My Generation (53 page)

There were literary journalists of that period who enjoyed pointing to a certain decadence in the Joneses' lifestyle and wrote reproachful monographs about the way that Jim and Gloria (now parents of two children) comported themselves: dinners at Maxime's, after-dinner with the fat squabs at hangouts like Castel's, vacations in Deauville and Biarritz, yachting in Greece, the races at Longchamps, the oiled and pampered sloth of Americans in moneyed exile. Much the same had been written about Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The tortured puritanism that causes Americans to mistrust their serious artists and writers, and regards it as appropriate when they are underpaid, evokes even greater mistrust when they are paid rather well and, to boot, hobnob with the Europeans. Material success is still not easily forgiven in a country that ignored Poe and abandoned Melville. There was also the complaint that in moving to France for such a long sojourn Jim Jones had cut off his roots, thus depriving himself of the rich fodder of American experience necessary to produce worthwhile work. But this would seem to be a hollow objection, quite aside from the kind of judgmental chauvinism it expresses. Most writers have stored up, by their mid-twenties, the emotional and intellectual baggage that will supply the needs of their future work, and the various environments into which they settle, while obviously not negligible as sources of material and stimulation, don't really count for all that much. Jim wrote some exceedingly inferior work during his Paris years.
Go to the Widow-Maker
, which dealt mainly with underwater adventure—a chaotic novel of immeasurable length, filled with plywood characters, implausible dialogue, and thick wedges of plain atrocious writing—spun me into despondency when I read it. There were, to be sure, some spectacular underwater scenes and moments of descriptive power almost like the Jones of
Eternity
. But in general the work was a disappointment, lacking both grace and cohesion.

Among the distressing things about it was its coming in the wake of
The Thin Red Line
, a novel of major dimensions whose rigorous integrity and disciplined art allowed Jim once again to exploit the military world he knew so well. Telling the story of GIs in combat in the Pacific, it is squarely in the gritty, no-holds-barred tradition of American realism, a genre that even in 1962, when the book was published, would have seemed oafishly out-of-date had it not been for Jim's mastery of the narrative and his grasp of the sun-baked milieu of bloody island warfare, which exerted such a compelling hold
on the reader that he seemed to breathe new life into the form. Romain Gary had commented about the book: “It is essentially an epic love poem about the human predicament and like all great books it leaves one with a feeling of wonder and hope.” The rhapsodic note is really not all that overblown; upon rereading,
The Thin Red Line
stands up remarkably well, one of the best novels written about American fighting men in combat. Comparing it, however, with
Go to the Widow-Maker
produced a depressing sense of retrogression and loss. It was like watching a superb diver who, after producing a triple somersault of championship caliber, leaps from the board again and splatters himself all over an empty pool. Jim's nettled response to my hesitantly negative criticism makes me glad that I never expressed my real feelings or my actual chagrin; he might have wanted to strangle me.

But it is important to point out that although
Go to the Widow-Maker
was written in Paris, so was
The Thin Red Line
. This would strongly suggest that the iniquitous life that Jim Jones had reputedly led in Paris, the years of complacent and unengaged exile, bore little relation to his work, and that if he had stayed at home, the motivations that impelled him in a particular literary direction, and that shaped his creative commitments, would probably have remained much the same. Jim loved the good life. He would have richly enjoyed himself anywhere and would have, as always, worked like hell. But a common failing of many writers is that they often choose their themes and address their subject matter as poorly as they often choose wives or houses. What is really significant is that while a book like
Go to the Widow-Maker
represents one of those misshapen artifacts that virtually every good writer, in the sad and lonely misguidedness of his calling, comes up with sooner or later,
The Thin Red Line
is a brilliant example of what happens when a novelist summons strength from the deepest wellsprings of his inspiration. In this book, along with
From Here to Eternity
and
Whistle
—a work of many powerful scenes that suffered from the fact that he was dying as he tried, unsuccessfully, to finish it—Jim obeyed his better instincts by attending to that forlorn figure whom in all the world he cared for most and understood better than any other writer alive: the common foot soldier, the grungy enlisted man.

