Read Online Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones - Free Book Online

type of belief system had been imparted to me in childhood, and after my father’s death I had no idea where to look for solace.
    The one thing my father had always been adamant about, the one plan he would never diverge from, was that Jamie and I go to college. He’d finished only two semesters of college himself. He’d studied at the University of Hawaii for six months, before Pearl Harbor. And after the war, in 1945, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill and came to New York to study writing at NYU. When he told his literature professor that he wanted to be a writer, the man tried to talk him out of such a hopeless aspiration, and suggested journalism school. My dad had hated New York, been desperately lonely, and couldn’t wait to go home. So he quit school, went back to Illinois, and wrote From Here to Eternity .
    I knew my father had been a good father and a kindhearted and wise man. But now that he was gone, now that he was no longer there to protect me and teach me about life, I wanted to know: How good was he, as a writer? What would people say about his work in, say, fifty years? Would he be dismissed? Or would people still be reading him when his great-grandchildren went to college? I decided to read his books.
    That spring and summer, I read his big novels, beginning with From Here to Eternity . I had no concept of literary technique and read strictly for story. In my narrow view of things, Jaws and Moby-Dick had quite a lot in common. Both were about crazy men chasing after huge white malevolent predators from the deep, and Jaws was a lot easier to read. But I could hear my dad explaining that just because Moby-Dick was harder to read, did not make Jaws a better book.
    In From Here to Eternity , the common foot soldier, a thirty-year man, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a dirt-poor boy from a long line of western Kentucky coal miners, is good at two things—both of which he learned in the army—playing the bugle and boxing. He is so good a bugler that he played taps at Arlington in front of presidents. He’s a world-class boxer too, but he won’t box anymore, because he blinded a man in a match.
    Sergeant Warden, Prewitt’s superior, despises everyone equally, but in secret, he tries to protect his men from their officers, men like Captain Dynamite Holmes, who wants to win the boxing championship more than anything, because it will advance his career. Captain Holmes orders the company to give Prewitt The Treatment, and they punish him mercilessly. But Prewitt still refuses to fight. He will not break the solemn vow he made to himself. So he suffers The Treatment in dignified silence.
    Staff Sergeant Warden watches all of this, doing what he can when he can to protect the stubborn, prideful, ignorant soldier inhis care, who hasn’t learned yet that he is nothing but a number. Warden despises Captain Holmes, and thinks one day he’ll make a fine general.
    â€œGood generals had to have the type of mind that saw all men as masses, as numerical groups of Infantry, Artillery, and mortars that could be added and subtracted and understood on paper. They had to be able to see men as abstractions that they worked on paper with. They had to be like Blackjack Pershing who could be worried about the morality of his troops in France so much he tried to outlaw whorehouses to save their mothers heartache, but who was proud of them when they died in battle.”
    Here, I thought, as my heart started to pound inside my chest, was a tiny corner of James Jones’s Higher Truth revealed.
    When Prewitt, after suffering The Treatment for several weeks, plays taps at lights-out in the Schofield Barracks quadrangle, the hairs on my arms stood up, as if electrified.
    â€œThis is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it…This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear…This is the song you’ll listen to