What's all the fuss about James Jones?

James Jones Literary Society ^ | James Jones

[PJ-Comix]

Jones provides the answer himself in this passage from From Here to Eternity.

He looked at his watch and as the second hand touched the top stepped up and raised the bugle to the megaphone, and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them.

The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years. The second note was short, almost too abrupt. Cut short and soon gone, like the minutes with a whore. Short like a ten minute break is short. And then the last note of the first phrase rose triumphantly from the slightly broken rhythm, triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above the humiliations, the degradations.

He played it all that way, with a paused then hurried rhythm that no metronome could follow. There was no placid regimented tempo to Taps. The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinite sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a woman had once told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all the grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are, they said, you made us, now see us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heroes; the song of the Stockade prisoners itchily stinking sweating under coats of grey rock dust; the song of the mucky KPs, of the men without women who collect the bloody menstrual rags of the officers' wives, who come to scour the Officer's Club--after the parties are over. This is the song of the scum, the Aqua-Velva drinkers, the shamelessness who greedily drain the half filled glasses, some of them lipstick smeared, that the partyers can afford to leave unfinished.

This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember? This is the song you close your ears to every night, so you can sleep. This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear. This is the song of the Great Loneliness, that creeps in the desert wind and dehydrates the soul. This is the song you'll listen to on the day you die. When you lay there in bed and sweat it out, you know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends don't mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one thats dying and not them; when you wait for it to come and know the sleep will not evade it and martinis will not put it off and conversation will not circumvent it and hobbies will not help you to escape it; then you will hear this song and remembering, recognize it. This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?

"Day               is done...
Gone               the sun...
From-the-lake
From-the-hill
From-the-sky
Rest in peace
Sol jer brave
God is nigh..."

And as the last note quivered to prideful silence, and the bugler swung the megaphone for the traditional repeat, figures appeared in the lighted sallyport from inside of Choy's. "I told you it was Prewitt," a voice carried faintly across the quadrangle in the tone of a man who has won a bet. And then the repeat rose to join her quivering tearful sister. The clear proud notes reverberating back and forth across the silent quad. Men had come from the Dayrooms to the porches to listen in the darkness, feeling the sudden choking kinship bred of fear that supersedes all personal tastes. They stood in the darkness of the porches, listening, feeling suddenly very near the man beside them, who also was a soldier, who also must die.

[PJ-Comix]

Now THAT is writing!!!

[PJ-Comix]

FYI

[JenB]

Thanks for posting this excerpt. Is that the style all through? Personally, I generally prefer a more straightforward narrative - a reliable first or third person, limited point of view, dry wit and, um, half the number of adjectives as in this piece.

See, this is where we differ. You go for this style, it seems. I want, first and foremost, a geat story. If it's a good story - well, this year I read The Kalevala. It's an epic poem translated from Finnish, with a peculiar meter and unpronouncable names. (The rythm is exactly the same as in Longfellow's Hiawatha.) I loved it. I have read The Illiad, and loved it. Tolkien, my most favorite author of all times, used words lavishly and lovingly... but for style, give me Robert Heinlein and Connie Willis.

[HairOfTheDog]

Good evening Comix.... Jen, should we let on that we have Lord of the Rings in a Word Doc, and could copy and paste quotes with reckless abandon?

[PJ-Comix]

You should read the entire novel. This Taps bugle call was done in a certain context. And, yes, most of the novel is a more straightforward narrative. But this Taps HAD to be a pause in the novel. If you read it, you'll find out. And once you start, you can't stop yet you dread that inevitable time when you must stop reading at the end.

[PJ-Comix]

Here is a review of "From Here To Eternity" by James Norton. Note what he says here: "With the exception of the occaisional breathless passage of vivid description, Jones writes only what he needs to in order to tell the story — which means that his 850 pages feel like a world."

The taps playing scene in the original post was one of those "occasional breathless" passages:


In literature, it's fair to say that the higher the aim, and the greater the prize, the greater the risks, and the harder the task. Critics love deflating pompous failed novelists — it's like stepping on a roach, only cleaner, and more humorous.

