1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium
Editor's Note: The following text is author Budd Schulberg's edited remarks from the 1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium at the Southampton Campus of Long Island University last June. This is the second in a series of the distinguished speakers' edited comments to be published:
I'm really happy to be here this morning to have a chance to play a small part in this tribute that we're making to Jim that is so, so richly deserved.
I met Jim this way: It was in 1957. I was working in New York City, working with (Elia) Kazan. We were trying to do a follow-up film to the (On The) Waterfront film we'd done together. I was working on a movie called A Face in the Crowd. I went to a cocktail party that Harvey Breit, who was the associate editor of The New York Times Book Review, was giving-a little kind of literary liquid gathering. It was actually in the apartment of Ernest Hemingway that Harvey had been using. He was a friend of Ernest's. There I met, for the first time, someone who had just walked into town, Jim Jones.
Jim Jones looked, to me, very much like a hick, a hick from the sticks. He wasn't dressed like the rest of us. He didn't have the uniform on right, and he wore those big brown shoes and stuff like that. It just didn't look right there on Fifth Avenue and 62nd Street. But we got to talking, and we got along great. Well, we sort of fell to talking about things, various things, about boxing-he was as interested in boxing as I was.
After the party, we went out to dinner together and we kept talking and then we went back to my apartment and we talked all through the night. One thing that affected me was that Jim had just come to town with his second novel, and the second novel was still in manuscript. And it was the biggest I've seen-I've had a lot of friend authors in my life, but this was the thickest manuscript I have ever seen. It took a strong man to carry this thing. I mean it was about like this, literally two Manhattan telephone books, and it was called Some Came Running. Jim said he had been working on it for six years.
We talked about the second-novel syndrome, the fear of that, especially in America, the writers who have suffered through a phenomenal first-novel success, the kind of success that Jim Jones had with From Here to Eternity, which was a breakthrough in every way. It was critically hailed, sold millions of copies and made an awful lot of money, and it became a hit movie. It was an American success story and is something that Jim and I both commiserated with each other that night back at my place. There is something very tough in our society about having a first-novel success. I had had that happen to me. And it really is something in this country that happens to you. When I wrote What Makes Sammy Run? I was instantly famous and people were saying, "How will you take it?," "How are you taking it?" or "How is he taking it?" It was a barrage. Well, if anything, Jim's book was even bigger, and he had gone home to a small town in Illinois-I admired him for that-even after the success of the movie and after Jim had become a celebrity, he did go back to his old loom and sit there, weaving and weaving and weaving, year after year after year.
Finally, he came up with this very, very long book. Maybe twice as long, I'm not sure of this, but I think it could be twice as long as From Here To Eternity, which was not exactly a novella. And I felt sorry for Jim because I thought, as I looked at the size of this thing, I thought of all those hours and hours and days and weeks and years that Jim had been sitting there while he could be famous somewhere else, sitting there in a small town in Illinois, typing away on something he believed in, the so-called arduous, very tough-to-overcome syndrome of the second novel.
We talked late that night, went on drinking and talking, and I forgot at some point, I didn't remember how or when I went to sleep, and I remember in the morning going out in the living room and hearing the not-so-gentle sound of snoring and I went out maybe around noon-this is not how writers spend all of their time, by the way-I went out and there was Jimmy on the floor, sleeping on the floor, soundly.
We got up, had breakfast about three o'clock that afternoon and talked some about his book. And then about five o'clock I said, "I have to go somewhere. I'm going to a friend's for cocktails." This may be name dropping, but forgive me. I said, "Friend of mine, Faye Emerson." And Jimmy said, "Oh, great. I'd love to meet Faye Emerson. So can I go with you?" And thinking about this huge book, I felt that I had to let him come with me. So we went there, and we began to do the same thing as the night before. We went and chatted with her for a while and had a few drinks and went out for dinner, came back to the apartment, and we went on talking. By this time, I began to have the feeling that Jim and I had been married for several years. At the same time, some of the talk was pertinent.