Romain Gary wasn't too far off. There was a certain grandeur in Jones's vision of the soldier. Other writers had written of outcasts in a way that had rendered one godforsaken group or another into archetypes of suffering—Dickens's underworld, Zola's whores, Jean Genet's thieves, Steinbeck's migrant
workers, Agee's white Southern sharecroppers, Richard Wright's black Southern immigrants, on and on—the list is honorable and long. Jones's soldiers were at the end of an ancestral line of fictional characters who are misfits, the misbegotten who always get the short end of the stick. But they never dissolved into a social or political blur. The individuality that he gave to his people, and the stature he endowed them with, came, I believe, from a clear-eyed view of their humanness, which included their ugliness or meanness. Sympathetic as he was to his enlisted men, he never lowered himself to the temptations of an agitprop that would limn them as mere victims. Many of his soldiers were creeps, others were outright swine, and there were enough good guys among the officers to be consonant with reality. At least part of the reason he was able to pull all this off so successfully, without illusions or sentimentality, was his sense of history, along with his familiarity with the chronicles of war that were embedded in world literature. He had read Thucydides early, and he once commented to me that no one could write well about warfare without him. He'd also linked his own emotions with those of Tolstoy's peasant soldiers, and could recite a substantial amount of
Henry V
, whose yeoman-warriors were right up his alley. But the shades of the departed with whom he most closely identified were the martyrs of the American Civil War. That pitiless and aching slaughter, which included some of his forebears, haunted him throughout his life and provided one of the chief goads to his imagination. To be a Civil War buff was not to be an admirer of the technology of battle, although campaign strategy fascinated him; it was to try to plumb the mystery and the folly of war itself.

In 1962, during one of his visits to America, I traveled with Jim to Washington. Among other things, an influential official with whom I was friendly and who was on President Kennedy's staff had invited the two of us to take a special tour of the White House. Oddly, for such a well-traveled person, Jim had never been to Washington, and the trip offered him a chance to visit the nearby battlefields. He had never seen any of the Civil War encampments. Jim went out to Antietam, in Maryland, after which we planned to go to the Lincoln Memorial before driving over to the White House. When he met me at our hotel, just after the Antietam visit, Jim was exceptionally somber. Something at the battlefield had resonated in a special troubling way within him; he seemed abstracted and out-of-sorts. It had been, he told me finally, a part of the battleground called the Bloody Lane that had so affected him when he'd seen it. He'd read so much about the sector and the
engagement and had always wondered how the terrain would appear when he viewed it firsthand. A rather innocuous-looking place now, he said, a mere declivity in the landscape, sheltered by a few trees. But there, almost exactly a century before, some of the most horrible carnage in the history of warfare had taken place, thousands of men on both sides dead within a few hours. The awful shambles was serene now, but the ghosts were still there, swarming; it had shaken him up.

Soon after this, at the Lincoln Memorial, I realized that the cavernous vault with its hushed and austere shadows, its soft footfalls and requiem whispers, might not have been the best place to take a man in such a delicate mood. Jim's face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address engraved against one lofty wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation and brotherhood dreamed by the fellow Illinoisan whom Jim had venerated, as almost everyone does, for transcendental reasons that needed not to be analyzed or explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting the conventional response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded with savage bitterness, and for an instant it was hard to absorb. “It's just beautiful bullshit,” he blurted. “They all died in vain. They all died in vain. And they always will!” His eyes were moist with fury and grief; we left abruptly, and it required some minutes of emotional readjustment before the storm had blown over and he regained his composure, apologizing quickly, then returning with good cheer and jokes to more normal concerns.

Many years went by before I happened to reflect on that day, and to consider this: that in the secret cellars of the White House, in whose corridors we were soon being shepherded around pleasantly, the ancient mischief was newly germinating. There were doubtless all sorts of precursory activities taking place which someday would confirm Jim's fierce prophecy: heavy cable traffic to Saigon, directives beefing up advisory and support groups, ominous memos on Diem and the Nhus, orders to units of the Green Berets. The shadow of Antietam, and of all those other blind upheavals, was falling on our own times. James Jones would be the last to be surprised.

[Introduction to
To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones;
Random House, Inc., 1989.]

