Book Review: WWII - A Chronicle of Soldiering

WWII: A Chronicle of Soldieringby James JonesUniversity of Chicago Press, 2014The earlier editions of this book, James Jones' WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering, had their share of problems. The original 1975 edition was an elaborate picture book, but, as the Publisher's Note of this new University of Chicago Press edition points out, those pictures had separate and often stingy copyrights and permissions. Those copyrights and permissions survived into the mass market paperback of the original edition, but in order to include all those great black-and-whites, the paperback had to be bound so firmly that you practically had to tear it apart in order to look through it (such limitations of form we endured in the days before iPads). It's thus probably not surprising that the whole shebang fell out of print - especially given the parlous and radically uneven nature of Jones' literary reputation since his death in 1971.That reputation currently flickers close to its nadir here at the dawn of the 21st Century. Jones' great novels, Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, Go to the Widow-Maker, and From Here to Eternity, have been only spottily and raggedly in print in the last twenty years, and they're not read, and they're scarcely taught, and they're critically disparaged, and their few fans usually mumble apologies for their lapse in taste. The sad truth is that for most of today's readers encountering this new picture-free edition of WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering on the New Release tables of bookstores, "James Jones" will be an unfamiliar name.But for some of those new readers, WWII will be a familiar kind of narrative experience, if a queasy one. Anyone who's ever had a WWII veteran in the family knows that queasiness well; whether it was a hard-handed father or a saintly old grandfather, the stories they tell tend to be the same - raucous, brutal, and coarse, the kind of thing you laugh at even while feeling slightly embarrassed to laugh. On the one hand, we remind ourselves that these men shipped out as teenagers to face the risk of death in Europe and the Pacific, but on the other hand, we feel awkward when even a beloved old relative rattles off "Jap" and "Kraut." We simultaneously crave and cringe at the unvarnished immediacy of these memories.WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering is a version of those unvarnished memories, only polished by a first-rate literary craftsman and strengthened by an at first deceptive amount of good research.You'll certainly cringe while reading it. Jones was a soldier during the war, a witness to Pearl Harbor, a participant in combat on Guadalcanal, and the recipient of a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and he has a corresponding lack of postmodern nicety. Reading the book is very similar to sitting at the dinner table with the old soldier: you tensely hope the forthcoming anecdote will be one of the presentable ones, and it doesn't always happen. Take Jones on that favorite of warrior-subjects, women. You need to brace yourself:

Mothers, at least American mothers, are a weird lot. Some sea-change seems to happen in a woman as soon as she becomes a mother. If she gives up enjoying sex with her boyfriend when she finally marries him and becomes a wife, she gives up even dreaming about it when she becomes a mother. All sorts of virtues claim her, and she claims them.

And just like those dinner-table performances, just when you hope the worst of it is over, you get a little more:

Thus, to teach a young American male to love war and to enjoy killing his fellow man - even a Jap or a Nazi - was about comparable to teaching his fresh, dewy-eyed virginal sister to love the physical aspects of simple fucking and that fellatio could be an enjoyable form of high art. These were the young men who hastened joyously to enlist in the early days after Pearl Harbor, and for some months after. One wonders, looking back on it, if perhaps a great part of their joy was not a result of being able legitimately to get away from homes filled with mothers and/or wives like those described above.

Thankfully, Jones, like so many of his fellow soldiers, has some fun stories as well:

Back in the outfits, the same old grind went on. Fight and run, run and fight. Walk, walk, walk, walk. A friend of mine had as his jeep driver an infantryman who finally had refused to walk anymore. He had been courtmartialed for this, given a month in a stockade, and when he came out, had been put to driving my friend's jeep. This much was okay, drive he would do; walk he wouldn't. He would not even walk to the latrine. When he had to go, he would come out of his shelter, drive his jeep fifty yards to the latrine and hop out. When he finished his crap, he would drive the jeep back to the CP. He had made his separate peace.

Jones does some remarkably sharp reflecting on the art and practice of history-writing itself - this is an entirely, refreshingly earnest book for all its gruff jadedness. He knows he's taken part in an enormously significant historical event, and at random intervals throughout WWII: A Chronicle of Soldiering he turns from his straightforward narrative to introspection about what we can and cannot know. "In my old age I have about come to believe that the whole of written history is miscreated and flawed by these discrepancies in the two ideals systems," Jones (who was 52 at the time) writes, "the one of how we would all like to believe humanity to be, but only the privileged can afford to believe is; and the one of how we all really know humanity in fact is, but none of us wants to believe it."In a way that's both slightly ironic and slightly saddening, Jones' book manages to proceed equally in both those systems simultaneously, and the end effect, mesmerizing in its own way, is that of a smart, hot-hearted man trying to grapple with the epic thing that happened to him in his youth. Jones died far too young, only a couple of years after he wrote this book, and it's a powerful, curious testimony. The good folks at University of Chicago Press are to be congratulated for salvaging it and putting it in front of the bookshopping crowds this winter. It doesn't look like those crowds want much to do with Jones anymore (sic transit, as he himself would have understood), but the gamble is praiseworthy even so.