Into Eternity:
The Life of James Jones, American Writer
By Frank MacShane
Houghton Mifflin, 355 pages, $18.95
James Jones may well be the most paradoxical modern American novelist. He was not a conventionally successful writer. His books sold millions of copies despite a steady onslaught of terrible reviews, which by all rights should have buried him soon after the initial enthusiastic reception accorded his first blockbuster best seller about the peacetime Army in Hawaii, ”From Here to Eternity,” published in 1951.
Nor was he a conventionally good writer. Almost wholly self-taught, he developed a style more clumsy and verbose than any major author since Theodore Dreiser, and at times he seemed to challenge grammar, piling two or three adverbs in succession–pitifully awfully terribly. As for his female characters, they seldom showed more individuality than a Playboy foldout;
their dialogue usually consisted of male-fantasy lines such as ”I never knew it could be like this.” Yet Jones managed, through three decades of enormously dedicated work, to chronicle the influence of World War II on American society, and the American psyche, better than almost any writer of his generation.
Perhaps most remarkably, as a writer whose reputation was forged primarily as a war novelist, Jones consistently exposed the insanity of modern warfare. His purpose was not to glorify the courage of the warrior who takes on the irrational horror as a challenge to his masculinity, a la Rambo, but rather to show that fighting for any mass cause is bound to rob the individual of his conscience, his values and everything else he holds dear.
On top of all these contradictions, Jones, whose views were both traditionally humanitarian and amazingly prophetic in the light of the voluminous antiwar literature that came out of Vietnam, was not a very likable fellow. He was a drunk and a tough guy who enjoyed punching out anybody who might contradict him in ordinary barroom banter, and his self-pity was unquenchable. His income averaged nearly $200,000 a year for more than a decade; and yet, living in his luxury house on the Ile de St. Louis in Paris, he was forever crying over the hard lot of the American writer.
It is the great virtue of Frank MacShane`s biography of Jones, ”Into Eternity,” that it manages to build sympathy for Jones almost from the first few pages about his boyhood in Robinson, Ill. Here, in Jones` predictable conflicts with small-town authority and bigotry–as later, in Jones` stint in the Army (from which he received a psychiatric discharge), and in the pre-fame years, when Jones wandered the country like a shiftless outcast or lived off the bounty of his considerably older, wealthy, married mistress, Lowney Handy –MacShane reveals how Jones` ambivalences, especially his impossible attachment to both pioneer optimism and post-war cynicism, were rooted in the American heritage itself. Jones, MacShane argues, could not have been a truer product of a country that honors only success, but which accepts dishonor as a matter of course in attaining it. But unlike many other writers who sell out
(and Jones did sell out, unfortunately, writing trashy movie treatments and scripts to support his arrogantly high lifestyle), Jones at least had the honesty and the guts to question the worth of the American dream that had victimized him.
MacShane carefully traces the maturation of Jones` novelistic point of view. From the very beginning, Jones had been cursed with the disease, endemic to American novelists, of living his life in a perpetual search for material for his writing. Long before he was shipped into actual combat at Guadalcanal, Jones was recording interesting slices of military life in notebooks and letters to his brother, for future use in the novel he planned to write about the coming war. We see how the cockiness and offhand irreverence of the early drafts of ”From Here to Eternity” changed and grew at Scribner`s under the expert editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins and, after Perkins` death, Burroughs Mitchell, to a far more sophisticated appraisal of the trauma of living under armed force. Jones had learned, in his own words, ”to present life moving pictorially like a movie, but tied closely to the mental life which moves right with it.”
Jones did not attempt to build upon ”Eternity`s” immense popularity with a cautious sequel, but rather struck out into new territory in ”Some Came Running,” an overwritten but ambitious dramatization of the hopeless attempts of returning veterans to adjust to the relatively unscarred American civilization that had blithely shipped them off to an inferno of destruction. Certainly the awkward mixture of comic and sordid scenes contributed to the critics` scorn, but a great deal of the hostility toward the novel was actually generated by Jones` assumption that war veterans are a permanently cracked lot, bound to have an explosive and degenerative effect on their complacent fellow citizens. It was this apparently unpatriotic stance (and in truth a deep-rooted pacifism that Jones could never quite own up to) that offended Ernest Hemingway, who accused Jones of being a ”whimpering neurotic” whose books would ”do great damage to our country.”
Eventually Jones completed his World War II trilogy with ”The Thin Red Line,” which followed the innocent and unprepared ”pineapple Army” into the murderous nightmare of taking the Pacific Islands back from Japan; and with
”Whistle,” which dealt with the hollow homecoming of the physically and mentally crippled vets to a hospital in Tennessee, where death becomes their unshakable obsession. It is this trilogy that gives Jones his permanent place in American letters. But MacShane, while quite candid about the superficiality of Jones` several potboilers, makes us admire the willingness to experiment that led Jones to embark on novels about the perils of scuba diving (”Go to the Widow-Maker”) and about the youth rebellion of the `60s (”The Merry Month of May”).
In addition, ”Into Eternity” ranks Jones among his contemporaries–not only Hemingway, whose hardboiled heroes Jones found both inspiring and ridiculous, but also Norman Mailer, who had far less ability to laugh at himself than Jones, and such fellow expatriates as James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw and William Styron. Still, one wishes MacShane had ventured to compare Jones with Beat novelists of the same period, such as Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, whom Jones evidently scorned, but with whom he shared many attitudes, including a preference for underdogs and a universal distrust of authority, especially of the governments that had created world war.
The one area MacShane fails to explore sufficiently is the contradiction in Jones between the macho brawler and the shy, scholarly man who would spend many hours alone every day in his study, and often go far out of his way to avoid arguments. At the very end, MacShane quotes Jones` friend Willie Morris that ”he knew so much about human cruelty in all of its manifestations, but as a human being was so lacking in cruelty himself.” But one can`t help suspect that this basic irresolution in Jones–an attraction to apocalypse combined with a repulsion for the disorder of modern life, both typically smalltown and Midwestern–was the wellspring of his creativity.
Nevertheless, Frank MacShane, so successful in reviving other slighted and maligned writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Raymond Chandler and John O`Hara, has created a highly readable and genuinely tragic account of the too- easily-written-off bad boy of American fiction, James Jones.
