[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 59 (Thursday, May 8, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2432-H2434]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      DEDICATION OF ETERNITY HALL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Riggs). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Hawaii [Mr. Abercrombie] 
is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Mr. Speaker, it is a matter of some coincidence that 
today is Humanities on the Hill Day, and we had an opportunity, many of 
us, to meet with the representatives of the Endowment for the 
Humanities in our local jurisdictions from all over the country.
  In that context, I had the privilege of addressing the group who came 
here this morning for a few minutes, and had a chance to comment to 
them about a recent event in Hawaii at Schofield Barracks where I had 
the opportunity to deliver remarks at the dedication of Eternity Hall, 
Eternity Hall in Quadrangle D at Schofield Barracks. That occasion was 
on April 2, 1997.
  Tomorrow, Mr. Speaker, marks the 20th anniversary of the death of 
James Jones, the author of ``From Here to Eternity.'' I would like to 
take this opportunity, then, today to deliver yet again the comments 
that were made on that occasion, to indicate to my colleagues that 
tomorrow the film ``From Here to Eternity'' will be shown at Schofield 
Barracks, because the young soldiers that are there have taken a 
renewed interest in their history, have taken a renewed interest in 
Schofield Barracks and in World War II and, by extension, the author 
who made it possible for us to understand more about ourselves as a 
result of the great art that is ``From Here to Eternity.''
  Mr. Speaker, ``From Here to Eternity,'' like all great works of art, 
transcends its form. In this instance, the novel. Like all great works 
of art, it transforms those who experience it, its readers. It 
transposes its content, the characters and their actions, into a larger 
vision of life itself, a dimension of depth beyond the story itself.
  Schofield Barracks is the stage upon which the story unfolds. But it 
is not events of which we learn. Rather, we learn the meaning of 
integrity, honesty, honor, and above all, what it takes to be human. 
This is what it meant to me. ``From Here to Eternity'' shaped the basic 
values I hold to this day.
  So it was with a sense of outrage that I read a sneering, wounding 
article about James Jones just before leaving for Europe in 1967 on a 
backpack trek around the world. I had no idea I would literally walk 
into him in Paris some weeks later.
  I knew it was him the moment I saw this short, square block of a man 
plowing down the avenue. In my mind's eye now I see a cigar clamped in 
his clenched jaw, but perhaps it is only because I like to believe it 
was there. All I really saw were his eyes. How could such gentle eyes 
be locked into such a rugged mug of a face?
  To his friend William Styron, and I quote, ``was there ever such a 
face, with its Beethovenesque brow and lantern jaw and stepped-upon-
looking nose. A forbidding face until one realized that it only seemed 
to glower, since the eyes really projected a skeptical humor that 
softened the initial impression of rage.''
  On impulse, I spoke to him.
  ``Don't pay any attention to the critics. You write for us, for me. 
We're the readers. Pruitt, Warden, Maggio, they're real for us. ``From 
Here to Eternity'' means everything for us. What you write is important 
to us. To hell with the critics. Keep writing for us.'' Or some such 
blither.

                              {time}  1915

  I felt a total fool. He stared at me, and I bolted away. A few days 
later I found myself outside his home on the Ile St. Louis behind Notre 
Dame. The San Francisco Diggers who fed the homeless during those years 
had published a directory of Americans worldwide who could be counted 
on to be kind to American travelers in need. I had come upon it in a 
Left Bank book store, and Jones's name and address were in it.
  I rang the bell on impulse out of both a desire to apologize and yet 
tell him again more clearly how much he meant to us as readers. A 
suspicious housekeeper somehow agreed to tell him that the man who 
stopped him on the Right Bank the other day wanted to see him.
  Amazingly she returned animated. By all means Mr. Jones would see me. 
He was anxious to see me. Please come up. Would it be possible to wait 
a few minutes while he finished his writing for the day. Please don't 
leave.
  I was a bit dazed as I sat on a stool on what appeared to be a tiny 
bar and library area. Suddenly he burst through a door, barrel-chested, 
huge smile, moving like a pulling guard on a halfback sweep.
  ``Am I glad to see you. I told Gloria,'' his wife Gloria, ``I told 
Gloria all about our meeting. I've been writing on the energy of it for 
the past two weeks. I never seem to meet readers any more. It's always 
somebody who wants something from me. How about a drink?''
  From that moment, I ceased to be a fan. I became a fierce partisan. I 
had never met anyone so nakedly honest in his observations and 
inquiries, so plain-spokenly straight. No rhetorical brilliance, just 
easy-fit words and thoughts expressed as solid and simple as a beating 
heart, just like From Here to Eternity.
  In 1951, the Los Angeles Times said:

       James Jones has written a tremendously compelling and 
     compassionate story. The scope covers the full range of the 
     human condition, man's fate and man's hope. It is a tribute 
     to human dignity.

