Author: James Jones
Category: Literature
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Jones received an honorable discharge on July 6, 1944. Before he returned to Robinson, he traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, where Thomas Wolfe was born and lived with his dysfunctional family until he went away to college. Then Jones went to live with Lowney and Harry, with Harry providing money for him until From Here to Eternity was completed in 1950. Harry had a room built for Jones at the back of the family home and later bought Jones a Jeep and a trailer, which allowed him to get away from Robinson for short periods of time. Harry seems to have been completely aware of the sexual relationship of his wife and her young writer and raised no objections. In many ways, Harry was the unsung hero in this story. He gave Jones a home and an allowance, providing the time for the young veteran to learn to write.
Jones began to shape his novel, and Lowney must have played a major part in crafting an outline and in providing special details about Robinsonians. By the time he left the army in 1944, he probably had written some battle scenes and accounts of his first going AWOL and the drunken episode on the night train. He had undoubtedly written some account of his hell-raising in Robinson and about his quarrel with Uncle Charlie (named Erskine Carter in the novel). When he came to writing about Lowney, he omitted their love affair and did little with her interest in teaching him to write.
For many years, Jones was besotted with Lowney, but even early in their relationships he subconsciously seemed to have misgivings about her. In They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Lowney is given the name Cornelia but is always called by her nickname, Corny. In many sections of the novel, she fits the classic definitions of that word: trite, banal.
One of Jones’s successes in his first novel was his dialogue, especially among servicemen. All the resentments come pouring out, overbearing, pompous, insolent officers; doctors who were indifferent to suffering and were little better than butchers; self-righteous chief clerks; the politics in the army; anti-Semitism and discrimination against people of color; the hypocrisy of mindless religious support of war by ministers and civilians alike; the civilian and military misunderstanding of the walking wounded. Few wanted to listen to the army groundlings who came from poor families and who had little education. Veterans of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and assorted mini-wars would understand the dissatisfactions of Jones’s combat soldiers in World War II.
Jones in They Shall Inherit the Laughter dared to discuss taboo subjects. He defended a musician friend who was alleged to be gay; he wrote sensitively about the musician’s friend who was an African-American; and he opposed anti-Semitism in the army.
What kind of framework would allow Jones to put the parts together? Undoubtedly with the help of Lowney, the decision was made to have two central characters—Johnny Carter (based on Jones) and Corny Marion (based on Lowney). Physically or psychologically wounded men would meet at the home of Corny and Eddie Marion. These men who were not getting the help they needed from military personnel or the understanding they needed from family on the home front had turned to mindless carousing, fueled by alcohol. Corny and her husband provided them with a refuge to talk to other servicemen who understood what they had gone through. Corny, in the latter part of the novel, becomes the men’s therapist, trying to help them solve their intractable problems. Jones the student/lover of Lowney, appears to be a true believer in Corny’s solutions, but Perkins and other editors at Scribner’s understood the novel was flawed. Unfortunately, Perkins did not work with Jones to tear the novel apart and remove much of the material based on Lowney. Perkins helped Wolfe revise and reduce the size of the immense manuscript Look Homeward, Angel, but Perkins was in ill health when he began reading They Shall Inherit the Laughter and unable to do for Jones what he did for Wolfe.
It is likely that Lowney suggested the title for this first novel, using words from beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5)
“Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh.” (Luke 6:21)
In addition to references to Theosophy and to Hindu texts, Lowney often used biblical quotations. She interested Jones in religious views drawn from many sources, including the Bible, but in They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones had not internalized these ideas and they seem awkwardly attached to quite unaccepting materials. In the war stories and the talk of enlisted men, Jones had a tragic view of life. Emersonian Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and Eastern texts, interesting and useful as they are, did not mesh with his core beliefs.
Jones worked on the novel from the time he left the army in July 1944 until January 1945, when he had a finished manuscript. He then decided to enroll for the spring semester at New York University, where Wolfe had once taught. He wanted to submit the novel to the fabled editor Maxwell Perkins, who had worked with Wolfe, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. He arrived at Perkins’s office without an appointment, carrying with him his manuscript. The receptionist told Jones that Perkins was out of the office, but that if he would leave his manuscript it would be read. Jones was not willing to do that. The receptionist disappeared, then returned to say that Perkins had returned by way of a back entrance and would see him. The story was fictional: There was no back entrance.
The two men began an intense discussion of the war, ignoring the novel itself. Finally, late in the afternoon, Perkins suggested the two adjourn to the Ritz Bar for “tea.” Jones impressed Perkins, who clearly wanted to find a new World War II writer for the Scribner’s list. He passed the manuscript on to other editors, who read it but sensibly recommended against publication. The poet John Hall Wheelock, an editor at Scribner’s, wrote Maxwell Aley, Jones’s agent, that the novel was “a serious attempt to do a big piece of work.” Perkins wrote Aley that Laughter lacked “the technique” to make it publishable. Left open was the resubmission of a revised manuscript. Unfortunately, Jones was not given the specifics he needed to make successful changes.
