by James Jones
I thought it was a great idea. Novels on childhood, particularly Middlewestern childhoods, were dime a dozen. It would be a fresh approach. I already had one finished childhood story (“Just Like The Girl”) which would fit right in, and I had notes on a whole flock of others, twelve or thirteen. I attacked this project. Three of the last four stories here are the result of that. “Sunday Allergy” is the result of a break taken off from childhood stories.
Then, after finishing “The Tennis Game,” I took another break from childhood stories to write another short story, one I had made notes on for a long time. It was an Army story and was to be called “The Pistol.” And, of course, somewhere about five or ten pages into it I suddenly realized I didn’t have a short story here, I had a short novel. Moreover, I had something I had been looking for for a long time: namely, a subject around which to construct a deliberately, consciously symbolic novel; one in which the symbol is deliberately imposed upon the material from outside, beforehand, more in the European manner. But I wasn’t sure I had enough material to flesh it out. Should I try it or not? I discussed it with my wife. “Write in a fight,” she suggested. “You write fights marvelously.” So I did.
And, I haven’t gotten back to my book of childhood stories since.
They’re still there though, waiting. I have the notes, and I have the titles for most. Maybe I’ll get to it after I finish the current novel. If I do, all of the childhood stories in this volume will be included in it.
Writing short stories has a totally different feel from writing novels. I’m not sure whether I like it better or less. There isn’t that long haul ahead of you staring you in the face: this year, next year, the year after. By the same token the anguish of creative decision is much sharper writing stories. The particular point at which you must decide on the structure to point the ending you have finally discovered, comes much quicker. But then too it’s decided and over and done with much quicker. Writing stories is like having a series of high-fever ailments in which the crisis comes soon and either passes or doesn’t. Writing a novel is like having t.b. or some such long term chronic ailment with a low grade fever that takes a long time to cure. Take your choice. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.
As a postscript, it might be interesting for a writer—if not for a reader—to note the following statistic. In 1951 when From Here to Eternity was published I had five unpublished stories on hand. Within four months I sold four of the five, and sold them in every case to a magazine which had previously turned all five stories down at least twice. I don’t know what this statistic signifies. But I’m damn sure not going to knock myself off over it like Martin Eden did.
J.J.
Paris, October 1965
The Temper Of Steel
Edward Weeks chose this story from among the first five to print as an “Atlantic First” in the March 1948 issue of Atlantic Monthly, It seems young to me today, but I think it makes a good and serious point. The point however is well concealed. See if you can find it. In case you can’t, I’ll explain it after the story. It’s possible I didn’t point it up enough, but at the time I believed with Hemingway that one should not point one’s story points up.
1
“KNIVES,” THE TALL MAN SAID, looking down at the gate-leg table. “They are truly ingenious things, are they not?”
Johnny moved his cocktail glass and followed the tall man’s gaze down.
Their hostess smiled brightly. “Yes, aren’t they? So gruesome.” She spared the table one polite glance from her quick peerings about the room at her other guests. Her short hair, feathered about her ears and forehead, heightened the effect of a sparrow looking for bread. “Oh,” she said. “I see someone I must speak to. You two know each other? You won’t mind?”
“No,” Johnny said. He looked at his drink and decided he needed it.
“My dear lady,” the tall man said. “We met here in your home, at dinner. Don’t you remember?” He eyed Johnny. “Did we not?”
“Yes, Lon,” Johnny said. “Yes, we did.”
“But of course.” Their hostess smiled brightly. She put her frail hand on Johnny’s arm. “I want you to relax and just make yourself at home here. Another cocktail? These affairs are really nothing.” She brought the cocktail and flickered away after new crumbs.
The tall man picked up one of the knives and his eyes burned down into Johnny’s face. He tugged abruptly. The sheath embraced the knife, surrendered it only under pressure and with a squeak of protest. He held the knife with its tip pointed at Johnny’s chest and looked at him with that bright hard stare.
“Truly,” he said, “they are ingenious. Now you take these: there are none of the too heavy, too chrome, too fine-lined characteristics of mass production about these.”
Johnny looked at him and did not say anything. There were two knives in their embossed sheaths on the small table. Both knives had come from Africa in the hill country. The tall man had picked up the smaller one. The frantic buzz of conversation by which people earned their way at cocktail parties was incessant, fearing a letdown.
“These are individual pieces of work.” The tall man spoke authoritatively and gestured toward Johnny with the knife in his hand. “The savage who made this tried in his dim ignorant way to express himself, to put some of his knowledge of life and living into the making of it. To him, probably, it was truly beautiful. In fact, it is beautiful, because of its very crudeness, in the sense of being directly the opposite of our smoothly machined knives. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, Lon,” Johnny said. “I guess that’s right.” It was his own fault for coming to cocktail parties. He had only met Lon twice. Lon had lived an adventurous life. That was all right, he liked Lon, but he did not want to talk knives.
Lon tossed the knife into the air and caught it deftly by the blade as it flickered down. His eyes glittered an answer to the knife’s flicker of light.
“Yes,” he said caressingly, “this is a nice knife.”