O
ne of my oddest trips in a lifetime of odd trips was the one I took with Terry Southern across the U.S.A. in 1964. At that time I'd known Terry (whom I also called, depending on mood and circumstance, “Tex” or “T”) ever since 1952 during a long sojourn in Paris. Like a patient in lengthy convalescence, the city was still war weary, with its beauty a little drab around the edges. Bicycles and motorbikes clogged the streets.
The Paris Review
was then in its period of gestation, and the principals involved in its development, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, often spent their late evening hours in a dingy nightspot called Le Chaplain, tucked away on a back street in Montparnasse. In the sanatorium of our present smoke-free society it is hard to conceive of the smokiness of that place; the smoke was ice-blue, and almost like a semisolid. You could practically take your finger and carve your initials in it. It was smoke with a searing, promiscuous smell, part Gauloises and Gitanes, part Lucky Strikes, part the rank bittersweet odor of pot. I was new to pot, and the first time I ever met Terry he offered me a roach.

I was quite squeamish. Marijuana was in its early dawn as a cultural and spiritual force, and the idea of inhaling some alarmed me. I connected the weed with evil and depravity. We were sitting at a table with Terry's friends, the late film director Aram (“Al”) Avakian and a self-exiled ex–New York state trooper and aspiring poet whose name I've forgotten but who looked
very much like Avakian, that is to say mustachioed and alternately fierce and dreamy-eyed. Also present was a
Paris Review
cofounder, the late Harold L. (“Doc”) Humes, who had befriended me when I first arrived in Paris and was no stranger to pot. The joint Terry proffered disagreed with me, causing me immediate nausea; I recall Terry putting down this reaction to the large amount of straight brandy I'd been drinking, cognac being the
boisson de choix
in those days before Scotch became a Parisian commonplace. Terry responded quite humanely, I thought, to my absence of cool. He was tolerant when, on another occasion, I had the same queasy response. In our get-togethers, therefore, I continued to abuse my familiar substance, and Terry his, though he could also put away considerable booze.

I was living then in a room that Doc Humes had found for me, at a hotel called the Libéria that had been his home for a year or so. The hotel was on the little rue de la Grande Chaumière, famous for its painters' ateliers; my Spartan room cost the equivalent of eight dollars a week, or eight dollars and a half if you paid extra to get the henna-dyed Gorgon who ran the place to change the sheets weekly. The room had a bidet, but you had to walk half a mile to the toilet. You could stroll from the hotel in less than two minutes to La Coupole or to the terrace of Le Dôme, Hemingway's old hangout, which also reeked of pot or hash and featured many young American men sitting at tables with manuscripts while affecting the leonine look of Hemingway, right down to the mustache and hirsute chest. I even overheard one of those guys address his girl companion as “Daughter.” Terry and I would sit after lunch on the terrace, drinking coffee and smirking at these poseurs.

Terry was really hard up for money in those days, even in a Paris where a franc went a long way. I wasn't rich myself but I was, after all, a recently published bestselling author, and I could occasionally buy him a meal. We ate a couple of times in a cramped but excellent bistro on the avenue du Maine and had such luncheons as the following, which I recorded in a notebook:
entrecôte, pommes frites, haricots verts, carafe de vin, tarte tatin, café filtre
. Price for
two:
$3.60. The U.S. dollar was, of course, in a state of loony ascendancy, for which the French have been punishing us ever since; if, in addition, you exchanged your traveler's checks for the fat rate given by Maurice Loeb, the cheerful
cambiste
who hung out on the rue Vieille du Temple, in the Jewish Quarter, you could really become a high roller in 1952. It was one of the reasons the Communists plastered
U.S. Go Home
signs on every available wall.

