The Ice-Cream Headache: And Other Stories Read online

  The Ice-Cream Headache

  And Other Stories

  James Jones

  Contents

  Preface by Kaylie Jones

  Introduction by James Jones

  The Temper of Steel

  Just Like the Girl

  The Way It Is

  Two Legs for the Two of Us

  Secondhand Man

  None Sing So Wildly

  Greater Love

  The King

  The Valentine

  A Bottle of Cream

  Sunday Allergy

  The Tennis Game

  The Ice-Cream Headache

  A Biography of James Jones

  This collection is ‘dictated’ to my 7-year-old son, Jamie

  Preface by Kaylie Jones

  MY FATHER HAD MINT-CONDITION first editions of all of his books leather bound with gold lettering—blue for my brother Jamie and brown for me. He signed each volume on birthdays and other holidays, an extra little gift from him. In my volume of The Ice-Cream Headache, he wrote; “To Kaylie—on her ninth Birthday. Hoorah! A new one is almost finished! And so am I.” In Jamie’s—to whom the book is dedicated—he wrote: “To Jamie—this is the one I promised you two years ago. Sorry it is a year late. Still, it’s better than nothing. Anyway, it’s your own.” Rereading his inscriptions, I see a recurring theme: The next one is almost done … and the next one … and the next one … As if he were already concerned about running out of time; feeling guilty for not having met some harsh, self-imposed deadline. We had no idea that within a year he would suffer his first bout of congestive heart failure, the disease that seven years later would take his life.

  In his introduction to The Ice-Cream Headache, James Jones compares writing stories to “having a series of high-fever ailments,” while writing a novel “is like having t.b. or some such long term chronic ailment with a low grade fever.” Typical of his sense of humor, the point he’s making is that writing is painful as hell on the best of days. My brother Jamie and I would watch him come downstairs from his office in the late afternoons, and it was not unlike witnessing a champion runner a few minutes after he’s crossed the finish line. If writing a novel is a marathon, then the short story is a sprint. But even while James Jones was putting together these stories, he was thinking of the book as a whole, and still suffered all the pain and loneliness of a long-distance runner. What amazed my brother and me as children was how, even on the most beautiful summer day, he’d climb those stairs, lock himself in, and write. No one was making him do it, and we found this astounding.

  His novels were big and fat and frightening. My bound editions went high up on a shelf next to my brother’s, for when we “grew up.” His books in progress lived with us like some strange relative in the attic. He’d talk about them, the problems he was having, and when he finished one, it was a celebration as big as a national holiday. Upon receiving The Ice-Cream Headache on my ninth birthday, knowing already that it contained short stories, I asked my father if he thought I was old enough to read it. He thought about it for a moment and said, “Sure—go ahead and start with the childhood stories.” And he told me their titles: “Just Like the Girl,” “The Tennis Game,” “A Bottle of Cream,” “The Valentine,” and “The Ice-Cream Headache.”

  My father had never talked much about his childhood. I gathered it had not been a happy one. I knew he’d been a boy through the Great Depression. He was eight years old in 1929, when his family lost everything, including their high standing in Robinson, the small southern-Illinois town where he was born and raised. Now, in preparation for my reading of these childhood stories, he told me that they were based on his own life, that the grandfather in “The Ice-Cream Headache” was his own grandfather, George Washington Jones, a lawyer who was a quarter Cherokee and had written a book himself, based on the trial of Christ. James Jones had loved and admired his grandfather, had adored his own drunken father Ray Jones, a dentist, whose best advice had been to always tell the truth, and he’d hated—passionately hated—his mother Ada, on whom the mother in the stories is based.

  When I turned nine, we were spending the summer in Deauville, France. I was taking riding lessons and swimming in the ocean every day. I lived a dream life of privilege, far from Robinson, Illinois, where I’d never been. I’d never met a single relative on my father’s side. His childhood was far removed from anything I knew, but his writing was so straightforward, so honest, the details so clear—the Midwestern summer heat, the small backyard, the public school’s hallways, the mother’s sweating back as she toils over the kitchen stove—that I felt I was there with him, witnessing his childhood as a powerless onlooker. My father was a romantic child, with an inquisitive, wide-open mind, and he was misunderstood, misinterpreted, by the adults entrusted with his care. They were no help at all to him in figuring out the ways of the world. The injustice, the cruelty, the absence of understanding he suffered as a child made me, at nine, sick at heart. And I knew that even if some of the details were changed—my dad often said that’s what a novelist did, fool with the facts—the little boy was my father, and he’d lived through these terrible things. It was almost impossible to imagine this strong, powerful, decent man at the mercy of such bungling, self-centered adults.

  In 1982, five years after his death, I visited Robinson for the first time. I learned that James Jones had had a helper in his young life—the librarian at the public library. He’d been a child who read voraciously, and by the age of eight, he’d read every book in the children’s wing of the Robinson library. He begged the librarian for permission to read the adult books. Concerned about what terrible lessons the little boy would learn, the kind lady supervised his reading until his high school graduation. But in school, he was a mediocre student, even in English—his best subject. According to his report cards, he was often bored and angry in class, argumentative with the teacher, who in his opinion didn’t understand the first thing about the books she was teaching. Following graduation, with few options, he joined the Army. This was in 1939. At his father’s suggestion, he went to Hawaii, where my grandfather was certain Hitler’s war would never reach.