Lon swung the knife up and down lovingly, as if tentatively measuring the weight for throwing. He looked almost as if he would throw it through the cocktail party to stick it quivering in the wooden door. His hatchet face turned toward Johnny, stabbing at him like a knife itself, like the killing knives Lon knew, and used, and loved.
Johnny could hear the unending slur of voices around the large room playing Lon’s accompaniment. All of them knew of Lon’s achievements. He knew them too, and he wished that Lon would drop it.
“The wide part of the blade,” Lon explained technically, “that is for cutting. You can slash a man to ribbons with this one—in spite of its crude workmanship. Knowing where our host got it, I don’t doubt that the lifeblood of a number of men has flowed along this blade, right where my finger is. Does that not evoke a peculiar emotion?”
“Yes.”
Johnny could tell what he was doing but he was not angry, he was only tired. He wondered abstractedly if Lon knew why he avoided knives, or if Lon knew that there was a memory struggling to crawl up from the bottom of his mind.
“The point is also very sharp,” said Lon. “Not much power would be needed to push this knife through the thick outer epidermis of a man.”
“That’s right,” Johnny said wearily. “But the trouble with a long thin point like that is if it hits a bone, it’s liable to break or bend and then your beautiful knife is ruined.”
Lon nodded approvingly. He squinted down the thin length of the blade, holding the point with his thumb in the old practiced manner.
“That is true. Still, this is a fine knife. Better than the other, which is too long. One wants a short knife. Knife fighting is a lost art, just as the making of fine knives is a lost art.”
“You must have had an adventurous life,” Johnny said. He could feel the memory climbing the ladder of his spine into his brain.
Lon looked at him quickly. “Well,” he said. He pinged the point with his thumbnail; “Most of my knife experience came after
the first war. In Spain and in northern Africa when I was wandering around. Of course, I had already learned my technique in Mexico, but the Mexican has not the finesse of the Spaniard, in knife fighting or anything else.
“Alley fights were the best. You have to learn to be quick and clean, or you do not get to use your technique very long. N’est-ce pas?” His hatchet face grinned. His bright eyes commanded Johnny as he jammed the knife back into its sheath. His bright eyes commanded everybody.
Johnny stood quietly wondering when he would finally shut up. Perhaps he did not know left hooks as he knew knives? He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly but the other would not go out with it. It was like a cat on the ladder and would not come down.
“I think I will go and find our host,” Lon said. “It is about time I was leaving.”
He stuck out his hand. Johnny shifted his glass to his left hand and took it. There was a heavy, smooth, clean pressure in Lon’s handclasp.
“I hope I have not upset you by my bloody talk,” Lon said.
“No. It didn’t bother me.” The knife was lying sheathed upon the table as before.
When Lon left him, he sat down in the nearest chair. He could feel the memory rising, as a gas-filled corpse rises to the surface of the sea. He tried listening to the conversation near him. His jaws tightened in the struggle.
2
THEY HAD CONVERSED LITTLE and softly, lying in a slit trench three feet by seven feet by two feet. Most people did not know the difference between a slit trench and a foxhole since the famous chaplain said there were no atheists in foxholes. You could not lie down in a foxhole and they were harder to dig and they were only for special cases. Even after digging a slit trench a man would be exhausted and drenched with sweat. And that when they were not even under fire.
On the line they never dug them any closer than five and it was often ten or fifteen or even twenty yards, when the line was too great for the number of them as it so often was in the early days of the Canal.
It was so different, this war, from the other, it was not like you read. Archie Binns did a good job of showing what it would come to be, next time, with his Japanese and Russians in Siberia in The Laurels Are Cut Down. Chivalry Was Dead, he said. Long live chivalry, I said, it all was dead. That trick of crawling in between the slit trenches at night, then jumping in from behind. Probably some point of Bushido honor: come back with a souvenir of a kill. Apparently honor also is subject to the Law of Relativity. But then they did not mind dying. Or maybe it was just that they were so hungry and they did it to get the luxurious cans of C ration each Yankee carried. You never knew, not any more.
He was terribly sleepy. After a certain point you were always terribly sleepy. Even if the guy in the next slit trench had the watch you did not sleep. How could you sleep? It was an all-out war, they said, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no time off for good behavior. Paydays used to be a half holiday, back in peacetime. This was it, they said, this was really the war to end war, this time we mean it, no crap, this is the one that counts, think of your sons. Probably the Russians said the same thing. But apart from that your ears and your nerves were always wide awake anyway, for a sound or a feel, always reaching, reaching out.
He heard no sound. Or felt anything either. He just knew it was there, suddenly. The hairs on the back of his neck rose up and prickled. Somewhat the same feeling you get when you suddenly know somebody is staring at you from behind and you turn around and sure enough there is somebody staring at you. Only this, of course, was greatly enhanced. When it hit him it shot clear through like an electric shock and he was wide awake. Yet he heard nothing.
He was lying on his belly with the brim of his helmet dug into the dirt to keep his face out of the mud. This slit trench was not really wet. It was only muddy with that thin film clay gets when the dew is mashed into it. Oh, it was a slick war all right, they said, it was a slick war.
