From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [489]
Jones objected to the removal of Red’s wet dream. He was willing to make some minor changes, but he wanted to keep that scene. He argued that “the people of this country don’t know what the hell goes on in it,” and perhaps that was why “they’re such sanctimonious bastards.” Jones failed to save the scene. He was also aware that many of the changes were dictated by Horace Manges, the attorney for Scribner’s, who was concerned about possible “obscenity” charges against the novel.
Jones also objected that “piece of ass” was removed everywhere it was used. He pointed out that “piece of tail” was commonly used by other writers. Manges was adamant.
Jones felt that Mitchell and Manges were being too cautious and that the editing was heavy handed. He agreed to some changes because he did not want Eternity “to be a Henry Miller ‘limited edition.’’’ During this emotional time Jones sometimes argued that passages in the novel should be printed exactly as he wrote them, and at other times, he was agreeable to deletions or to his making changes in the text.
The editing of the manuscript soon became a farce. Manges kept a “score sheet” while he was reading and found “259 fucks, 91 shits, and 5 pricks. He did not count the pisses for some reason.” Jones and Mitchell went through the manuscript in the Scribner’s office and “cut the fucks to 146 and shits to 45.” Manges agreed to all the changes except for some four letter words, and “he cut the fucks down again to around 106 and some shits.” Mitchell wrote Jones that Manges wanted the fucks reduced to 25 or 6, but Mitchell had refused because he had promised Jones to print “fucks in unprecedented scale.”
The scavenger hunt for objectionable words went on in Robinson, Illinois, also. Helen Howe, married to Jones’s boyhood friend Sylvanus (Tinker) Howe, received a telephone call from Lowney one evening reporting that the galleys had come, had to be proofed, and that four-letter words had to be removed. Four or five people, Jones included, sat around a table at Lowney’s house, and when they came to a four-letter word, they’d say, “The sentence says so and so. Can we take that one out?”
“Hell, no,” Jones would say. Helen remembers that “they needed to delete sixty-three and Jones only agreed to removing fifty-one.”
Jones liked Manges and was willing to horsetrade with him: “If I take this out, can we keep this.” The counting and horsetrading became a joke end ultimately collapsed, but the damage to the novel was not undone. It must be remembered that Jones generally handled this trying time with grace; he remained friends with Mitchell and liked Manges, using him later as his private attorney.
Scribner’s had an initial advertising budget of $10,000 for Eternity, placed advertisements in important journals, and sent galleys to American writers and to important newspapers end magazines. The initial reviews were mostly filled with praise. Mailer called Eternity “one of the best of the ‘war novels’ and in certain facets perhaps the best.”
The novel was published on February 25, 1951, and had phenomenal sales. By May it had sold 163,000 copies and was selling at the rate of 4,000 a week. Later, the paperback edition had even larger sales, and the popular movie of Eternity also increased sales. The novel soon appeared in English-speaking countries, and translations into many languages were forthcoming.
The reading public did not know about the changes made in the text of From Here to Eternity. This edition, based on the manuscript in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and on Jones’s letters of protest, restores the text to its original state, with changes agreed to by Jones.
Jones wrote Mitchell on March 18, 1950, “I would like you to remember . . . that the things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will, in five years, or ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway . . . and then we will kick ourselves for not having done it . . .” Jones properly argued that there was nothing salacious in the book. He rightly observed that in the fu