Maxwell Aley did give the manuscript a thorough reading. He wrote Jones on March 25, 1945: “The problem of the book remains Corny.” He was frank: “She sounds like a high school girl not a mature woman. . . . your reader would laugh because Corny is grandiose. She speaks like a second-rate editorial in a Southern newspaper.” Still, Aley did not recommend that Corny’s role in the novel be severely diminished; instead, he gave general advice: “Make it human. Break it up. You’re writing a novel not a tract, and when you are writing about Johnny you are usually adult and often first-rate by any standards.” Aley was correct about the Johnny sections, but many of the Corny sections needed to be abandoned.
It is safe to speculate that Lowney did not see her fictional portrait as Aley did. Jones, no doubt with Lowney’s strong support, dropped Aley as his agent. Without the editorial help he needed, Jones started to work with his revisions. He wrote Perkins on November 20, 1945, that he would be ready to resubmit the manuscript in four or five weeks. In that letter, he noted that Perkins had told him that the novel had “lacked resolution,” and that he had corrected that problem. He did submit the manuscript on January 17, 1946.
One of the readers for Perkins was Burroughs Mitchell, to be Jones’s editor after Perkins’s death. Mitchell thought the novel was “a clumsy, ill-proportioned book.” He believed the faults were too large to make another revision promising.
One of the faults of the novel, which made it clumsy, was the spewing out of gossip in the exposés of wealthy or prominent citizens of Robinson. A close friend of Lowney and Jones wrote on December 9, 2010: “It was Lowney’s experiences as part of Robinson bridge playing and golfing partners at the country club that supplied Jim with material for Laughter. He had been too young to know his characters. And I now realize that it was more gossip than true portrayals.” Jones did know his fellow soldiers.
Writing to Perkins on February 10, 1946, to ask about Scribner’s decision concerning publishing They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones mentioned that he wanted to do a novel about his friend Stewart and the peacetime army.
Jones wired Perkins on February 17: PROPOSITION ACCEPTED PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS AND AWAITING LETTER HERE. . . . In Maxwell Perkins, Jones had found another person who believed in his promise as a writer.
Perkins sent Jones an encouraging letter and explained his reasons for not accepting They Shall Inherit the Laughter. He felt the public was not interested in the subject at that time and that the novel would seem insulting by military people and by civilians. It might be more acceptable at a later time, Perkins believed. Jones never revised the novel, but Some Came Running and Whistle were indebted to it.
The editors at Scribner’s were correct; They Shall Inherit the Laughter should not be published, but there are chapters and parts of chapters that deserve to appear as stories.
I have rescued the best parts of the manuscript, but this publication is not They Shall Inherit the Laughter. It is a collection of interrelated stories now titled To the End of the War, a toast given by servicemen suffering from remembrances of death and destruction and fear, always fear, and at present they were possessed by anger, confusion, and guilt. They drank to stilled guns and to peace.
The best stories are about the autobiographic hero, Johnny Carter, and his friends. Corny has not disappeared, but her role is diminished, and she has been renamed. Jones turned a chapter about his friend George in the novel into the short story “Two Legs for the Two of Us” (which was eventually published elsewhere). He changed Corny’s name to Sandy to distance that story from Corny. I have followed Jones’s lead and used the name Sandy throughout. All other names remain the same.
Chapters based on gossip about prominent Robinsonians have been omitted.
Sections of the novel that read like book reports on Eugene Debs, Prince Kropotkin, Thorstein Veblen, and other radicals have been omitted. Reading in Lowney’s library, Jones caught the excitement of college students taking the course “Great Ideas of the World” and wanted to let the whole world know about his intellectual discoveries. Again, he had not internalized these ideas. That material is omitted.
Lessons on Emersonian Transcendentalism have been omitted, as has a lecture on the yin-yang symbol. Lowney’s comments on art and politics are not included.
Johnny’s rage remains, the causes near the surface and deep, deep.
One man whom Johnny once liked now gleefully wants to drop bombs. He remains in all his sinfulness.
Hypocrisy on the home front remains, as do war-mongering ministers, businessmen, and citizens.
Johnny and friends remain, frozen in time, as are their anger, frustration, pain, and humanity.
A toast: “To the end of the war.”
From his first writings about army life, James Jones had a gift for dialogue. In this story, probably written in 1944, he explores the mistreatment and resentments of enlisted men. Wounded and with physical or psychological impairments, they were now declared fit for additional combat service. Desertion was an option.
Little has changed since 1944: the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal, the repeated deployments, the refusal to give benefits to some wounded men and women, and the need for wartime cannon fodder, even if the soldier is not physically fit.
The widow of a fifty-year-old reservist in one of our current wars “said her husband suffered from a bad knee, a bum shoulder, and high blood pressure—and never should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place, given his physical ailments” (Newsweek, February 14, 2011, p. 34).
OVER THE HILL
ON THE ROAD, AUTUMN 1943
THE HOSPITAL RECEIVING OFFICE WAS a small wooden building set in the large quadrangle of brick buildings that held the wards and the various branches of Surgery and Therapy and Pharmacy. Through an opening in this brick bulwark the trucks brought the newly arrived patients from the hospital trains, and long lines of the walking sick and wounded twined in and out around the inner sanctum and passed through the Receiving Office to be assigned and checked and looked over. The hospital, originally built to handle three thousand patients, was already becoming overcrowded and plans were being figured as to how to handle the influx that swept in like waves from the hospital trains that pulled into the hospital siding downtown in Memphis every few days.