He always lay on his belly with his back up. Really comical how hard it is to lay on your back. You can’t do it. Whenever you heard one coming you always lay on your belly while you waited. Maybe you dug your fingernails into the slick too, but then that was different. They will always flop over on their belly when they hear one coming if they are on their back. You just can’t help it. Like a fish or a porcupine.
He turned his head to the left very slowly to look back. He could see nothing. The sky was clouded and there were no stars to outline a figure. He strained his eyes until he felt their muscles would crack and curl up like springs. Nothing. Still, he knew it was there. He could tell. The instinct told him. It was invariably right. He had developed it over a period of weeks. It was what they did not teach you in the field manuals.
It was very quiet and his eyes rolled in his head. Somewhere in the silence a grenade popped, fizzed, went off, sending a shower of little screamings outward. This was too close for a grenade and you could not fire without the muzzle blast betraying you. At night it was always the knife. This was his first.
The thought of it there sent a spasm of refined terror through him. A terror of hopelessness that made him want to shrug and turn his head back and close his eyes and simply wait. Waiting for it dejectedly, yet hoping all the time the instinct was wrong, and knowing at the same time the instinct was never wrong. He felt, then, it was not worth the trouble. There were a lot of things worse than dying. Slowly disintegrating day by day was worse than dying.
He did not know, you never knew any more. When you looked back and you saw how it all came about, it was so logical. How, in the beginning, it was not at all necessary. Just simply cause and effect that, in the beginning, was not at all necessary. It was not that people did not see it, everybody saw it. Everybody always saw it. That was why it was so hard to know. It was like the being always terribly sleepy. Just to relax, to sit quietly and not be sleepy, maybe then you could know. Just to relax was all. It was really very simple. It was not a question of being paralyzed with fear, it was simply having to decide. He was wide awake and terribly sleepy and he could not decide.
While he lay in the mud-slick fatigues, unable to decide, his hand with the rolls of dirt under the cracked and crusted nails decided. It slid down over the cloth made waterproof by weeks of soaking up his body oil. Quite silently it unfastened the snap and freed the knife from the sheath strapped to his leg. Then it relaxed full length along his side, cunning as animals are cunning. Perhaps in the end that was all it was.
Over the luxurious feeling of resignation was something else apparently, a flame over the sour damp ashes; a flame, now, that never came alive until there was no other thing, burning strongly in a wind of death. The hand and this primitive flame worked together leaving him out of it.
He was astonished to realize it was not five seconds since the hair first rose. He felt like he had just carried three thousand pounds a couple of miles.
The hand jerked sideways when the nothing jumped, flopping him over on his back and raising the knife in an arc until it was sticking straight up. The knife in the hand made of the arm the sharpened spike of the elephant trap. The nothing impaled itself by the weight of the body. The falling body jarred through his arm releasing the hand from its responsibility, pushed his arm down till the knob on the knife hilt ground against his pelvic bone.
The Jap’s knife struck his helmet slitheringly and stuck itself into the clay without power. The Jap hardly made a sound, only a sharp “unh” as the knife went into him. Such a silent war this one was.
There was a little struggle when he grabbed the Jap’s wrist with his left hand. But not much. The Jap’s hand came away from the hilt of his knife fairly easily. The knife had gone into him just under the breastbone. Sort of a solar plexus punch you might say, and it took his wind.
Blood ran distastefully over his hand and he pushed the Jap’s leaden weight away from him and pulled his knife out. He could see him now, the inscrutable almond eyes and the funny bell-shaped helmet, like a woman’s 1920s hat. The Jap pu
t both hands over his belly where the knife had been. The Jap lay on his back, eyes watching, chin pulled down against his chest, breathing with a kind of grunt.
Johnny heard the breathing above the explosions of his own heart and knew he had nothing more to fear from this one.
They looked at each other for a little while, both breathing softly. Then Johnny put his hand over the Jap’s face, the heel of his palm on his chin. The Jap did not shut his eyes and opened his mouth and bit at one of the fingers. Johnny moved the finger and thrust it up the Jap’s nose, the Jap still trying to bite it. Then he pulled his knife across the Jap’s bent throat, downward and away. The Jap quit trying to bite. He had not moved his hands from his belly.
Johnny grabbed him and rolled him out of the slit trench on the downhill side. His right hand had escaped, but he had not jerked his left hand quick enough and the geyser pumped against his arm. He wiped his hand vigorously and then lay in the slit trench, trying to keep out of the blood, waiting for morning to come. Somewhere in the silence a grenade popped, fizzed, went off, sending a shower of little screamings outward. A Nambu MG chattered in its falsetto foreign tongue. And him wishing to relax, just to relax, lying slow and easy, maybe under a tree, on a creek.
3
JOHNNY TOOK A SIP from his fresh martini. The olive oscillated slightly and a few drops sloshed over his fingers. People nearby were laughing at some quip of a Successful Author. He had missed it. The woman next to him offered to explain it, so that he could laugh too. He thanked her, seeing Lon coming toward him across the room with their hostess. Lon was wearing his rakish trenchcoat and carrying his slouch hat.
Lon shook his hand again. “Do not let my talk of knives get on your nerves. It is only that knives fascinate me.”