THEY DO SERVE BEER IN HELL
By Eyrna Heisler

There is yelling and screaming and fighting upstairs, but that’s a given. I’m seven, in my mother’s old bedroom from when she was a teenager. I can hear my grandmother screaming at my mother, reprimanding, lecturing, as if my mother is sixteen again. My grandmother is offended that my parents think she can’t run her house anymore. “Get out of my house and never come back,” my grandmother shouts. “We’re finished.”

My mother is yelling back, while my dad attempts to calm her down. I know they love me, they all do. But it doesn’t help. My parents rush in, both disconcerted. I can’t tell if my mother is about to break down in tears, or throw something. I’ve never really seen my father upset, or ever cry. But he has a look of sorrow on his face. He gets our bags and starts to pack. I’m nervous.

“We have to go,” my mother says, bending down in front of me. “She said we have to leave.”

“No.” I don’t want to leave.

“Yes. Now.”

“No, no, no, no! She’s joking. She’s just kidding. Please, Mommy.” What I’m really scared of is that if we go, if my Grammy throws us out this time, I will never see her again.

“She isn’t joking.” My mother turns away. Going to her bag, shoving her clothes in, as well as mine, frantically.

“I’ll go start the car,” my father says, walking out the door, bags in hand.

“No, Daddy, she’d never make us leave. Daddy, stop. We’re staying.” It’s my last desperate plea for us to stay. By now I have tears streaming down my face. My grandmother walks in, glares at my mother, then takes me by the hand into the vast living room. There are wine bottles littering the pulpit bar.

“You are the best child in the world! Much better than your mother ever was. I have never loved another child as much as I love you,” she says to me. I inhale the strong smell of alcohol and cigarettes on her breath. “You don’t have to leave. I want you to stay. Your parents are who I’m kicking out. I love you. Stay with me.”

My mother is suddenly standing behind me. “Mom, you can’t do that. You cannot put her in a position to choose. She’s seven. And you can’t put me in that position either. It’s not your place, I’m her mother, I decide what’s best for her.”

My mother takes me by the hand, walks me through the enormous house, through the yard, and out to the car. The two-hour drive from the Hamptons to New York City passes in a blur of tears.

My relationship with my grandmother was a complicated one. When I try to remember what our relationship was like, nothing comes to mind. I remember the places, like the dark bar where she used to take me for lunch; or sitting in the front seat with her at Carvel’s, eating a vanilla cone with sprinkles; or the Bratz and Barbie aisle at the toy store. I see it like a story in my head, from above. I see the fat little kid and the faceless, silver-haired grandmother. I don’t remember her, or the things that she would say, or the way she would treat me. She’s like a character, mingled with the views of what other people’s opinions of her were, misshapen and contorted. The only problem is I can’t go back and reread the book to form my own version of it.

This incident when my grandmother threw my parents out of her house was the first time my parents realized she was no longer sober. She spent the next few years in various hospitals, until she finally died, two years later. But at that moment she was alive, and healthy. Well, as healthy as an old raging alcoholic could possibly be, while also being blind drunk. Turns out that wasn’t the first time my parents had been thrown out of her house. She threw them out the day after their wedding, too.

In 1950, when my father realized that Scribner was going to cut a great many sexual references along with four-letter words from the manuscript of From Here to Eternity, he grew calm and focused and reasonable–that is, reasonable for a man who was known for his hot temper. He wrote thoughtful, equable letters to his editor, Burroughs Mitchell (later collected in To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones, 1989), who’d taken over for Maxwell Perkins after Perkins died. Mitchell and the in-house lawyers had explained that the book would not get past the censors if they left it the way it was …

Read the rest on The Huffington Post’s Books Page.

By the way, Gina Misiroglu of Red Room put me in touch with the AOL people, which is one of the great ways she’s bringing traffic to Red Room and getting attention for Red Room’s authors.

