From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [506]
The scavenger hunt for objectionable words went on in Robinson, Illinois, also. Helen Howe, married to Jones’s boyhood friend Sylvanus (Tinker) Howe, received a telephone call from Lowney one evening reporting that the galleys had come, had to be proofed, and that four-letter words had to be removed. Four or five people, Jones included, sat around a table at Lowney’s house, and when they came to a four-letter word, they’d say, “The sentence says so and so. Can we take that one out?”
“Hell, no,” Jones would say. Helen remembers that “they needed to delete sixty-three and Jones only agreed to removing fifty-one.”
Jones liked Manges and was willing to horsetrade with him: “If I take this out, can we keep this.” The counting and horsetrading became a joke end ultimately collapsed, but the damage to the novel was not undone. It must be remembered that Jones generally handled this trying time with grace; he remained friends with Mitchell and liked Manges, using him later as his private attorney.
Scribner’s had an initial advertising budget of $10,000 for Eternity, placed advertisements in important journals, and sent galleys to American writers and to important newspapers end magazines. The initial reviews were mostly filled with praise. Mailer called Eternity “one of the best of the ‘war novels’ and in certain facets perhaps the best.”
The novel was published on February 25, 1951, and had phenomenal sales. By May it had sold 163,000 copies and was selling at the rate of 4,000 a week. Later, the paperback edition had even larger sales, and the popular movie of Eternity also increased sales. The novel soon appeared in English-speaking countries, and translations into many languages were forthcoming.
The reading public did not know about the changes made in the text of From Here to Eternity. This edition, based on the manuscript in the Rare Book and Special Collections Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and on Jones’s letters of protest, restores the text to its original state, with changes agreed to by Jones.
Jones wrote Mitchell on March 18, 1950, “I would like you to remember . . . that the things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will, in five years, or ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway . . . and then we will kick ourselves for not having done it . . .” Jones properly argued that there was nothing salacious in the book. He rightly observed that in the future “we will wonder why we thought we couldn’t do it. Writing has to keep evolving, into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve. You remember that.”
Establishing the Text
The manuscript of From Here to Eternity in the Rare Book and Special Collection Library was photocopied for my use. Just over 170 pages have changes and deletions. The editorial deletions were made by pencil marks, and the original word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or entire page are legible.
Jones often wrote in the margin of the manuscript pages his objections to deletions: “I hate to lose this,” and “only for profanity.” When he made such objections, I have restored that passage. “One way, two way, and three way girls” was attacked by the editors but survived in the text.
Jones wanted such words as “fuck,” “fucking,” “cocksucker,” “asshole,” and “cunt” left in the text, and I have restored them wherever they were omitted. The huge penis is once again rampant.
I have restored the discussion about art between Warden and Mazzioli, the wet dream episode, and the extended pages on “cunt-pictures.” Deletions in the queer passages are returned to the places where they belonged. Sections of the quarrels between Warden and Karen have been returned to the text.
If Jones revised a section, I