[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.
____________________