This is the table in the house our parents rented in Skiathos, Greece, where our dad told us the story of THE ILIAD for the first time. He explained, to our great surprise, that Achilles was gay and Patrocles was his lover, and that was why Achilles got so angry when Patrocles was killed. I wrote about this in my memoir, LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME. My brother and I thought he was making it up.

Our father was 24 years old in 1943, when he decided he wasn’t going to fight anymore. He was disgusted and enraged by the army’s red-tape bureaucracy, by the fact that when the wounded soldiers came home from the war, they were treated badly and without respect. He went AWOL several times, until they threw him in the stockade. When asked by an army psychiatrist why he was acting this way, he said he’d killed an emaciated Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat on Guadalcanal and he never intended to kill anyone ever again. If that made him crazy, then so be it. The army finally discharged him as unfit for duty in 1944, and gave him a pension. When FROM HERE TO ETERNITY was published in 1951, the army took his pension away, because they decided that anyone who could write a book couldn’t be all that crazy.

We have the letters he wrote to his editor at Scribner, Burroughs Mitchell, fighting and arguing to keep every f-word and c-word; every reference to homosexual sex; every scene of masturbation, in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY – and more often than not, he was overruled. What he cared about was depicting the reality of life in the pre-war army. The US Postal Service would not ship the book if it contained “prurient” language or scenes. His response to his editor was: “The things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway, that may not be as good as this one, and then we will kick ourselves for not having done it, and we will not have been first with this … 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. therefore, whatever changes you want made along that line will be made for propriety, and propriety is a very inconstant thing.”

My brother and I have wanted to publish an uncensored, unexpurgated version of the original manuscript for a long time, and Open Road Media‘s enthusiasm and energy for the project matched ours. Over the last few days this new edition has gotten a good deal of attention in the press — in The New York Times; on BBC News; and Perez Hilton‘s site.

My father believed that there has been and will be homosexual sex in the armed forces since armies have existed, which means, pretty much since men figured out how to band together and club each other on the head. He didn’t think it was a big deal and wanted people to be open and honest about it. He also believed that who a person likes to sleep with is hardly the point when you are lying in a foxhole with the enemy advancing upon you; what matters is if the person will stay cool and focused under fire. He didn’t see much progress in this area in his life time.

There are also sections of a novel of his that never was published, a first attempt, that we are going to release to the world. It is called TO THE END OF THE WAR. His scenes of the home front in 1943 are unlike anything else I’ve ever read. The soldiers, recovering from their wounds in a Memphis army hospital, are steeling themselves to be shipped back out overseas. They all know they’re being sent to England to prepare for the invasion of Normandy. They also know they don’t stand a chance of surviving this time. Some of their wounds are very serious, but the army doesn’t give them a break. And they are changed, psychically broken in some fundamental way. They can’t sleep at night, and would rather be back in the jungle with their old outfits, but their old outfits don’t exist anymore. They’ve kept track of everyone, and everyone is KIA, MIA, or transferred. The civilian population likes its heroes, just as long the heroes don’t act out, or talk too much, or need too much attention. So the soldiers learn to put on fronts, to wear the mask the world wants them to wear. My dad understood so much about human nature at such an early age, I can hardly believe it. There is only one writer I can think of who got this and took it a step further – Tim O’Brien, in THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. In his book, it’s the narrator who puts on the fronts, who lies, who tricks us, the readers, all in order to show us that there is no way in hell we, as civilians, will ever understand war.

As I was walking back from our writers’ Virtuous Circle lunch at the Algonquin, I happened upon the Veterans Day parade. I took a photo of these young men, so young, really, as they marched by and I felt tears spring to my eyes. A combination of deeply complicated emotions surged forth. I am a WWII veteran’s daughter. I love the US Armed Forces. I hate war. And I thought of my good friend, Larry Heinemann, Vietnam veteran, writer, and National Book Award winner, who says that for him, Veterans Day is a day of mourning. He also says that when he got home from the war in Vietnam he was so radical he couldn’t leave his house. On Veterans Day, he stays home and contemplates humanity and doesn’t like to talk on the phone.

But I have some good news to share this Veterans Day, news that is deeply important to me.

