undefinedSketch by Birnkrant, 1958.

 

James Jones was interviewed in the sitting room of his rented apartment on the Île de la Cité, where he lives with his lovely wife, Gloria, and a Burmese cat called Hortense who was any moment expecting an expensive (a hundred and fifty dollars per kitten) litter of her kind. The sitting room is furnished with an overstuffed day bed; an old wooden table littered with half-empty bottles of Scotch, Haut-Brion, and quarterly magazines; and an odd assortment of straight-backed chairs variously upholstered in bright red, blue, and royal purple. Although the Joneses are quick to deny responsibility for the discord of color that plays about the room, they are proud of the many paintings they have bought since coming to Paris. One of these is a delightful representation of the view from the window, which Jones commissioned from a ten-year-old boy whom he had seen the previous summer painting along the Seine. This view is of the quay, the river, and, across the river, the Hôtel de Ville. Barges churn by under the window, and to the right, upstream, one sees the water swirling under the stern of the Île Saint-Louis. It is what Jones looks out upon as he sits each morning over the typewriter, chain-smoking, writing in bursts of stenographic speed.

Although it was evening when we began and Jones had left his desk some hours before, he was still dressed for work. Tight khaki pants and a loose green sweater set off his slim hips, heavy round-shouldered torso, and thick neck. From time to time as he talked, Jones would get up and pace the room with a peculiar rolling gait which spoke more of the former Golden Gloves contender than of the ex-soldier who had loved close-order drill. He speaks with slow concentration, the Illinois drawl very evident; and one has the impression that he prefers an Anglo-Saxon obscenity to a word with a Latin root. But if violence is always near the surface of Jones’s talk, his voice and manner are warm and gentle; the violence is in his own struggle with language itself. One feels finally that he is happier in questioning and listening, which he does with an intensity that is almost disconcerting. Though increasingly wary of interviews, Jones was on this occasion as generous with his time and thoughts as he is always with his whiskey. By way of a warm-up he suggested a game of darts, but in spite of Jones’s anxious coaching, the interviewer proved an indifferent player, and the session was quickly elevated to a discussion of less serious matters.

 

INTERVIEWER

For a starter, let’s talk about why you have come to Paris. I understand you have sold the house you had built in Illinois and have moved here more or less permanently.

JAMES JONES

Well, I suppose my prime excuse, at least in the beginning, was a novel I had planned to write about Americans in Paris, Americans of my generation as distinct from Americans in the twenties. That in itself is fascinating: the difference in flavor between the two generations. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but essentially it will have to do with jazzmen, some French and some American, and writers too. But the original idea was to build it around the life and character of Django Reinhardt, the gypsy guitarist.

INTERVIEWER

Yes, I remember that you wrote something about him in From Here to Eternity.

JONES

That’s the guy. I’ve always loved his music, better than any other single jazz musician I’ve heard. Because of that, I got fascinated by what I read and heard about him. He seems to have been a total individualist, in the sense that gypsies often are: without loyalty of any sort to any country; I mean totally amoral in any political sense. And the jazz part of it fits in here too, you see, because jazz and the jazz life are, after all, semi-illegal. Always have been—from the early days of Storyville and the riverboats: I mean, whorehouses, boozing, bars, dope, even crime, all that stuff. I think that’s one of the reasons jazz has attracted each succeeding generation of young Americans. It’s a pretty amoral sort of life really, and is one way of escaping the increasingly encroaching controls of a bureaucratic government. Jazz and jazzmen live pretty much on the edge of the law—no matter how the propagandists of any country try to drag them by the hair into the national morality. They are never really outlaws, or outlawed, but they can always be found somewhere on that amorphous fringe. So what I want to explore in this novel is whether Django’s type of individuality can exist today in any form. And I think that if it can survive it will be there, in jazz and that type of life, in near illegality if you will, that we will have to look for it.

INTERVIEWER

Having left America as you have, do you think of the move as a political gesture, a cutting off of national affiliation?

JONES

Oh no. Not at all. I’m an American, and always will be. I happen to love that big, awkward, sprawling country very much—and its big, awkward, sprawling people. Anyway, I don’t like politics; and I don’t make “political gestures,” as you call it. I don’t even believe in politics. To me, politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it. Politics is like having diabetes. It’s a science, a catch-as-catch-can science, which has grown up out of simple animal necessity more than anything else. If I were twice as big as I am, and twice as physically strong, I think I’d be a total anarchist. As it is, since I’m physically a pretty little guy ... No, in fact, one reason I left was because I believe it is good for an American writer to get outside his country—outside his continent—and see it from a vantage point outside its pervading emotional climate.

INTERVIEWER

Do you mean to imply that the American climate of opinion is essentially hostile to the kind of individuality that Reinhardt, and this kind of life, expressed?

JONES

I think any national climate of opinion would be, in the world of today. My grandfather had a saying he used to say to me when I was a kid: “Bodder,” he would say (that was a nickname he had for me), “always remember that I’m always for you, but I’d rather be for you when you’re right than when you’re wrong.” Well, that’s the way I feel about America. There’s no use trying to say we haven’t done a lot of things that were bad. We have. Like McCarthy, and the Subcommittee hearings, forcing Americans to rat on their friends, putting Ring Lardner and those others in jail for refusing to, forcing still others to abscond, refusing others the right to work and blacklisting them. That’s a pretty black mark to have to live down. But those things are changing some now. And guys like Arthur Miller can still get up and fight back, and make it stick. And at least in America a writer can still write pretty much what he wants to say—at least, he can say more of it than anywhere else in the world today. Except maybe England.

INTERVIEWER

Incidentally, did you have any difficulty in getting Eternity published?

JONES

Well, some, I guess. But it was all sexual, not political. My editor and I went over it with the lawyers beforehand, and we had to cut some scenes and a lot of four-letter words. Then about two years after it came out there was some talk about banning it from the mails. Some devout Catholic postal inspector had discovered it. But it never was. We had to cut some of the sex in Some Came Running, too. I find it a curious comment on the world we live in that we make such a distinction between what we can say, and do, and be, in private—and in public. My two books and what we had to cut from them are a good example of this.

INTERVIEWER

Well, now that you’re settled here in Paris, do you ever plan to go back to America to live?

JONES

Oh, sure. Eventually. But I’ve also got a book with an Italian background I want to do before we go home. Both of these novels, the Paris one and the Italian one, will be really major novels. Or I hope they will. Both are pretty big bites to chew, if they come off like I am planning them. I’ve been making notes on both for several years. So it’ll be a pretty long time before we go back.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel that your attitude toward your work has changed since living here?

JONES

No, no. I find it easy enough to work anywhere ... that is, if I don’t get too drunk every night. Although it was not very long ago that I discovered this. In getting married, leaving Illinois for New York and then Paris, I sort of resolved a question in my own mind, which was whether I could live from day to day with a family and friends around me and continue to do the kind of work I want to achieve. I was afraid I couldn’t; I was afraid I had to be isolated in order to write.