From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [84]
They were all there: Life, with its cross-section pictures of the world and “The March of Time Marches On” air about it; Look, that was so obviously a second-rate imitation that had got on the gravytrain; Argosy and Bluebook, with their adventure stories about lovely ladies with smudged faces and strategically ripped dresses lost in jungles with aviators who protected them from pygmies; Country Gentlemen, with its Buick owning farmers dressed in tweeds; Field & Stream, with its comfortable hunters in sharp looking coats and breeches carrying fine shotguns and smoking pipes; Colliers, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, American, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, and all their starving young actresses and producers, who looked wellfed in the drawings, the young mountain men carrying cap and ball rifles and looking very bronzed and masculine, all of them bound together with a running theme of High-, Middle-, and Low-Class Americana on their cover pictures and that overflowed occasionally into a number of the advertisements.
They were all there, subscribed to by the Company, paid for by the Company Fund, provided for the recreation of the men.
And he thumbed through them all, not bothering to read the stories that always bored him with their unreality, looking at the pictures, and the ads.
“There’s a Ford in your future,” they told him. “‘What this country needs . . .’ . . . is a good money-saving motor oil for 25¢.” “This is the Jones family admiring young Johnny Jones, aged 4 days, 6 hours and 23 minutes—through a protective wall of glass at the hospital.” “Let me tell you why Jimmy is doing better in school—he eats Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.” “I like my sleep, says Al Smith—go Pullman.” “Rubber does it better.” (He got a grin from that one.) “NOW! You can own a Cadillac. Only $1345.00.” “The Red Horse is the People’s Choice.” “Give her the American kitchen of her dreams.”
In Harlan when he was a kid, in the outhouse, they had a Sears Roebuck catalog that his mother called “The Wishing Book.
There was one old issue of the Post, battered and rolled and curled and torn and dated back to November 30, 1940, that was a gold mine, a fine opium, with much food for thought.
Its cover, one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of Americana, Prew studied for a long, long time. It showed a young man lying on his topcoat on the ground, strumming on a uke and smoking on a pipe, with his shoeless feet propped on a suitcase that had a thumbing fist and MIAMI painted on it, and the shoes beside it on the ground. It was obvious he was bumming. Maybe, he decided finally, maybe he was a college boy. That must be what it was.
There was a Pall Mall ad in it that he liked. It was painted in bright color and showed some happy soldiers on the range. (There were lots of things about the Army now, in all the magazines, since the peace-time draft.) Three of these were in the prone position firing, and the other two were back on the ready line sitting on green grass, and one of these was holding up two cigarets, a Pall Mall and a short one. He was a very happy looking soldier.
He studied this one quite a while, too, professionally admiring the artist’s observation. The board stiff campaign hats that were definitely Regular Army, pre-draft, were there. The Infantry’s robin’s-egg-blue cord and acorns were on the hats. The old style chrome bayonet and white web sheath with its brown leather tip, the shooting jackets made out of the obsolete CKC blouses and ripped up the back for shoulder room, the sheepskin elbow and shoulder pads with the fleece turned in, the new M1 rifle that had not got to Wahoo yet and that he had only seen in diagrams—they all were there; and the range season with the deep smell of burnt powder and the clinking brassy tubes of cartridges heavy in the hand came back to him as he looked at it. The only thing he could professionally find wrong with it was that none of them had leggins on. Well, maybe they didnt issue leggins now, back in the States. He tore it out, thinking it would look good tacked to the inside of his footlocker top.
The gleaming white tubes of the tailormade cigarets in the picture made