From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [488]
Harry Handy helped Jones buy a Jeep and a trailer, allowing Jones to get away from Robinson, especially in winter months. The work on the manuscript continued, until it was finally 1,381 pages in length.
Jones sent Mitchell the chapter on Pearl Harbor on October 30, 1949, from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He called the chapter a “tour de force” and “the climax, peak, end focus.” He saw that the end of all of his struggles to write this vast novel were almost over. He believed that his Pearl Harbor would “stack up with Stendhal’s Waterloo or Tolstoy’s Austerlitz,” and he promised to rewrite any sections not living up to that almost impossible standard. With some humor, he wrote, “We must remember people will be reading this book a couple hundred years after I’m dead, and that the Scribner’s first edition will be worth its weight in gold by then. We must never forget that.”
Jones continued to travel and write. On November 18, 1949, he was in Tucson, Arizona, and working on the chapter in which Prewitt was killed: “I kind of hate to do it in a way, I’ve got so used to the son of a bitch being around. But my first loyalty goes to the book I guess,” he wrote Harry Handy.
Living in a trailer in North Hollywood, Jones finished Eternity on February 27, 1950, and mailed the last chapter to Mitchell, writing him that he was drinking his third martini. He felt “peculiar. Not elated. Not depressed. But peculiar.” He planned to send acknowledgments soon. On March 18, 1950, he wrote Mitchell that he thought Eternity was a “magnificent memorial to Perkins.”
The editors at Scribner’s—Mitchell, John Hall Wheelock, and others—were enthusiastic in their praise of the novel. Jones had remained in North Hollywood, and on March 29, 1950, the edited manuscript reached Jones. Jones was blindsided. There was nothing in Perkins’s letters to Jones about avoiding obscene language. Mitchell told Jones in November 1947 that Jones’s “reproduction of the army talk, the idiom, is remarkable. . . .” There had been no objections to using the word Mailer had spelled “fug.” There had been no objections to sex scenes, but in the revised manuscript page after page had deletions of words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages.
Jones was distressed by what he saw. He responded to Mitchell that day in a long letter indicating he was not amenable to many of the deletions and changes. He softened his letter somewhat by indicating that in some instances he had rewritten paragraphs and improved them. He particularly objected to the many deletions of the word “fuck” for, he wrote in the manuscript margin, removing it interfered with the rhythm of sentences.
Jones decried the removal of an extended scene between Warden and the clerk about painting; he thought the deletion was perhaps a way to remove “cunt” from the text. Jones fought to keep that scene because it showed the depth of character and knowledge of Warden.
Jones explained why be used the slang term “cunt-pictures.” The words were not used for their shock value but because “cunt” was as common a word in the Army as “latrine” or “chow down.” He argued that cunt is what “us American men of the lower classes, especially in the Army, are interested in.” He concluded, “But that term, and not the term ‘pinups’ was the term used in the Army.”
Jones objected to the deletions in Prewitt’s masturbation scene. He argued that Prew was a proud man and would not have done it unless it was necessary, “not on account of the loneliness and frustration . . . but on account of the pure subject of the fact t