Ice-Cream Headache (2 page)

Probably one of the reasons I’ve written so few stories is that I’ve almost always been involved with some damn novel or other. Also, it’s often hard to get them published in the magazines, even if you’re not young and unknown. Certainly, unless you want to turn yourself into a story hack, you cannot make a living off them. Then too there is the question of self-imposed censorship. One simply can’t write anything outspoken about sexuality and get it published in any magazine printing today. This automatically rules out a whole raft of subjects. If sexuality and an interest in it is one of your main themes, as it is with me, this takes away from what you can write a very large chunk of what you’d like to write. You find yourself pre-censoring from your material much of what you’d like to write according to what you know you can get printed, or else you just lay the idea away and never do it at all. I can do better with novels.

But perhaps some gossip about the stories would be interesting. The first batch of five was written in the summer of 1947 just after I had sent in to Maxwell Perkins the first two hundred pages of the first draft
of From Here to
Eternity.
I had begun it in March. Before that I had written an entire novel and then rewritten it twice, once in New York and once while working on a commercial fishing boat in the Florida Keys, and had tried my hand at innumerable stories. I was pretty discouraged about my two hundred pages and while waiting to hear from Perkins, unable to continue with the novel until I did, I hauled out some old story attempts (only one of them even finished) and had a go at rewriting them. I finished five of them before a letter came from Perkins; and in doing so suddenly and for no reason that I could find I began to write well, in my own voice and in my own way, with a sense of timing and with rhythms that suited my ear and my emotion. These five are reprinted here in the chronological order in which they were written from first one to last one, beginning with “The Temper Of Steel” and ending with “Secondhand Man.” And when Perkins’ cautiously and politely critical letter came back, I knew what he was talking about. I put the two hundred pages away and without looking at it began to write the version of
Eternity
which exists today, chapter by chapter without ever going back. That early two hundred pages, now lost or destroyed, gone anyway, had a rudimentary version of the “bugle scene” where Prewitt blows Taps, a very poor version. Perkins did not live to see the final version because he died that fall in 1947.

I worked hard all that year on
Eternity.
Then in the winter of 1948 while living in Naples, Florida, after sending in the second section of it to my new editor Burroughs Mitchell in the hope of a further advance, I was so written out, busted up and worn down I decided to take some time off and began a story concerned with some events of the previous summer. This became “None Sing So Wildly,” more a novella or novelette than a story. It took me three months to write. I had never meant to spend that much time on it. After I finished it, I rewrote the story “Secondhand Man” which had never satisfied me, expanding it from a mood piece about the North Caroline mountains into the character study it is today. I sent both of these all over, to just about everybody, but could not sell them. But I was getting used to that. I had sold one story the year before to the
Atlantic
, and after the first flush of joyful disbelief, found it changed my life almost not at all.

The next summer, in 1949, found me living in a house trailer in Memphis, Tennessee. It was very hot and I remember I had reached and was working on The Stockade section of
Eternity.
I had just introduced the character of Jack Malloy and was forced to bone up and reread everything I could about the Wobblies, and could not continue the book until I had. The story I began then, just to have something to do, became “Greater Love” and my first real attempt at writing seriously about combat. A new guy had moved in with a trailer down the street in the trailerpark, and it turned out that although I had never known him, he too had spent time in Guadalcanal and in New Georgia. I’m sure that our talks, sitting out at night on the porch beside his trailer or mine, breathing the night air and drinking beer, had something to do with that story being written when it was. I sent it all around too, with the usual result.

“The King” was written in the summer of 1955. By then I had finished
Eternity
and it had become a bestseller and famous and I was deep into the writing
of Some Came Running.
I had lived several months in New York that year, working on the novel, and while there I had returned often to an old haunt from poorer days at NYU: Jimmy Ryan’s on 52nd St. Jimmy claimed he remembered me from the “old days”, whether he really did or not, and we talked a lot about those “old days” back in the ’40s before Sidney Bechet moved to France. “The King” grew out of all that. I wrote it sitting in my housetrailer under the shade of three big soft maples on a grassy hillside in Marshall, Illinois.

