Blood and Sand
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing BLOOD AND SAND BY PEARL K. BELL James Jones, ex-soldier in the Regular Army, ex-Midwestern boozer and battler, and for more than a decade a fat-cat expatriate on the He...
...As her children crawl in and out of the playground sprinkler, Margaret watches with unseeing but instinctively vigilant eyes as she helps her Black Panther lover blow up the George Washington Bridge...
...But to read Mrs...
...The Seine, which he spends many a dreary paragraph watching from his tall windows, is "a never-ceasing source of interest to the eyeball...
...Educated, passionate, disorganized, and witty, Margaret Reynolds is "too old for an identity crisis and not yet past the age of uncertainty...
...Throughout his clumsy account, he remains hopelessly unaware of the play of complex motivations tangling private and public acts in a period of disorder (the motif of all great political novels, such as Flaubert's depiction of the 1848 revolution in L'Education Sentimentale...
...Roiphe's immensely subtle perceptions about the problems and pleasures of being a woman...
...Writers & Writing BLOOD AND SAND BY PEARL K. BELL James Jones, ex-soldier in the Regular Army, ex-Midwestern boozer and battler, and for more than a decade a fat-cat expatriate on the He Saint-Louis in Paris, has now turned from his earlier raunchy preoccupations-the peactime Army in Hawaii, young writers suffocating in the Illinois backwaters, and sexually inexhaustible scuba divers in the Caribbean—to deal with the short-lived French students' revolution of 1968...
...Jones' judgment consistently sounds as off-key as a long-untuned piano...
...The stumbling logorrhea of Go to the Widow-Maker is replaced, in The Merry Month of May, by desperate fatigue and repetitious lassitude...
...How else can one possibly explain the astonishing carelessness that leads Jonathan James Hartley III at the end to say: "And on Sunday I began this--what shall 1 call it...
...Yet in that first book Jones was in his element, giving documentary shape and substance to a brutal military world no novelist before him had known so intimately...
...At once sloppy and devoted, fiercely loving toward her husband and her two small children, she yearns not so much for liberation as for occasional relief: "I did not imagine on those early dates that laundry needed sorting...
...his son Hill is one of the Sorbonne revolutionaries...
...Following the pattern of many Americans living abroad, too, he wants to show off that French now trips as easily from his tongue as English...
...Touche...
...In Vietnam, she remembers how "our Mothers for Peace wrote both to their congressmen and the Pentagon, threatening a caravan of baby carriages blocking all traffic across the Potomac...
...Unlike the ladies of liberation, she cuts the resentment of the sane, if a bit rattled, housewife down to manageable size, acknowledges and clarifies discontent without screeching, and makes this particular marriage--and one charmingly original woman --poignant and believable...
...is nearly killed by a poisoned arrow in the Amazon...
...And I'll be interested to make a comparison to what it was like the first day...
...Besides, in 1950 his uninhibited candor and scatological savagery about sex were still enough of a rarity in American writing to shock and titillate...
...But Jones sorely lacks their political sophistication (Spender, for example, later turned a cool eye on the embattled students in The Year of the Young Rebel), and political sightseeing across the generational divide can be a risky pastime for an unpolitical man...
...Almost simultaneously, two middle-aged voyeurs of radical youth on this side of the Atlantic, Dwight Macdonald and Stephen Spender, were being hauled up through the windows into the "liberated" zones of Columbia University...
...James Jones' early success made him rich enough to live in style and in Paris, the struggles of the past forever behind him, the future empty of anything more to say...
...Narrator Hartley, our soidisant intellectual, says of a girl he has just slept with: "She just sort of laid there...
...But on her return, she can make a truce with her diaper-ridden reality...
...This research...
...Lured by her unending fulfillment of his favorite sexual fantasies, he abandons his family just at the time de Gaulle is restoring order to France...
...From the beginning we are told that the Gallaghers are doomed, and Jones mechanically places the stages of their degeneration in heavy-handed counterpoint to the inevitably doomed university rebellion...
...This he finds in the cynical 19-year-old black Samantha...
...Of course no one ever tried to argue that James Jones is a stylist...