He had asked me to start reading the novel and here and there, an hour here and an hour there, I had been plowing through Some Came Running. I was maybe a third through it by now. We began to argue a little bit about t. I had the feeling reading it that it was two wonderful things: a lot of true people and insights about a young wanna-be writer. From time to time, it would grip me, but then at other times I felt that it just was too much and that it really ought to be trimmed and trimmed and trimmed and squeezed down. And I began to wonder a bit about the form of it, and we got into one of those arguments and it was very much the way Scott Fitzgerald argued with (Thomas Wolfe). Anyway, the feeling that I had was that a novel, in the Flaubert way, should have a definite form. It should have as much of a form as a play or a movie. And Thomas Wolfe had argued with Scott about that side, and (Scott) had insisted on form. And Wolfe had insisted on content, that you just let it flow and let it all hang out, put it all in. And Scott thought, no, put it in and then take it out. Anyway, we argued about things like that, and we talked again through the second night.
On the third day, we repeated this very much the same way. We did the same thing. By this time, Jim was really living there at the place, and I still didn't have the heart to tell him that it was getting a bit much I thought because, honestly, every time I looked at Jim, I looked at that manuscript and I felt I had to do something for him. I knew what it was. And I knew how anxious he was about the second novel, and I was somewhat concerned for him that he might be in for a tough time unless he did something drastic to his book. So often the critics who are there loving your first book are just waiting in a cave to leap out at you on the next one. And I had a feeling that might happen to Jim.
At the same time, I admired Jim's character, his literary character. He-I'm trying to say this right-I mean he wasn't interested in writing per se, he wasn't interested if I talked about Scott's lovely lines ... and all the rest of it. Jim wasn't interested in that. What it was about was to just put down, as honestly as he could, what he was feeling. And so you'll find, looking through all of the work and some marvelous work of Jim Jones, you'll find very few fancy similies and metaphors or any kind of literary flourishes. It's just, here's what happened, here's the way I remember this. It sort of goes on like that. At its best, it's a very, very effective, maybe the best kind of American writing. It's almost a common-place writing in a way. It's sort of aimed really at the people, and it doesn't have the style, it doesn't have the posture of an Ernest Hemingway. It doesn't have any intellectuality of a Norman Mailer. It just sort of is.
And at its best, which you see in marvelous books-I loved From Here To Eternity-but The Thin Red Line could be the best war book ever written in America. That book is a tremendous book. It really answered the challenge that was thrown at Jim: Can anybody write a better book about the military than From Here to Eternity? And that book, even though there were scores of characters, 20-30 people that you get to know fairly well, what you really get to know is the company. Company C becomes the character of the book. It really says that all of these people, even though they're so important, each one to themselves, are really each just a cog. The hero of the book is Company C. Jim had an understanding of the military that goes beyond, I think, any American writer.
Anyway, back at my apartment, on the third day, wherever I went, Jim was saying things like, "Well, what are we doing today?," "Where are we going?" We were absolutely joined at the hip. Finally it came Monday morning and reality was setting in. I had to go up and meet Kazan. I had promised to bring him a new scene he was waiting for. And so I finally told Jim that, even though I was really enjoying his company, it couldn't go on like this anymore. And he was sort of crestfallen.
And at that point, I looked at him and I said, "Jim, what's wrong with you?"-This is now the way great writers speak to each other-and Jim's answer was, "I'm lonely." That's exactly what he said, he said, "I'm lonely." And then we talked a few minutes about that. He had written, he was really lost in the city, he was on the verge of a-we had talked about that sort of a very serious change in his life. He had had a rather strange dependence on this patron of the arts in the small town in Illinois who'd set up a kind of writers colony where Jim had worked. And they'd had a very strong relationship, but Jim, I think, probably due to the success of From Here To Eternity and probably to just maturing and growing up, had the feeling that this was really coming to an end, and I think I simply happened to meet Jim at a critical moment in his life when he knew what had come behind, but wasn't really sure where he was going-exactly how, almost how he would live, because he had lived in this protected cocoon, in a way, that Mrs. Handy ran out there for such a long time, and he was really breaking out of this cocoon now and not knowing quite how to do it.
