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Jones was turning out words until two days before he died,
with the urgency of an old soldier cranking out rounds to
turn back a frontal assault.
So in a sense, James Jones went to war on December the 7th, 1941
and stayed there like many other combat veterans until his death
on May the 9th, 1977.
Willy Morris wrote the chapters in summary form from Jones'
dictation and the novel was published posthumously in 1978,
the last step of a mission started more than 30 years ago.
When Jones got out of the Army in 1944, he returned home to
Illinois and began working with his writing mentor and patron
Loany Handy, a remarkable and complex character in her own
right who together with Jones and her husband Harry, later
started the Handy's Writers' Colony in Marshall, and helped
Jones propel is writing career into international recognition.
And this is Loany and Jones outside of the house he built
after the publication of "From Here to Eternity"
in Marshall that still stands.
I think they are going to take a tour of it in Marshall tomorrow.
After operating unofficially and from soon after Jones came home
from the Army and met Handy, the colony was officially in
operation until, from just after "From Here to Eternity" was
published in 51' until Handy's death in the early 60s.
Several novels were published from colony writers and several
books and articles have been written about the colony.
And Handy's collection of teaching creative writing with a
discipline regime, that includes copying literally the works of
writers that she thought would benefit each colonist to study.
Some of the novels include Jerry Tschappat, "Never the Same
Again" written under the pseudo name of Gerald Tesch, Edwin
Daly's "Some Must Watch", Tom Chamales' "Never So Few", Jere
Peacock's "Valhalla," which is about the Korean War, and I
think it's the Korean War's twin to "From Here to Eternity".
It paints; I think Norman Mailer said that it gives the best
description and the best account of a marine in
combat that he's ever read.
And the last colony resident I mentioned earlier, Jon Shirota's
"Lucky Come Hawaii".
Early on, Jones wrote an unpublished novel "They Shall
Inherit the Laughter" under Handy's early tutelage
and sent it of to New York.
Legendary scribers editor Maxwell Perkins liked the
writing but steered Jones instead to write about the
peacetime army in Hawaii, and the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor after learning that Jones had been an
eyewitness to the account.
So Handy then shepparded the writing of the manuscript in
Robinson and several other spots around the country, supported
Jones and picked up other young writers with whom to work.
Long before Jones finished the manuscript of "From Here to
Eternity", he said he realized he should write a trilogy to
cover the ground he wanted.
"I was going to go from Pearl Harbor which is here in Hawaii
to Guadalcanal down in the Solomon's, and then back to the
hospital in Memphis, mainly the path I had taken, and finally
realized that it would take three books to accomplish that."
In addition to the trilogy, he managed to write among other
non-related, non war-related works.
A short novel "Nevalla the Pistol", the nonfiction World
War II and numerous short stories and articles.
And he worked as a consultant and dialogue writer on the
movie, "The Longest Day" from Cornelius Ryan's nonfiction
account of 1944's Allied invasion of Normandy.
Not as well received by the critics but no less significant,
Jones wrote about the soldiers return to a changed world at
home that he was no longer understood or accepted
in "Some Came Running".
Helen Howe is going to give you an hour's talk on "Some Came
Running" in just a few minutes.
I'm looking forward to that because Helen knows some things
about that, that I've never heard.
Which was set in Southeastern Illinois and Western Indiana.
Then near the end of his life he went back for one last look at
war and it's aftermath in the 1973 trip to Vietnam that
resulted in "Viet Journal".
Let's take a quick look here at how Jones made his mark as a war
novelist and particularly as a World War II novelist.
In "From Here to Eternity" starting out in pre-war Hawaii,
Jones introduces the universal soldier and
begins the process of his evolution.
The concept of this evolution was not necessarily clear-cut
for Jones initially, but developed over time.
When he explained it in World War II he wrote, "I think that
when the nationalistic or ideological propaganda and
patriotic slogans are put aside, all the straining to convince a
soldier that he is dying for something, it is the individual
soldier's full final acceptance of the fact that his name is
already written down in the rolls of the already dead.
Only then can he function as he ought to
under fire," close quotes.
That real evolution is revealed and Jones himself is revealed in
Pruit the revel, bugler, boxer, and straight duty soldier who
loves the army but hates the system that takes away his
individualism and honor.
He's in Warden, the cynical hardnosed first sergeant who
dislikes all officers and runs the company, taking care of his
enlisted men without seeming to care for them.
He is in Sark the mess sergeant who feeds the troops well and
runs the mess hall without interference from anyone
including Warden.
Their regular Army men, all of them,
and they're all hard drinkers.
And they're men who are obviously
based on real soldiers.
So Jones speaks through these characters and thus for all
soldiers and he understands them because he's one of them.
And as the rugged individualist Jones broke the language barrier
in literature in "From Here to Eternity"
when it was published in 1951.
Salinger's "Catcher In the Rye" was published later that year
and contained the controversial word, four letter word.
In his big 1948 World War II novel "The Naked and The Dead,"
Norman Mailer had been forced to use the "fugg" F-U-G-G.
There's a little anecdote about a literary, elderly literary
woman meeting Mailer in New York at a literary party afterwards,
and when she was introduced to him she said, "oh, you're the
young man who doesn't know how to spell ***".
[audience laughter].
And now I've talk now, I've talked with, I haven't talked
with Mailer about that but I've talked with Mike Lennon and he
says Norman says that was his publicist story, but he said it
made a good story so he never said much about it.
But anyway, Jones' realistic writing of Army life contained I
think Kaylee said last night 640 to start with, I'm not sure how
many were in that first one, but they were forced
to take some of them out.
But Mailer, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, and a host of
other writers had wanted to include such language in their
books that were published in the mainstream press
but they'd been unable to do so.
Jones's writing reflected then a realistic credible picture of
the attack on Pearl Harbor and the peacetime Army with his
adventures, bombs, drifters, many escaping the depression,
and it's regular Army non-commissioned officers and
officers waiting for war to earn their promotions.
The harsh language and course descriptions infused his work
with authenticity, and I can't imagine the military without the
harshness and coarseness Jones brings to his work.
So he found his literary voice in "From here to Eternity" which
became a blockbuster literary success that gave him an
audience he needed to continue to write about the war and the
army for the rest of his life.
Excuse me.
But it enabled him to be ranked up there with the very best
among war novelists, and when one looks at
the literature of World War II.
The late Willy Morris wrote that Jones "is the one person to have
given us this stunning corpus of work which will be read and
remembered and re-read 500 years from now."
Then after the attack on Pearl Harbor Jones helped set up the
Island defenses for the Japanese invasion that never came.
It was from those days that Jones found material not only
for "From Here to Eternity" to write, but also for his novel
"The Pistol" which focused on a .45 caliber pistol a young
soldier was carrying on duty the morning of the attack, and shows
the significance the soldier places on
having one in war time.
The soldier knew the pistol wasn't much use against
airplanes, but felt safe having one on his hip, and Jones also
had a pistol at that time.
Now the writing style of the two works is of interest to me.
"From Here to Eternity" is written more in the style of
Thomas Wolfe, whom he had read in the Schofield Barracks
Library; lengthy sentences and long descriptive paragraphs, and
was a big novel divided into five books.
"The Pistol" on the other hand is written more in a sparse,
terse style that's reminiscent of Hemingway, another writer
whom Jones had studied and admired,
shorter sentences and fewer details.