To the End of the War (11 page)

An important date for James Jones was November 3, 1943, when he met Lowney Handy, wrote A.B.C. Whipple in
Life
, May 7, 1951. Whipple speculated: “If this meeting had not taken place,
From Here to Eternity
would not have been written at all.” Perhaps this is true; Lowney and Harry Handy did help Jones. He could have continued to study at New York University, where he would have met many writers. He could have studied with G.I. Bill support at the University of Illinois where there were several creative writing teachers and
Accent
, a well-known little magazine. He remained with Lowney for years.

The conversations of Johnny, George, and Will are the real strengths of this story, but Sandy is seen as a sympathetic woman who was interested in helping servicemen with problems. Johnny was enchanted by her.

THE MARION HOME, AUTUMN 1943

“H
OW’S THE PLAYING COMING ALONG,
Will?” Johnny asked after a pause.

Will waved his hand in a dismissing gesture. “You know how it is, in the army,” he said easily. “I never have any time to practice. The only piano around is in the Service Club, and it’s badly out of tune; it’s a gift from somebody that didn’t want it anymore. And somebody’s always playing the jukebox. Or else a bunch of guys come up and hang around the piano and want me to play popular numbers for them. What can you do? You can’t turn them down. My fingers are stiff now from not getting enough practice.”

Will smiled and glanced at his long fingers, inspecting them. He had spent the morning in the church at the organ. He was alone and playing for his own amusement and enjoyment. He had played the organ in his mother’s church since he had been in the eighth grade. The morning had left him a little depressed. He had finally had to quit, his fingering was so bad.

“I played in a band and orchestra in Miami Beach. But I quit that; I couldn’t stand it. You know how a GI band is. After I quit that, I got into this ASTP thing.” Wilson laughed. “That’s the biggest hoax of the war. I had to get into the Engineering part of it. They aren’t really trying to teach anybody anything. You have to have a Master’s Degree to get into either the Psychology or the Languages. You know how many young men who got drafted out of mid-year in college are going to have a Master’s Degree. Nobody tries anymore. We all go to classes and play tick-tack-toe or just sit. The instructors are worse than the students: Everybody’s just putting in time. Nobody expects to learn anything or teach anything.

“I’m going to get out of that as soon as I go back from furlough. If they won’t let me quit, I’ll get myself flunked out and go back to being a clerk, typist, I guess. At least I’m still in the Air Corps. Why in God’s name did you transfer out of the Air Corps into the Infantry?”

Johnny grinned and shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I suppose you could say I was looking for adventure, I guess. I was just a punk kid who believed all the crap he read in books. I wanted to be a soldier in the old British tradition of Kipling and P. C. Wren. Comradeship and the Regiment-Against-the-World-Stuff. There was none of that at Hickam Field, and I thought I could find it in the Infantry.”

“Did you find it?” Wilson grinned.

“Sure. Like hell. They don’t make that kind of soldier anymore. I doubt if they ever did, except in some romantic writer’s mind.”

“This ASTP thing,” Will went on, “is terrible.” Will felt he had struck a topic that Johnny did not like to talk about, and he tactfully swung away from Johnny’s acrid embarrassment. “It’s a graft racket of some kind; I wish I knew just what. I think it’s a means of finding work for a lot of colonels and majors who got political commissions and are useless for anything else. It’s a terrible mess, and it’s going to crack pretty soon. They’ll turn these thousands of guys back to straight duty and probably stick them in the Infantry. That’s the way the rumour has it. They’re the cream of the brains of the enlisted ranks, and they’ll all get shoved right into Combat Infantry. It’s too big a stink to last much longer, and they’ll have to find something to do with all those men. I’m getting out while I can still get back into the Air Corps; I have no desire to be a slogging Infantryman. It’ll bust pretty soon, and there’ll be hell to pay for somebody. A situation like that makes soldiers wonder what in hell this war is, a war for freedom or a way to provide employment for a bunch of future generals.”