  My father never saw his parents again. His mother, Ada Blessing Jones, died shortly before Pearl Harbor of diabetes, which she refused to have treated because she’d become a Christian Scientist. After Pearl Harbor, his father, Ray Jones, tried to enlist. He showed up stinking drunk at the recruitment office and was laughed out the door. He went back to his office, sat down in his dentist’s chair, and shot himself through the mouth.

  It was not until my first trip to Robinson that I tackled the rest of The Ice-Cream Headache, the stories about love and war. I’m still struck by their brutal honesty. James Jones doesn’t gloss over the ugliness, and yet, he handles his characters, adult and child, with infinite delicacy and compassion. He was ahead of his time in every way, addressing issues such as the plight of single women trying to make it on their own in New York City, and young men returning from WWII with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which the soldiers called combat fatigue, and were expected to recover from by the sheer force of their will. He never treated his characters with condescension, instead with epic compassion and a straightforward language that reflects the very nature of who they are. James Jones paints a devastatingly clear and poignant picture of a time and place, of a young artist’s struggle to break free, not only of his past and his prohibitive culture, but of the scars left upon his psyche by the horrors of war, and the horrors of childhood.

  It is no surprise, then, that he dedicated the book to his only son, Jamie. Just as Jamie and I were under the impression that we were “one nation invisible, with liberty
and justice for all,” we believed our father dictated his books to those he loved, and thus the dedication, a testament to his unique sense of humor.

  With another novel almost done, indeed, so was he. In 1977, fighting against time, writing twelve to fourteen hours a day in order to finish his last novel, Whistle, the last of the trilogy begun with From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, he died, four chapters from the end. Willie Morris put my father’s tape recordings and notes together and finished the novel for him.

  I feel sad to this day that I never got the chance to discuss his larger works with him. But I do have the memory of that one day, when at nine years old, in France, I ran to him in tears and threw myself into his arms.

  “But, Daddy, these stories, they’re not true, right? They’re not really true?” I wanted him to reassure me.

  “They’re all true,” he said in a quiet tone, “I just had to change things sometimes, you know, lie a little, to make them better stories.”

  I remember crying in his arms, unable to stop, and his calm and even voice as he explained to me that the world was not always a nice place and that people were sometimes quite terrible, even though they usually thought they were doing the right thing—and he wished it could be otherwise and that he could tell me it wasn’t so, but there it is.

  I felt so guilty for every cruel thing I’d ever done to anyone smaller or weaker than myself. And I blurted this out to my father:

  There was a little girl in my class—a chauffeur’s daughter who was on scholarship. She was small for her age and her clothes were too small and stained. I admitted forlornly that I’d been mean to her and I vowed never to laugh at her, or mistreat any other fragile soul ever again.

  My father chuckled good-naturedly at my solemn vow and told me not to be too hard on myself, but he was proud of me, he said, for telling the truth.

  “What happened to Chet Poore?” I asked him. I was referring to the magnificent outlaw in “A Bottle of Cream”—to this day one of my favorite short stories.

  “Oh, he died in jail, I guess,” my father said wistfully. “That wasn’t his real name.”

  “What was his real name?”

  “I don’t remember,” my father said. “I don’t remember if it really happened that way at all.”

  Introduction by James Jones

  IN PLANNING THIS BOOK of stories I decided against any rewriting or revising. So these are presented to you just as they were when they were first finished no matter how long ago and then published, or in the case of two, not published at all. Mainly this is because I felt that to revise them at this late date instead of helping them might very well take away from them the very thing I like about them most which is their flavor of “youngness,” of emotional freshness of “Then,” of emotional immediacy according to the time and place in the progression of a writer’s life when they were written. The truth is, I don’t think I could revise them, because I am no longer the man who wrote them. As a matter of fact, the man who wrote each story probably ceased to exist after that story was written and finished, by the mere fact of having written it.

  Particularly the first story I find “young” in the technical sense of writing technique. It makes its effects well, I think, but in a way which is a little bit too obvious, too heavily pointed, too easy for the reader to see behind. This is a little embarrassing, but not very much so, since I was “young” myself then. I find the story amusing for this, perhaps an interested reader will also, but I think the story’s point is as valid today as it was then, if perhaps (with the Special Forces soldiering of today) not even moreso.

  Anyway naturally I got older. I think a reader who is interested will find that the stories get older too. This is not to say that each story is conclusively and positively better than the last one! How I would like to be able to say that! How any writer would! But I find it interesting to follow the changes and progression, the various experiments successful or less successful. Perhaps the interested reader will also. There are a number of moods, several different styles, several different attacks. They begin with five stories written in 1947, when I was 25 (My God, is that possible?!) and run through a period of ten years to four written in 1957 when I was 35, which are the last stories I have written.

