It sounded like overkill. Was this some irrational competitive obsession, I wondered, the insecure epigone putting down the master? But I soon realized that in analyzing his judgments about Hemingway I had to set purely literary considerations aside and understand that a fierce and by no means aimless, or envy-inspired, indignation energized Jim's view. Basically, it had to do with men at war. For Jim had been to war, he had been wounded on Guadalcanal, had seen men die, had been sickened and traumatized by the experience. Hemingway had been to war too, and had been wounded, but despite the gloss of misery and disenchantment that overlaid his work, Jim maintained, he was at heart a war lover, a macho contriver of romantic effects, and to all but the gullible and wishful the lie showed glaringly through the fabric of his books and in his life. He therefore had committed the artist's chief sin by betraying the truth. Jim's opinion of Hemingway, justifiable in its harshness or not, was less significant than what it revealed about his own view of existence, which at its most penetrating—as in From Here to Eternity and later in The Pistol and The Thin Red Line—was always seen through the soldier's eye, in a hallucination where the circumstances of military life cause men to behave mostly like beasts and where human dignity, while welcome and often redemptive, is not the general rule. Jones was among the best anatomists of warfare in our time, and in his bleak, extremely professional vision he continued to insist that war was a congenital and chronic illness from which we would never be fully delivered. War rarely ennobled men and usually degraded them; cowardice and heroism were both celluloid figments, generally interchangeable, and such grandeur as could be salvaged from the mess lay at best in pathos: in the haplessness of men's mental and physical suffering. Living or dying in war had nothing to do with valor, it had to do with luck. Jim had endured very nearly the worst; he had seen death face-to-face. At least partially as a result of this he was quite secure in his masculinity and better able than anyone else I've known to detect musclebound pretense, empty bravado. It's fortunate that he did not live to witness Rambo, or our high-level infatuation with military violence. It would have brought out the assassin in him.
I went to Europe soon after this and was married, and Jim and I were not in close contact for several years. When we got together again, in New York during the waning 1950s, he too was married, and it was his turn to shove off for Europe, where he settled in Paris, and where he and Gloria remained for the better part of the rest of his life. We saw each other on his frequent trips to the United States, but my visits to Paris were even more frequent during the next fifteen years or so, and it is Paris, nearly always Paris, where I locate Jim when I conjure him up in memory. Year in and year out—sometimes with my wife, Rose, sometimes alone—I came to roost in the Joneses’ marvelous lodgings overlooking the Seine, often freeloading (à l’anglaise, observed Gloria, who took a dim view of the British) so long that I acquired the status of a semipermanent guest. My clearest and still most splendid image is that of the huge vaulted living room and the ceiling-high doors that gave out onto the river with its hypnotic, incessant flow of barge traffic moving eastward past the stately ecclesiastic rump of Notre Dame. The room was lined with books, and an entire wall was dominated by the nearly one hundred thickly hulking, drably bound volumes of the official United States government history of the Civil War. The very thought of shipping that library across the Atlantic was numbing. What Jim sometimes called Our Great Fraternal Massacre was his enduring preoccupation, and he had an immense store of knowledge about its politics, strategies, and battles. Somehow in the lofty room the dour Victorian tomes didn't really obtrude, yet they were a vaguely spectral presence and always reminded me how exquisitely American Jim was destined to remain during years in Paris. War and its surreal lunacy would be his central obsession to the end, and would also be that aspect of human experience he wrote best about.
