He was a self-taught hick from the midwest discovered by the same editor – Max Perkins at Scribners – who

He was a self-taught hick from the midwest, discovered by the same editor – Max Perkins at Scribners – who, a generation before, had championed the work of Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.The unravelling of Jones’s reputation began as soon as his second novel, Some Came Running, was published in 1957 Critics began to mock his lumpen, naturalistic prose. Mailer, eager to resume his position at the top of the pile, accused him of selling out and losing his rebelliousness. He was castigated for leaving America to live in exile in France. By the time he died in 1977, he was considered an anachronistic figure. “His place as a chronicler of the Second World War was taken by Norman Mailer and Mailer was always much more in the news than James Jones,” reflects James Ivory.”The more I read about him, the more I respect him,” claims Kris Kristofferson, who plays Bill Willis (the character based on James Jones) in A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries.

Kristofferson, an ex-US army captain with a reputation of his own for hell-raising, found plenty of points of identification with the soldier-turned-writer. As he puts it, “both of us came from a generation where the military was a fact of your life”.Kristofferson points out that Jones is a contradictory figure; someone who seemed to live up to the old Hemingway myth of the drunken, macho artist, but also, at least in the latter part of his career, maintained a relatively stable and happy family life. The James Jones he portrays in A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries is a laconic, kind-hearted patriarch. His wife, Gloria (Barbara Hershey), and children, are devoted to him.

He plays poker for small stakes, likes a whisky, but otherwise has no noticeable vices. At the suggestion that the character is almost too clean- living, Kristofferson protests: “Compared to people today, he drank a hell of a lot!”Jones’s lifestyle in Paris didn’t impress critics of the time, who expected their great American authors either to be much poorer, or to suffer more. “Literary journalists,” William Styron recalls in his foreword to the collected edition of Jones’s letters, “wrote reproachful monographs about the way Jim and Gloria comported themselves: dinner at Maxine’s, after- dinner with the squabs at hang-outs like Castel’s, vacations in Deauville and Biarritz, yachting in Greece, the races at Longchamps, the oiled and pampered sloth of Americans in moneyed exile.”A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries is based on an autobiographical novel by Jones’s daughter, Kaylie Jones. Events are seen from her perspective, not that of her grizzled old novelist father. Only occasionally are we made aware that her father is still haunted by the war. We hear him talk, in passing, about the difficulty and discomfort that a soldier experiences when obliged to defecate, mid-battle. The reference will be immediately clear to anybody who has read The Thin Red Line (1963).

One of the most brutal, disquieting passages in the book describes how a young American at Gauadalcanal bludgeons, stabs and disembowels a Japanese soldier who disturbs him as he tries to relieve himself. (It remains to be seen how Malick’s long-awaited new movie, which stars John Travolta, George Clooney, Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, will deal with the scene.)To describe the war as the key formative influence on Jones would be an understatement It obsessed him He returned to it again and again in his fiction. Even on his death bed, wracked with cancer, he was still mulling over it, dictating passages from his final novel, Whistle, into a dictaphone. He knew that it was impossible to recreate what he had seen and suffered on the page. In his 1975 book, WW2, he has a beautiful image to describe the bad faith inherent in writing about war.

“It always makes me think of the way the Navahos polish their turquoise. They put raw chunks in a barrel half-filled with birdshot, and then turn the barrel and keep on turning it until the rough edges are all taken off and the nuggets come out smooth and shining Time, I think, does the same thing… especially with wars.”Jones was fascinated by the economics and morality of mass destruction, and by what he called the “evolution of a soldier”, the process by which young, individualistic Americans were turned into fighting machines. In his words, “to teach a young American male to love war and enjoy killing his fellow man – even a Jap or a Nazi – was about comparable to teaching his fresh-faced, dewy-eyed virgin sister to love the physical aspects of simple fucking” His prose was often clumsy and ungainly.