by James Jones
TO THE END OF THE WAR
Unpublished Stories by James Jones
Edited and with Introductions
by George Hendrick
To My Father
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it; he died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he owed.
As ’t were a careless trifle.—Macbeth
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: FROM THEY SHALL INHERIT THE LAUGHTER TO TO THE END OF THE WAR
OVER THE HILL
NIGHT TRAIN
BACK HOME IN ENDYMION
JOHNNY MEETS SANDY
SURELY NOT THE RED CROSS
AIR RAID
WILD FESTIVITY IN EVANSVILLE
YOU ARE AWOL
EVERY TIME I DROP AN EGG . . .
STRANGER IN A NEW COMPANY
ARMY POLITICS AND ANTI-SEMITISM
HE WAS A WOP
YOU ARE AWOL UNEDITED MANUSCRIPT PAGES
NOTES FOR THE INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
FROM THEY SHALL INHERIT THE LAUGHTER TO TO THE END OF THE WAR
JAMES JONES WROTE TO HIS editor, Maxwell Perkins, about his first, unpublished novel, They Shall Inherit the Laughter: “Laughter was largely autobiographical and I had a readymade plot and characters who followed it; all that I had to do was heighten it and use my imagination.” He wrote the truth; he used his own life in a story set during a dramatic period when World War II still raged and he went over the hill, returning to his hometown, Robinson, Illinois. Almost every character in the novel was based on someone he knew, or knew about, in East-Central Illinois.
A soldier named James Jones went AWOL, probably November 1, 1943, and went back to Robinson, where he had been born in 1921. His grandfather George Jones had once lived on a nearby farm but became prosperous after oil was discovered on his property. He moved into Robinson, studied law, established a practice, and became sheriff of the county for four years. He was a leading citizen and moved his family into a three-story Southern-style mansion.
George Jones was a religious man, a Methodist, a teetotaler, domineering. He demanded that his four sons become professionals: two doctors and two lawyers. He sent his sons to Northwestern University, where one son took his own life. Ramon Jones, father of James Jones, was destined for medicine, but he convinced his father to allow him to go into dentistry, which demanded fewer years of study, in order to marry more quickly. He married Ada Blessing in 1908, and soon established his practice in Robinson. Dr. Jones was a handsome, outgoing man, but he began to drink heavily. Ada Jones was a vain, beautiful woman, obsessed with social status. Eventually she became religious and turned to Christian Science. James Jones, deeply attached to his father, came to despise his mother, who often quarreled with her husband.
George Jones died in 1929, and the family at first was partially immune from the economic depression, which began that year, for he left a significant estate. In 1932, with the collapse of the Samuel Insull public utilities empire, where George Jones had heavily invested, the largest part of the family fortune disappeared. Dr. Jones lost his inheritance and was losing his patients since they could no longer afford dental care.
After Dr. Jones was forced to give up his house, he moved his family into rented quarters. His wife was acutely unhappy about her decline in social standing, and Dr. Jones withdrew more and more into alcoholism. In this bitterly divided family, struggling through the long depression, Jones had an unhappy, rebellious adolescence. As soon as he completed high school and turned eighteen, in 1939, he joined the Army Air Corps but eventually transferred to the Infantry and was stationed in Hawaii. His service in the peacetime army, concluding with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, became the subject matter of his second novel, From Here to Eternity.
Jones’s personal world was shaken while he was in Hawaii; his mother died and his father committed suicide. The most positive thing that happened in this period of his life was his discovery of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, who wrote about a family much like his own. From reading Wolfe, Jones wrote, he realized that “I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written.” He began to write poetry and prose sketches.
Jones had been assigned to Company F, Second Battalion, Twenty-Seventh Infantry Regiment, which was ordered to go to Guadalcanal. The troopship he was on arrived December 30, 1942. The battles on that island were fierce, and the troops suffered from dengue fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases, and continual fear.
In an undated manuscript, he wrote, “I might be dead in a month, which would mean that I would never learn to say and never get said those things which proved I had once existed somewhere.” Every soldier “accepted,” Jones wrote in WWII, “that his name is already written down in the rolls of the already dead.”
Jones often told the story of a day on Guadalcanal when he killed a Japanese soldier and found in the man’s billfold a picture of his wife and child. Jones then viewed war in a different way, recognizing he had obliterated a so-called enemy who was a fellow human being. He wanted to be finished with killing. Jones’s most dramatic retelling of the incident is in his novel The Thin Red Line.
Jones was saved from taking another man’s life. On January 12, 1943, he was hit in the head by a fragment from a mortar shell. There was blood everywhere, and his glasses were shattered. Had he not been in a shallow foxhole, he would have soon been in a deeper grave.
Jones was taken to a field hospital where he stayed a week before rejoining his company. The battle for Guadalcanal was basically over then; the Japanese troops were being evacuated. The U.S. troops there expected to be sent to New Georgia in the Solomon Islands for more combat. Jones felt his luck had run out. He wrote his brother that until a soldier was hit, he was confident it would happen to other guys but not to him. Once hit, he wrote, “You lose that confidence.”
