The Ice-Cream Headache: And Other Stories

By James Jones

Short stories by the award-winning author of From Here to Eternity:“One of the significant writers of his generation” (The New York Times Book Review).
  In his introduction to this collection of sharply crafted short stories, James Jones compares novel writing to a long-term, chronic illness. Writing short stories, he says, is like a brief, intense fever: the kind that can kill or disappear in a matter of days. Although best known for epic war novels such as From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, Jones also wrote short stories, and the ones in this volume burn with deadly intensity.   Besides the expected stories of the soldier’s life, Jones gives us something surprising: five stories of childhood, tender and horrifying at the same time, inspired by his early life in the Depression-stricken Midwest. They and the other shorts in this volume are accompanied by author’s notes, which supplement Jones’s introduction, and a preface by his daughter, Kaylie Jones.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: May 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781453215647

James Jones

James Jones (1921–1977) was one of the most accomplished American authors of the World War II generation. He served in the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1944, and was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the battle for Guadalcanal, where he was decorated with a purple heart and bronze star. Jones’s experiences informed his epic novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. His other works include Some Came Running, The Pistol, Go to the Widow-Maker, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, The Merry Month of May, A Touch of Danger, Whistle, and To the End of the War—a book of previously unpublished fiction.

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The Ice-Cream Headache

And Other Stories

James Jones

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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 down 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?

I thought it was a great idea. Novels on childhood, particularly Middlewestern childhoods, were dime a dozen. It would be a fresh approach. I already had one finished childhood story (Just Like The Girl) which would fit right in, and I had notes on a whole flock of others, twelve or thirteen. I attacked this project. Three of the last four stories here are the result of that. Sunday Allergy is the result of a break taken off from childhood stories.

Then, after finishing The Tennis Game, I took another break from childhood stories to write another short story, one I had made notes on for a long time. It was an Army story and was to be called The Pistol. And, of course, somewhere about five or ten pages into it I suddenly realized I didn’t have a short story here, I had a short novel. Moreover, I had something I had been looking for for a long time: namely, a subject around which to construct a deliberately, consciously symbolic novel; one in which the symbol is deliberately imposed upon the material from outside, beforehand, more in the European manner. But I wasn’t sure I had enough material to flesh it out. Should I try it or not? I discussed it with my wife. Write in a fight, she suggested. You write fights marvelously. So I did.

And, I haven’t gotten back to my book of childhood stories since.

They’re still there though, waiting. I have the notes, and I have the titles for most. Maybe I’ll get to it after I finish the current novel. If I do, all of the childhood stories in this volume will be included in it.

Writing short stories has a totally different feel from writing novels. I’m not sure whether I like it better or less. There isn’t that long haul ahead of you staring you in the face: this year, next year, the year after. By the same token the anguish of creative decision is much sharper writing stories. The particular point at which you must decide on the structure to point the ending you have finally discovered, comes much quicker. But then too it’s decided and over and done with much quicker. Writing stories is like having a series of high-fever ailments in which the crisis comes soon and either passes or doesn’t. Writing a novel is like having t.b. or some such long term chronic ailment with a low grade fever that takes a long time to cure. Take your choice. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.

As a postscript, it might be interesting for a writer—if not for a reader—to note the following statistic. In 1951 when From Here to Eternity was published I had five unpublished stories on hand. Within four months I sold four of the five, and sold them in every case to a magazine which had previously turned all five stories down at least twice. I don’t know what this statistic signifies. But I’m damn sure not going to knock myself off over it like Martin Eden did.

J.J.

Paris, October 1965

The Temper Of Steel

Edward Weeks chose this story from among the first five to print as an Atlantic First in the March 1948 issue of Atlantic Monthly, It seems young to me today, but I think it makes a good and serious point. The point however is well concealed. See if you can find it. In case you can’t, I’ll explain it after the story. It’s possible I didn’t point it up enough, but at the time I believed with Hemingway that one should not point one’s story points up.

1

KNIVES, THE TALL MAN SAID, looking down at the gate-leg table. They are truly ingenious things, are they not?

Johnny moved his cocktail glass and followed the tall man’s gaze down.

Their hostess smiled brightly. Yes, aren’t they? So gruesome. She spared the table one polite glance from her quick peerings about the room at her other guests. Her short hair, feathered about her ears and forehead, heightened the effect of a sparrow looking for bread. Oh, she said. I see someone I must speak to. You two know each other? You won’t mind?

No, Johnny said. He looked at his drink and decided he needed it.

My dear lady, the tall man said. We met here in your home, at dinner. Don’t you remember? He eyed Johnny. Did we not?

Yes, Lon, Johnny said. Yes, we did.

But of course. Their hostess smiled brightly. She put her frail hand on Johnny’s arm. I want you to relax and just make yourself at home here. Another cocktail? These affairs are really nothing. She brought the cocktail and flickered away after new crumbs.

The tall man picked up one of the knives and his eyes burned down into Johnny’s face. He tugged abruptly. The sheath embraced the knife, surrendered it only under pressure and with a squeak of protest. He held the knife with its tip pointed at Johnny’s chest and looked at him with that bright hard stare.

Truly, he said, they are ingenious. Now you take these: there are none of the too heavy, too chrome, too fine-lined characteristics of mass production about these.

Johnny looked at him and did not say anything. There were two knives in their embossed sheaths on the small table. Both knives had come from Africa in the hill country. The tall man had picked up the smaller one. The frantic buzz of conversation by which people earned their way at