  Probably one of the reasons I’ve written so few stories is that I’ve almost always been involved with some damn novel or other. Also, it’s often hard to get them published in the magazines, even if you’re not young and unknown. Certainly, unless you want to turn yourself into a story hack, you cannot make a living off them. Then too there is the question of self-imposed censorship. One simply can’t write anything outspoken about sexuality and get it published in any magazine printing today. This automatically rules out a whole raft of subjects. If sexuality and an interest in it is one of your main themes, as it is with me, this takes away from what you can write a very large chunk of what you’d like to write. You find yourself pre-censoring from your material much of what you’d like to write according to what you know you can get printed, or else you just lay the idea away and never do it at all. I can do better with novels.

  But perhaps some gossip about the stories would be interesting. The first batch of five was written in the summer of 1947 just after I had sent in to Maxwell Perkins the first two hundred pages of the first draft of From Here to Eternity. I had begun it in March. Before that I had written an entire novel and then rewritten it twice, once in New York and once while working on a commercial fishing boat in the Florida Keys, and had tried my hand at innumerable stories. I was pretty discouraged about my two hundred pages and while waiting to hear from Perkins, unable to continue with the novel until I did, I hauled out some old story attempts (only one of them even finished) and had a go at rewriting them. I finished five of them before a letter came from Perkins; and in doing so suddenly and for no reason that I could find I began to write well, in my own voice and in my own way, with a sense of timing and with rhythms that suited my ear and my emotion. These five are reprinted here in the chronological order in which they were written from first one to last one, beginning with “The Temper Of Steel” and ending with “Secondhand Man.” And when Perkins’ cautiously and politely critical letter came back, I knew what he was talking about. I put the two hundred pages away and without looking at it began to write the version of Eternity which exists today, chapter by chapter without ever going back. That early two hundred pages, now lost or destroyed, gone anyway, had a rudimentary version of the “bugle scene” where Prewitt blows Taps, a very poor version. Perkins did not live to see the final version because he died that fall in 1947.

  I worked hard all that year on Eternity. Then in the winter of 1948 while living in Naples, Florida, after sending in the second section of it to my new editor Burroughs Mitchell in the hope of a further advance, I was so written out, busted up and worn down I decided to take some time off and began a story concerned with some events of the previous summer. This became “None Sing So Wildly,” more a novella or novelette than a story. It took me three months to write. I had never meant to spend that much time on it. After I finished it, I rewrote the story “Secondhand Man” which had never satisfied me, expanding it from a mood piece about the North Caroline mountains into the character study it is today. I sent both of these all over, to just about everybody, but could not sell them. But I was getting used to that. I had sold one story the year before to the Atlantic, and after the first flush of joyful disbelief, found it changed my life almost not at all.

  The next summer, in 1949, found me living in a house trailer in Memphis, Tennessee. It was very hot and I remember I had reached and was working on The Stockade section of Eternity. I had just introduced the character of Jack Malloy and was forced to bone up and reread everything I could about the Wobblies, and could not continue the book until I had. The story I began then, just to have something to do, became “Greater Love” and my first real attempt at writing seriously about combat. A new guy had moved in with a trailer dow
n the street in the trailerpark, and it turned out that although I had never known him, he too had spent time in Guadalcanal and in New Georgia. I’m sure that our talks, sitting out at night on the porch beside his trailer or mine, breathing the night air and drinking beer, had something to do with that story being written when it was. I sent it all around too, with the usual result.

  “The King” was written in the summer of 1955. By then I had finished Eternity and it had become a bestseller and famous and I was deep into the writing of Some Came Running. I had lived several months in New York that year, working on the novel, and while there I had returned often to an old haunt from poorer days at NYU: Jimmy Ryan’s on 52nd St. Jimmy claimed he remembered me from the “old days”, whether he really did or not, and we talked a lot about those “old days” back in the ’40s before Sidney Bechet moved to France. “The King” grew out of all that. I wrote it sitting in my housetrailer under the shade of three big soft maples on a grassy hillside in Marshall, Illinois.

  Some Came Running was coming on toward being finished by this time. Whatever the critics thought of it (which was damned little!) it had nevertheless kept me occupied for six whole years. During that time I took time off to do only that one story, “The King.” But I made notes from time to time on story ideas and various approaches to them. Then in 1957, with the book in hand (that magnificent phrase!), I met my wife, married, spent half a summer in Haiti, learned skindiving. Perhaps this huge change in my life, this half a year spent in the middle of an “expanding universe” so to speak, influenced me. In any case when my wife and I returned to Illinois in the summer of 1957 I found myself aware of the Middlewest and its ambiance in a way I had not been since probably my twelfth or thirteenth year. Also I wanted to do some stories before tackling the next novel on the list. I had always meant to do a novel on childhood in the ’20s and ’30s set in that beautiful, grim, frightening, land- and spirit-locked part of the world. Ergo, why not do a book of childhood stories on it instead?