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Was a WWII Classic Too Gay?
As the nation marks another Veterans Day with gays still barred from serving openly, Kaylie Jones, daughter of From Here to Eternity author James Jones, reveals that a major gay sex storyline was cut from her father’s famed novel. Plus, view the original manuscript.
My father, James Jones, shocked the world by using the F-word and many other colorful expletives in his 1951 novel From Here to Eternity. When he was asked to eliminate the offending language from the book, which was based on his experiences in Hawaii in the peace-time Army, he refused and wrote his editor at Scribner’s, Burroughs Mitchell, a prescient letter:
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 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 know there is nothing salacious in this book as well as I do. Therefore, whatever changes you want made along that line will be made for propriety, and propriety is a very inconstant thing.
Click Image to View The Original From Here to Eternity Manuscript
My father was told to cut the homosexual scenes in the novel, and he refused to eliminate them because he felt this would be unfaithful to reality he witnessed. (The original manuscript of From Here to Eternity resides in the rare books library at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the extent to which the scenes were cut can be seen by comparing the original text to the published version.)
How courageous was my father’s stand? Only five years before the publication of From Here to Eternity, Doubleday published Edmund Wilson’s novel, Memoirs of Hecate County. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice raided Doubleday bookstores in Manhattan and seized 130 copies of the book due to its explicit depiction of heterosexual sex. The New York District Attorney charged Doubleday with selling obscene material. Doubleday was convicted. Once the novel had been declared obscene in New York, Doubleday took it out of circulation nationwide to avoid the risk of further prosecution. Booksellers and librarians removed it from their inventories. The Supreme Court later split 4-4 on the case, allowing the conviction to stand. The book was not republished in the US until 1959.
Maggio makes extra bucks by hanging out with older, rich gay men who live in Honolulu, who pay good money for his company. The original manuscript goes into great detail about what kind of sexual favors soldiers like Maggio are willing to provide.
My father wanted to write an honest and truthful book about the peace-time Army preceding WWII, and he insisted that could not be done if the language and routines of the soldiers were eliminated from the book. The soldiers in Hawaii were dead broke, barely one step up from homeless. They joined the Army during the Great Depression because they had nowhere else to go. And they were treated almost as badly as the homeless by the civilians that populated Oahu. They spent their meager Army salaries on leave days paying for whores and booze and on gambling – a way to pass the time.
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Having recently finished and thoroughly enjoyed Kaylie Jones's memoir, LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME, I read this essay with great enthusiasm. What a wonderful way to commemorate so solemn an occasion as Veteran's Day. Thanks to Jones for adding another layer to her father's legacy. I knew James Jones to be an amazing writer; it's gratifying to learn he was also a man of courage. Of course it's disheartening to realize that almost fifty years after the publication of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY gays, both in and out of the military, are still not guaranteed the same rights in our country as all Americans. President Obama recently stated, "I will end 'Don't ask; Don't tell.'" It's a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.
It should be no surprise that organized religion, with its foundation in fear and the criminalization of all forms of pleasure, should set its sights on James Jones.
These cavemen drive me nuts, even though they are finally back on all fours, reduced from the height of their powers in the fifties. I regret that Mr. Jones had to endure their attention.
Reading Jones is an amazing experience - he was so brilliant in such an effortless way.
Kevlar, God still loves you and you can find your help through him/
This is a fascinating article! Congrats to Kaylie and the Daily Beast! I believe that one of the things that made Provincetown into a gay/gay-friendly resort was not only the presence of the art colony, but the fact that from around 1900 through WWII it was a regular location for summer maneuvers for the entire US Navy--Tennessee Williams wrote letters to friends about his escapades with the sailors in Provincetown---an important and intentionally hidden aspect of military life--Kudos to you and your father for his bravery!
This is absolutely fascinating. Your father's account squares with the history recorded by Alan Berube in his great book "Coming Out Under Fire." No surprise that Maggio's gayness didn't make it into the film, yet the taunting Ernest Borgnine piles on Frank Sinatra isentirely congruent with gay-bashing.
Prewitt, meanwhile was played by an actual gay actor, Montgomery Clift.
No same-sex doings in Terence Malick's film of "The Thin Red Line" -- or the previous motion picture adaptation either.
I don't think my father intended to portray Maggio as gay, only as someone who didn't mind trading sex for extra cash with rich, gay men. Many soldiers apparently did this, and did not think of themselves as gay, as I pointed out in my essay.
I read this book in the mid-50's as a high school senior, primarily because it described sex and used the word, "fuck." Big stuff to a high school kid in the 50's. But I was drawn into the novel, and I've read it a few more times over the years. It's a masterpiece.
But my most significant rereading of the novel was in the early 60's, after I had spent time in the Army. I realized on rereading that Jones had captured the essence of Army life--a home for its soldiers with an essence that other institutions don't have. You do indeed run into characters in the Army much like what Jones portrayed.
A great novel, far greater than my poor powers of description can convey.
That was part of the intrigue of Catcher in the Rye for me.
Lovely that the author has to cast her prejudice and generalizations onto gays. Calling a gay "the dominant one" reinforces stereotypes about gays and gay relationships. Good going!
I take exception to this comment.
The whole point is that Jones wanted to create, within the aesthetic parameters of his novel, a realistic portrait of life. There are great variations from one gay relationship to another, but certainly there are some gay relationships that revolve, in a healthy way even, around dominant and submissive roles. In the case of these characters, internalized homophobia caused by societal bigotry made a truly healthy relationship impossible for them. It seems apparent to me that Kaylie Jones is insightful and was not casting "her prejudice and generalizations onto gays" in any way. Similarly, had she described Hamlet as indecisive, that would not have been disparaging of Danes at all.
Open and unfettered swearing is positively evolving? It seems more like backward 'progress' from civilization to undisciplined animal behavior to me.
Thank you.
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