  The book was From Here to Eternity. Its author was 30 years old. In 
March of 1942, he had written to his brother Jeff from his bunk at 
Schofield Barracks.

       Sometimes the air is awfully clear here. You can look off 
     to sea and see the soft, warm, raggedy roof of clouds 
     stretching on and on and on. It almost seems as if you can 
     look right on into eternity.

  It is 20 years tomorrow since James Jones died, leaving his work to 
speak for him and to us.
  Biographer George Garret said,

       Boy and man, Jones never lost his energetic interest, his 
     continual curiosity, the freshness of his vision. It was 
     these qualities, coupled with the rigor of his integrity, 
     which defined the character of his life's work.

  Others, of course, recognize these qualities and wish to speak for 
and about James Jones on this anniversary of his passing.
  Winston Groom, George Hendrick, Norman Mailer, William Styron, whose 
Forward to To Reach Eternity: The letters of James Jones, I include 
here in its totality and from which I will read, Mr. Speaker, excerpts, 
and Willie Morris, friend and biographer of his last days, all are 
represented in the remarks which follow.
  First is a letter to me from Winston Groom:

       Dear Congressman Abercrombie: Gloria Jones asked me to 
     write to you regarding the dedication of a building in 
     Schofield Barracks in honor of her late husband, James Jones.
       This is a wonderful and fitting tribute to a fine soldier 
     and a great writer who contributed perhaps more than any 
     other to the public understanding of the military during the 
     World War II era.
       Long before I wrote Forrest Gump I began a friendship with 
     Jim Jones which was cut far too short by his untimely death. 
     He was always kind and giving to the younger generation of 
     writers and took time to help me with my first novel, Better 
     Times Than These, which was about the Vietnam War. In fact, I 
     dedicated that book to Jim.
       I congratulate you and all the others who worked to create 
     this very appropriate memorial to a great American patriot 
     and champion of the common soldier.
       Respectfully yours, Winston Groom.

  I received a letter from George Hendrick, a professor of English at 
the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

       Dear Neil: I'm sending along, as promised, the statement 
     for the Schofield Barracks ceremony. I am certainly pleased 
     to know about this important event and to play some small 
     part in it.
       The university library has acquired the manuscript of From 
     Here To Eternity and The Pistol, and they will be on exhibit 
     at the next meeting of the James Jones Literary Society in 
     Springfield on November 4 of this year. I hope you can 
     attend.

  Professor Hendrick's comments are as follows:

       Pvt. James Jones, then a member of the air corps, 
     transferred to the 27th Infantry Regiment at Schofield 
     Barracks in September of 1940. Jones, not yet 19 years old, 
     was already an aspiring novelist, and he was later to have a 
     clear recollection of life in F Company in Quad D, of the 
     lives of officers and enlisted men, and of the landscape 
     around Schofield. In From Here to Eternity

[[Page H2433]]

     he made this peacetime army uniquely his own.
       When Jones was finishing Eternity in 1949 he wrote a 
     chapter about the events of December 7, 1941, at Pearl 
     Harbor, with emphasis on the strafing of Schofield Barracks 
     that day. He wrote his editor about the chapter.

  And I quote:

       Here is the piece de resistance, the tour de force, the 
     final accolade and calumnity, the climax, peak, and focus.
       Here, in a word, is Pearl Harbor . . . I personally believe 
     it will stack up with Stendhal's Waterloo or Tolstoy's 
     Austerlitz. That is what I was aiming at, and wanted it to 
     do, and I think it does it. I don't think it does, send it 
     back, and I'll rewrite it. Good isn't enough, not for me, any 
     way; good is only middling fair. We must remember people will 
     be reading this book a couple of hundred years after I'm dead 
     . . .
       The chapter did not need rewriting. In fact, his intent 
     throughout the novel had been to aim high and capture for all 
     time the complex world of Schofield Barracks as it was in 
     1940 and 1941.
       From Here To Eternity is now a classic American novel, and 
     Schofield Barracks is preserved in it as if in amber.