He was spared a landing and battles on New Georgia by another piece of luck. He was having trouble with his ankle, which he had injured playing football at Schofield Barracks. After it became increasingly difficult for him to walk, he was sent home by hospital ship, first to New Zealand for a short time and then on to San Francisco. He was then transferred to Kennedy General Hospital near Memphis, Tennessee.
At Kennedy General Hospital, he received a course of therapy and then was sent to a convalescent barracks for a month, but the treatments had to be extended and went on month after month. In the months he was hospitalized, he came into contact with large numbers of men from two battle zones: Attu and Guadalcanal.
Attu is in the fog-shrouded Aleutians off the coast of Alaska. In an attempt to retake the island from the Japanese, American troops landed on May 11, 1943. From the first, the battle for Attu was a fiasco. The practice landings for the officers and men took place on warm California beaches, giving them no worthwhile knowledge about what they would face in the fog and on the tundra of Attu. In addition, through faulty intelligence, the army believed that 500 Japanese were stationed on the island. In fact, there were 2,300.
To make matters even worse, the map available to those planning and supervising the operation showed the topography only up to a thousand yards from the shoreline. In the uncharted interior of Attu, companies were lost and wandered for days in the eternal fog.
The absolute disaster came early. The troops landed wearing ordinary winter uniforms, not suitable for the fierce winds and rain of the island. They wore leather boots, which were not waterproofed. Men had cold, wet feet, rubbed raw. Gangrene followed. Whole wards were soon filled with Attu survivors who had lost their feet. The Japanese commander decided to stage a banzai attack, said to be the first of the
war, on American forces, May 29, 1943. His men had suffered large-scale casualties in the past eighteen days. He had only a thousand men who could bear arms. His men who were ill or who could not walk were ordered to kill themselves. At three a.m., the Japanese began a silent attack, bayoneting U.S. troops in their sleeping bags. Then shooting began and grenades were exploded. According to one account, once the silence was broken the Japanese were screaming, “Japanese drink blood like wine.”
After the Japanese slaughtered the first American troops they came upon, they moved on and finally met resistance. The Japanese then began killing themselves, mostly by holding grenades to their bodies. Of 2,300 Japanese men on Attu, 29 were prisoners. The rest were dead. The U.S. troops also suffered heavy losses: 549 were killed, 1,148 wounded, 2,100 with gangrene, exposure, and shock. The Attu survivors in the hospital had many stories to tell Jones.
The survivors of the Guadalcanal battles had their tales, and Jones had his. His dreams were crowded with scenes he could not forget, scenes largely connected with ridges named the Galloping Horse. General Collins on January 8, 1943, gave the order to take those mountain ridges. Later, in The Thin Red Line, Jones wrote an unforgettable account of that battle. He also wrote a long poem called “The Hill They Call the Horse” sometime after that battle. Sleepless in a hospital—New Zealand? San Francisco? a hospital ship? the hospital near Memphis? We do not know—he relived scenes in the concluding section of the long poem:
And my fear crawls up and chokes me.
This is why I came:
This is the force of madness that took me by the hand
And would not let me cringe! Why me! Why me!
Dumbly with cloven tongue I stand in the bloody dawn
Atop, the Horse.
I would run: my legs laugh in my face.
For across the crest they come
In solitary line
As I last saw them:
Dried mud ground into their green fatigues, gritty to the touch;
Helmets, those who have them, rusty, caked with mud;
Sweat streaming down, faces twisted with the agony of fear,
and tension.
They pass by me with stumbling tread,
And each looks at me reproachfully and sadly:
They died: I lived. They resent my luck.
They cannot see that I am not the lucky one.
As they pass, I see them as I saw them last:
George Creel—
A little string of brains hanging down between his eyes;
Joe Dommicci—
His eyes big between his glasses and a gaping hole where once
had been his ear; . . .
Hannon—
Stumbling along, face gone below the eyes;
Big Kraus—
No marks, no blood, just dead with hard-set lips and
unbelieving eyes; . . .
The line goes on—for there are many.
Red Johansson—
Both legs gone and spouting fountains while he drags
himself across the ground.
The line goes on—for there are many more.
There is the boy (I never knew his name)
Who was lying wounded on a litter,
Glad he had been wounded,
And believing he was safe at last
When a sniper blew his brains out
And filled the litter with a pool of blood.
The line goes on—
I see it in the distance, climbing,
Groping blindly up that hill,
The hill they call The Horse.
And my unseen chains release me,
And I am away—through swirling wisps of madness and
of pain.
I am back inside my body with its straining antenna of fear.
I am safe—at least for now,
But I cannot relax:
I know I must go back some day—provided that I live.
I must see this place in stillness—when the jungle has reclaimed it.
Or I shall never rest.
I cannot sleep tonight. . . . Perhaps a pill.
Once his ankle began to improve, Jones was given passes to go into Memphis, where he rented a suite in the Peabody Hotel for six weeks. It was a wild, drunken time for him, with local women ready to go to bed with him. For a time, he wrote that he didn’t get pleasure from laying a woman unless he was drunk.
