local residents, especially when he rode his big tan Harley around town while wearing Persian slippers with absurdly curved and pointed toes. People didn't know quite what to make of him, his expensive residence and the unusual assortment of writers who lived in the Marshall colony or who visited Jones in his home. It is a tribute to the writer that these stories persist in the 1990s, that people from Jones's midwestern origins care about his life and work, that the literary and artistic foment in southeastern Illinois during the 1950s and early 1960s is studied, appreciated, not forgotten.
** ** **
From Here to Eternity (1951), Some Came Running (1957), The Pistol (1959), The Thin Red Line (1962), Go to the Widow-Maker (1967), The Merry Month of May (1971), A Touch of Danger (1973), Whistle (1978), The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968), Viet Journal (1974), World War II (1975).
** ** **
Anyone interested in the writer is encouraged to join the James Jones Society. To become a member, contact Juanita Martin, Treasurer, Lincoln Trail College, 11220 State Hwy. One, Robinson, IL 62454-9524. The annual membership fee is $15. The Society sponsors an annual meeting; the 1992 conference was a full day's affair, with speakers, films, and a dinner afterward.
** ** **
WORKS CONSULTED
Didion, Joan. The White Album. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
Hendrick, George, ed. To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones. New York: Random House, 1989.
Jones, James. From Here to Eternity. New York: Scribner, 1951.
Jones, Kaylie. "Back to Eternity." Travel-Holiday, Mar. 1990.
MacShane, Frank. Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Smith, Wes. "A Town Forgives Its Least-Favorite Son." Chicago Tribune. 24 July 1992.
Wood, Thomas J., and Meredith Keating. James Jones in Illinois: A Guide to the Handy Writers' Colony Collection in the Sangamon State University Library Archives. Springfield: University Library, Sangamon State U, 1989.