WHISTLE – James Jones

It took me almost twice as long to read James Jones's WWII trilogy as it took him to write it. I was about ten years late when the first novel—From Here to Eternity—came out, in 1951. Fairly current when the second—The Thin Red Line—arrived, in 1962 (a year before I entered the Army), but for some probably explainable reasons when Whistle, the last one, hit the bookstores in 1978 I hesitated, a hesitation that lasted until a week ago.

Don't worry, the span is too long for me to remember enough to address all three novels here. In fact I've just now downloaded From Here to Eternity, mainly to revisit Whistle's four central characters when they were comparative youngsters getting their start in army life. It doesn't bother me that the names will be different. Jones had wanted to keep them the same throughout the three books. He scrapped that plan when he found near the end of Eternity the story demanded he kill off one of the four characters. He addressed this problem in an author's note:

Unfortunately the dramatic structure—I might even say, the spiritual content—of the first book demanded that [...] be killed in the end of it. The import of the book would have been emasculated if [...] did not die.

When the smoke cleared, and I wrote End to From Here to Eternity, the only end it seemed to me it could have had, there I stood with no [...] character.

Jones explained this was especially tricky, as he'd had big plans for [...] in the next two books. His solution was to change the names of all four characters, which he did for Thin Red Line and again for Whistle. "But," he wrote, "I changed them in such a way that a cryptic key, a marked similarity, continued to exist as a reference point with the old set of names. It seems like an easy solution now, but it was not at the time." Jones wrote this note four years before his death of congestive heart failure. He left about a dozen pages of Whistle unwritten, but his friend and fellow novelist, Willie Morris, inherited the manuscript and summarized the remaining scenes based on conversations with Jones and on Jones's notes. The book was published the following year.

I recall this happening—Jones's death and Morris's contribution—and I remember reading a little about Whistle, that it concerned the four central characters returning from their war, wounded both physically and emotionally. I suspect the reviews mentioned unhappy endings for the four. I've never liked unhappy endings, probably because I tend to identify closely with fictional characters. I've matured somewhat in recent years, though, and can appreciate the occasional bummer if it's handled well in a story. My literary advisor, Fictionaut's Kitty Boots, has guided me artfully in this direction.

I knew early on—from the story itself--to expect Whistle's bummer ending, that it was inevitable, but I had no idea how big a bummer it would be. I'm wondering now if knowing what was coming, knowing what the story required him to do with these characters of his he'd lived with most of his life, if that didn't have a bearing on Jones's cashing in before he had to actually write those scenes. In her memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Jones's daughter, Kaylie, recounts an incident when her father came out of his writing room weeping because he'd just killed off a character. "My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears flowing," she said.

Jones depicted the collective consciousness of the entire unit, Charlie Company, in Thin Red Line. This focus shrinks to the four central characters in Whistle. Wounded in the South Pacific, they're shipped Stateside to a military hospital where they struggle now trying to heal sufficiently either to return to duty or be discharged. The battles now are fought in their heads, scarred with horrors and guilt and a deadly cynicism, torn between acknowledging their human frailty and brandishing their illusion of manhood. Of the four, Bobby Prell's fight to save his legs hit me the hardest, as I believe it did his three buddies.

Shot multiple times in a Japanese ambush that killed two members of his squad, Prell nonetheless led the remaining men to safety and provided vital intelligence of an impending enemy attack. His actions saved countless American lives and led to his commander putting him in for a Medal of Honor. His first sergeant, however, scoffed at the honor, claiming Prell had taken an unnecessary risk leading his squad into the ambush. Yet, when Prell's mutilated legs failed to heal, threatening his life, it was the sergeant, Winch, using reverse psychology, who sparked in Prell the will to live, thus allowing the legs to heal. Prell's other two buddies had given up trying to encourage him, after he refused to give permission for the legs to be amputated. Here's Winch:

What Prell needed was enemies. An enemy, if he was going to fight. He wasn’t complex enough to fight without an enemy there in front of him.

“You reckon they’ll give me a tin cup and some GI pencils to sell, when they let me out of this?” Prell said from the bed.

“They’ll do better than that,” Winch said. “They’ll give you a pension. And a leather leg. So you can go down to the American Legion on Saturday nights and show the boys your stump and tell them how you fought the war in the South Pacific. Just don’t tell them about your squad.”