Is it any wonder that most writers try their hands at light tasks before throwing themselves at the book that might ruin their reputation? For every "Infinite Jest," the postmodern world has coughed up a dozen little "High Fidelities" — enjoyable novels that take an inspired stab at one of life's shins and then take a proud bow.

The giants are few and far between.

Works like Dante's "Inferno," Joyce's "Ulysses," Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" all represent the output of men who have stood toe-to-toe with life and tried, through the telling of one enormous, ambitious tale, to tell the full story of humanity.

"From Here to Eternity" is, in many ways, a mostly forgotten member of this thinly populated but towering tribe.

"Eternity," recently re-issued in paperback by Delta Fiction, is dedicated to The United States Army. With no substantial digressions, it is about the Army that author James Jones writes, spilling forth 850 pages of text that hand down the chronicle of G Company, a unit stationed in Hawaii before and during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Mr. Jones's work sugarcoats nothing. It's true that his love for the service comes through, telegraphed by his vivid depictions of the men who have been thrust into it. But it's an ode intertwined with a viper — "Eternity" aggressively explores and riffs upon the very essence of the Army — the relationship between the officer and the enlisted man, between the favored and the despised.

Two strong, angry soldiers stand at the center of Jones's work: Robert E. Lee Prewitt, and Milton Anthony Warden. Prewitt is a brilliant bugler and talented boxer who wants neither to bugle, nor box. Warden is a frustrated Sergeant who begins an affair with his commanding officer's wife in order to find vengeance, but ends up entangled with a woman who is in every way his equal.

And so it comes to pass that Warden must buy into the Army's system in order to keep what he loves, while Prewitt fights against the manifold and terrible cruelties inflicted upon him by a clique of officers determined to make him break.

Finding comparable books is difficult. "All the King's Men" comes to mind — it has a scope and honesty that is deep and vast as "Eternity," although Robert Penn Warren finds delight in the tangled threads of politics and history, where Jones seems to find only variations of the same sad lie.

"Eternity" is an old-fashioned book, in some ways. Its prose is hard-working and clean. Its characters are lean, earnest and beaten down by the world they dig, sweat and die in. Its dialogue is clipped, and its passions are bottled up behind the brittle, sliding plates of mental and emotional armor that make up Jones's interpretation of the male psyche. And by heavily concentrating on the camp life of the pre-war period, Jones avoids many of the tired combat cliches and overblown piles of heroism under fire that mar so many other novels about war.

"Eternity" is also a timeless book. Its author does not pull punches. The men of G Company swear with color and furor, fight each other viciously for stupid reasons, get the clap, pine away for destructive women and waste themselves away. Men bleed internally, get sick, hate each other for stupid reasons, and do noble things for those they respect. When relationships pull apart and snap under the tension of camp life, the reader understands every frayed strand, and every newton of pressure.

With its scope, "Eternity" is more lived than read. It assumes a comfortable, confident hold on its reader — its characters touch each other and lash out at one another with a modest, dusty realism that renders Jones's accomplishment in a way that could never be duplicated or usurped by a writer with a more aggressive, showboating style. With the exception of the occaisional breathless passage of vivid description, Jones writes only what he needs to in order to tell the story — which means that his 850 pages feel like a world.

If the mark of a truly great author is the hewing of a new cosmos from the insubstantial dross of the imagination, James Jones is among the best we've seen.

[Rocko]

Have you read Mervyn Peake?

[PJ-Comix]

Have you read Mervyn Peake?

No but you've Peaked my interest. What books did he write?

[Rocko]

The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Well worth investigating. Made recently into a BBC series...but I haven't seen it.

Now it's off to work for me!

[Sam Cree]

One thing important to me in fiction is that I actually identify with the protagonist on some level. I just saw Attack of the Clones and, since the main character was a jerk, found it very difficult to get interested in the film, in spite of the stunningly beautiful special effects.