1999 James Jones Literary Society Symposium

Peter Matthiessen


Editor's Note: Peter Matthiessen, naturalist, explorer and writer, author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord and the National Book Award Winner The Snow Leopard, first met Jones in New York in 1952. In this piece, edited from the talk he gave at the 1999 Jones Symposium at Long Island University, Mathiessen recalls the many years of their friendship, but particularly Jones’s last days and his race with death to complete his final novel,Whistle.

    I think the first time I ever spent an evening with Jim was with Bill Styron. Whenever they used to give the old National Book Awards; the publisher would send all the young writers around to beef the place up a bit, and Bill and I went with Jim. When we went out there in New York, Jim was assaulted; this was after Some Came Running. He’d had the extraordinary reception for From Here to Eternity, so now he was really beset by these critics, these book reviewers that came up to him. I suppose they were the meanest of the mean. These people really wanted to snipe at him, just to ask him how he felt after having such a big seller and a well-received book, to have a book that had been received so badly.

    And I remember, we got very cross with these people, and we tried to drive them off Jim like flies. Styron was saying: “Don’t answer them, don’t even answer them!” We already knew about book reviewers by that time, but Jim was amazing. He knew what they were doing; he knew what they were up to. They said: “What were you trying to do in Some Came Running? How do you explain a book like that?” And Jim almost had notes in his pocket. He just very earnestly took them on, one after the other. He refused to get mad, and it was amazing, because he did have a temper, but he just somehow had a dignity about it. He didn’t get mad, he didn’t get shrill and strident; he just handled it beautifully. I was enormously impressed. At first, I thought he was naïve, that he just didn’t get the meanness in those questions, like Styron and I did. But Jim had a kind of deceptive naïveté.

        I think that before I met Jim, I was in Paris. It was in the old Paris Review days; and John Marquand, who was a friend of ours, had a letter from Jim, and he showed it to me. And Marquand, being a very sophisticated sort of east coast person, said: “Look at this!” I think he was torn about laughing at it, because there was also something about it that touched him. In this letter, Jim was describing a letter that he had from a young writer, a young fan. And this fellow had said: “What’s the meaning of life?” very earnestly. And Jim had answered back just as earnestly, and he described this to Marquand as if he’d just discovered an extraordinary truth. He said: “Life has no meaning.” Well, we felt like laughing, it was so very, very earnest. But you know what the meaning of life is after a while, and you begin to sense that this is really what Jim was after.

   He wanted to go very deep, as Bill says, but he was not a stylist at all. Sometimes his efforts to go deep seemed superficially very clumsy. But consider the effect that the book From Here to Eternity had on everybody I knew – on writers, on fans -- and myself included. It just knocked me absolutely cold. We didn’t care about the style; I mean, who could care about the style?  You were just tremendously moved. I think Prewitt became the prototype for all the laconic, quiet, mysterious, basically tragic heroes populating almost every novel there is now. They’re very common indeed, and Prewitt really had a tremendous influence. I see rickety Prewitts showing up in all kinds of fiction.

   Jim could be irreverent, and cynical, but he had the courage to talk earnestly about things like the meaning of life. And Bill was quite right, this would often happen quite late in the evening, when you’d go to Gloria and Jim’s house. We’d have a ball, and we’d all get pretty drunk. But Jim, I can remember; would get to the point where he was sort of holding himself up behind his own bar. About that time we’d get into some real deep talk, and he’d want to talk about books and the meaning of life.

   I remember a dinner party given by a woman in New York, and we both felt great. We’d had a lot of whiskey, no question about that. Jim was trying to teach me how to – oh, I’ve forgotten the name of that dance (laughs). He gave up on me as completely hopeless, so I said: “Well, let’s go down to the sidewalk and spar!” I guess maybe this was after he’d done this with Norman. I said: “It’d be really fun, let’s just go down there and spar, just for the fun of it!” And he says: “Well, you know, it would be fun, no question about it, really good fun.” He says: “But the first time one of us gets hit on the nose, the fun is gonna stop!” So, as a very poor second to doing that, we put a huge ceramic frog belonging to the hostess in her guest toilet. So this frog was peering up at the men who used the toilet.

