Living with Books:

...This happened to Wolfe, but Wolfe was not only a more talented person than Jones to begin with...

...From Here to Eternity is not a good novel, but it is not altogether bad...

...His editors obviously could have saved him from hundreds of his blunders, and must have longed to do so...

...Because he is, in his intentions though only in his intentions, a serious writer, the lesson is made quite clear that there is no substitute for the disciplined imagination...

...When Jones calls himself a born writer, the phrase has for him mystical connotations...

...Jones simply plods ahead, setting down in dreary detail Frank's economic, social and, especially, sexual activities...

...All this in 15 pages, and the next chapter is just as bad, although Dave mutters selfeffacingly only once...

...Considerable space is also devoted to theorizing on love and literature and the relationship between them...

...he had read more widely and more discriminatingly...

...But if there is a vast amount of intentionally bad writing in the book, the reader observes that Jones also writes badly when he is almost certainly under the impression that he is writing well, perhaps even beautifully...

...It shows what happens when the Wolfean influence hits a young man who has had interesting experiences...

...He is 35, we learn, and had left the town in disgrace 19 years earlier...

...Under the influence of Gwen and her father, a poet, he begins writing again...

...He sees himself, obviously, as a pretty tough customer—remember the pictures of him before he graduated into Ivy League clothes—and in that respect Dave Hirsh is certainly fashioned in his creator's image...

...The Tamiment Institute Library, -which incorporates the Meyer London Memorial Library of the Rand School of Social Science, contains a unique collection of materials in the history of the American labor and radical movements and in the related social sciences...

...What a book these characters would make some day...

...Feeling-compelled to deal with all these characters, and being unable to present concisely even the simplest scene, Jones has no trouble at all in running up more than 1,200 pages...

...Not having bothered to make himself a writer in the first place, he has no idea how to go about making himself a better writer, and he is likely to regard his faults as virtues...

...This, I suspect, is writing that is unintentionally bad: "But if all these feelings were strong in them when they heard the news, and afterwards at his funeral,—it would have been a great deal stronger, and a great deal more perplexing, and puzzling, and disquietingly unintelligible, if any of them had been able to be with him in some occult way, right there inside of his own head, that night when he— all unknowingly—took his last ride...

...Sex, indeed, seems to be a pretty grim business for everybody in the book, and especially so for Frank Hirsh, who winds up as a Peeping Tom...

...Gwen does most of the talking about literature, with some assistance from her father, Dave, and Wally Dennis...

...He continues: "I was stationed at Hickham Field in Hawaii when I stumbled upon the works of Thomas Wolfe, and his home life seemed so similar to my own, his feelings about himself so similar to mine about myself, that 1 realized I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written...

...He had abandoned authorship, however, before going into the Army...

...And so Jones discovered that he was not merely a writer but a successful and famous writer...

...What kind of man is it who can talk about "such an external perennial," "his crisply enunciated editor's voice," "some exotic routine," "such excellent delicious whiskey...

...And poor Edith Barclay, for whom "shibboleths were crashing down all over ! Sometimes, for a chapter or two, Jones will exploit a particular mannerism until the reader cringes...

...The prologue has given us a glimpse of him in action in Germany—a portrait of the hero as killer...

...He comes at last, as might have been predicted, to a violent end...

...Her father, who has studied at Harvard and Heidelberg, just like Faulkner's Gavin Stevens, has "started a new, long poem recently, and she was getting excited about it...

...I'm a writer by personality," he told a Newsweek reporter, and in a television interview on the day of publication he repeated that he had been a writer all his life without knowing it until he read Thomas Wolfe...

...He added that he was studying French...

...everyone talks about sex...

...Nor that Dave, confronting his sister, observes that "her breasts, never too out-standing, as it were, had fallen even more so...

...This naively romantic concept of the creative person and the creative process makes Jones an incurable amateur...

...He had been doing an enormous amount of reading in connection with the new poem, all of it on chess...

...Most of them, fortunately, either are lazy or are easily discouraged...

...In his amateurish, arrogant way, Jones has achieved the reductio ad absurdum of what Wright Morris calls "the raw material myth"—the notion that the way to create literature is to get as many "real" things as possible down on paper...

...Chapter 39 is devoted to Gwen and her thoughts about herself and her father...

...he is lying with a woman...

...There is some dreadful writing in the book and a wide streak of sentimentality, but it seems to give a sense of what life in the peacetime Army was like, and I am assured by people who know that it does...

...When Dave experiences what he thrice describes as "that somnambulant drunken almost clairvoyant trance," he is not walking in his sleep...

...If so much bad writing has never appeared between covers before, this is not merely because Jones is an invincibly bad writer...