“You son of a bitch,” Prell said. His voice did not increase in tone or volume, but the timbre of it got taut, vibrant. “I’ll kill you when I get out of this. That’s a promise. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking you up, if it takes the rest of my life, and kill your sharecropping ass.”

“I don’t think so,” Winch said. “I’ll probably be dead long before you’re well enough to do anything.” There was probably more truth in that than he realized when he said it, Winch thought, and grinned. Oh, well. He would be his enemy. Everybody needed one enemy.

“At least, you won’t be going around leading any squads into any death traps,” he said.

The Indian eyes of Prell glittered at him from the bed. He didn’t answer.

“I think you’d better go,” the ward nurse said nervously from beside Winch, “really.”

“Okay. Well, take it easy, kid,” he said. “Keep fighting.” He turned on his heel.

Outside in the corridor he had to lean against the wall. He felt drained and absolutely gray all over, and had to suck in energy with his breath.

Less than a week later Prell took a turn for the better, and his legs began to heal. Happy ending for Prell? Well, there's more.

Then there's the title. Doesn't seem to fit with the first two. It comes from this ancient French ditty Jones includes as the book's epigraph:

Bounce, and dance; bounce, and

dance;

Jiggle on your strings.

Whistle toward the graveyard.

Nobody knows who or what

moves your batten.

You’ll not find out.

[For more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]

LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME – Kaylie Jones

[Caution: This review contains a word that will cause some readers to wince, some of them inwardly while evincing an air of amused tolerance, yet others, the stoics, are apt to affect no noticeable response despite the tickle of their emotional equipoise. There are those, of course, who will mark the encounter with a laugh that resembles the bark of a happy spaniel. The advisory here is intended primarily for those whom the word and its context may invade to their very core. I make no apology for including it, as it derives from the very core of this memoir and its often astonishing milieu.]

I came close to panic just now getting this review started. Things are pretty much under control at the moment—a few deep breaths, some cognitive intervention, deadline pressure, deeep breaths... Odd, how the pressure by itself was largely responsible for the near panic as well as quelling it. The same pressure, working with the breathing and objective reasoning, helped halt the looming hysteria in its silly tracks. You see, I’d started rereading parts of Lies My Mother Never Told Me to refresh my memory from having devoured it start to finish almost a year ago. But I had forgotten one cannot without risk read just parts of this amazing memoir and expect to put it down, fiddle around with other things, and then return on a whim and continue reading. The parts I’d dipped into moments ago merely for reference grabbed me by the hair and started pulling me back in to repeat the entire ride. I knew if I let this happen I’d sure as hell miss my deadline for this week’s Friday’s Forgotten Books feature on Patti Abbott’s blog. I read fairly fast, but write rather slowly. I had to decide—and I have—that meeting the deadline has priority over the consuming pleasure of rereading the entire book. Bear with me, please, (I say to myself) as I struggle to stick to this decision.

My interest in reading Lies My Mother Never Told Me was not to learn about the lying mother, the former Hollywood actress Gloria Mosolino, but about her husband, a novelist who had a deep and lasting influence on me as a young man. James Jones’s second novel, Some Came Running, lodged itself so firmly in my psyche that reading it again more than half a century later enraptured me even more than it had the first time. And I’d been to Paris in the interim. Paris! A bonus was the discovery that Jones’s daughter, Kaylie, who was born in Paris, had published this memoir, which I immediately downloaded and read and now am fighting to keep from reading again so I can get this review written in time for the Friday feature.

Kaylie Jones

Writers who manage to captivate me with their art, who engage my imagination in sync with theirs, seduce my curiosity about themselves as well. Reading a book that fascinates me, I find myself constantly flipping to the back cover or flyleaf to study the author’s photo to see if I can pick up something in the eyes or facial expression that jibes with what I presume resides in someone whose work has such dominion over me. A certain poise, a confidence, maybe even a hint of otherworldliness. More substantial in feeding this curiosity is stuff written about them, especially by someone close to them, a family member, also their own informal writing—diaries, personal letters.  