  Norman Mailer, along with William Styron and James Jones, the great 
trio of writers to come out of World War II said, and I quote:

       The only one of my contemporaries who I felt had more 
     talent than myself was James Jones, and he has also been the 
     one writer of my time for whom I felt any love. We saw each 
     other only six or eight times over the years, but it always 
     gave me a boost to know that Jim was in town. He carried his 
     charge with him, he had the talent to turn a night of heavy 
     drinking into a great time. I felt then and can still say now 
     that From Here To Eternity has been the best American novel 
     since of the Second World War, and if it is ridden with 
     faults, and ignorances, and a smudge of the sentimental, it 
     has the force that few novels one could name. What was 
     unique about Jones was that he had come out of nowhere, 
     self-taught, a clunk in his lacks, but the only one of us 
     who had the guts of a broken-glass brawl.
  William Styron faxed to me his introduction to the volume of Jim 
Jones's letters. He asked that certain passages, those which he thought 
were most effective for illuminating James Jones, be read at the 
ceremony. He invited me to feel free to use any part of the essay, not 
just the circled passages, and I think that I have the essence of it 
here from William Styron:

       From Here To Eternity was published at a time when I was in 
     the process of completing my own first novel. I remember 
     reading Eternity when I was living and writing in a country 
     house in Rockland County, not far from New York City, and as 
     has so often been the case with books that have made a large 
     impression on me, I can recall the actual reading, the mood, 
     the excitement, the surroundings. I remember the couch I lay 
     on while reading, the room, the wallpaper, white curtains 
     stirring and flowing in an indolent breeze, and cars that 
     passed on the road outside. I think that perhaps I read 
     portions of the book in other parts of the house, but it is 
     that couch what I chiefly recollect, and myself sprawled on 
     it, holding the hefty volume aloft in front of my eyes as I 
     remained more or less transfixed through most of the waking 
     hours of several days enthralled, to the story's power, its 
     immediate narrative authority, its vigorously peopled 
     barracks and barrooms its gutsy humor and its immense 
     harrowing sadness.

  The book was about the unknown world of the peace time army. Even if 
I had not suffered some of the outrages of military life, I am sure I 
would have recognized the book's stunning authenticity, its burly 
artistry, its sheer richness as life. A sense of permanence attached 
itself to the pages. This remarkable quality did not arise from Jones's 
language, for it was quickly apparent that the author was not a 
stylist, certainly not the stylist of refinement and nuance that former 
students of creative writing classes had been led to emulate.
  The genial rhythms and carefully wrought sentences that English 
majors had been encouraged to admire were not on display in Eternity, 
nor was the writing even vaguely experimental; it was so conventional 
as to be premodern. This was doubtless a blessing, for here was a 
writer whose urgent, blunt language with its off-key tonalities and 
hulking emphasis on adverbs wholly matched his subject matter. Jones's 
wretched outcasts and the narrative voice he had summoned to tell their 
tale had achieved a near-perfect synthesis. What also made the book a 
triumph were the characters Jones had fashioned--Prewitt, Warden, 
Maggio, the officers and their wives, the Honolulu whores, the brig 
rats, and all the rest. There were none of the wan, tentative effigies 
that had begun to populate the pages of postwar fiction during its 
brief span, but human beings of real size and arresting presence, 
believable and hard to forget. The language may have been coarse-
grained but it had Dreiserian force, and the people were as alive as 
those of Dostoevski.
  It has been said that writers are fiercely jealous of one another. 
Kurt Vonnegut has observed that most writers display towards one 
another the edgy mistrust of bears. This may be true, but I do recall 
that in those years directly following World War II, there seemed to be 
a moratorium on envy, and most of the young writers who were heirs to 
the Lost Generation developed, for a time at least, a camaraderie, or a 
reasonable compatibility, as if there were glory enough to go all 
around for all the novelists about to try to fit themselves into the 
niches alongside those of the earlier masters.
  When I finished reading From Here to Eternity, I felt no jealousy at 
all, only a desire to meet this man just four years older than myself, 
who had inflicted on me such emotional turmoil in the act of telling me 
authentic truths about an underside of American life I barely knew 
existed. I wanted to talk to the writer who had dealt so eloquently 
with those lumpen warriors and who had created scenes that tore at the 
guts. Jim was serious about fiction in a way that now seems a little 
old-fashioned and ingenuous, with the novel for him in magisterial 
reign. He saw it as sacred mission, as icon, as Grail. Like so many 
American writers of distinction, Jim had not been granted the benison 
of a formal education, but like these dropouts he had done a vast 
amount of impassioned and eclectic reading; thus while there were gaps 
in his literary background that college boys like me had filled, he had 
absorbed an impressive amount of writing for a man whose schoolhouse 
had been at home or in a barracks. He had been, and still was, a hungry 
reader, and it was fascinating in those dawn sessions with him to hear 
this fellow built like a welterweight boxer, speak in his gravelly 
drill sergeant's voice about a few of his more recherche loves. 
Virginia Woolf was one, I recall; Edith Wharton another. I did not 
agree with Jim much of the time, but I usually found that his tastes 
and judgments were, on their own terms, gracefully discriminating and 
astute.
  Basically it had to do with men at war, for Jim had been to war, he 
had been wounded on Guadalcanal, had seen men die, had been sickened 
and traumatized by the experience. Hemmingway had been to war too, and 
had been wounded, but despite the gloss of misery and disenchantment 
that overlaid his work, Jim maintained he was at heart a war lover, a 
macho contriver of romantic effects, and to all but the gullible and 
wishful, the lie showed glaringly through the fabric of his books and 
in his life.

