From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [504]
Jones was psychologically wounded at that time, defiant and usually drunk. Lowney Handy and her husband, Harry, eventually let him into their home. She was an unofficial social worker, helping the troubled. She arranged Jones’s discharge from the army in 1944, and Harry supported him financially for six years while he wrote They Shall Inherit the Laughter and From Here to Eternity. Lowney was convinced Jones would be a major writer. She did not have a literary education, but she was an avid though unsystematic reader. She was seventeen years older than her young protegé. She became his teacher and at times his lover. Her abilities as a teacher were evolving but they began at an unsophisticated level. She dominated his life, but she allowed him time to learn to write. She did insist that he revise and revise. Her editing skills improved over the years, though she continued to be erratic in her judgments. A New Ager, she saw the world through the prism of Mme. Blavatsky and Theosophy and other Eastern thought and introduced these religions and philosophies to Jones, ideas in many ways opposed to his tragic view of life.
Jones thought he could write the Stewart novel in six months. He was too optimistic; he worked on the manuscript from 1946 to 1950. At times, he wrote Perkins on March 4, 1946, he was “stumbling along in the dark,” “with nobody to teach him what he must learn.” This was a plea to Perkins for more assistance and a recognition that Lowney had her shortcomings as a teacher. On March 16, 1947, he wrote Perkins that Laughter had been autobiographical, and he had a ready-made plot. In the Stewart novel, “I have nothing to go on except certain people I knew in the army and what made them tick. There is no plot at all except what I can create.”
Perkins was in failing health, and his letters to Jones were encouraging, but his suggestions were general in nature. Perkins died on June 17, 1947, and by that time he had read several chapters of the manuscript now titled From Here to Eternity. He had faith in the novel and regarded Jones as his last American discovery. Scribner’s then assigned Burroughs Mitchell, a young editor who had served as enlisted man and then officer in the Navy during the war, to be Jones’s editor.
Jones and Mitchell were soon friendly. Although a few years older than Jones, Mitchell’s service in the Navy gave him an understanding of the world Jones was attempting to capture in his novel. Jones was plagued with self-doubts and Mitchell tried to reassure him in a quiet way. Lowney, however, was not low-keyed in her encouragement. She wrote Jones on March 29, 1948, “After thirty you should be far ahead of Tolstoy when he was eighty. . . . You will be the greatest creative artist in the writing of fiction to come out of this age—perhaps the greatest that America ever produces.”
Harry Handy helped Jones buy a Jeep and a trailer, allowing Jones to get away from Robinson, especially in winter months. The work on the manuscript continued, until it was finally 1,381 pages in length.
Jones sent Mitchell the chapter on Pearl Harbor on October 30, 1949, from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He called the chapter a “tour de force” and “the climax, peak, end focus.” He saw that the end of all of his struggles to write this vast novel were almost over. He believed that his Pearl Harbor would “stack up with Stendhal’s Waterloo or Tolstoy’s Austerlitz,” and he promised to rewrite any sections not living up to that almost impossible standard. With some humor, he wrote, “We must remember people will be reading this book a couple hundred years after I’m dead, and that the Scribner’s first edition will be worth its weight in gold by then. We must never forget that.