There’s risk, of course, that I might learn of weaknesses in my hero of the mighty pen, that he or she is or was a jerk, or worse. Knowing the possibility exists never slows me down, though. It might even speed up my desire to find out, having the macabre attraction of a disaster, a burning building or a highway crash. My psychologist son might well recommend intervention, were he aware of this situation.

I knew James Jones was relatively safe from such exposure in his daughter’s memoir. Her foreword to the new edition of Some Came Running tipped me off. And there’s this, in the first couple of pages of Lies My Mother Never Told Me:

One night when I was perhaps two, I stood up in my crib when my parents came in to say good night and announced, “I’m all alone.”

“No, no,” my father explained, “you’re not alone. You have us.”

“No. You have each other,” I told him, “but I’m all alone.”

Apparently my father sat down in a chair and burst into tears. My mother used to say that these words of mine convinced them to adopt my brother.

Why had my statement made my father cry? Perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part, but I hope that on some unconscious level, he knew my words were true.

When I was little my mother often told me, “If I had to pick between having your father or having you, I would pick your father.” This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable and honest statement because, given the choice, I also would have picked my father.

Kaylie and her dad

I almost cried reading that. Knowing James Jones cried makes it easier for me to admit this. He was a tough guy. He’d boxed in several Golden Gloves tournaments as a young man. The Army decorated him during World War II, where killing a Japanese soldier face to face changed his outlook on violence. He never wore or spoke of the Bronze Star awarded him for valor in combat. Kaylie says she learned from her mother what he’d done to earn it:

A soldier from his company had taken machine gun bullets to the stomach. He lay in plain view of the Japanese pillboxes, screaming, trying to hold in his intestines with his hands. Two medics who’d tried to assist him had already been killed. My father, furious, ran from his position of safety, zigzagging like crazy until he reached the poor soldier and shot him up with the medics’ morphine.

Killing the Japanese soldier was the first time Jones knowingly killed anyone in the war. It was also the last time. He’d wrenched the attacking enemy’s bayoneted rifle from his hands and beat him to death with it. He kept the man’s wallet, which contained a black-and-white photo of a young Japanese woman holding a baby in her arms. Kaylie Jones writes, “I had seen the wallet once, perhaps ten years earlier in Paris, when in a mournful and fragile moment, he’d taken it out of its hiding place and sat at the dining room table, looking at it.

“For the rest of my father’s life, he was haunted by the killing of this Japanese soldier. After he was sent back to the States for surgery on some torn ligaments in his ankle, he told his superior officers he would not fight anymore. They threw him in the stockade. They thought he’d lost his mind.”

Years later Jones broke down after writing a scene in his novel, The Thin Red Line, when a character sacrifices himself to save his men. “My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears flowing.” Another time his emotions took over while reading E.B. White’s Stuart Little aloud to Kaylie and her adopted brother, Jamie. Both were six. The tears came during the scene when the eponymous mouse leaves his human family to search for the sparrow that had become his dear friend.

“My brother and I were perplexed while our big, strong, grown-up father’s voice broke, and tears fell from his eyes.

“‘Oh, Daddy, don’t cry!’my brother said. ‘It’ll be all right, he’ll find her!’ Our dad sighed, then said in a calm, fatalistic tone, ‘Well, maybe not…’

“This was the first time we were faced with the possibility of loss and the reality of sad endings. Stuart does not find the sparrow, but he goes on, wandering purposefully down the road with his suitcase. To this day I cannot look at a copy of Stuart Little without thinking of my father and the lesson he tried to impart to us for our future years. Just looking at the book today in Barnes & Noble makes me so choked up I can barely speak.”

James Jones

Lest you get the wrong impression, James Jones isn’t the only “character” who cries in Lies My Mother Never Told Me. It’s not really a memoir of James Jones, either, although he's what first drew me to the book. It’s essentially a sad, sad story of alcoholism and a little girl whose beautiful mother seems to despise her. The girl’s parents are both alcoholics, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the girl eventually becomes one herself. The saving grace in this horrid situation is, despite his uncontrolled drinking that would kill him, the unquestionable, undying love James Jones had for his wife and daughter. His death at 56 devastated them both.

Yet, there are moments of sidesplitting humor sprinkled along the stream of sorrow that winds with gentle honesty through this memoir. Kaylie describes one such moment she learned from her mother that happened shortly after Jones’s death.

