SOME CAME RUNNING (1,266 pp.)—James Jones—Scribner ($7.50).
James Jones is the Stanley Kowalski of U.S. letters. Bulked into the sweaty T shirt of latter-day realism, he stirs raw sex, raw talk, raw emotions and raw ideas in a crude vat of the rawest home-brewed English. In From Here to Eternity, this concoction helped put across Novelist Jones's abrasive vision of a little-known area of U.S. life, the peacetime Regular Army. Steamy with sex, Some Came Running may hit the same one-armed bandit of bestselling success, but it is more than one-third longer (some 700,000 words in all) than king-sized Eternity—and three-thirds duller.
Dave Hirsh, late-thirtyish mock hero of Running, is that stock figure of much modern fiction, the self-pitying sore head who believes that the world owes him a loving. Dave is a World War II veteran and the author of two minor novels. He has been AWOL from his typewriter for seven years, and Choctaw rather than English would appear to be his first language. Sample: "A person could actually kill themselves that way." On an alcoholic whim, Dave returns in 1947 to Parkman. Ill., the hick home town he had deserted 19 years earlier in flight from a paternity charge lodged against him by a hay-prone hoyden. Parkman is Peyton Place transplanted, with more skeletons than it has closets.
Pigs in a Brassière Factory. Dave's father is a salty old reprobate who once ran off with the family doctor's wife and returned only to booze away his social security money at the local bars. Older brother Frank, acting head of the family, is a canny millionaire-in-the-making and a guilt-ridden lecher who loses successive mistresses to his wife's beagle-eyed sleuthing. Dave cannot stand the pompous Philistinism of Frank and his circle, gravitates toward Parkman's lower depths, a kind of Mermaid Tavern setting where the young toughs drink, brawl and frolic with the "pigs" who work at the brassiere factory. The arbiter of this elegant bunch is 'Bama Dillert, a gambler without a river boat. 'Bama is a cool autocrat of the poker table, and Dave Hirsh shortly becomes his equally cool partner. 'Bama believes that luck is a function of the brain and that man will eventually master it ("maybe thats the next stage of life or evolution us human beins will evolve up to or something like that"").
The next stage of life for Dave is his strange platonic affair with Gwen French. Gwen is teacher of "creative writing" at Parkman College, where "the sharp vinegary smell of intellectual ferment was everywhere... and the sizzling sound of the frying brains." Naturally, Dave falls into her skillet. He dreams of "a long, rich, exchangeful, reaching out, and perhaps even sometimes touching, making contact, love affair." But Gwen French believes that unrequited love drives a man to ink. Dave's novel progresses to a tattoo of discipline and advice ("Don't complexify it").
The complexifying thing, it turns out. is that Gwen is a virgin of 35, desperately posing as a woman of the world. In moods of blue solitude, she drags down her poet-father's hidden collection of pornographic slides and projects a few lubricious scenes on the fireplace wall. Poor Dave, the man of "exquisite sensibilities," breaks training altogether by bedding down with a shapeless lump of sensuality from the brassiere factory and later marrying her. Finally, his wife's berserk first husband plants a bullet in his brain. After what Dave has been through, this is arguably a happy ending. Besides, Novelist Jones has Dave will his manuscript to his peerless editor Gwen, and everyone knows that getting published is what really counts.
Without Water Wings. Says James ("I got over my inferiority complex") Jones of Some Came Running: "I'm fully satisfied, but I hesitate to call it great, on grounds of immodesty." Actually almost all of it is as silly as its plot. The book is one vast notions counter of half-fashioned ideas on life, love and literature. Its central proposition is the trite one that no one can swim in the sea of life without the water wings of illusion. At its best, Some Came Running does reflect the cultural claustrophobia of small-town life and the personality quirks that sometimes go with it. At its frequent worst, it is a mishmash of joyless fornication, head-splitting hangovers, and a neo-Dreiserian conviction that life itself is a four-letter word.
In sheer bulk (1,266 pp.), Some Came Running begs for superlatives and earns at least one—it is the biggest literary sleeping pill (2 Ibs. 11 oz.) of the season, a title that few believed could be wrested from Atlas Shrugged (2 Ibs. 10 oz.).
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