                              {time}  1930

  He therefore had committed the artist's chief sin by betraying the 
truth. Jim's opinions of Hemingway, justifiable in its harshness or 
not, was less significant than what it revealed about his own view of 
existence, which at its most penetrating, as in From Here to Eternity 
and later in The Pistol and The Thin Red Line, was always seen through 
the soldier's eye, in a hallucination where the circumstances of 
military life cause men to behave mostly like beasts and where human 
dignity, while welcome and often redemptive, is not the general rule.
  Jones was among the best anatomists of warfare in our time, and in 
his bleak, extremely professional vision he continued to insist that 
war was a congenital and chronic illness from which we would never be 
fully delivered. War rarely ennobled men and usually degraded them. 
Cowardice and heroism were both celluloid figments, generally 
interchangeable, and such grandeur as could be salvaged from the mess 
lay at best in pathos, in the haplessness of men's mental and physical 
suffering.
  Living or dying in war had nothing to do with valor, it had to do 
with luck. Jim had endured very nearly the worst. He had seen death 
face to face. At least partially as a result of this, he was quite 
secure in his masculinity and better able than anyone else I have known 
to detect muscle-bound pretense and empty bravado. It is fortunate that 
he did not live to witness Rambo or our

[[Page H2434]]

high-level infatuation with military violence. It would have brought 
out the assassin in him.
  The next major work of war was The Thin Red Line, a novel of major 
dimensions whose rigorous integrity and disciplined art allowed Jim 
once again to exploit the military world he knew so well. Telling the 
story of GIs in combat in the Pacific, it is squarely in the gritty, 
no-holds-barred tradition of American realism, a genre that even in 
1962, when the book was published, would have seemed oafishly out of 
date had it not been for Jim's mastery of the narrative and his grasp 
of sun-baked milieu of bloody island warfare, which exerted such a 
compelling hold on the reader that he seemed to breathe new life into 
the form.
  Romain Gary had commented about the book: ``It is essentially a love 
poem about the human predicament and like all great books it leaves one 
with a feeling of wonder and hope.'' The rhapsodic note is really not 
all that overblown.
  Upon rereading, The Thin Red Line stands up remarkably well, one of 
the best novels written about American fighting men in combat. The Thin 
Red Line is a brilliant example of what happens when a novelist summons 
strength from the deepest wellsprings of his inspiration. In this book, 
along with From Here to Eternity and Whistle, a work of many powerful 
scenes that suffered from the fact that he was dying as he tried 
unsuccessfully to finish it, Jim obeyed his better instincts by 
attending to that forlorn figure whom in all the world he had cared for 
most and understood better than any other writer alive, the common foot 
soldier, the grungy enlisted man.
  His friend at the end, Willie Morris, wrote these words:

