From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [503]
All happy and out on the town
Looked like time for me to choose, them Re-enlistment Blues.
Slep in the park that Sunday
Seen all the folks goin to church
Your belly feels so empty
When you’re left in the lurch
Dog soljers dont own pews. Re-enlistment Blues.
So I re-upped on Monday
A little sad and sick at my heart
All my fine plans was with my money
In the poke of a scheming tart
Guy always seems to lose. Re-enlistment Blues.
So you short-timers, let me tell you
Dont get yourself throwed in the can
You might as well be dead
Or a Thirty-Year-Man
Recruitin crews give me the blues,
Old Re-enlistment Blues.
Acknowledgment
LOOKING BACK, IT SEEMS to me now that the writing of this book was a collective enterprise. This is a rather startling development. If someone had suggested such a thought to me a couple of years ago when it was somewhat less than half completed, he would have been met with such a vehement attack of denial that he would have been forced to retire in embarrassment. Nevertheless, it is true.
Grateful acknowledgment is here tendered to the late Mr. Maxwell E. Perkins, for his help in even getting it started and his aid in keeping it going up to the time of his death; to Mr. John Hall Wheelock, for his periodic injections of encouragement and his help in editing it; to Mr. Burroughs Mitchell, for his sweating of it out over a period of almost three years without the slightest whimper and his fine work of editing; and to Mr. & Mrs. Harry E. Handy of Robinson, Illinois, without whose initial impetus I would never have started out to be a writer at all, and whose material and spiritual expenses over a period of seven years provided me with necessary nourishment.
Without all of these people this book would never have been written.
Afterword
Publishing History
“I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED to do a novel on the peacetime army,” James Jones wrote his editor, Maxwell Perkins, on February 10, 1946. Jones had resubmitted the manuscript of his novel They Shall Inherit the Laughter on January 17, 1946, and was impatient to learn the decision of the publishing house, Scribner’s. He perhaps had a premonition that the manuscript would not be accepted, for he sketched out several novels he was thinking of writing, including the one that became From Here to Eternity:
I want this protagonist to be: (Stewart is an old friend in the army, Wendson is a former 1st/Sgt of mine. I would use both in the same company.) ‘Draw Stewart’s life in army, his intense personal pride, his six months on stockade rockpile rather than admit he was wrong and accept company punishment when he felt he was right in his actions. The small man standing on the edge of the ocean shaking his fist, the magnificent gesture, both Wendson and Stewart completely fearless (unloved men, yet forced to prove to themselves that they can get along without love, because they have never had honesty or love, insist that they neither miss them or want them). Almost a criminal, almost an artist, but not either. . . .’
Perkins recognized the possibilities of a peacetime army novel, and he had serious reservations about They Shall Inherit the Laughter because he felt the reading public was not interested in the subject and that the work would insult military people and civilians.
Perkins telegraphed Jones on February 16, 1946:
“WOULD YOU CONSIDER PAYMENT FIVE HUNDRED NOW FOR OPTION ON STEWART NOVEL, AND SETTING ASIDE INHERIT LAUGHTER FOR REASONS ILL WRITE SOME FURTHER PAYMENT TO BE MADE AFTER WE APPROVE SOME FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS. WISH TO COOPERATE BUT HAVE MORE PAITH IN SECOND NOVEL AND HAVE FURTHER REVISION TO PROPOSED FOR LAUGHTER.”
Jones telegraphed Perkins his acceptance on February 17, 1946, stating, “PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS.” Perkins had edited Wolfe, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and his encouragement was vital to Jones, who left the army in 1944 after being wounded on Guadalcanal and spending months in a hospital near Memphis, Tennessee.
Jones had started writing after he joined the army in 1939 and had begun sections