This day, however, was not one of those in which a wild scramble was enacted to get the patients settled before dark. There was no influx of patients in the quadrangle, and its largeness looked deserted and lonely except for the occasional uniformed figures going back and forth on some kind of duty.
Corporal Johnny Carter, formerly of Endymion, Indiana, carrying the black gladstone which held all his earthly possessions, limped indifferently across the expanse of dusty sparsely grassed red earth from the Convalescent Barracks to the Receiving Office. He was on his way out, back to duty.
He left his bag on the porch of the white wooden building and went inside to pick up his records and travel orders. He didn’t know yet where he was going, and he didn’t care much since one place would be about the same as another: The best he could hope for would be a camp near or in a large town. He was not happy at the prospect of going back to duty.
The chief clerk, who handed him the orders and the large brown envelope of records, was a tall slim arrogantly intelligent young man, after the usual pattern of army clerks. He was a technical sergeant and his black wavy hair was worn long in defiance of tradition, showing proudly that he did not spend time in the field as do the less intelligent common ruck of soldiery.
“Corporal,” he said. “You will have a two-man detail to report in with you. Here are the train tickets. That two-and-a-half-ton job out in front is the truck to take you to the station. Your detail hasn’t shown up yet. When they do, have them load their equipment in the back and get in. All three Service Records are in that envelope. Be very careful of them. In the army, a man’s Service Record is more important than anything else. Including the man.”
Johnny did not like the chief clerk’s long hair or his arrogant intelligence that he wore like chevrons. He grunted an “Okay,” and turned to the door. In his four and a half years in the army, he had done some clerical work himself and had come in contact with a great many clerks.
The chief clerk leaned his elbows on the counter behind which he stood and elaborately lighted a cigaret with a silver Dunhill lighter which he took from his pocket.
“Is that that Camp Campbell detail?” A first lieutenant sat behind the counter, his feet—encased in the prescribed leggings—cocked up on a typing table, a pencil behind his ear, reading a newspaper. “Yessir,” said the chief clerk. “I want to talk to him,” said the lieutenant, “Corporal,” said the chief clerk. “The lieutenant wants to speak to you.”
Johnny came back and stood at a weary attention before the lieutenant. The lieutenant put down his newspaper irritably, took down his feet, stood up, took the pencil from behind his ear and turned it over and over in his bands. He neglected to give Johnny “at ease,” and Johnny continued to stand at attention. The chief clerk stood respectfully near, a little behind the lieutenant. “These two men you’re in charge of are bad ones,” the lieutenant said. “One of them, Wilkinsson, has been over the hill four times since he came here. The other one—what’s his name?” he turned to the chief clerk who handed him a copy of the Special Orders and murmured a respectful “Gettinger.”
The lieutenant took the paper and ran his pencil down the page line by line as a pointer. “Gettinger,” he said finally. “The other one, Gettinger, has been over twice. You may have trouble with them. If they try to get away from you, put the hammer on ’em.” The lieutenant gave Johnny a sharp glance to impress his order. Johnny was no
t an MP and did not carry sidearms. He had a wild vision of himself throwing rocks at two retreating figures. But being more or less experienced in the army, he refrained from asking for clarification as to with what he would put the hammer on ’em.
“If they get away from you,” the lieutenant said, “report them to the nearest Provost Marshall.” Outside of downtown Memphis, Johnny had no idea of the whereabouts of any Provost Marshall in the country. However, he did not interrupt the lieutenant to ask. Johnny, who was still standing at attention, snapped out a belligerent salute, said “Yessir,” and walked outside. The lieutenant returned the salute with a casual gesture and, his duty attended to, sat back down, replaced the pencil behind his ear, recocked his feet, and took up his interrupted newspaper. He began to speak authoritatively about the Russians to the chief clerk, who successfully accomplished the feat of listening respectfully and comradely at the same time.
Outside Johnny tossed his bag into the back and then sat down on the running board of the empty truck to wait, feeling vaguely resentful and irritated. In 1945 the fall was a long one, and in November the weather was still hot out in the sun. Johnny scraped little crosses in the dust with the toe of his shoe and felt the sweat begin to trickle down his spine and drip from his armpits. His vague irritation rose and became specific: He was wearing one of his good uniforms. He possessed four; two of them had been issued by the hospital, the other two he had bought downtown in Memphis. The issue uniforms were khaki chenille summer uniforms; they fitted him like bags, and there are no post tailors or regimental tailors here as there had been at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii to put them down. He wore them as little as possible. The other two uniforms were officer uniforms with shoulder straps and were of tropical worsted wool. He had been ordered by several MPs to remove the shoulder straps, but up to now he had been able to wriggle out of doing so, although he never considered why it was so necessary to him to keep the unauthorized officer shoulder straps. He got up from the running board and moved out of the sun to sit on the edge of the little porch of the Receiving Office.