...He finds plenty of consolation with prostitutes, pick-ups, and the girls from a local brassiere factory, one of whom he eventually marries, out of despair over Gwen...

...There is no doubt that Wolfe did a good deal of damage of that sort, but Jones is a notable and appalling example...

...He has fallen in love with Gwen, of course, but his suit is unsuccessful, chiefly because Gwen, at 35, is a virgin and ashamed of being one...

...Dave's and Frank's dissolute father...

...But I think that even he has enough sensitiveness to realize, however dimly, that there are literary resources he lacks...

...On a drunken impulse he has come back to his home town for a brief visit...

...Jones tells us a great deal about other characters, too: Gwen and Bob French...

...Here, for instance, is the first sentence of the special note at the beginning of the book: "In this book, which is entirely fiction, the macabre imaginings of a novelist's mind, whose characters and situations are completely imaginary, and any resemblance to actual persons is accidental, as everyone can see, nobody like that ever lived, the fanciful workings of a perfervid brain,—in this book, then, the author . . " etc...

...What one feels in Jones is not merely ignorance but also sheer hatred of the language...

...The Library's facilities are available to scholars, students, and those professionally working in the fields of study covered by its resources...

...He adopts a mucker pose in an attempt to convince people that he is a mucker because he wants to be one and not because he couldn't possibly be anything else...

...Gwen French, who is the principal theorist, maintains that agony is the necessary source of creativity and that falling in love is the readiest way of achieving the proper degree of misery...

...The result was From Here to Eternity, an 861-page novel about life in the regular Army, ending with the attack on Pearl Harbor...

...Jones believes that women do not care much about sex, or at any rate care less about it than they do about other things, and hence marriages and love affairs alike are bound to end badly...

...I am grateful to Jones for mentioning in his foreword that the character of Gwen was suggested by Emily Dickinson...

...Having discovered that he was a writer, of course he had to write, and after he got out of the Army he was encouraged and aided by Mr...

...cruel to the reader, for the book is 1,266 pages long...

...Other topics are discussed, too: Bob French, for instance, discourses on reincarnation, and Dave works hard to establish parallels between our times and the decadent days of Rome...

...Nor that Dawn Hirsh Shortridge, being interviewed by somebody from a magazine, finds herself expanding "under his sympathetic—if somewhat rather detached—impetus...

...it would never have occurred to me...

...Frank's wife, Agnes...

...The badness of the writing is a phenomenon that demands explanation, but no one should suppose that it is the book's only shortcoming...

...the interviewer asked...

...He is attracted to such people, "mainly because the respectable always bored the hell out of you...

...It is not even suggested that there is a craft to be mastered...

...The Tamiment Institute Library 7 East 15th Street, New York 3, N. Y. (ALgonqvin 5-6250...

...All the literary people in the book— Dave and Gwen and Bob and Wally Dennis—are convinced that writers are born and that whether they write badly or well depends on what happens to them in their love affairs, not on how well they master their craft...

...Sometimes Jones gives the impression of writing both about and for morons...

...And so, characteristically, he tries to make a virtue of his shortcomings...

...Jones, of course, was always energetic and determined, and since the success of From Here to Eternity he has been arrogant...

...Jones must have given orders that nothing was to be changed, and, with the success of From Here to Eternity behind him, he could make the orders stick...

...Thus Some Came Running (Scribner, $7.50) reads like a cruel parody of From Here to Eternity— cruel to Jones, for his weaknesses and vanities are starkly exposed...

...Dave reflects...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks James Jones's 'Some Came Running': A Study in Arrogant Primitivism Writing about himself in Twentieth Century Authors, James Jones says that he joined the Army after getting out of high school because his family had lost its money and jobs were hard to find...

...All the reviews I have seen, including the one or two that found something pleasant to say about the novel, have pointed out that the writing is bad, but I am afraid that only extensive quotation can indicate how extraordinarily bad it is...

...No, he replied, not merely without embarrassment but as if he thought the question irrelevant...

...The reader is likely to conclude, as Dave does on visiting 'Bama's farm, that "the whole damned thing was, as far as he was concerned anyway, just about phenomenal...

...After various wanderings, he had settled down in Los Angeles, fallen hopelessly in love, and written a couple of books...

...Along with 'Bama, the gambler, Dave meets several young men who give an impression of "hard living and wild midnight revels and a complete lack of social consciousness, responsibility...

...Friends of the library, trade unions and other organizations are reminded that the Library welcomes gifts of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, photographs and other memorabilia relating to the labor and radical movements...

...As for ignorance, when he speaks of "the loverlike smiles and looks and peregrinations," the context makes it clear that he has no idea what "peregrinations" means...

...Edith's giddy grandmother...

...one of his mistresses, Edith Barclay...