Open Road Media is going to reissue an unexpurgated, uncut, uncensored edition of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY in 2011, the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and my dad’s 90th birthday. This will be the edition my father always wanted published, with the swear words he was forced to cut returned to the text; and with the homosexual sex scenes also back in place.

What amazes me is that it’s 60 years later and our government and military are still waffling about allowing gay people to be honest about their sexuality. I think this is a travesty and so did my father – 60 years ago!

I honor you on this Veterans Day, Larry Heinemann, and all the other veterans who still feel the scars – physical or psychological – that never seem to completely heal.

It’s sunset and Kevin and I take the dogs for a walk in Karl Schurz Park while Eyrna is at her martial arts class. This is my favorite time of day, twilight, and a huge amber harvest moon floats above the buildings on the other side of the East River. We walk past the children’s playground, where we haven’t been at all lately. Through the tall fence hang the bright red harnesses of the baby swings, empty at this darkening hour, and I say, “Do you remember when we put her on those swings for the first time?” Of course, he remembers. She was only a couple of months old, fearless even then. She laughed and laughed, not wanting to stop.

We pass the toddler jungle gym, painted in primary red and blue, with its curving wood bridge that seemed such an obstacle to her at eleven months, when she first stumbled across it without holding on. I was scared she’d fall and tear open her face, but I let her do it on her own, trying not to hover. Across the way stands the elementary school kids’ jungle gym, colorful scaffolding with obstacles and levels and ropes and rope ladders, and a twisting shiny slide.

“Remember when I let her climb that one?” Kevin points, “And you were scared to death?” I was scared to death, it’s true. Having only this one child, I looked around to see if any of the other mothers or nannies were concerned. But Kevin never cared what other people thought. She was the smallest child on the jungle gym, and the older kids weren’t above shoving her out of the way. But still, she wasn’t afraid. Kevin stood underneath, watching, not saying a word. Would he be able to catch her if she fell? I had faith he would. But still, I held my breath.

She’s too old now even for the middle-schoolers’ park, which stands slightly away from the others, surrounded by its own gate. Ah, the hours we spent in there, watching, staying out of her games until she wanted us to play some part: tick-tack-toe opponent; pretend vendor; Frankenstein; time-keeper. Kevin reminds me of the day she made the transition to the big kids’ swings. “Do you remember?” I laugh. I remember that he pushed her so high in the air and she kept shouting, “Higher, Daddy! Higher!” until the chain ropes that held the swing lost their tautness and I thought she was going to go flying over the fence.

She’ll be starting high school next year. Where did the time go?

“We did a good job, didn’t we?” I ask Kevin.
“I think we did.”

I grew up rich, in Paris, in a town house on the Seine. Eyrna had none of that. But we traveled a great deal, and took her with us, everywhere. We went to the Venice Film Festival and stayed in a Renaissance palazzo as guests of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. We went to San Diego and swam with dolphins.

She saw the sun set from the top of Montmartre as the nuns sang hymns inside the cavernous church, their high, innocent voices carried forth on the still air. “Eyrna,” I said, opening my arm in a wide circle, the city spread out below us, “I give you Paris.”

Once, a crotchety super down the street yelled at her while she was walking the dogs by herself. He scared her so badly she wouldn’t walk on his side of the street anymore. Kevin went out there and told the super if he ever scared his daughter again, he’d beat the crap out of him. The super said he had a gun. Kevin said, “Good, I look forward to the law suit.”

Next year she’ll start high school. We’ve told her many times, We’ll always be here if you need us. Even at three o’clock in the morning. If you’re ever scared, we’ll come get you. Only four more years and she’ll be off to college.

Soon, we’re going to have to step back and say, “Eyrna, we give you the world.”

This morning, I got to make the phone call to the winner of the $10,000 James Jones First Novel Fellowship.

