From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [427]
But even then, when he was almost sober, he knew he could have done it, if things had been just a little bit different. That Eugene Gant, in that Thomas Wolfe book, that might have been himself when he was a kid. It was just exactly like him. It was almost weird, as if this Wolfe had looked into his head. How he lay out under the trees in the afternoon with the patches of sunlight and thought about women. How he got up early winter mornings when it was still dark to carry papers. How he wanted to see the nigger whore naked. If you changed it just enough to put it in Harlan Kentucky, it would be him! Christ, what a guy wouldnt give—to have known a fellow like that and been friends.
It was while he was reading Martin Eden that he got the idea to start writing down titles of other books to read, like Martin had done. There were lots of them in London. Most of them he had never heard of. A few he had heard Malloy mention. He wrote down all of them, with the author’s name, in the little notebook he had had Alma buy for him. He would look at the growing list as proudly as if it was a Presidential Citation. Before he was done, he would read them all. The next time he ran into Jack Malloy he would be able to talk back instead of just listen.
He did the same thing with a Thomas Wolfe book that Alma brought home on a hunch, writing them down in his notebook as he came on them. But when he had finished that one he found he had so many titles of books he wanted to read that it would take him at least a year of doing absolutely nothing but reading just to get through them.
It was partly that, the hopelessness of ever reading all of them, that brought the reading jag to its end.
The other thing that helped to end it and break it off short was Alma.
She got up early one morning and cornered him in the kitchen before Georgette was up. He was reading another Thomas Wolfe book, the one where the kid went to New York to become a great writer. He never did get to finish it to find out what happened to him. He was sitting behind the table of the glassed-in breakfast nook and could not get out.
“I want to know what you plan to do?” Alma said after she had got a cup of his coffee that was still heating on the stove.
“Plan to do when?” he said.
“Anytime,” Alma said crisply. “Now. Tomorrow. Next week. Shut that book and listen to me. What are you going to do?”
“Do about what?” he said.
“About the way things are,” she said. “Shut that book and listen to me! I’m getting tired of talking to the front covers of books!”
“Whats wrong with the way things are?”
“Just about everything,” Alma said. “I hardly talk to you from one day to another. You look at me as though you were half asleep—like now. As if you hardly knew who I was. I’m Alma, remember? Maybe you’ve forgotten? It was almost five months since I’d seen you, and then you were hurt.”
“Maybe being hurt got to my brain and made me remember,” he said, trying to be humorous. It did not come off very well.
“You dont expect to go on living here like this indefinitely, do you?” Alma said brittlely. “I think its time you figured out what you plan to do, dont you? Do you plan to go back to the Army? Do you plan to try to live here and get a job? Do you plan to try to get back to the States? Just what do you plan to do?”
Prew tore off a strip of newspaper to mark his place and pushed the book down the table out of reach. “Frankly, I aint planned anything. Does it make any difference?”
“Ugh,” Alma said. “This coffee is horrible.”
“Tastes all right to me,” he said defensively; her complaint of the coffee, like everything else, seemed to be directed at him personally.
“It’s been simmering on the stove so long its as muddy and thick as sorghum molasses,” Alma said. She got up and threw her cup out and emptied the rest and put a new filter paper in the Silex hourglass and put on water for a new pot.
Prew watched her. Her long black hair was still matted from sleeping and the thin print dressing gown