Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer
MacShane, Frank
merely that Harriet Winslow, as she gives up her somewhat tarnished virginity, explores a realm of experience which she has hitherto avoided, but that her encounter with Arroyo represents the...
...CUBAN AMERICAN NATIONAL FOUNDATION 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, N.W., Suite 601 Washington, D.C...
...Our popular fiction has also become horribly debased...
...Jones's gauche prose style is enough to prevent all but the most committed Dreiserites Former U.S...
...The details of his life—a rough childhood, a miserable stretch in the Army, a tempestuous but happy marriage, a disastrous second novel, a tour of duty as Parisian expatriate, an early death brought on by the excessive consumption of alcohol—have the vaguely familiar ring of a dozen other literary lives...
...specialize, those old war horses look better and better with each passing bestseller list...
...Or From Herr to Eternity...
...Permanent Representative to the U.N...
...Before all the jobs were done, streets collapsed and windows shattered, and workers drowned or got crippled by the bends...
...Compared to the reeking garbage in which our great publishing houses currently Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...John Hersey...
...Diana Trilling used to keep that kind of schedule forty years ago when she wrote her "Fiction in Review" column for the Nation, and it doesn't seem to have done her any lasting harm...
...The station's "brief, emotion-filled life" (just fifty-three years) paralleled the unforeseen decline of railroading...
...Ann Gavin's Irish-accented voice still called out departure times to those in the waiting room, but the real departures were permanent ones to the suburbs—all made in automobiles traveling roads built with federal highway funds...
...His treatment of From Here to Eternity is all too typical: he ranks it above Guard of Honor and The Naked and the Dead as the "most successful" American novel to come out of World War II...
...3.00...
...nervous academics, having run out of new things to say about Kafka, are falling on the likes of James Jones like a ton of bricks...
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...But by 1908 one could walk from Jersey City to Long Island City...
...It tried to delay doom by selling the old station for a mess of air rights...
...Eighteen years after Cassatt had first seen the baths of Caracalla Charles McKim was fortuitously entranced by the same sight...
...The result was colossal: "As in the great cathedrals of Europe, the separate elements of Pennsylvania Station coalesced into a unified form that em-braced the human spirit...
...Whoever it may be, you can count on one thing: he'll emerge from this thoughtful new revaluation as an underrated classic...
...even the steamy blockbuster novel could be counted on more often than not for a good read...
...His reading nurtured his philosophical nature, and without cant or illusion he confronted the nature of love, sex, and mortality...
...But to say all this is to make the novel appear more discursive and analytic than it really is, since Fuentes narrates principally through a succession of juxtaposed images, and his characters converse through inter-changed soliloquies rather than naturalistic speech...
...Her final verdict on Marquand, for example, is as dispassionate a statement of the case for popular fiction as can be found: Without transcending the high-grade commodity level, he has done a great deal to raise our standards of what a literary commodity can be...
...Moreover, just as the novel mingles fact and fiction, it occasionally jumps abruptly into fantasy, with the literal This is a lousy time to be a compulsive reader...
...The crowds began to leave after the Second World War...
...The Old Gringo is an intriguing performance...
...One learns the secrets of the Sunnyside train yards, where chefs "were specially trained in the `dummy diner,' a mock-up of a real dining car kitchen," and where there "was even a `tomato ripener,' whose job it was to shoot up tomatoes with ethylene gas so they would be ready for the salad chef...
...And as good as it is, From Here to Eternity is still a piece of popular fiction, an amalgam of middle-period Hemingway and fondly remembered thirties movies marred by a truly corny whore-with-aheart-of-gold subplot introduced in all seriousness as a philosophical statement about the nature of romantic love...
...The feeling when you approached it," says Brendan Gill, "was awe and intimidation...
...Along with the new ventricles running under the Hudson, auricles were dug between Manhattan and Queens, taming the East River for the Long Island Railroad (owned by the Pennsylvania...
...Equally confusing are the many references to her father's Negro mistress, who may have known Harriet in Washington, or may be merely a product of the latter's imagination...
...The photographs she has gathered harrow the reader even more than her text...
...Cassatt spent seventeen years of what should have been his prime in premature retirement, preferring sailing and horses and the company of his wife to the business dealings he was so good at...
...Remember A Rage to Live...
...Nor is Mr...
...A whole ribbon of Manhattan, from east to west under the Thirties, was excavated for the sake of the trains...
...That is the moment for which the great muck heap of that book exists...
...Which begs the question: why would anyone want to read a threehundred-page biography of James Jones in the first place...
...Mrs...
...The station that sat atop these arterial triumphs cost $90 million to build...
...Veteran craftsmen like John P. Marquand were writing novels that could be taken more or less seriously by the intelligent reader...
...Trilling certainly didn't, not even after reading several tons of junk...
...One reason he did was the chance to end an absurdity that irked his imagination—namely, the need for railroad passengers coming to New York from the south and west to get off in Jersey City and reach Manhattan by ferry...