Some Came Running
was coming on toward being finished by this time. Whatever the critics thought of it (which was damned little!) it had nevertheless kept me occupied for six whole years. During that time I took time off to do only that one story, “The King.” But I made notes from time to time on story ideas and various approaches to them. Then in 1957,
with the book in hand
(that magnificent phrase!), I met my wife, married, spent half a summer in Haiti, learned skindiving. Perhaps this huge change in my life, this half a year spent in the middle of an “expanding universe” so to speak, influenced me. In any case when my wife and I returned to Illinois in the summer of 1957 I found myself aware of the Middlewest and its ambiance in a way I had not been since probably my twelfth or thirteenth year. Also I wanted to do some stories before tackling the next novel on the list. I had always meant to do a novel on childhood in the ’20s and ’30s set in that beautiful, grim, frightening, land- and spirit-locked part of the world. Ergo, why not do a book of childhood stories on it instead?

I thought it was a great idea. Novels on childhood, particularly Middlewestern childhoods, were dime a dozen. It would be a fresh approach. I already had one finished childhood story (“Just Like The Girl”) which would fit right in, and I had notes on a whole flock of others, twelve or thirteen. I attacked this project. Three of the last four stories here are the result of that. “Sunday Allergy” is the result of a break taken off from childhood stories.

Then, after finishing “The Tennis Game,” I took another break from childhood stories to write another short story, one I had made notes on for a long time. It was an Army story and was to be called “The Pistol.” And, of course, somewhere about five or ten pages into it I suddenly realized I didn’t have a short story here, I had a short novel. Moreover, I had something I had been looking for for a long time: namely, a subject around which to construct a deliberately, consciously
symbolic
novel; one in which the symbol is deliberately imposed upon the material from outside, beforehand, more in the European manner. But I wasn’t sure I had enough material to flesh it out. Should I try it or not? I discussed it with my wife. “Write in a fight,” she suggested. “You write fights marvelously.” So I did.

And, I haven’t gotten back to my book of childhood stories since.

They’re still there though, waiting. I have the notes, and I have the titles for most. Maybe I’ll get to it after I finish the current novel. If I do, all of the childhood stories in this volume will be included in it.

Writing short stories has a totally different feel from writing novels. I’m not sure whether I like it better or less. There isn’t that long haul ahead of you staring you in the face: this year, next year, the year after. By the same token the anguish of creative decision is much sharper writing stories. The particular point at which you must decide on the structure to point the ending you have finally discovered, comes much quicker. But then too it’s decided and over and done with much quicker. Writing stories is like having a series of high-fever ailments in which the crisis comes soon and either passes or doesn’t. Writing a novel is like having t.b. or some such long term chronic ailment with a low grade fever that takes a long time to cure. Take your choice. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

As a postscript, it might be interesting for a writer—if not for a reader—to note the following statistic. In 1951 when
From Here to Eternity
was published I had five unpublished stories on hand. Within four months I sold four of the five, and sold them in every case to a magazine which had previously turned all five stories down at least twice. I don’t know what this statistic signifies. But I’m damn sure not going to knock myself off over it like Martin Eden did.

J.J.

Paris, October 1965

Edward Weeks chose this story from among the first five to print as an “Atlantic First” in the March 1948 issue of
Atlantic Monthly,
It seems young to me today, but I think it makes a good and serious point. The point however is well concealed. See if you can find it. In case you can’t, I’ll explain it after the story. It’s possible I didn’t point it up enough, but at the time I believed with Hemingway that one should not point one’s story points up.

“K
NIVES,” THE TALL MAN SAID,
looking down at the gate-leg table. “They are truly ingenious things, are they not?”

Johnny moved his cocktail glass and followed the tall man’s gaze down.

Their hostess smiled brightly. “Yes, aren’t they? So gruesome.” She spared the table one polite glance from her quick peerings about the room at her other guests. Her short hair, feathered about her ears and forehead, heightened the effect of a sparrow looking for bread. “Oh,” she said. “I see someone I must speak to. You two know each other? You won’t mind?”

