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| Censored gay sex scenes in From Here to Eternity revealed Daughter of author James Jones discloses details of cuts insisted upon by the novel's original publisherIt is one of the most celebrated images in cinema, an icon of heterosexual romance: Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing as the waves crash over them in the 1953 film From Here to Eternity. But behind the Hollywood gloss is a tale of censorship and repression, with the author of the award-winning novel on which the film was based forced to remove scenes of gay sex from the manuscript before publication.Kaylie Jones, a novelist in her own right, says her father, James Jones, was told by his publisher Scribner to eliminate both expletives and homosexual scenes in From Here to Eternity, which was based on his own experiences in Hawaii in the army on the eve of the Pearl Harbour bombing.The original manuscript of From Here to Eternity went into "great detail" about the kinds of sexual favours soldiers like Private Angelo Maggio, played in the film by Frank Sinatra, would provide to rich gay men for money, Kaylie Jones revealed in an article written for US news website the Daily Beast."'I don't like to be blowed [by a man]'," the novel's hero Private Robert E Lee Prewitt tells Maggio in a section cut from the novel. "Angelo shrugged," writes James Jones. "'Oh, all right. I admit it's nothing like a woman. But it's something. Besides, old Hal treats me swell. He's always good for a touch when I'm broke. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Comes in handy the middle of the month ... Only reason I let Hal blow me is because I got a good thing there. If I turned him down I'd blow it sky high. And I want to hang onto that income, buddy.'"James Jones initially refused to cut the expletives from his novel, writing to his Scribner editor that "the things we change in this book for propriety's sake will in five years, or 10 years, come in someone else's book anyway … and we will wonder why we thought we couldn't do it. Writing has to keep evolving into deeper honesty, like everything else, and you cannot stand on past precedent or theory, and still evolve … You know there is nothing salacious in this book as well as I do."He then agreed to cut a "certain number" of uses of the word fuck from the book, his daughter wrote, "in part because there was a question whether the US postal system would even deliver the book to stores because of its 'salacious' nature", although 32 still remain. But he refused to eliminate the homosexual scenes in their entirety "because he felt this would be unfaithful to reality he witnessed", although they were extensively cut back when it was published in 1951.James Jones, she wrote, "believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time". "He also believed also that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier's capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago," she wrote. The US military's current "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy allows gay men and lesbians to serve only if they keep quiet about their sexuality. President Obama has previously announced his intention to revoke the rule, but for the moment it remains in force.Kaylie Jones told the Guardian that she decided to divulge the details following the recent death of her mother. "She didn't think this was relevant," Jones said. "Now that I'm executor of the literary estate with my brother, we think it's relevant given the Don't Ask, Don't Tell controversy in the American military [and] the Maine same-sex marriage vote.""In some ways", she continued, the original novel was "a better book. The gay passages are not what I'd cut from the book. If we published a new edition, I would include them," she said. From Here to Eternity won America's National Book Award on publication in 1951, while the 1953 film won eight Oscars.Publishers at the time, according to Kaylie Jones, were under pressure from a Catholic group called the National Organisation for Decent Literature, which objected to "the lascivious type of literature which threatens the moral, social and national life of our country" and blacklisted From Here to Eternity. Its members would visit booksellers with lists of "harmful" titles, informing the shops' managers if they found them in the stores. "The result? Widespread intimidation and boycott of booksellers," she wrote in her piece for the Daily Beast."Things are much better now for writers," she told the Guardian. "I think my father paved the way for many writers. He made the literary world safe for the F word."FictionPublishingAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The Collected Stories by William Trevor Joseph O'Connor salutes the achievement of a master storytellerThis handsome, slip-cased, double-volume set of short stories contains more than 1,000 pages of William Trevor's prose, superseding his Collected Stories published in 1992. Admirers of his persuasive and scrupulously understated writing will have read many of these stories before, but the power of this unforgettably impressive gathering is in the breadth and consistency of his achievement.From early masterpieces such as "Access to the Children", "The General's Day", "The Ballroom of Romance" and "Matilda's England" to the well-wrought wonders contained in his last four books, the characterisation is skilful and subtle. There is sometimes a scene of brilliantly spine-tingling unease, as disconcerting as anything in Kafka or Pinter, but generally his characters have been the ordinary lonely, lost people trying to make sense of their fate.Whether the old curate in "Justina's Priest", the unhappy lovers in "Office Romances" and "The Forty-Seventh Saturday", or the middle-aged blind-daters who endure a mortifying encounter in "An Evening Out", his people are recognisable strugglers. His genius is that everything they do is wholly believable, even when it is bizarre or out of character. And the hard-won compression of his careful style charges his depictions with an immense power. His ironies are sparing, organised with masterful timing, often directed at marriage or courtship. The story "Graillis's Legacy" reveals more about the demands of fidelity than does many an epic novel. And "The Penthouse Apartment", a wonderful story, builds an atmosphere of almost dizzying panic.John McGahern wrote that every storyteller needs first "a way of seeing". What is remarkable about this collection is how it reveals the extent to which the touchstones of Trevor's aesthetic were there from the very earliest stories: the crafted sparseness of description, the luminous sense of place, the extraordinarily profound insight into the depths concealed by social conversations. Each story proceeds at a