...As an example of the critical biography as high art, Into Eternity is nothing special...
...At one and the same time he convinces us of the non-referential nature of his fiction and the dead-serious historical import of what he has to say...
...It isn't surprising that Jones, a devotee of the hardboiled detective story, actually broke down and wrote one when he needed extra money to keep his Paris residence afloat...
...The result was a long, clumsy, enthralling novel about the peacetime Army that is still in print after thirty-five years, one surprisingly good Holly-wood adaptation, and God only knows how many copies sold...
...charming lightweights like Jay McInerney are being touted as voices of a generation...
...For that matter, the en-tire story is more or less the imaginative re-creation of Harriet and others who recall the Old Gringo, so that its veracity is called into question within the frame of the novel itself...
...Hearteningly ambitious in its scope, From Here to Eternity is warmed by a dignity so transparently authentic that Whittaker Chambers was moved to comment: To my grotesque way of thinking, one of the great moral moments in current U.S...
...Diehl has a grand time talking about how it all was while it lasted, providing us with photographs of Ethel Barrymore on the Broadway Limited and of station-master Bill Egan surrounded by his own pictures of American Presidents...
...There are two heroes in Mrs...
...as a secondary source of factual information about the author of From Herr to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, it is a solid, eminently reliable performance...
...So when it came time to build the station, the client was able to find an architect who dreamed the same language...
...But when the gigantic Pennsy, after passing through a mediocre patch, offered him its presidency in 1899, he took it...
...From Here to Eternity is essentially a moral book...
...MacShane's students is about to give us the lowdown on yet another forgotten American...
...In English and Spanish...
...Norman Mailer once called Jones "the worst writer of prose ever to give intimations of greatness...
...One might question, how-ever, whether it all adds up to a coherent work of art, or whether Fuentes, in his improvisation of a historical theme, has merely performed a clever conjuring trick...
...Office buildings and a new Madison Square Garden would, according to the scheme, rise above a new subterranean station, "a bleak parody of railroad stations in general and a tragic joke in comparison with its magnificent predecessor...
...Until I read Lorraine B. Diehl's new book I never knew that the sculpted eagle squatting before the new station on a pedestal marked "1%8" is actually one of those that Adolph A. Weinman carved for the old station...
...No doubt one of Mr...
...Although dedicated to William Styron, the novel seems closer in style to William Faulkner, with language so densely metaphoric that vehicle frequently merges with tenor...
...The problem is that Frank Mac-Shane is either unable or unwilling to make this kind of distinction in his critical discussions of Jones's work...
...She writes in a clear and moving way, only rarely slipping into the bland and generalizing style of documentary voiceover...
...The wrecking ball took its first swipe on October 28, 1963...
...The absence of this sane and judicious perspective is all too typical of a distressing new phenomenon on the American literary scene: the current group of academic biographers who cull the checklists of our second-string novelists with unseemly enthusiasm...
...By the time I commuted in with him, to a summer job in his office in '68 and '69, a new Pennsylvania Station was the terminus for the Long Island Railroad...
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...But Frank MacShane can almost always be relied on to get the facts straight, and he has done so once again with this book...
...His whole life was an education in books, and in the work of such writers as Teilhard de Char-din, Stendhal, Conrad, and Yeats he searched for an understanding of life...
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...One day he read Look Homeward, Angel and concluded, like so many other sensitive young men before him, that "I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written...
...By the early sixties the Pennsy was quickly going broke...
...Still, Mrs...
...writing is the quarry scene in From Here to Eternity—the scene in which one of the prisoners takes his crowbar and, on request, breaks the arm or leg of a fellow prisoner...
...Diehl's book is impassioned...
...The really remarkable thing about Jones, one feels after reading Into Eternity, was the distance he was able to travel on sheer nerve alone...
...Amtrak and Conrail took over, having been left with a new station worthy of their charm and performance...
...I wonder if he paid them any notice, since my father tended to equate all placards with subversion, and since the walk along 34th Street from his office to the station eventually became a gauntlet of 3-card monte hustlers and Hare Krishnas, something to be made with fast feet and downcast eyes...
...THE LATE, GREAT PENNSYLVANIA STATION Lorraine B. Diehl/American Heritage Press-Houghton Mifflin/$19.95 Thomas Mallon 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...
...Facing the first page of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR Tyrrell yearns for your company...
...The station made some vain attempts to keep up with the streamlined times—in the late fifties a clamshell ticket counter aped an airline terminal's—but it inevitably turned into a "soot-laden tomb" that people were (at first) not sorry to see go...
...The trick, of course, is not to go too far with this line of reasoning...
...Witness Frank MacShane, a professor at Columbia University whose previous books include uncritically admiring biographies of John O'Hara and Raymond Chandler and whose new book, Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer, opens with the profoundly wrong-headed pronouncement that James Jones "deserves to stand in the first rank of American writers in the second half of the twentieth century...
