From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [487]
Perkins recognized the possibilities of a peacetime army novel, and he had serious reservations about They Shall Inherit the Laughter because he felt the reading public was not interested in the subject and that the work would insult military people and civilians.
Perkins telegraphed Jones on February 16, 1946:
“WOULD YOU CONSIDER PAYMENT FIVE HUNDRED NOW FOR OPTION ON STEWART NOVEL, AND SETTING ASIDE INHERIT LAUGHTER FOR REASONS ILL WRITE SOME FURTHER PAYMENT TO BE MADE AFTER WE APPROVE SOME FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS. WISH TO COOPERATE BUT HAVE MORE PAITH IN SECOND NOVEL AND HAVE FURTHER REVISION TO PROPOSED FOR LAUGHTER.”
Jones telegraphed Perkins his acceptance on February 17, 1946, stating, “PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS.” Perkins had edited Wolfe, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and his encouragement was vital to Jones, who left the army in 1944 after being wounded on Guadalcanal and spending months in a hospital near Memphis, Tennessee.
Jones had started writing after he joined the army in 1939 and had begun sections to appear in They Shall Inherit the Laughter while still hospitalized. He was angry and embittered about the possibility of being sent to the European theater of war, went AWOL, probably on November 1, 1943, and returned to his home in Robinson, Illinois. His mother had died while he was stationed in Hawaii, and his father, a dentist, had committed suicide.
Jones was psychologically wounded at that time, defiant and usually drunk. Lowney Handy and her husband, Harry, eventually let him into their home. She was an unofficial social worker, helping the troubled. She arranged Jones’s discharge from the army in 1944, and Harry supported him financially for six years while he wrote They Shall Inherit the Laughter and From Here to Eternity. Lowney was convinced Jones would be a major writer. She did not have a literary education, but she was an avid though unsystematic reader. She was seventeen years older than her young protegé. She became his teacher and at times his lover. Her abilities as a teacher were evolving but they began at an unsophisticated level. She dominated his life, but she allowed him time to learn to write. She did insist that he revise and revise. Her editing skills improved over the years, though she continued to be erratic in her judgments. A New Ager, she saw the world through the prism of Mme. Blavatsky and Theosophy and other Eastern thought and introduced these religions and philosophies to Jones, ideas in many ways opposed to his tragic view of life.
Jones thought he could write the Stewart novel in six months. He was too optimistic; he worked on the manuscript from 1946 to 1950. At times, he wrote Perkins on March 4, 1946, he was “stumbling along in the dark,” “with nobody to teach him what he must learn.” This was a plea to Perkins for more assistance and a recognition that Lowney had her shortcomings as a teacher. On March 16, 1947, he wrote Perkins that Laughter had been autobiographical, and he had a ready-made plot. In the Stewart novel, “I have nothing to go on except certain people I knew in the army and what made them tick. There is no plot at all except what I can create.”
Perkins was in failing health, and his letters to Jones were encouraging, but his suggestions were general in nature. Perkins died on June 17, 1947, and by that time he had read several chapters of the manuscript now titled From Here to Eternity. He had faith in the novel and regarded Jones as his last American discovery. Scribner’s then assigned Burroughs Mitchell, a young editor who had served as enlisted man and then officer in the Navy during the war, to be Jones’s editor.
Jones and Mitch