kind of internal rhythm, the clarity of cadence and gracious austerity of the writing achieving an exactitude few living writers could match.And his sense of eloquent tact animates every paragraph. He never crowds his characters or smothers them with adjectives, but allows them to incarnate themselves on the page. There is a wise, forgiving kindliness in his curiosity about human foibles, but it's an effective strategy too, for it coaxes the reader into the story so irresistibly. He dares to leave enormous questions about his people unanswered. It is as though these stories are sheet music and the reader is putting together the song while the author slips unnoticed from the building.A good number of these miniatures are quietly charged with the unquestioning, stoical, intoxicating sadness of so many rural Irish lives of the past. But his bleak English suburbs are conjured as evocatively, as are his hot tourist destinations from Jerusalem to Cap Ferat, and the denizens of his wrecked aristocratic mansions. He is wonderful on roads not taken, on responsibilities ducked, on guilty secrets and stunted compromises. Buildings and gardens come to life as he describes them. And he is brilliant on marriage, the tacit détentes and unasked questions that lock spouses together as powerfully as do love and fondness. He writes of one wife that something in her "had been smashed to pieces". There is never a moment of false lyricism. Many of his women live in a world of choking passivity, where events can only be controlled at a price. He writes of another character. "She had once been Mrs Horace Spire and was not likely to forget it." We don't forget it either.Compassionate, poignant, clear-eyed, often heart-rending, these stories build into a sustained meditation on the problems that have long preoccupied their author: love lost, marital infidelity, duties of decency shirked, ageing, loyalty, self-caused loneliness. His characters become progressively more disrupted by politics as you move through the collection, but even in the stories that allude to Ireland's sectarianism the emphasis is on people, not the slogans they live by, or die by. It is surprising to see how often imagery of childlessness surfaces in the stories, and how eerie some of the early pieces are. Trevor is Ireland's Chekhov but in tales such as "In at the Birth" the ghost of Poe seems to wander too.The prose is clear as water, but with so many eddying undercurrents of meaning that second and third readings yield startling new insights, and this is the greatest pleasure of this immensely enjoyable collection. What is extraordinary, looking back now at five decades of his work, is not just the restricted range of his linguistic palette – there is scarcely a metaphor anywhere in the book – but the truthfulness and scope he achieves with it.The simplicity and authority of the writing is haunting and finally moving. Joyce is always present as an influence, not the linguistic pyrotechnician of Ulysses, but the modest and punctilious voice of Dubliners. (One story, "Two More Gallants", engages directly with Joyce's collection.) In Trevor's work, plainness is everything, a kind of grammar as well as a worldview. It is hard to think of any writer who is better at silences, the subtle ways in which they articulate affection or power. "Her lipstick had left a trace on the rim of the teacup and Norah drew her attention to it with a gesture. Kathleen wiped it off." This moment from the strange story, "Sitting with the Dead", is typical of his focused attentiveness. He mines whole histories from the unspoken, the denied. A widow remembers how her furious husband ruled by threats. "The time she began to paint the scullery, it frightened her when he stood in the doorway, before he even said a thing." And then there is the sheer grace of his sentences, the joy of recognition they bring. An eavesdropper "was skilled at breaking into privacies without the knowledge of the person observed; he prided himself on that, but twice, or even three times, he suddenly had to drop his scrutiny, taken unawares by having his gaze returned".Flannery O'Connor famously wrote that the short-story form is all about the point not understood at once, the thing half-glimpsed in a corner. It has been William Trevor's achievement over nearly to 50 years as a writer to have shone light into those spaces with such unerring steadiness that you hardly even notice he is doing it. This is a magnificent collection, astonishing in its pleasures. The lack of an introduction is its only flaw.Joseph O'Connor's Ghost Light will be published by Harvill Secker in May.FictionWilliam Trevorguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Artists including Mike Figgis and Lemn Sissay celebrate 30 years of Artsadmin London arts group Artsadmin marks 30 years of producing and supporting artists' work with a specially commissioned series of artworksMike Figgis feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about life after 'Eat, Pray, Love' The author of the mega-selling book finds herself a publishing phenomenon and a partner in an unlikely marriage. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Set of stamps gives Australian writers seal of approval Contemporary Australian writers including Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally are being honoured with a collection of commemorative postage stampsAustralian literary legends including Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and The Thorn Birds author Colleen McCullough are to be featured on a series of stamps.Carey, the Booker prize-winning author of titles including Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, flew in from his home in New York for the stamps' launch in Melbourne today. "To be on an Australian stamp is really quite moving. There's a big part of me that really wants to be part of Australian culture," Carey said.The "Australian Legends of the Written Word" series from Australia Post also features Tim Winton, Bryce Courtenay and David Malouf in recognition of their "outstanding contribution to the social and cultural life" of Australia.Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark, said the stamp "reminds you of all the teachers who said 'you'll never go anywhere, son'", adding to the Sydney Morning Herald that he was "glad they are self-adhesive because it prevents jokes about licking their backside".And Courtenay, bestselling author of novels including Power of One and the autobiographical April Fool's Day, about medically-induced Aids, continued in that irreverent vein. "Stamps aren't what they used to be," he told the paper. "It was the king's head on stamps when I was young. Now they just put old shitbags on them."FictionPeter CareyThomas KeneallyAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |