To Reach Eternity

...I know now for sure you can never get over me, and that I can never get over you...

...Also his various comments on Mencken, and on Scott Fitzgerald, and on Tom Wolfe...

...After finishing Some Came Running late in 1956, Jones took a break from his writing table and from his tempestuous taskmaster (or -mistress) and went to New York, where Budd Schulberg introduced him to Gloria Mosolino, whom he married a few weeks later...

...He was living in a farmhouse, which he bought and remodeled, on Long Island when he died in May 1977...

...even so, I have to applaud Jones for stating the obvious, no matter that he stumbles and almost falls in doing so...

...Not until some four months after that, with the couple back home in Illinois, did Gloria learn about Jones's relations with Lowney...

...Still, he must have been a pleasant fellow...

...Shortly thereafter, Jones and Gloria, whose marriage turned out to be a truly happy one, moved to New York for a brief stay, and thence to Paris, where they lived until 1974, when they returned to the States...

...No, that's misleading: he was an awful letter writer...

...To hold our attention, letters must contain "surprises" of some kind, either in opinions expressed or, more importantly, in turns of phrase, in the manner of expression...

...It just is, and must be accepted...

...In one Texas-sized billet-doux, which even so has been abbreviated by the editor, thus making one wonder just how long it really was, he tries to get at the heart of the matter, or anyhow to lay bare his soul...

...Dont ask me why, or how...

...In a letter to Norman Mailer, who, incidentally, comes off rather badly in this collection, Jones spoke of those character limitations with a fervor that borders on moral indignation: The consensus of [Hemingway's] outlook might be worded thusly: Say and do everything you can that will make Hemingway look good, even if it does make a lot of other people look bad...

...Its just love, overpowering, all embracing, unbeatable, thats all...

...He also spent a sizable sum on the bachelor quarters he built at the time...

...But, alas, that's not all, not by a country mile, since six and a half long pages come panting after...

...He believed that Faulkner, like all the "affirmation-shouters," had somehow convinced himself that he really believed in the comforting words of that ringing endorsement of the species...

...Jones separated the combatants before any injury was done...

...For example, he confessed to being "heartily disgusted" with Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech...

...The letters to Mitchell take up about a fifth of the volume...

...There are also, of course, the obligatory epistles to Lowney—as dull as they are long, and they seem at times to be interminable...

...Near the end of his long stay in Paris—where his splendid apartment overlooking the Seine attracted visitors, whether welcome or not, like an oasis in the Sahara—Jones admitted that he had never really learned to like the French...

...It is as simple as that...

...While he admired the fiction of Faulkner and the early short stories, at least, of Hemingway, and even went so far as to mimic, almost to the point of parodying,their styles in some of his short stories (see The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, especially the title story, which apes Faulkner, and "None Sing So Wildly," which echoes Hemingway in an unwittingly comic manner), he readily called them to account when he thought they overstepped the bounds of common sense or decency...

...Look up his comments on Sherwood Anderson—a snide parody of whom the whole book of Torrents of Spring aims at...

...The Colony, as it was called, was the brainchild of Lowney Handy, the free spirit who took Jones in hand following his discharge from the Army in the summer of 1944...

...Johnson that a man's soul lies naked in his letters, then there's no gainsaying the fact that Jones was an extraordinarily decent fellow...

...The more he sought to clarify a matter, the more he obscured it...

...Note: the editor silently corrected misspellings but left the apostrophe-free contractions in place...

...If we can believe with Dr...

...And they always will...

...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1989...

...William H. Nolte is C Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...

...They all died in vain...

...To be charitable, I might note that not many people, either professional writers or the merely literate, are capable of doing much more than conveying information in their correspondence...

...But some of the letters indicate that Jones possessed a good crap-detector, at least one that was operative in the case of other people although it sometimes malfunctioned in his own case...

...I doubt that anyone not permanently adolescent would disagree with his view that Papa was a war lover and "a macho contriver of romantic effects...

...We have loved through more than one eternity, to be able to love so much...

...I cant explain...

...In like manner, according to Styron, who went with him to the Lincoln Memorial, he dismissed Lincoln's Gettysburg Address as "just beautiful bullshit," adding with savage bitterness, "They all died in vain...

...The first half of this volume is given over to letters, many of them quite long by modern standards, written between 1939, when Jones was an 18-year-old enlistee in the Army, and 1951, when From Here to Eternity made him famous and at least moderately wealthy...

...We are in love...

...Styron also recalls how Jones would "denounce Papa for a despicable fraud and poseur" whose later work was phony to the core...

...he considered the remarks "truly childish...

...Although Jones encouraged people to believe that Lowney was his foster mother (she was seventeen years older than he), they shared both bed and board during the long apprentice years, as her understanding husband, Harry, looked the other way...

...Some people, Jones admitted, found the strophes moving...

...At which point marks of elision come to our rescue, only to be followed by a confession: "Words just fail me, Lowney...

...Unfortunately, Jones offers little that surprises and nothing that thrills...

...In short, it was Hemingway's character that Jones found most repulsive...

...There he talks of how much he has finished for this or that chapter, what his intentions are for the next chapters, how, in short, the book-inprogress is progressing...

...Information but not entertainment—not, anyhow, to the serene outsider, to you and me...

...Enough said...

...He almost always used three (or four or five) words where one would suffice, and he had an uncanny knack for placing those extra words in the wrong place...

...Without Styron's excellent foreword and George Hendrick's editorial assistance, particularly in biographical matters, the book would be of little interest to anyone save the most avid Jones fans, and there don't seem to be many of that breed left...

...22.50 William H. Nolte W hat can one say about this collection of some 120 letters of James Jones without finally damning it with faint praise...

...But he was not a good letter writer...

...The fact that Papa was a dreadful cad is perhaps too well known to warrant repeating...

...Most usually they begin: "Poor Tom Wolfe etc, etc" or "Poor Scott Fitzgerald etc, etc"–=`if he had only known thus and so" (implying he, Hemingway, does know this or that) "perhaps it would have helped his work thus and so...

...Oddly enough, the collection contains only one letter from his last three years...

...He seems to have been every bit as likable, kind, and considerate as William Styron would have us believe in his recollection of their long friendship...

...Thats where my faith is founded...

...Most of the royalties from that novel, which had a tremendous effect on me when I read it in my early twenties, were used to subsidize a colony for writers in Marshall, Illinois, a few miles from his hometown of Robinson...

...Two instances should suffice...

...Just that we are a man and his woman who love each other, a woman and her man who need each other...

...M ost of the early letters were written to his brother Jeff and to his editors at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins and, following Perkins's death in 1947, Burroughs Mitchell...

...The awakening came when Lowney burst through a screen door and attacked the innocent interloper with a Bowie knife...