...Then he grinned delightedly, childishly . . . Bob said gently . . . Dave said quickly he said suddenly . Bob grinned suddenly Bob said apologetically Bob said solemnly Bob said in a pained voice his voice still strangely, if a little whimsically, pained his voice still pained Gwen said primly Gwen said crisply Bob said heartily . . . Bob said extravagantly Gwen said from the stove subduedly Bob said gallantly Dave said quickly . . Gwen called primly Bob said mildly . . Bob said heartily . . Bob said gaily . . . Bob said grandly . . Dave muttered selfeffacingly . Bob said cheerily . . . she said distinctly Dave said warily Gwen said directly . she said almost primly . he said selfeffacingly Bob said to him cheerfully Bob said cheerfully...

...And now we are off: "he muttered selfeffacingly she said merrily . he said delightedly Dave said sincerely he said simply Bob said shyly Gwen said merrily Gwen said, almost angrily he said intimately Gwen said gaily Dave said softly and grinned shyly Gwen said gaily and commandingly Dave muttered selfeffacingly . . . Bob said...

...As an editor and a teacher of writing, I encounter many such amateurs, young men and young women who have convinced themselves, somehow or other, that the finger of destiny is pointing straight at them...

...But he is still an amateur...

...They and the proofreaders, I am sure, suffered agonies...

...Jones, his high opinion of himself confirmed by the success of his first novel, was almost bound to surrender to his worst impulses...

...Had he ever been in France or Italy...

...In Chapter 22, for example, Dave calls for the first time on Gwen and Bob French...

...The trouble with the kind of person who can tell himself that he has been a writer all his life without knowing it is that he never discovers what it means to be a writer...

...Convinced that he is "a writer by personality,' he believes that all he has to do is to put words on paper and that if he agonizes enough in the process the result is bound to be good...

...Dave stays on in Parkman because he meets Gwen French, a teacher of literature at a local college and an authority on the group of Los Angeles writers to which Dave belonged...

...Jones knew the regular Army and, d la Wolfe, spilled his knowledge on page after page...

...All the discussions are dull, and many of them are silly...

...This is not Dave's story alone, not by any means...

...Wally Dennis, a young would be writer, has an affair with Dawn Hirsh, Frank's daughter, and much space is devoted to that and to Dawn's subsequent marriage to somebody else...

...Well, you're a sight for sore eyes!' Gwen smiled gaily...

...He is encouraged to do this, I believe, by a kind of theoretical primi-tivism...

...It is, indeed, a painfully dull book, and the pain is greatly exacerbated by the badness of the writing...

...At his request she has sent to a New York dealer for a number of rare books on chess, five of which Jones names, with publishers and dates...

...In this aspect, the book is reminiscent of the work of John O'Hara, although there is little enough of the kind of insight that makes one forgive O'Hara for his more pedestrian pages...

...In another aspect the novel brings Steinbeck to mind...

...I believe he is incapable of realizing just how gross, slovenly and tasteless the book is, but if he could realize it I don't think he would care...

...This is not just inept or careless writing...

...What he finally told her, when he had apparently worked it out to his satisfaction, was that the poem was going to be about chess (she had rather guessed that...

...Bama is a major character in the book, and in a way Jones's hero as well as Dave's...

...In the course of the television interview, he announced that he was going to Europe for two years to write a novel about France and one about Italy...

...It was taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club, made into a movie, and given a National Book Award...

...He is a noble person and very good to his wife and children, whom he keeps on a farm and occasionally visits...

...and Mrs...

...In a paper she has written, she tells Dave: "My thesis was that it's this unique and abnormally high potential for the falling in love process, the really abnormal need for it and the inability to escape it, that largely both makes and destroys the creative personality in any given individual...

...They are, one may be sure, pretty fine people at heart, just like the bums in Steinbeck's Monterey books...

...Some Came Running begins with the return of Dave Hirsh to Parkman, Illinois in 1947...

...Many pages are devoted to his brother Frank, who achieves financial success in the three or four years covered by the novel, and who also manages to get himself involved with a series of women...

...The author of such a sentence, obviously, cannot write clearly and gracefully, knows that he cannot, and has perversely decided to write as obscurely and clumsily as possible...

...Gwen regards Dave as a tough guy with "a basic inherent sweetness of soul...

...Harry E. Handy of his native Robinson, Illinois...

...He goes into partnership in a taxi business with his brother Frank, who is an up-and-coming merchant, but he soon makes a pleasanter and more profitable deal with a gambler named 'Bama...

...One cannot be surprised that Bob French, in spite of Harvard and Heidelberg, speaks of someone as "a man of so obviously little intellectual capacities...

...Dave's earlier career and the careers of his California friends illustrate this theory, and of course he illustrates it all over again after falling in love with Gwen...

...it is an assault upon the language...