Into this beautiful room with its flood of pastel Parisian light, with its sound of Dave Brubeck or Brahms, there would come during the sixties and early seventies a throng of admirable and infamous characters, ordinary and glamorous and weird people—writers and painters and movie stars, starving Algerian poets, drug addicts, Ivy League scholars, junketing United States senators, thieves, jockeys, restaurateurs, big names from the American media (fidgety and morose in their sudden vacuum of anonymity), tycoons and paupers. It was said that even a couple of Japanese tourists made their confused way there, en route to the Louvre. No domicile ever attracted such a steady stream of visitors, no hosts ever extended uncomplainingly so much largesse to the deserving and the worthless alike. It was not a rowdy place—Jim was too soldierly to fail to maintain reasonable decorum—but like the Abbey of Thélème of Rabelais, in which visitors were politely bidden to do what they liked, guests in the house at 10, Quai d'Orléans were phenomenal ly relaxed, sometimes to the extent of causing the Joneses to be victimized by the very waifs they had befriended. A great deal of antique silver disappeared over the years, and someone quite close to Jim once told me they reckoned he had lost tens of thousands of dollars in bad debts to smooth white-collar panhandlers. If generosity can be a benign form of pathology, Jim and Gloria were afflicted by it, and their trustingness extended to their most disreputable servants, who were constantly ripping them off. One, an insolent Pakistani houseman whom Gloria had longed to fire but had hesitated to do so out of tenderheartedness, brought her finally to her senses when she glimpsed him one evening across the floor of a tony nightclub, bewigged and stunningly garbed in one of her newly bought Dior gowns. Episodes like that were commonplace chez Jones in the tumultuous sixties.
There were literary journalists of that period who enjoyed pointing to a certain decadence in the Joneses’ lifestyle and wrote reproachful monographs about the way that Jim and Gloria (now parents of two children) comported themselves: dinners at Maxime's, after-dinner with the fat squabs at hangouts like Castel's, vacations in Deauville and Biarritz, yachting in Greece, the races at Longchamps, the oiled and pampered sloth of Americans in moneyed exile. Much the same had been written about Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The tortured puritanism that causes Americans to mistrust their serious artists and writers, and regards it as appropriate when they are underpaid, evokes even greater mistrust when they are paid rather well and, to boot, hobnob with the Europeans. Material success is still not easily forgiven in a country that ignored Poe and abandoned Melville. There was also the complaint that in moving to France for such a long sojourn Jim Jones had cut off his roots, thus depriving himself of the rich fodder of American experience necessary to produce worthwhile work. But this would seem to be a hollow objection, quite aside from the kind of judgmental chauvinism it expresses. Most writers have stored up, by their mid-twenties, the emotional and intellectual baggage that will supply the needs of their future work, and the various environments into which they settle, while obviously not negligible as sources of material and stimulation, don't really count for all that much. Jim wrote some exceedingly inferior work during his Paris years. Go to the Widow-Maker, which dealt mainly with underwater adventure—a chaotic novel of immeasurable length, filled with plywood characters, implausible dialogue, and thick wedges of plain atrocious writing—spun me into despondency when I read it. There were, to be sure, some spectacular underwater scenes and moments of descriptive power almost like the Jones of Eternity. But in general the work was a disappointment, lacking both grace and cohesion.
Among the distressing things about it was its coming in the wake of The Thin Red Line, a novel of major dimensions whose rigorous integrity and disciplined art allowed Jim once again to exploit the military world he knew so well. Telling the story of GIs in combat in the Pacific, it is squarely in the gritty, no-holds-barred tradition of American realism, a genre that even in 1962, when the book was published, would have seemed oafishly out-of-date had it not been for Jim's mastery of the narrative and his grasp of the sun-baked milieu of bloody island warfare, which exerted such a compelling hold on the reader that he seemed to breathe new
life into the form. Romain Gary had commented about the book: “It is essentially an epic love poem about the human predicament and like all great books it leaves one with a feeling of wonder and hope.” The rhapsodic note is really not all that overblown; upon rereading, The Thin Red Line stands up remarkably well, one of the best novels written about American fighting men in combat. Comparing it, however, with Go to the Widow-Maker produced a depressing sense of retrogression and loss. It was like watching a superb diver who, after producing a triple somersault of championship caliber, leaps from the board again and splatters himself all over an empty pool. Jim's nettled response to my hesitantly negative criticism makes me glad that I never expressed my real feelings or my actual chagrin; he might have wanted to strangle me.