    I think it was probably shortly after that, that Jim and Gloria went to Paris. I hadn’t been back from Paris very long – I should never have gone to Paris. I left Paris with a real thing about the French. I thought they were such wonderful people and charming, but I thought there was such meanness towards everything and everybody, especially helpless people and old people, and I got fed up with them. I came home very suddenly after living there for about three years. As a matter of fact, Jim did the same. He suddenly got fed up with Paris. We compared notes on that, how we both suddenly had enough of that kind of attitude.

   The Thin Red Line, of course, came out in that period, and again, I was knocked out, it was just terrific. And I remember it inspired me to write one of the very first, and pretty near the last fan letters I ever wrote. Jim was teaching at Miami, when I wrote him this terrific fan letter, and he never bothered to answer it.  I brought it up with him later. I said: “I wrote you this great fan letter one time.” And he said: “Oh, I never answer.” He said: “It’s just the biggest waste of time and energy.” And I knew he was absolutely right. He kept his eye on the ball; he didn’t get distracted by that sort of thing.

  He was a very gallant man. In that last year or so before, when he was dying, he went on an odd book tour, and I think that really helped speed him along. In those days, I was very arrogant and snotty, and I wouldn’t go on book tours. I never had gone on book tours except very recently, now that the publishers are all crying poor-mouth. But I told him: “Don’t go on that, you know it’s a killing job from what I hear.” But he did go, and on a long one, too. But he never complained, he never said: “Oh I shouldn’t have done that;” or: “I wish I hadn’t done that.” He really wanted to talk to people about his book, he really wanted to communicate. He just felt that these were important books, saying “I want to get the message out,” and so forth.

   So, he then got very sick, and I remember what  I think was the last dinner before he left his own house for the hospital, and it was not very long before he died. And we sort of plotted with Gloria, and we thought up this great dinner. We gave him Steak au Poivre, with a beautiful sauce. Alongside this very hot pepper steak, we had a plate of ice-cold oysters. It was absolutely mind-blowing. And Jim was very, very, happy.

   During that supper, he told us a story: he’d come very near death already and more than once. And he described a machine you use for shaking the water off salad. It’s an amazing machine. You shake it, and its leaves fly open and close all in order. He was using the machine to describe his own condition, saying: “You know, a few times when every leaf had opened, I thought: ‘Oh my God, I only have one left!’” And the last leaf closes -- that was his last hold on life; and he said he really fought and came back and click, and another one, click, and another leaf would open again, and then click, click, he forced it back open again. It was amazing, the way he told it, just an amazing metaphor. He had this ongoing heart condition, and he knew he was going to die. I think he had made his peace with it a long time before because I never heard anything like a complaint or self-pity.  He was, in a way, enormously detached from it.

   All he cared about was finishing the book Whistle that Willie Morris was helping him with: he was a writer to the end. As long as he could do it, he was working on that book. And we were out there at the hospital; we had a gang out in the waiting room. Debbie was out there, I’ve forgotten who else; people sort of came and went you know. We’d take turns going in to visit and see him. I have this image of Jim:  he was quite a small man in terms of height, quite short in the lower part of his body, so when he sat up in the cranked-up hospital bed, you just saw him from the waist up. And I’ll never forget it, he was just kind of pinned on that white, upright bed like a butterfly. By this time he wasn’t strong at all, he could hardly move: but he was absolutely indomitable. He gave a smile when you came into the room, and he could talk and so forth – we even snuck some whiskey in for him; I think Gloria took some whiskey in.

