Taps for Enlisted Man Jones

The son of a dentist, he grew up hungering for more action and fame than his home town of Robinson, Ill., could possibly offer. So right out of high school, in 1939, a feisty welterweight by then, he signed up with the regular Army. As promised, adventure and travel were his --Honolulu, Schofield Barracks, amateur boxing, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Purple Heart, Bronze Star. But advancement seemed beyond James Jones --twice he made noncom and got busted back to private. After five boisterous years and a war, he returned to civilian life. But he packed the Army with him and marched its brawling, grumbling, whoring characters through his typewriter. The result was From Here to Eternity in 1951. The novel was greeted with raves, big sales and a National Book Award. Critics invoked Crane, Hemingway and Wolfe when writing about the veteran's furious, gritty depiction of the U.S. Army as it was just before World War II. Yet at Jones' death last week at age 55, of congestive heart failure, it could be said that in writing, as in soldiering, advancement seemed somehow beyond him.

To Paris. As a young literary lion, Jones could not be expected to accept such a view. He proclaimed that his second novel, Some Came Running (1957), was not only longer than War and Peace but better. In fact, he said, it was "the greatest novel we've had in America." The critics vehemently disagreed and Jones went off to live in Paris. He and his blonde wife Gloria (once a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe) were to spend 16 years abroad. Throughout, Jones kept doggedly writing, but never again did he achieve the acclaim of Eternity.

The Thin Red Line (1962) impressed some reviewers. Jones, like Dreiser, often infused his fiction with a force that transcended the clumsy writing. Before long, however, even his primitive power seemed to have fizzled away. Such novels as Go to the Widow-Maker (1961) and The Merry Month of May (1971) were not only badly written but also burdened by fatuous philosophizing.

Jones never seemed thrown or slowed down by the loss of critical approval. Indeed, he never indulged in the public pouts one expects of celebrated literary types. In Paris, apart from a couple of boorish flashes of temper, he lived an abundant life and made his strikingly craggy face familiar around the boulevards. He also continued to write and yearn for literary immortality. Even when he did gripe about reviewers, one could wonder whether he really cared what they were saying--or even quite understood. "They just said I was a bad writer, bad grammar, blah, blah, blah," he told one interviewer. It was as if the fine points of writing did not matter that much to his work. And perhaps they did not, any more than the fine points of draftsmanship mattered to Grandma Moses when she sat at her pine table.

In 1975, Jones, Gloria and their two children returned from Paris to live in Sagaponack, N.Y. By then even Eternity was most often recalled as the source of the movie that revived Frank Sinatra's fading career. In the end the author must have suspected he was bound to be remembered not as a literary man but as a soldier who was fated to write. As he sometimes admitted, the Army he joined so young was the only milieu he really understood. His work in progress was a novel entitled Whistle, projected as the last book of a trilogy begun with The Thin Red Line and From Here to Eternity. Linking these books is not really necessary. Eternity alone ensures Jones an honorable place in the enlisted man's ranks of American fiction.

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