And at this point, he said he really needed someone to be with. And he didn't feel like just camping around town, meeting a bunch of different girls. All of that. He was really, he was like a little ad that you see in those personals about looking for a serious relationship. And so, he said, "I really need a girl. I need a girl to live with through my whole life." And I said, "That's a pretty tall order. What sort of girl are you looking for?" And Jim said, "Well, I'd like to have someone who looks kind of like Marilyn Monroe, except that she is literary, knows about writers, is interested in writing and also has a great sense of humor," and he went on and on about this person that should not really have existed in the world.
The only thing is I happened to know one person like that. Just by accident, she'd been in small roles in several films of ours, and I had happened to meet and admire Gloria Mosolino and I said, "Well, Jim, I know somebody who is a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe, and actually she wrote a pretty good novel." She wrote a novel about Pottsville, Pa., that I thought was publishable. It's only problem was that it sort of overlapped with the work of John O'Hara. It even has the same characters in it because O'Hara used Gloria's uncle, a bootlegger in Pottsville, as one of the main characters in Appointment in Samarra, so they're writing about the same people. And she wrote about them very well. So that's when Jim picked up his ears and said, "Gosh, when could I meet her?" and I said, "Well, I'll call her and ask her."
So I did. I called Mos, as we all called her for Mosolino, and I said, "Mos, I have a friend here who is from out of town who is looking to meet someone who looks like Marilyn Monroe, is literary and writes, and is interested in authors and, obviously, I thought of you." She said, "Budd, you know me pretty well, do you think I'll like him?" And I took a deep breath, I looked at Jim waiting there, looking at me as I talked and I said, "Gloria, I hope you're sitting down, ut I have some kind of strange feeling that you're going to marry him."
Two weeks later they sent me a telegram congratulating me on my wisdom of my matchmaking, and they were on their way to Haiti to be married. As I said just previously, forever after, it was one of those really marvelous, creative and loving experiences. You don't see too many like them.
Jim went on to, as we all know, a really notable career. Some Came Running came out and took its lumps, as I feared it might. It got a few favorable reviews, but a good deal of abuse for over-writing, over-long, all kinds of things, but it did at least succeed for Jim in breaking through to that second novel. It had only taken six years and he was, in a sense, released to go on and do all the work that would follow.
As I watched his career develop-I often remember that argument we had about form and content-and here and there in other books like Go to the Widow Maker, I felt the lack of form throughout the work. But there was too much again, lots and lots of great stuff in it; but on the other hand, Jim really was a natural and he had his own sense of form and I think as he matured as a-well, I don't know if you can mature from From Here To Eternity, which is almost a perfect book, it's a gorgeous book to re-read-but I think he did mature insofar as later on he was thinking about editing, he was thinking about the form of a book like The Thin Red Line and in a work like The Pistol that is really a very wonderful little short, self-contained book. Jim Jones proved that he did hold his own in the battle of form and content and all the rest. When it came to form, at his best he could hold his own with Flaubert and Scott Fitzgerald, who didn't do so great with form in Tender Is The Night, either, but filled it with wonderful material.
Anyway, I'm really happy that you asked me. I feel proud to be just one stepping stone in the life and the career of Jim Jones. I wonder sometimes if fate, some sort of force, is at work with people because it was a fortuitous moment that brought Jim and me together that night at Harvey Breit's cocktail party. I'm awfully, awfully happy that it happened. When I look at Kaylie Jones, now a successful novelist in her own right, I always get a little tearful, but I can't help the way I feel about it.