Every time we enlist a new judge, we give that person the privilege of making the call. I didn’t judge last year because my book was coming out and I was on the road; novelist Nina Solomon graciously took my place. She thus had the honor of phoning the 2009 winner, Tena Russ. Nina, who also teaches in the Wilkes MFA Program, said bringing Tena the good news made her feel happy for an entire month. It is one of the few times we, as teachers, as writers, get to feel powerful, as if we are moving boulders out of a struggling writer’s path. Nothing guarantees the novel will find a publisher, but our list of success stories is long. Our 2007 winner, MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER, was published last spring to critical acclaim and was chosen as one of Oprah’s top summer reads.

Our past winners include Leslie Schwartz, who won in 1997 for JUMPING THE GREEN, which became a best-seller. I never got to meet Leslie, because during that year’s James Jones Literary Society symposium, I was nursing my newborn, my only child.

Greg Hrbek, the 1996 winner for THE HINDENBERG CRASHES NIGHTLY, went on to become a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and one of his short stories was included in The Best American Short Stories of 2009, edited by Alice Sebold.

Mary Kay Zuravleff of Washington DC won the 1994 contest for her wonderful novel THE FREQUENCY OF SOULS, which went on to be published to rave reviews. Her second novel, THE BOWL IS ALREADY BROKEN, was published in 2005 by Farrar Straus & Giroux. She told me winning the Fellowship changed her life. These are just a few.

Earlier today, upon having made our decision, I learned the name of this year’s winner. Gina Ventre. Up until that point, I only knew the working title and log number of her novel: #170, MOON’S EXTRA MILE. I called her and left a message to call me back as soon as possible. Then I sent an email, realizing most people check their emails much more frequently than their mobile phones. I received a response in about 5 minutes. Gina wrote that she was at work and couldn’t take a break to call me back until 1:30 PM. Where are you? I wrote back. She replied that she was at work behind a desk, at a hospital in Ohio.

At 1:30 on the nose, Gina called. I told her she’d won the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Dead silence. Finally, in a timid murmur, she asked, “The whole thing?”
“The whole thing,” I replied.
After another silence, she said, “Holy shit.” Then she seemed to be catching her breath and asked me to hold on a second while she tried to process this news. “Can I tell people? I mean, is this for real?”
“It’s for real and yes, you can tell people.”

When I called Robin Oliveira and told her she’d won, she wept for 5 minutes straight before I could get a word in. She told me she’d given up. She was about to throw the book away. Now she’s on Oprah’s summer list.

When my daughter asks me about my father, who died long before she was born, I try to draw a three-dimensional picture of him, but my memories are confused. I can’t remember now what is purely true, and what has been embellished in my years of storytelling. One thing I know is true: he loved young writers. He wanted to help them. In 1973, he wrote a letter to a general he’d befriended while he was in Vietnam during the war, writing a series of articles for the New York Times Magazine. He told the general to support his Hippie son, who wanted to become a writer. He told the general that it took as long to become an accomplished writer as it did to become a doctor or a lawyer. Why not give his boy the same chance he would give him if he was in graduate school for medicine? It’s because of this letter that I started the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. This link will take you to the Wilkes University site for information on applying next year.

And Nina Solomon was exactly right. Having the privilege of making that phone call to Gina Ventre, the 2010 winner, will keep me flying for at least a month.

Ruth Nelda Gonzalez and Me at My Books & Books Reading

I just got home from my trip to Florida. While snow kept me from attending the first leg of my journey at the Jacksonville BookMania Festival, I did make it to Miami and to Boca Raton.

In Miami, I read at Books & Books and received a warm welcome. The room was full, mostly due to Connie Ogle’s excellent feature article on the front page of Sunday’s 2/28 Miami Herald Arts section: http://bit.ly/bgQiyi

Sometimes it’s difficult to feel so exposed, because my memoir does disclose some pretty personal stuff about my past and my difficult relationship with my mother. But then the most amazing, wondrous things happen if I remain open.