“No,” Johnny said. He looked at his drink and decided he needed it.

“My dear lady,” the tall man said. “We met here in your home, at dinner. Don’t you remember?” He eyed Johnny. “Did we not?”

“Yes, Lon,” Johnny said. “Yes, we did.”

“But of course.” Their hostess smiled brightly. She put her frail hand on Johnny’s arm. “I want you to relax and just make yourself at home here. Another cocktail? These affairs are really nothing.” She brought the cocktail and flickered away after new crumbs.

The tall man picked up one of the knives and his eyes burned down into Johnny’s face. He tugged abruptly. The sheath embraced the knife, surrendered it only under pressure and with a squeak of protest. He held the knife with its tip pointed at Johnny’s chest and looked at him with that bright hard stare.

“Truly,” he said, “they are ingenious. Now you take these: there are none of the too heavy, too chrome, too fine-lined characteristics of mass production about these.”

Johnny looked at him and did not say anything. There were two knives in their embossed sheaths on the small table. Both knives had come from Africa in the hill country. The tall man had picked up the smaller one. The frantic buzz of conversation by which people earned their way at cocktail parties was incessant, fearing a letdown.

“These are individual pieces of work.” The tall man spoke authoritatively and gestured toward Johnny with the knife in his hand. “The savage who made this tried in his dim ignorant way to express himself, to put some of his knowledge of life and living into the making of it. To him, probably, it was truly beautiful. In fact, it is beautiful, because of its very crudeness, in the sense of being directly the opposite of our smoothly machined knives. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes, Lon,” Johnny said. “I guess that’s right.” It was his own fault for coming to cocktail parties. He had only met Lon twice. Lon had lived an adventurous life. That was all right, he liked Lon, but he did not want to talk knives.

Lon tossed the knife into the air and caught it deftly by the blade as it flickered down. His eyes glittered an answer to the knife’s flicker of light.

“Yes,” he said caressingly, “this is a nice knife.”

Lon swung the knife up and down lovingly, as if tentatively measuring the weight for throwing. He looked almost as if he would throw it through the cocktail party to stick it quivering in the wooden door. His hatchet face turned toward Johnny, stabbing at him like a knife itself, like the killing knives Lon knew, and used, and loved.

Johnny could hear the unending slur of voices around the large room playing Lon’s accompaniment. All of them knew of Lon’s achievements. He knew them too, and he wished that Lon would drop it.

“The wide part of the blade,” Lon explained technically, “that is for cutting. You can slash a man to ribbons with this one—in spite of its crude workmanship. Knowing where our host got it, I don’t doubt that the lifeblood of a number of men has flowed along this blade, right where my finger is. Does that not evoke a peculiar emotion?”

“Yes.”

Johnny could tell what he was doing but he was not angry, he was only tired. He wondered abstractedly if Lon knew why he avoided knives, or if Lon knew that there was a memory struggling to crawl up from the bottom of his mind.

“The point is also very sharp,” said Lon. “Not much power would be needed to push this knife through the thick outer epidermis of a man.”

“That’s right,” Johnny said wearily. “But the trouble with a long thin point like that is if it hits a bone, it’s liable to break or bend and then your beautiful knife is ruined.”

Lon nodded approvingly. He squinted down the thin length of the blade, holding the point with his thumb in the old practiced manner.

“That is true. Still, this is a fine knife. Better than the other, which is too long. One wants a short knife. Knife fighting is a lost art, just as the making of fine knives is a lost art.”

“You must have had an adventurous life,” Johnny said. He could feel the memory climbing the ladder of his spine into his brain.

Lon looked at him quickly. “Well,” he said. He pinged the point with his thumbnail; “Most of my knife experience came after the
first
war. In Spain and in northern Africa when I was wandering around. Of course, I had already learned my technique in Mexico, but the Mexican has not the finesse of the Spaniard, in knife fighting or anything else.