Decency and Integrity

...Yet at the same time it is a fine and keenly felt memoir that takes pains to record the integrity of Jones' life and art when the people who remember him are still present...

...For rewriting a single line of dialogue in the film The Longest Day, Darryl Zanuck paid him $15,000...

...You're the best friend I ever had...

...Morris was already a distant admirer who regarded From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and Some Came Running as "three of the finest novels in American literature...

...and if this is not an example for young writers, what is...

...The Jones house at 10 Quai d'Orleans became a focal point for the local American community: a place for drinks and good conversation, weekly poker games and harmless hijinks...

...There was Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's, who did so much to encourage the young writer...

...Up until two days before he died he would be talking into a tape recorder about his novel [ H histle...

...He worked hard to bring to perfection a prose style which, though sometimes on the surface awkward, was so direct, honest, and consistent in its treatment of human beings and the world that it brought its own moral strength to his narratives...

...He was deeply loving and tender, but he did not want just anybody to know it...

...He was, in the truest and best sense, an old-fashioned man...

...He lived extravagantly and his time in Paris was a fifteen-year fete," Irwin Shaw recalls here...

...Jones was fortunate in being able to surround himself with people who shared his sense of decency and integrity...

...He loved a good time more than most, and had the craziest, most shit-eating laugh...

...He was haunted by the fear of poverty and lived on a large scale...

...Although he looked and sometimes tried to sound like a tough guy, he was in fact the most pacific of men, not at all drawn to the Hemingway macho, and the fights he had all were invariably with bullies...

...The two met in the late 1960s at a party in Manhattan...

...His courage needed no proving...

...You're my best friend...

...Morris replied, "I love you too...

...Morris, a native of Yazoo, Mississippi, was the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of Harper's magazine and the author of the acclaimed memoir North Toward Home...

...Jones, Morris adds, "could not stand fraud, or phoniness, or meanness...

...He would get to work early, even after a late night, and write up to a thousand words a day...

...He had always had, too, an almost religious dedication to his work...

...In writing this book Morris relied chiefly on his own recollections and on correspondence and conversations with Jones' friends, many of whom are quoted at length...

...Reminding us of these elements in Jones' best writing and showing how they emerged from the novelist's character and experiences are the chief contributions of this book...

...Such was the depth of the friendship recounted here, and Morris wisely makes no claims for objectivity in his memoir...

...Morris contends that critics have held two things against Jones, his quick success and his high living in Paris: "Envy has always had a large part to play in book reviewing, as it does in almost everything else (so do personal grudges and old scores to settle, as well as the desire to create a stir at another man's expense, much more than is generally admitted), and early literary success in this country has often created its own special backlash...

...On his death bed, he asked Willie to complete the final chapters of Whistle, the last book in his war trilogy...

...Granted, Morris continues, that Jones "wrote some bad prose-what good writer doesn't?-but he also wrote some of the finest lyrical passages in American literature...

...There was Lowney Handy, the extraordinary woman who took Jones in shortly after his discharge from the Army in 1944 and enabled him to work on his first novel in a study in the back of her house in Robinson...

...His anecdotal approach is particularly effective in evoking the years in Paris, where Jones brought his family in 1958 and began writing The Thin Red Line...

...In 1974, having spent 15 years abroad and suffering from heart failure, Jones returned to the United States with his wife and children and bought a house in Sagaponack, Long Island, down the road from Morris...

...Jones was visiting from Paris...

...Reviewed by Joseph Barbato Shortly before his death in the spring of 1977, James Jones told Willie Morris, "Goddamn I love you, Willie...

...Since Jones has more than his share of detractors, it is refreshing to read Morris' view of him: "I was to learn over the years that beneath the rough exterior was a profoundly cultured and sophisticated man, a student of literature, history, art, and music...

...To make extra money, says Morris, Jones occasionally worked on movie scripts, insisting that his name not appear in some of the credits...

...His liquor bills alone were shocking, but he was constantly worried about money...

...his "lowest tolerance was for gratuitous cruelty...

...And later, in Paris, there were innumerable good friends-william Styron, Irwin Shaw, Romain Gary, and Francoise Sagan, among others...

...But for all the partying, he remained a disciplined writer...

...Morris has given us a testimonial, to be sure...

...The same may be said of others in the novelist's life...

...Both were small-town boys who had made good: Jones, the war novelist from Robinson, Illinois, achieved instant success with his first book at the age of 29...

...Even so, the book may well influence the opinions of those who have questioned Jones' seriousness of purpose as a writer of fiction...

...Of Jones' wife, Morris writes: "It says something about Jim Jones that he pursued a girl of inestimable character, loyalty, independence, and courage like Gloria Mosolino of Pottsville...

...Even with the final collapse of his body he w as the sanest man 1 ever knew...