But it is important to point out that although Go to the Widow-Maker was written in Paris, so was The Thin Red Line. This would strongly suggest that the iniquitous life that Jim Jones had reputedly led in Paris, the years of complacent and unengaged exile, bore little relation to his work, and that if he had stayed at home, the motivations that impelled him in a particular literary direction, and that shaped his creative commitments, would probably have remained much the same. Jim loved the good life. He would have richly enjoyed himself anywhere and would have, as always, worked like hell. But a common failing of many writers is that they often choose their themes and address their subject matter as poorly as they often choose wives or houses. What is really significant is that while a book like Go to the Widow-Maker represents one of those misshapen artifacts that virtually every good writer, in the sad and lonely misguidedness of his calling, comes up with sooner or later, The Thin Red Line is a brilliant example of what happens when a novelist summons strength from the deepest wellsprings of his inspiration. In this book, along with From Here to Eternity and Whistle—a work of many powerful scenes that suffered from the fact that he was dying as he tried, unsuccessfully, to finish it—Jim obeyed his better instincts by attending to that forlorn figure whom in all the world he cared for most and understood better than any other writer alive: the common foot soldier, the grungy enlisted man.
Romain Gary wasn't too far off. There was a certain grandeur in Jones's vision of the soldier. Other writers had written of outcasts in a way that had rendered one godforsaken group or another into archetypes of suffering—Dickens's underworld, Zola's whores, Jean Genet's thieves, Steinbeck's migrant workers, Agee's white Southern sharecroppers, Richard Wright's black Southern immigrants, on and on—the list is honorable and long. Jones's soldiers were at the end of an ancestral line of fictional characters who are misfits, the misbegotten who always get the short end of the stick. But they never dissolved into a social or political blur. The individuality that he gave to his people, and the stature he endowed them with, came, I believe, from a clear-eyed view of their humanness, which included their ugliness or meanness. Sympathetic as he was to his enlisted men, he never lowered himself to the temptations of an agitprop that would limn them as mere victims. Many of his soldiers were creeps, others were outright swine, and there were enough good guys among the officers to be consonant with reality. At least part of the reason he was able to pull all this off so successfully, without illusions or sentimentality, was his sense of history, along with his familiarity with the chronicles of war that were embedded in world literature. He had read Thucydides early, and he once commented to me that no one could write well about warfare without him. He'd also linked his own emotions with those of Tolstoy's peasant soldiers, and could recite a substantial amount of Henry V, whose yeoman-warriors were right up his alley. But the shades of the departed with whom he most closely identified were the martyrs of the American Civil War. That pitiless and aching slaughter, which included some of his forebears, haunted him throughout his life and provided one of the chief goads to his imagination. To be a Civil War buff was not to be an admirer of the technology of battle, although campaign strategy fascinated him; it was to try to plumb the mystery and the folly of war itself.
In 1962, during one of his visits to America, I traveled with Jim to Washington. Among other things, an influential official with whom I was friendly and who was on President Kennedy's staff had invited the two of us to take a special tour of the White House. Oddly, for such a well-traveled person, Jim had never been to Washington, and the trip offered him a chance to visit the nearby battlefields. He had never seen any of the Civil War encampments. Jim went out to Antietam, in Maryland, after which we planned to go to the Lincoln Memorial before driving over to the White House. When he met me at our hotel, just after the Antietam visit, Jim was exceptionally somber. Something at the battlefield had resonated in a special troubling way within him; he seemed abstracted and out-of-sorts. It had been, he told me finally, a part of the battleground called the Bloody Lane that had so affected him when he'd seen it. He'd read so much about the sector and the engagement and had always wondered how the terrain would appear when he viewed it firsthand. A rather innocuous-looking place now, he said, a mere declivity in the landscape, sheltered by a few trees. But there, almost exactly a century before, some of the most horrible carnage in the history of warfare had taken place, thousands of men on both sides dead within a few hours. The awful shambles was serene now, but the ghosts were still there, swarming; it had shaken him up.