“Yeah,” said Johnny. “I know what you mean. It’s the same way overseas.” It was a strange thing, Johnny found, to be riding in the back of “Aunt” Fanny’s car with Wilson Carpenter and talking about the army. It was strange to hear familiar terms and expressions of bitterness coming from the mouth of Wilson Carpenter. Always before, his life in the army and the war and his life in Endymion had been two complete compartments, but now he was seeing them merge and become one. Even smug, self-centered, hateful little Endymion was being caught up by the great maelstrom. It brought home to Johnny the fact that nowhere in the world anymore, was there a place safe from the invading hatred and blood-lust and bitterness. He had felt somehow that when he came here to Endymion he could swing into a world from which the war and death and army politics were absent, could have a short breather in which he could forget about wearing a uniform and taking orders from some senator’s lawyer’s son, from the rah-rah ROTC boys who needed a sergeant to always tell them what to do. He should have known better. Even Wilson Carpenter who played the piano well enough to make a concert tour with a group of professional singers before the war, even he was inextricably bound into this thing, even he felt the slow bite of the acid of hate.

Wilson’s mention of the rumours and the gripes brought back pictures into Johnny’s mind teeming with men, bitter men who griped, not because the custom was to gripe but because if they didn’t let out their hatred that way they would turn upon themselves and bite themselves like rattlesnakes and die of their own venom; unhappy men who lived by rumour because they had no other force to tie their lives to. Johnny remembered suddenly that he was a soldier in uniform, and that he was over-the-hill, and that in time he must go back.

“I’ve been doing a little composing, Johnny,” Wilson told him. “Nothing much. Just setting some poems I like to music. But I’m feeling my way around, in the dark sort of. Maybe when this silly war is over, I’ll be able to do something. I’ve seen some things in the past two years that I’d like to be able to say in music.”

Johnny watched Wilson light a cigaret. As kids, there had been a quality about Wilson that had always made Johnny feel loutish and uncouth, made him feel big and brutish and dumb, though actually he had been no bigger or stronger than Will. The feeling was still there. Johnny felt as if his fingers were all thumbs beside the superb coordination of Will’s body. He envied Will his relaxed and easy-going poise. He envied Will his outward calm. There was some inner conviction in Will that gave him an ability to take things as they came Johnny could feel the calm power that radiated from Will’s personality.

He and Will had lived side by side as children. They had been seated next to each other in almost every class in school, clear through high school. As far back as Johnny could remember, Wilson’s mother had dominated Wilson’s life with an iron-clad hand. He could still hear, her sharp insistent voice calling, “Will-l-l-l-
son
! You come home now. You have to practice.” He actually believed they could hear her a block away. Even as a small boy, a frown would pucker Will’s little pug-dog face, and he would say reluctantly, “Gee, I gotta go home. I’d sure like to stay and play some more, but I gotta do my practicing.” And he would trudge off home, his feet dragging, his hands jammed into his pockets. Wilson had never rebelled or fought back. He had always done what his mother told him; he was a “good son.” But Johnny knew there was more to it than that. The same situation of the mother’s dominance of the son occurred hundreds of times in every generation in every town. And almost invariably, it was a symbol for the failure of the young man who was dominated. The mother tied the boy to her apron strings, and the boy could never fight loose, from the moment he learned about sex, he turned his knowledge and twisted it around his mother; he fell in love with his mother, and—even like Stendhal—dreamed about sleeping with her and being her lover. He measured other women, as he grew older, alongside the yardstick of his mother, and none of them ever quite measured up. That was common knowledge, everyday psychology, known by laymen who never heard of the Oedipus complex. And yet the mothers continued to bind their sons with apron strings, in order to receive the pure kind of love their husbands could not give them, and never was there a surer recipe for failure. It made homosexuals, it made misfits who could not adjust to life, and still the mothers continued their ravenous eating of their young.

It was supposed to make great artists of men, but Johnny knew that such a superstition was untrue. A man could not become great at anything unless he found some way to combat the absorption of his soul. Most men did it by fighting and by rebellion, and by the time they had fought free, their freedom was lost in their own rebellion. But Wilson had never needed to fight free. Somewhere along the line as a child, he had learned some inner secret, had learned to tap some hidden wellspring of strength that other men did not know about. Wilson had found some way to be mentally free of his mother’s dominance, and so he could afford to ignore his physical dominance. It was this same source of spiritual knowledge that puzzled Johnny. He could feel its presence, but he could never grasp it.

Johnny shook his head and lit a cigaret, himself, noticing how awkwardly he did it compared to Will.