Jones’s psychological state worsened, and he began to pick fights in bars. Not only was he haunted by the memories of death and destruction on Guadalcanal, but also he faced being sent to England preparing for the coming invasion of the Continent. Hospital personnel seem not to have recognized his psychological state at this time. He did get some relief from the horrors when he was engrossed in writing sketches of his wartime experiences and those told him by the men in the Memphis hospital. At this point, his fiction had not been shaped or put into any discernible order.
This is the backstory for the novel he was beginning, a work eventually called They Shall Inherit the Laughter.
Callous doctors certified this man Jones, with a weak ankle and with severe psychological problems, to be fit for duty. Disgusted, he went over the hill, heading for Robinson, probably on November 1, 1943. He stayed with his uncle Charles Jones and wife, Sadie, who now lived in the mansion once owned by George Jones. Jones and other members of his family believed that Uncle Charlie had managed to possess more of George Jones’s estate than was legal or ethical.
Uncle Charlie was a staid attorney offended by his nephew’s drunkenness and public scenes. The uncle was more interested in protecting the family name than helping his troubled nephew. He even let the drunken Jones spend the night in jail to teach him a lesson. Jones wanted to become a writer, but Uncle Charlie could not understand that. His advice: Jones should get a job once he was discharged from the army and do his writing in his spare time.
After a few days in Robinson, with all the memories of the past and the problems of the present, Jones was intoxicated most of the time, out of control, headed for a scene with his uncle or with leaders of the community whom he considered hypocrites. Aunt Sadie was more sympathetic to Jones than her husband was, and she decided to ask Lowney Handy to help Jones.
Lowney was an unconventional woman married to the superintendent of the Ohio Oil Refinery there in Robinson. She was about forty, childless, something of an unofficial social worker, early on helping the down-and-out, and during the war, servicemen. Kentucky-born, she was a brilliant conversationalist. She had read widely but unsystematically. She attempted to write fiction but was not successful, for she lacked control over her material. Her husband, Harry, was one of the most important men in Robinson. Once she played a role in social events, but she retreated from such activities. She was at times eccentric and often quixotic. She was an early New Ager, interested in Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy, Hindu religious texts, and other Eastern religions. She was a good listener and would give full attention to the stories of the troubled people who sought her out. She was, in this early period when she knew Jones, an admirable person. Jones did not do her justice in They Shall Inherit the Laughter, in Some Came Running, and in Go to the Widow-Maker, where she was caricatured. Later, she became autocratic, possessive, and destructive.
Aunt Sadie brought Jones to see Lowney early in November, 1943. A.B.C. Whipple in “James Jones and His Angel,” Life, May 7, 1951, gave Lowney’s account of the meeting: “He swaggered; he wore dark glasses; he even asked me to read his poetry aloud. He had obviously come over for a free drink. Then he saw my books. . . . He flipped through them and plopped them back as if he were gulping down what they had in them.” Jones’s account of this meeting is in “Johnny Meets Sandy.”
Jones returned to the Handy home the next day, and he and Lowney spent the rest of the day in bed. Because she liked his writing and believed in his future as a writer, Jones wrote that “she subjected herself to me and made herself my disciple in everything from writi
ng to love.” Lowney certainly did not believe what she told this young man she had just met. She made quick decisions; after seeing a part of what he had written, she set out to help him be a published writer. In order to do that she began to control his antisocial activities, and she became his warden, his keeper. She certainly did not become his subject. She was not an experienced teacher, but she decided to help him learn to write.
As part of Lowney’s control over Jones, she met his sexual needs. She had little interest in sex. Her husband had passed on gonorrhea to her, and as part of the treatment, she had a hysterectomy. In their fashion, Harry and Lowney loved each other; he supported her expensive book-buying and did not ask her to return to the social life in Robinson she now scorned. She stayed with him through his alcoholism and his own affairs.
Before Jones returned to army duty in Camp Campbell in Kentucky, he wrote the Handys that he wanted to live with them, and Lowney and Harry decided to take Jones into their home. In reality, Lowney decided and Harry offered no opposition. Once Jones was back on duty, Lowney began to maneuver to get him released from the army. Jones continued to go AWOL to work on his novel, which had been nebulous until after he met Lowney.
At Camp Campbell, he became company clerk but was disgusted when the army mistreated a Jewish officer whom Jones admired. Again, he went AWOL; when he returned, he was placed in the stockade and then transferred to a prison ward in the hospital. He saw a psychiatrist, and Jones wrote his older brother, Jeff, a summary: He told the doctor “that I am genius (altho they probably won’t believe that); that if they attempt to send me overseas again, I’ll commit suicide; that if I don’t get out of the army I’ll either go mad or turn into a criminal—which is just next door to a writer anyway. . . .” All he wanted to do was write. Jones obviously had all these feelings, but Lowney probably helped him shape them into a narrative for the psychiatrist. Lowney was persistent: Jones the genius needed to get out of the army and fulfill his destiny. Jones was also persevering. He had done his part in the war. He had no luck left. He wanted out.