Soon after this, at the Lincoln Memorial, I realized that the cavernous vault with its hushed and austere shadows, its soft footfalls and requiem whispers, might not have been the best place to take a man in such a delicate mood. Jim's face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address engraved against one lofty wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation and brotherhood dreamed by the fellow Illinoisan whom Jim had venerated, as almost everyone does, for transcendental reasons that needed not to be analyzed or explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting the conventional response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded with savage bitterness, and for an instant it was hard to absorb. “It's just beautiful bullshit,” he blurted. “They all died in vain. They all died in vain. And they always will!” His eyes were moist with fury and grief; we left abruptly, and it required some minutes of emotional readjustment before the storm had blown over and he regained his composure, apologizing quickly, then returning with good cheer and jokes to more normal concerns.
Many years went by before I happened to reflect on that day, and to consider this: that in the secret cellars of the White House, in whose corridors we were soon being shepherded around pleasantly, the ancient mischief was newly germinating. There were doubtless all sorts of precursory activities taking place which someday would confirm Jim's fierce prophecy: heavy cable traffic to Saigon, directives beefing up advisory and support groups, ominous memos on Diem and the Nhus, orders to units of the Green Berets. The shadow of Antietam, and of all those other blind upheavals, was falling on our own times. James Jones would be the last to be surprised.
[Introduction to To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones; Random House, Inc., 1989.]
Transcontinental with Tex
One of my oddest trips in a lifetime of odd trips was the one I took with Terry Southern across the U.S.A. in 1964. At that time I'd known Terry (whom I also called, depending on mood and circumstance, “Tex” or “T”) ever since 1952 during a long sojourn in Paris. Like a patient in lengthy convalescence, the city was still war weary, with its beauty a little drab around the edges. Bicycles and motorbikes clogged the streets. The Paris Review was then in its period of gestation, and the principals involved in its development, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, often spent their late evening hours in a dingy nightspot called Le Chaplain, tucked away on a back street in Montparnasse. In the sanatorium of our present smoke-free society it is hard to conceive of the smokiness of that place; the smoke was ice-blue, and almost like a semisolid. You could practically take your finger and carve your initials in it. It w
as smoke with a searing, promiscuous smell, part Gauloises and Gitanes, part Lucky Strikes, part the rank bittersweet odor of pot. I was new to pot, and the first time I ever met Terry he offered me a roach.
I was quite squeamish. Marijuana was in its early dawn as a cultural and spiritual force, and the idea of inhaling some alarmed me. I connected the weed with evil and depravity. We were sitting at a table with Terry's friends, the late film director Aram (“Al”) Avakian and a self-exiled ex–New York state trooper and aspiring poet whose name I've forgotten but who looked very much like Avakian, that is to say mustachioed and alternately fierce and dreamy-eyed. Also present was a Paris Review cofounder, the late Harold L. (“Doc”) Humes, who had befriended me when I first arrived in Paris and was no stranger to pot. The joint Terry proffered disagreed with me, causing me immediate nausea; I recall Terry putting down this reaction to the large amount of straight brandy I'd been drinking, cognac being the boisson de choix in those days before Scotch became a Parisian commonplace. Terry responded quite humanely, I thought, to my absence of cool. He was tolerant when, on another occasion, I had the same queasy response. In our get-togethers, therefore, I continued to abuse my familiar substance, and Terry his, though he could also put away considerable booze.
I was living then in a room that Doc Humes had found for me, at a hotel called the Libéria that had been his home for a year or so. The hotel was on the little rue de la Grande Chaumière, famous for its painters’ ateliers; my Spartan room cost the equivalent of eight dollars a week, or eight dollars and a half if you paid extra to get the henna-dyed Gorgon who ran the place to change the sheets weekly. The room had a bidet, but you had to walk half a mile to the toilet. You could stroll from the hotel in less than two minutes to La Coupole or to the terrace of Le Dôme, Hemingway's old hangout, which also reeked of pot or hash and featured many young American men sitting at tables with manuscripts while affecting the leonine look of Hemingway, right down to the mustache and hirsute chest. I even overheard one of those guys address his girl companion as “Daughter.” Terry and I would sit after lunch on the terrace, drinking coffee and smirking at these poseurs.
My Generation: Collected Nonfiction Page 53