On one side, I am at times blindsided by the rage and resentment from extended family members, who think this kind of stuff — like alcoholism and abuse (verbal, physical, psychological) should be “kept in the family” and never aired in public. This is a shame-based reaction to mental illness that I totally reject. Interestingly, the people who are angry about the book NEVER come forth and tell me they’re angry; they pass the message on in a back-handed, back-channel way, through other family members, or friends, who in turn feel compelled to pass the piss and vinegar on to me. Truth be told: I couldn’t care less. They’re not even my relatives, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t take on other people’s shame any more. I’m done with that.

But, the most amazing result of this book for me is the complete strangers I’ve met at my readings and at book fairs and through email who not only thank me for writing this book, but share their deepest fears and pain with me. This is something I never expected, a gift that goes so far beyond our human fear of shame and dishonor. I am surprised and blown away every time. And every time I begin to feel drained from the strain of deflecting the resentment and anger, someone approaches me out of the blue, writing me an email, or showing up at a reading, or befriending me at an event, and sharing a story that recharges my depleted batteries and urges me to go forward on this weird journey of healing.

At the Brandeis University fundraiser lunch in Boca Raton, five of us women writers spoke to a gathering of 500 women (and 5 men). Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, shared about working as a doctor for 2 years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She focused on the similarities between women of all religions; she talked about the commonalities between us all, not the differences. She was a true ambassador for peace. Lisa See, whose great-grandfather was a Chinese immigrant, talked about her family history and the history of the Chinese immigrant experience and how these are the rich sources from which she mines her stories. Thrity Umrigar, a Parsi writer originally from India, shared her childhood experiences growing up a Zoroastrian in a predominantly Hindu society and the experience of being an “outsider,” which is shared by so many all over the world. Barbara Delinsky shared about her incredibly interactive relationship with her readers, and how her topics are often culled from women’s issues in the news.

Thrity Umrigar, Lisa See, Dr. Qanta Ahmed
After the luncheon, a stranger approached me and asked me for my opinion: Did I think she was an alcoholic? She began to tell me her story. Her close friend, now sober, apparently told her she had a drinking problem. She wanted to know if I agreed. I told her alcoholism is a self-diagnosed disease; I couldn’t know and couldn’t say. But I suggested she try to stop drinking for 3 months. She said she had no desire to stop. Well then, I said, if it hasn’t affected your life in a negative way, what’s the problem? The problem was the friend who had frightened her.

A little while later, several others came over and told me quietly that they were also in recovery, and were delighted by my outspoken approach to the disease of alcoholism.

But really, the coolest thing that happened was I made a friend. Dr. Qanta Ahmed and I came back on the same flight to NYC. We talked the whole way. We are going to try to bring a group of American women writers to Riyadh to speak to Saudi women as ambassadors of peace. What a world. I am just happy to be alive.

Yesterday my MFA student Lynn Bryant at Wilkes University read from her Masters thesis in front of a gathered crowd of her peers and other instructors. She read for ten minutes, a scene in which on the surface, very little happens: a couple has mint tea in a hotel restaurant in Fes, Morocco. But in this scene everything happens. The young man is Moroccan, A Berber who has chased this African American girl from Meknes, where they met in the restaurant of a different hotel, where Alae, the young man, is the maitre d’ — a pretty good job by Moroccan standards. Alae has brought his mother and sister to Fes to meet Willow, as if this is already a formal engagement, as if they’re already committed to each other. He has given Willow a family heirloom, a ring that in his mind binds her to him. Willow is not sure whether she should have refused the ring, run away; and now, she is deeply charmed by his wild sincerity, this impetuous show of affection. The scene shifts between their two point of views. They’ve known each other less than 24 hours and they are about to invest all their hopes, their fears, their dreams, in each other. She takes his hand and allows him to lead her into the lobby, where his mother is waiting.

I can’t stop thinking about this scene this morning. I am wondering if in a world where urgency — gaming, reality TV, and things like that — have taken over our appetite for entertainment, if a story like this, a story so smoothly written, so beautifully internal — a story about the clash between Christian and Muslin cultures — will be appreciated by the general reading public. I worry about this. I want this book to find a publisher and an audience. I think this book is very important.