...Every novelist has his Paris novel, and The Merry Month of May (Delacorte, 361 pp., $7.95) is Jones' misguided effort to combine it with that other difficult genre, the political novel...
...a man of an unquenchable literary bent," who lives in Paris and edits a successful competitor of the Paris Review...
...Who can tell...
...The cliches and solecisms manage to intrude almost as often as they did in the simpler days when Jones prided himself on the crudeness of his prose as the honest reflection of his heroic and unmannered authenticity...
...Though the tone of Up the Sandbox is modest, restrained, quietly self-mocking, Mrs...
...flies to Vietnam on a fact-finding mission as Another Mother for Peace...
...For the cause assigned to the Gallagher family's destruction--Louisa's failed suicide reduces her to a mindless vegetable, Hill sinks into a drug-stupefied pseudomysticism--is Harry's hot-breathing pursuit of perfect three-cornered sex, like a Holy Grail...
...The Sorbonne.' " 'Yes,' I said...
...Unlike the voracious, oversexed hotheads of Jones' earlier books, Hartley is a quiet observer and commentator telling the tragic story of his good friends the Gallaghers, fellow expatriates on the He Saint-Louis, whose downfall is made to seem inexorably linked to the barricades and street fighting on the opposite shores of the Seine...
...As a famous American resident, Jones was undoubtedly granted frequent laissez-passer into the holy revolutionary sanctums of the Sorbonne and the Odeon during the spring upheavals...
...To turn from the humorless, creaking dullness of James Jones to Ann Richardson Roiphe's brilliant little novel Up the Sandbox (Simon and Schuster, 155 pp., $4.95) is like pushing through a scabrous tunnel into the warm light of day...
...Just as the utterances of Jones' playwright hero in Go to the Widow-Maker made it hard to believe he could write his own name, much less a successful three-act play, so the words uttered by the crack scenarist and his intellectual-editor pal reduce the characters to rubble...
...Language, in James Jones, becomes a dumb beast...
...his wife Louisa, a Boston Brahmin, is a neurotic 1940s version of radical chic...
...But they hardly come within shouting distance of Mrs...
...Strangelove shudder...
...This exploration...
...One conversation between this mid-20th-century Damon and Pythias goes: " 'It will be interesting to see what it is like over there,' Harry said...
...Incredibly, Up the Sandbox has been praised by some reviewers for "taking you to where Kate Millett and Betty Friedan leave off...
...But when his English is so inept--"There is no use of my going into the relative goods and evils of Communist-Marxism as they were seen in the 1930s and '40s"--can his French be far behind...
...Roiphe invents a wild and daring scheme for portraying a young mother on New York's Upper West Side, sitting away the summer hours in a gritty playground while her husband fills hundreds of index cards for his doctoral thesis...
...A joke...
...I am baffled by the esteem in which he is held by people who ordinarily know better...
...This piece of crud...
...Without having to rely on anything like Jones' self-indulgently Kinseyish detail, Mrs...
...And she can be marvelously funny...
...By now, in the free-and-easy '70s, all that horny agility and four-letter machismo seems as limp as a toothpaste commercial, and equally mendacious...
...As Leslie Fiedler once pointed out, "I take it that when a critic says that From Here to Eternity is in the tradition of 'Naturalism' he means nothing more spectacular than that it is badly written in a special and quite deliberate way...
...Lacking any practical means of escape, she turns to the next best source, fantasy...
...The basic incongruity in this dismal book is Jones' pretense of slipping into the skin and sensibility of one Jonathan James Hartley III, "failed poet, failed novelist...
...Harry Gallagher is an immensely successful screenwriter who settled in Europe after being blacklisted in Hollywood for his dubious political past...
...The police, with clubs and paddy wagons, could naturally remove the mothers, babies, balloons and lollipops from the area, but the resulting worldwide publicity would have been enough to make even a Dr...
...Roiphe provides the kind of insight into sexual feeling that Jones will never discover, or even know that he lacks...
...Nothing in the American literary experience is as characteristic or as sad as the embattled tough guy, with only one real book to write, who goes on turning them out after hitting that first jackpot...
...Roiphe is to renew one's sense of its miraculous possibilities...
...is propositioned by Fidel Castro on a magazine assignment to Cuba (he turns out to be a woman...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 5
