American author, who in many novels has described war and military life. James Jones’s best-known work is FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1951), a story of the pre-World War II army. The book was adapted for the screen, and the film received an Academy Award for best picture in 1953. THE THIN RED LINE (1962) had basically the same characters as From Here to Eternity, only the names were changed. Terrence Malick’s film version of the book from 1998 was criticized for its lack of dramatic focus, and praised for its photography.
“Ahead of them the LCIs waited to take them abroad, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships. One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way.” (from The Thin Red Line)
James Jones was born in Robinson, Illinois, as the son of a dentist, Ramon Jones and Ada Blessing Jones. His father had problems with alcohol and mother was religious, and in this atmosphere of hot emotions Jones grew up. His grandfather owned one of the oldest and biggest houses on East Main Street. He had a good deal of social prestige based on oil money but the social bottom of the family fell out after his death. Jones has admitted, that this experience gave him a talent for seeing behind the social facades.
Jones completed his high school education in Illinois. Because of the Depression, he couldn’t continue his studies. During World War II he served in the US army as a sergeant (1939-44). During this period he wrote several letters to his brother Jeff, who shared his literary aspirations - the letters were later published in To Reach Eternity (edited by George Hendrick, 1989). Jones was at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked; on Guadalcanal he was injured in a combat, and received the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He also boxed as a welterweight in Golden Gloves tournaments. Jones’s boxing experiences gave much authentic flavor to the fight scenes in From Here to Eternity. To make up for his lack of higher education, Jones attended the University of Hawaii for a short time in 1942 while stationed on Oahu. In 1945 he attended New York University.
Jones’s wartime experiences in Hawaii formed the background for his first novel, From Here to Eternity, which depicted life in an Army base at the time of Pearl Harbour. Jones spent six years writing the book. The beauty and power of the narrative gained acclaim among critics and readers. It became a Book of the Month Club selection and received the National Book Award for fiction in 1951. The central character of the story is Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a recruit from Kentucky, known as Prew to his friends. He is a man with a high personal integrity, who has no other choice in his life but the army. He has given up boxing because of the damage he did in the ring to another boxer. However, his individuality leads to a conflict with the system itself. He refuses to join the boxing squad and Captain Holmes warns him that “in the Army it’s not the individual that counts”. Holmes attempts to break his spirit. Prewitt becomes involved with a bargirl. When his friend Angelo Maggio is badly beaten in the Hickam Field Stockade by Fatso Judson, Prewitt kills Fatso with a knife, and is killed when he tries to return to his unit. Milt Warden, the highly competent Top Sergeant, has an affair with the wife of Captain Holmes, and cannot help Prewitt. Most of the story takes place before the Japanese surprise attack. With Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) the novel is among the best works depicting the American army in the Pacific during World War II.
With the money he earned from his bestseller, Jones purchased and furnished a house in Marshall, Illinois, and established a writers’ colony with the assistance of Lowney Handy. She also became Jones’s mistress. After gaining financial independence, Jones was very generous to his fellow writers, and at one point he paid the poet Delmore Schwartz’s hospital bills. Mailer’s attitude toward Jones became strained, Mary McCarthy called Jones ”intelligent” and ”uneducated,” but William Styron remained his friend. Ernest Hemingway wrote about Jones to their mutual publisher, Charles Scribner: ”I hope he kills himself as soon as it does not damage his or your sales.”
Jones was very sensitive to criticism about his work and worked for seven years before his second book, SOME CAME RUNNING (1957), was published. It drew on his life in Illinois after the war and did not gain much critical acclaim. Frank MacShane described the novel in his biography about Jones “more like a nineteenth-century novel, infused with social consciousness and sympathy for the characters. The reader therefore does not know whether to take the story straight or to accept its basic absurdity…”
In 1957 Jones married Gloria Mosalino, whom Irwin Shaw described as “the candle that kept the house alight.” They lived in Paris from 1958 until 1975, when they returned to the United States. In France their house became a meeting place for writers and artists. From this period dates material for the critical novel about the Paris student riots of 1968, THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY (1970). It was particularly praised for its description of Paris and its ambience. Jones’s other works include PISTOL (1958), a story of an army private who accidentally obtains a gun on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack. The Thin Red Line, about raw recruits, who land on Guadalcanal, demonstrated the author’s ability to create many individualized characters and dramatic episodes. The book formed the basis for Terence Malick’s three-hour drama (1998). Unlike the more successful war film from the same year, Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winner Saving Private Ryan, Malick avoided all hero worship. The book followed the experiences of a rifle company, C, for “Charlie Company”. There is no single hero in the story, although the characters of Witt, Welsh, and Storm have similarities with Prewitt, Warden, and Stark.
“This was war? There was no superior test of strength here, no superb swordsmanship, no bellowing Viking heroism, no expert marksmanship. This was only numbers. He was being killed for numbers. Why oh why had he not found and taken to himself that clerkish desk-job far in the rear which he could have had?” (from The Thin Red Line)
Jones’s last work, WHISTLE (1978), was published posthumously. It concerned a group of wounded soldiers sent home and their attempts to adjust to normal life. The four central characters appearing in the novel are the same personae - with different names - that appeared in From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, illustrating the various kinds of tragedy that come to the soldier. Jones did not finish the last three chapters. They were completed by his friend Willie Morris, who used the author’s notes and conversations with him. Whistle ended Jones’s great war trilogy.
In 1974 Jones was offered a teaching position at Florida International University in Miami. At the end of the 1976 school year, the Joneses moved to Southampton, New York. He died in Long Island, on May 9, 1977.
For further information: Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2); Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, an American Writer by Frank MacShane (1985); James Jones by G.P. Garrett (1984); James Jones by J.R. Giles (1981); James Jones by W. Morris (1978) - Other great war novels about the war in the Pasific: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Herman Wouk’s The ‘Caine’ Mutiny, Pierre Boulle’s Bridge on the River Kwai, J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, James Dickey’s The Performance, Tamiki Hara’s Glittering Fragments, John Ciardi’s The Massive Retalion, Nobuyuki Saga’s The Myth of Hiroshima, Nobuo Ayukawa’s Saigon 1943.
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