   We were having a real vigil, and a wake outside: we were already mourning, and here’s this cheerful fellow, and we’d go in there for a hit of good spirits and gallantry, and then go out and mourn again. And then of course, he died. With Irwin Shaw and William Morris, we went to the undertaker’s. It was one of them right over here (in Southampton), and there we got his little casket. He’d been cremated, and we took the casket back to my house. I have a little Zen meditation room, and my mother’s remains were in a casket there; we hadn’t quite buried her yet, either. (As a matter of fact, people come and go in that room. We’ve had several people in there for a while. We have my old editor; he’s been there for about three years now. And I’m kind of anxious for somebody to come and get him!)

    But anyway, we stashed Jim up there, it was terrifically moving. Irwin Shaw was a charming, delightful, fellow, but was pretty tough in his way. I never saw Irwin break down until that one time. Willie hadn’t either, but he just broke down and sobbed when we did that. And of course, those of you who were at the funeral, with the bugles, it was quite a thing.

   Meanwhile, we had a logistical problem, and that was getting Jim buried.  In Sagaponack, there are two graveyards. One of them is an old one right on the highway. It’s an old and very pretty cemetery, that hadn’t been used in many years. They weren’t burying people there anymore. It was a bit overgrown, and little bit seedy. But as it happened, I used to be a commercial fisherman, and there was a guy I used to fish with called Bobby Tillotson.  He was a craggy, tough old guy, but with a lot of integrity.

   I went down there, and saw that this old cemetery was closer to the Jones’s house than the other one was. So I found out that Bobby was the chairman of the graveyard committee. It was probably about eighteen years since this group had met, but he was the chairman of the board. So I went to see him, and I said: “Bob, a friend of mine died recently, and we’d like to see if we couldn’t get him buried down here.” He said: “Uh-uh, ain’t anybody been in here in over a hundred years.” He says: “I don’t think we’re going to go back to that kind of stuff!” He says: “Anyway, it’s all taken up here in the front. There’s still a few old people that want to put themselves in here.” I said: “Well, what about the back? The whole back is practically empty.” And he says: “Well, there ain’t nothin’ but Injuns back there!” He shook his head.

   Finally I said: “Listen, I’m serious; this was a real good guy, and a veteran, a World War II veteran.” This kind of perked him up, and he says: “Well, I’ll have to take it up with the board!” He went back, and he took it up with the board, and he comes back and says: “Well, they want to know if you’re going to bury him?” And I said: “Yup, I’m going to dig the grave.” And he says: “Well, you gotta keep it in line.” He says: “We can’t pay a lot of money out for mowing grass all the time; you’ve got to line him up with them others back there!” “Well, we’ll get him lined up,” I said, “Don’t worry about that.” So he says: “OK, I’ll go back to the board again.” So he went back to the board, reporting about the lawn mower, and then they had to have another meeting, and we were just waiting around, working with Cathy Ann Mosley; Gloria didn’t want any part of the whole thing. So finally, I got back to Bobby and asked: “Bobby, what did the board say?” I’d give my eye teeth to have seen that board meeting, to have been there at that meeting; and Bobby says: “Alright, they’ve agreed to it; we’ll let him in on one condition.” I said: “What’s that, Bob?” He says: “He’s got to be dead!” That’s very old-fashioned “’Ponack” humor.

   Well, I did dig the grave, and Kaylie Jones and I worked on it, and we had a wonderful burial, with a simple ceremony. And it was a great chance to get to know Kaylie and Jaime even better. It was terrific, and we became kind of a team there, getting this job done. I was grateful to have this chance to get close to the family.

   And I just want to close by saying: if you judge Jim by From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line especially, I think he did find the meaning of life. That’s the residue, that’s what it comes down to when those books are put away. If you were a snotty critic from Kentucky or someplace, sure, you could shoot him down in terms of his style and stuff. But the meaning just came through, and he thought it through deeply. There was a kind of metaphysical quality: almost as if he wanted to see the religion and the richest elements behind it; and I think he kind of found it. I think that’s why those books are so strong, and why they stick with us -- and why Jim Jones is going to stick with us a lot longer than some of these very fashionable writers today.