       Dear Congressman Abercrombie, I hope this is what you had 
     in mind. My friend Jim Jones was sent to Schofield Barracks 
     at the age of 18 in 1939 as a private in the old Hawaii 
     Division, which later became the 25th Tropical Lightning 
     Infantry Division. He was a member of Company F. It would be 
     the division of the memorable characters in Jones's classic 
     novel From Here to Eternity: Prewitt and Maggio and Warden 
     and Chief Choate and Stark and Captain Dynamite Holmes and 
     the others, and it would go through Guadalcanal and New 
     Georgia and the liberation of the Philippines all the way to 
     the occupation of mainland Japan, although Jim's own fighting 
     days would end when he was wounded at Guadalcanal.
       Schofield Barracks resonates with the memory of James Jones 
     and the imperishable characters and events he placed here in 
     his fiction, the sounds of the drills, the echoes of Private 
     Robert E. Lee Prewitt's Taps across the quadrangle, the 
     Japanese planes swooping over the barracks of the fateful 
     morning of December 7, 1941.
       On the morning of December 7, after the attack started, Jim 
     went to the guard orderly desk outside the colonel's office 
     of the old 27th Regiment quadrangle to carry messages for 
     distraught officers, wearing an issue pistol he was later 
     able to make off with as his fictional Private Mast did in 
     The Pistol.
       In mid-afternoon of that day his company, along with 
     hundreds of others, pulled out of Schofield for their 
     defensive beach positions. As they passed Pearl Harbor, they 
     could see the rising columns of smoke for miles around. Jones 
     wrote:
       ``I shall never forget the sight as we passed over the lip 
     of the central plateau and began the long drop down to Pearl 
     City. Down toward the towering smoke columns as far as the 
     eye could see, the long line of Army trucks would serpentine 
     up and down the draws of red dirt through the green of cane 
     and pineapple. Machine guns were mounted on the cab roofs of 
     every truck possible. I remember thinking with the sense of 
     the profoundest awe that none of our lives would ever be the 
     same, that a social, even a cultural watershed had been 
     crossed which we could never go back over, and I wondered how 
     many of us would survive to see the end results. I wondered 
     if I would. I had just turned 20 the month before.''
       It is fitting that Eternity Hall be dedicated to James 
     Jones. He was one of the greatest writers of World War II. 
     Many consider him the foremost one. His spirits will dwell 
     forever on these grounds.

  On my last night in Paris heading for Africa and beyond, I left Jim 
and Gloria vowing someday somehow would I see From Here to Eternity and 
Jim honored at Schofield Barracks.
  James Jones had said to his brother in 1942,

       I would like to leave books behind me to let people know 
     what I have lived. I'd like to think that people would read 
     them avidly, as I have read so many, and would feel the 
     sadness and frustration and joy and love I tried to put in 
     them, that people would think about that guy James Jones and 
     wish they had known the guy that could write like that.

  They know you at Schofield Barracks, Jim, today, in Eternity Hall. 
The ghosts of all those who came before to this quadrangle and the 
shades of all those who will come, know you and they know you love 
them.
  As he neared death, he struggled to finish Whistle, to complete what 
he had begun with Eternity. The final scene of the novel became the 
ultimate expression of his passion. Facing the end, he wrote of 
``taking into himself all the pain and anguish and sorrow and misery 
that is the lot of all soldiers, taking it into himself and into the 
universe as well.''
  The universe for James Jones in From Here to Eternity began and ended 
at Schofield Barracks. The measure of this universe and the final 
judgment of and about James Jones is to be found in the simple 
declaration of his dedication:

       To the United States Army. I have eaten your bread and 
     salt. I have drunk your water and wine. The deaths ye died I 
     have watched beside, and the lives ye led were mine. From 
     Rudyard Kipling.

  ``I write,'' Jim said, ``to reach eternity.'' You made it, Jim. Today 
in Eternity Hall, in Quadrangle D, in Schofield Barracks, you made it. 
Welcome home, Jim.

                          ____________________