That June I was busy in my room each afternoon, writing on a manuscript that would eventually become my short novel
The Long March
. One afternoon, unannounced, Terry showed up with his own manuscript and asked me if I would read it. His manner was awkward and apologetic. I knew he was working on a novel; during our sessions on the terrace of Le Dôme he had spoken of his serious literary ambitions. I had met a lot of Texans in the Marines, most of whom lived up to their advance reputation for being yahoos and blowhards, and I never thought I'd encounter a Texan who was a novelist. Or a Texan who was really rather shy and unboastful. The manuscript he brought me made up the beginning chapters of
Flash and Filigree
, and I was amazed by the quality of the prose, which was intricately mannered though evocative and unfailingly alive. The writing plainly owed a debt to Terry's literary idol, the British novelist Henry Green, one of those sui generis writers you imitated upon pain of death, but nonetheless what I read of
Flash and Filigree
was fresh and exciting, and later I told him so. Even then he had adopted that mock-pompous style that was to become his trademark, yet I sensed a need for real encouragement when he said: “I trust then, Bill, that you think this will put me in the quality lit game?” I said that I had no doubt that it would (and it did, when it was finally published), but as usual his talk turned to the need to make some money. “De luxe porn” was an avenue that seemed the most inviting—lots of Americans in Paris were cranking out their engorged prose—and of course it was one of the routes he eventually took, culminating a few years later in the delectable
Candy
. For Tex, success was on the way.

I didn't see a great deal more of Terry in Paris. That summer I went off to the south of France and, later, to live in Rome. But back in the States Terry was very much a part of the quality lit scene in New York during the next twenty years, frequenting places like George Plimpton's and, later, Elaine's, where I too hung out from time to time. He had great nighttime stamina, and we closed up many bars together. He bought a house in the remote village of East Canaan, not very far from my own place in Connecticut. And it was either at this house or mine that we decided to make a transcontinental trip together. I had been invited to give a talk at a California university, while Terry, having collaborated on the screenplay of Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove
, a great hit, had been asked to come out to the coast to write the script for a film version of Evelyn Waugh's
The Loved One
. It was a perfect vehicle, I thought, to hone his gift for the merrily macabre.
But the catalytic force for the whole trip was Nelson Algren. Nelson had written me, asking me to visit him in Chicago. The two of us had become friends and drinking companions during several of his trips to New York from Chicago, a city with which he had become identified as closely as had such other Windy City bards as Saul Bellow and Carl Sandburg and Studs Terkel. In his letter he said that he'd show me the best of Chicago. I had for some reason never been to Chicago, and so Terry suggested that we go west together and stop by and make a joint visit to Nelson, with whom he had also become pals. He had the notion of doing the Chicago–Los Angeles leg by train since soon, as he astutely predicted, no one would be traveling on the rails except the near destitute and those terrified by airplanes. By taking the fabled Super Chief of the Santa Fe, he pointed out, we'd be able to get a last glimpse of the great open spaces and also of the sumptuous club cars upon whose banquettes the movie bigwigs and sexy starlets had cavorted while the prairies whizzed by. It would bea precious slice of Americana soon to be foreclosed to travelers in a hurry, and I thought it was a fine idea.

Nelson was in his mid-fifties, one of the original hipsters. He had been telling stories about junkies and pimps and whores and other outcasts while Kerouac and Ferlinghetti were still adolescents, and had nailed down as his private literary property the entire grim world of the Chicago underclass. After years of writing, including a stint with the WPA Federal Writers' Project during the Depression and another one hammering out venereal-disease reports for the Chicago Board of Health, he hit it big with
The Man with the Golden Arm
, a vigorous novel about drug addiction that won the first National Book Award in 1950 and was made into a successful movie starring Frank Sinatra. Money and fame were unable to go to Nelson's resolutely nonconformist head; “down-at-the-heel” would have been the politest term for the neighborhood he still lived in, where he took the three of us (my wife, Rose, having signed on at the last minute) after meeting our plane at O'Hare. It was a predominantly Polish faubourg, hemmed in by mammoth gas-storage tanks, and the odor of fatty sausage and cabbage began at the curb, becoming more ripe and pronounced as we labored up the five flights to what Nelson called his “penthouse”—an incredibly cramped and cluttered apartment with only two small bedrooms, a tiny kitchenette, and an old-fashioned bathroom with water-stained wallpaper.