“I’ve got a Negro friend down at camp,” Will was saying, “Who’s doing some fine work. He’s from Terre Haute; I met him over a piano and we got to talking about Terre Haute. He’s really got a lot of talent. I’d like for you to meet him. He’s already finished a concerto since I’ve known him. His ear is so fine he doesn’t even need a piano to compose. He does it on paper right out of his head. I’ve been trying that some and I’m getting on to it. If I can do that, I’ll be able to work no matter where I am. I’ll need that knowledge, because I expect to be sent overseas as soon as I get myself kicked out of ASTP. My Negro friend has been helping me. We work together a lot.”

Wilson laughed. “I almost got beat up by a couple of guys who were in my barracks, because I ran around with this Negro boy. They told me I couldn’t associate with him, and that if I didn’t quit being friendly to him, they’d beat me up.” He laughed again, pleasantly.

Johnny’s face tightened up and became taut. Wilson was surprised to see how such subtle changes of expression could make his face into a diabolic mask. “What did you do?” Johnny asked in a flat voice.

“Nothing,” said Will. “I just talked to them. I told them in as calm a voice as I could muster that I’d kill them both if they ever laid a finger on me or the Negro. I wouldn’t of course; I wouldn’t know what to do but run if they started to beat me up. But my bluff worked; I impressed them enough so that they’ve left me alone. You wouldn’t think sane, intelligent men would act that way, would you?”

“No,” said Johnny. “Nobody could be intelligent and feel like that.”

“Well, they’re supposed to be intelligent,” Will said quietly. “They seem to be pretty smart. I suppose they just don’t think much.”

Fanny pulled the car into Sandy’s driveway, and they got out. Johnny’s face remained taut and his eyes cold and hard. Wilson had never seen him look like that before, and he was sorry he had ever mentioned the affair. He wondered what Johnny was thinking to make his face look so.

Actually, Johnny was not thinking anything. Several visions were in his mind, swirlingly mingled together so that he couldn’t have sorted one from the other. One memory was a scene from a novel by Jim Tully, a scene which told in brutal photographic words of the lynching and burning of a Negro. Another was a scene he had himself witnessed in Honolulu; three MPs beating a helpless drunken soldier unmercifully with their loaded sticks. The other memory he had also seen; three American Infantrymen, carrying a sick and helpless Jap prisoner, stripped naked, carrying him back to the rear. They carried him face down; the Jap was sick with dysentery and the excreta dribbled from him in a yellow stream; every time the three soldiers came near a rock in their path, they would bounce the Jap viciously against it either on his chest or on his face or perhaps his crotch. If Johnny had been asked to voice his thought, he would have mumbled something about it being an inhuman perverse thing that made strong men, powerful in number, enjoy oppressing and injuring a helpless defenseless man, all of which would have sounded rather trite and platitudinous to a listener.

Fanny led them to the front door where she knocked several times. Sandy came and let them in. She took them through the house to the sunroom where George Schwartz sat sullen and defensively in a deep chair, his right pants leg pinned up and his crutches leaning against the wall behind him. On the floor of the room were two large cardboard boxes filled with books, wrapping paper, and cut cord lying in disarray around them.

“You’ll have to excuse the way things look, Fanny,” Sandy said, with what might have been a touch of irony. “I just got some books in today from Indianapolis. George and I have been giving them the once-over.” She moved a stack of books from the divan to make room and set them haphazardly in a corner. Johnny and Wilson sat down on the vacated divan near George’s chair. Johnny was half lost in his own chain of thoughts begun by Wilson’s remark about the Negro, and Wilson seemed his usual easy self, but both of them partially felt that feeling of awkwardness that belongs to just-arrived guests who as yet don’t know what to do with themselves or what to say.

The room was a small one with a low ceiling that made it seem smaller than it was, in comparison to the larger and higher-ceilinged other rooms. It had the effect of a hidden private alcove. There was one big easy chair, an antique love-seat, and a big couch-bed covered with a green and cream plaid that looked soft and comfortably mussable. There were small windows along two sides, and the other two were covered with shelves of books. Bookcases had been built in over the couch to form a tiny canopy at the head which concealed two fluorescent reading lamps. The other wall was covered with bookshelves to the low ceiling, leaving only room for the door into the next room. It was a comfortable, lived-in room, a hodge-podge with no pretension toward “style” or “period.” It was a room people walked into and made themselves at home, at the same time feeling self-conscious about doing so.