Old school fiction

I have at hand a hard cover first edition of James Jones' 1957 novel, Some Came Running. It's 1266 pages long, and I don't have time to read it. But I wanted to hold it. I read the paperback, which is abridged, as a young man. I love the film and saw it recently, still loving it. But I wanted to see the original because Jones, who followed his blockbuster From Here To Eternity with this huge book, considered it his best work.

Critics at the time hated it. They haven't mellowed much. Some, but not much. Yet the book does have its fans. The writer Willie Morris called it "the towering work of native social realism that American writers once dreamed of writing." He compares Jones to Dreiser and Lewis. These were "old school" writers who told big stories taking big books, "social realism" in America. No one writes books like this any more. I think the reason why is that social realism narrative has been usurped by film, a transition that began in the 50s with films like On the Waterfront and Marty. Why read a huge novel when you can get your gritty fix of social realism in two hours in a theater? For the busier and busier rising middle class, the new fix became attractive and the rule. Novels went on to do other things.

Jones, like Dreiser, is not a good writer so much as a great storyteller. Jones style is driven by adverbs and the credo that more is better. This is why readers preferred the abridged paperback, significantly shorter (as I recall, about 25-30% was cut), to the hard cover original. But it's the original I wanted to see. I never had seen it before and I managed to get it via university loan from a distant college. I didn't want to read it. I wanted to touch it. Such is the magic of literature.

Interestingly, Jones uses this epigraph for the novel, from Don Quixote: "At last he was free of the damnable books of Romance." This is interesting because Jones wrote his own kind of Romance, in a classic sense, continuing the mythology of the hard-drinking, hard-living, misunderstood literary writer who is his protagonist. The social realism of the book embraces its gritty setting and back alley behaviors but the attitude toward Dave, the writer, the worship of the writer in this context, presents another kind of damnable storytelling.

Now that I've held it, something I've wanted to do for decades but could never find it, I'll return this fat unread novel. I applaud Jones for writing it. I applaud him for sticking to his guns. Writers get to be their own best/worst critics, and Willie Morris is right to put Jones in the family of Dreiser and Lewis, an old school of writing that is long, long, long gone.