[Reminder: this is the part containing the word, as cautioned above, that might penetrate some readers “to their very core.”]

My mother adored Lauren Bacall, known as Betty to her close friends, and they had been good friends for many years. Gloria thought Betty Bacall was the most beautiful woman she’d ever met, and she admired Betty because Betty was completely down-to-earth and suffered no flattery from sycophants.

For several days after my father died, my mother, lying with a bottle of scotch on the couch in the living room, refused to budge. Someone called Betty Bacall, who arrived like the cavalry. Taking the situation in hand, she said to Gloria, “All right, Moss. You don’t have to get up now, but you will soon. I went through it with Bogie and I know exactly how you feel. Here’s what you do: nothing. No impulsive decisions, no rash moves. Don’t start giving stuff away that you’ll regret later. Don’t sell the house. Don’t do anything stupid and for God’s sake, don’t fuck Frank Sinatra.”

Betty was of course referring to her own disastrous rebound relationship with Sinatra in the wake of Humphrey Bogart’s death. Gloria started to laugh. She laughed so hard she had to sit up to avoid choking, and from there, she finally got up and had something to eat. Two days later the phone rang. Gloria picked up. “Hi, Moss, it’s Frank.”

“Frank who?” she said.

“Frank who the hell do you think? Sinatra.” They had been friends for many years, but it seemed absurd to her that he’d automatically assume there were no other Franks of importance in her life.

After a pause, he said, “I called to say I’m so sorry about Jim. Do you need me to come out there?”

“Uh…”

To his great astonishment, she started to giggle, and couldn’t stop.

There, I made the deadline. Now I can go back and read Lies My Mother Never Told Me. Again!

[for more Friday's Forgotten Books see the listing on Patti Abbott's unforgettable blog]  

SOME CAME RUNNING (revisited) - James Jones

I am yet under the spell Some Came Running put on me fifty-two years ago. If James Jones wasn't himself a sorcerer, he surely must have tapped into some magic reservoir of imagination when he created the most poignant romantic tragedy I've ever read.

I've kept the paperback copy from 1963 but haven't opened it since. Was afraid Jones's story might no longer affect the profound emotions it did back then in me—a small-town Midwesterner on the verge of running away to the Army to flee his failures. I've learned from sad experience along the way trying to recapture a past enchantment often dispels the memory's potency. Some Came Running's was one I had rather not risked losing.

What finally prompted me to take that risk was hearing “Gwen's Theme” from the novel's movie version. Now, the movie left so little impression on me I have barely a recollection of seeing it. I did not recognize the music. Knowing what it represented, though, I could feel through its peculiar, rending harmonies, its swells, diminishes, and earnest tempos, the depth of longing and anguish and sorrow shared by Gwen and her lover as they returned to me from the book. It drew me in like a siren song. With my old paperback copy still in boxes with hundreds of other books from my recent move, I went online to see if maybe there was an ebook version. This is when I learned not only that Some Came Running had been out of print for over half a century, but that a newly abridged edition appeared just last year.

Forgotten Books: Some Came Running, by James Jones

As serendipities go this was a dilly. A dipsy doodle of a dilly, a chance coincidence that has gifted me back half a century to a novel that lodged itself more pervasively throughout my psyche than any other. Reading that last sentence scares me a little as I'm not often so definitive, preferring instead to hedge and dillydally leaving as many doors and windows—escape hatches--open as I can without appearing blatantly chickenshit. But I've given this some thought, and I cannot think of another novel that has stayed with me as has Some Came Running.

And I have read a lot of novels.

Funny thing is I didn't know how deeply and thoroughly Some Came Running had embedded itself until yesterday, when I started reading it again. It will take at least a week or more for me to finish it, again, but I knew within the first couple of sentences of my second read in fifty-some years how important this masterpiece of James Jones's is. To me. I rarely read novels more than once. And those I have, for the most part, have shown their age—or have reminded me too poignantly of mine. With this in mind, remembering how much I had enjoyed Some Came Running the first time around, I approached a reread with the caution one might feel on the verge of meeting a long-ago good friend after much life has burnished and reshaped memories that could evaporate in a blink.