...Jeane J. Kirkpatrick analyzes the "Kennedy-Khrushchev Pact", the 1962 agreement that guaranteed the security of Fidel Castro's regime, and asks what the implications of a similar accord between Washington and Managua would be for the Western hemisphere...
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...There was far more than the station's destruction to upset him in the 1960s, but I'm sure that somewhere in his shy being he felt a loss, and that that August pro-test demonstration was the only one he ever exempted from scorn...
...In the end, Into Eternity serves chiefly as a distressing reminder of the runaway inflation which mars the American literary scene today...
...Can he have it both ways...
...figure advances...
...soaring (its waiting room modeled on the baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome), that opened on September 8, 1910...
...Lots of bad novels got written and published, of course, but quality control in the popular fiction business was still significantly tighter...
...on the other hand, the America that she and the Old Gringo are fleeing from seems a land of flabby vices—of prudery, venality, and most of all, hypocrisy...
...Diehl's excellent book has any conspicuous flaw, it is her title, for large portions of the narrative, as well as many of the extraordinary photographs and maps, are really about the clawing out of tubes under the Hudson River that would eventually bring the Pennsylvania's trains into the gigantic new station that Cassatt dreamed of and McKim designed...
...In 1968 the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the New York Central, an amalgamation that must have given robber barons gravespins...
...The plot is solid, the detail convincing, the macho romanticism smoky and fragrant...
...Except, that is, for one particularly American touch: the waiting room had no benches—an extraordinary national in-junction to be up and doing...
...On August 2, 1962, he must have passed the preservationists picketing on Seventh Avenue against its destruction...
...MacShane at a loss for superlatives in subsequent pages: He had appeared like a comet from the heart of America, and he wrote with a directness and truthfulness that recalled such distinctly American writers as Walt Whitman and Mark Wain...
...merely that Harriet Winslow, as she gives up her somewhat tarnished virginity, explores a realm of experience which she has hitherto avoided, but that her encounter with Arroyo represents the irreconcilable otherness of the two nations: Discovering the reality of Mexico, Harriet encounters sex and violence, often together...
...Constructed out of materials from the Plasticrete Corporation of Hamden, Connecticut, as opposed to the old station's travertine marble, it looked, and still does, more or less like a looted K-Mart...
...For most readers, the very thought of ranking From Here to Eternity anywhere near a masterpiece like Guard of Honor will be jolting...
...reality of narrative assertions left up in the air: Arroyo speaks nonchalantly of having "willed" his father's legal wife to barrenness, and we are told that Harriet has had her mother buried in Arlington National Cemetery...
...If Mrs...
...After all, how else is a starving young assistant professor going to get tenure these days...
...Diehl's book: Alexander Cassatt, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Charles McKim, head of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White (the White being Stanford White...
...By the 1920s ridership was still rising, but automobiles and airplanes were coming off assembly lines in irresistible challenge...
...Herman Wouk...
...Clearly, tunnels were in order...
...The unspeakable loneliness of self-pity that is blind and tongueless rose up hot in her, trying to bring tears...
...It's not just that we're going through what Joseph Epstein likes to call "a bad patch" in our serious fiction...
...That's pretty strong stuff, especially when applied to the man whom Wilfrid Sheed once described as "the king of the good-bad writers" and whose eleven books are studded with hideous examples of paralyzing syntax...
...Just in time for the American century, those tunnels gave the United States a functioning heart...
...This unholy alliance ended in bankruptcy two years later...
...Without urging us to regard his novels as "important," he has done more than any writer of our time to close the dangerous gap between important and popular fiction...
...When the Duke of Windsor showed up in Penn Station requiring attendance, Egan greeted him by saying: "How are you, Prince...
...Between 1910 and 1963 it flew, with twenty-one others, above the Doric columns marking the entrance to a Roman wonder in which "everything grand and beautifuland uplifting . . . was designed for the man or woman who caught a train...
...Unlike most of those other young men, though, he promptly sat down and started to act on this wildly optimistic conclusion...
...Scholarly biographies are pulling down sixIV!y father was a railroad commuter, and for years he would come home from Manhattan to Long Island through the old Pennsylvania Station, a miracle, somehow both massive and Thomas Mallon teaches English at Vassar College and is the author of A Book of One's Own...
...The scale of the whole place was, in fact, as frightening as it was ennobling...
...20007 INTO ETERNITY: THE LIFE OF JAMES JONES, AMERICAN WRITER Frank MacShane/Houghton Mifflin/$18.95 Terry Teachout THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 51 from taking him seriously as a "great" writer...
...From Here to Eternity is a textbook example of the very best sort of popular novel, the kind that went out with Brylcreem and the nuclear family...
...What can I do for you...
...It used to be possible for a first-rate book reviewer to read a new novel every day without going crazy in the process...
...serious fiction is in a slump of unprecedented magnitude...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