The boxy living room was dark and jammed with books. It was fairly clean amid the disorder, but the pad was the lair of a totally undomesticated
animal. I do recall a framed photograph of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Nelson had had a torrid affair, and whom he still referred to as “the Beaver.” That night we partook of Polish cuisine, mystery stew and memorably awful, in a nearby restaurant, where Nelson titillated us with secret hints about the Chicago he was going to show us the next day. With the exception of Rose we all got pie-eyed. I was very fond of Nelson but I always thought he was half crazy. When he got enthusiastic or excited his eyes took on a manic gleam, and he would go off on a riff of giggles that was not unlike Richard Widmark's in
Kiss of Death
. Terry and I exchanged bewildered glances. I frankly had no idea what we would experience, thinking of such wonders as Michigan Avenue, the Art Institute, lunch at the Pump Room, the great Museum of Science and Industry, the Merchandise Mart, even the celebrated stockyards. That night, we three visitors slept in the same room, Rose and I locked immobile in a narrow, sagging single bed and Terry on a cot only a foot away, where he drifted off to sleep with a glass of bourbon still in his hand, heaving with laughter over Nelson and our accommodations.

Early the next morning, still behaving like a man withholding knowledge of a delightful mystery, Nelson took us by taxi on a meandering route through the city and deposited us at the entrance of the Cook County Jail. He then revealed that he had arranged to have us given a guided tour. This would be our most authentic taste of Chicago. We were all stunned—Terry, wearing his shades, said, “Well, Nelse old man, you shouldn't have gone to all the bother”—but in a way it was something I might have anticipated. Despite the merciless realism that he brought to his subject, Nelson was basically an underworld groupie; he loved all aspects of outlaw life, and his obsession with crime and criminals, though romantic, was eclectic to the extent that it also embraced the good guys. He counted among his many cronies a number of law enforcement officers, and one of these was the warden of the Cook County Jail. Despite the drab municipal sound of its name, the Cook County Jail was then, as now, a huge heavy-duty penitentiary, with harsh appurtenances such as a maximum-security unit, industrial areas, facilities for solitary confinement, and a thriving—if the term may be used—Death Row. All this was explained to us in his office by the warden, a thin man with a disarmingly scholarly look, whom Nelson introduced us to before vanishing—to our intense discomfort—saying he'd pick us up later. Clearly none of us could comprehend this sudden abandonment. While the warden fiddled with the buttons of his intercom, Terry wondered in a whisper
if I was as hungover as he was; beneath his dark glasses his cheeks were sickly pale and I heard him murmur, “Man, I think this is turning into some kind of weird nightmare.” Rose tried to appear happy and self-contained. We heard the warden summon Captain Boggs.

Captain Boggs had a round, cheerful, fudge-colored face and could not have weighed an ounce less than 250 pounds. His title was associate captain of the guards, and he would be our guide through the institution. As we trailed him down the corridor I couldn't help being struck by his extreme girth, which caused his arms to swing at wide angles from his body and made his body itself, beneath the slate-gray uniform jacket, appear somehow inflatable; he looked like a Negro version of the Michelin tire man. I was also fetched by his accent, with its rich loamy sound of the Deep South.

I thought of Richard Wright's native son, Bigger Thomas, also an émigré from the cotton fields to Chicago, only to become the doomed murderer of a white girl; plainly Captain Boggs, in all of his heftiness, had made a prodigious leap for a onetime black boy. He had a rather deliberate and ornate manner of speaking, possibly the result of many trips with what he called “VIP honorees,” and the tour itself dragged on through the prison's depressing immensity, seeming to continue hour after hour. “Dis yere is de inmates' dinin' facilities,” he said as we stood on a balcony overlooking an empty mess hall. “Dis yere,” he yelled at us at the doorway to a deafening machine shop, “is where de inmates pays off they debts to society.” We went down into a cavernous basement, chilly and echoing with a distant dripping sound. “Dis yere is what is called de Hole. Solitary confinement. You gits too smart, dis yere where you pays fo' it.” We would not be able to go on the tiers of the cell blocks, Captain Boggs explained, Rose being a distracting presence. “Dem suckers go wild aroun' a woman,” he declared.

We did end up, finally, on Death Row. After going through a series of doors, we immediately entered a small, windowless room, where we had a most disconcerting encounter. Seated at a table was a white inmate in orange prison coveralls being given an intravenous injection by a black male nurse. Captain Boggs introduced us to the prisoner, whose name was Witherspoon, a mountaineer transplant up from Kentucky (and known in the press as “the Hillbilly from Hell”) who had committed a couple of particularly troglodytic murders in Chicago, and whose date with the executioner was right around the corner. Witherspoon and his gruesome crimes were of national interest, his case having made the New York papers.