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I learned a lot about the play of emotion. There was a part of me that whistled in the dark, and said, "It's all right, he wrote a very good book; it's probably better than The Naked and the Dead." I must tell you now, in this point of my literary existence, I think it was better than The Naked and the Dead, because it went into the taproot of Army experience. I had learned a lot in the Army from a couple of years in it, and it had had a huge effect on me, and I'd been able to write a pretty good novel with it. But it hadn't been my life in the way it had been for Jones. He hadn't had a successful career life as an adolescent and a young man, so he went into that Regular Army. That was going to be his life; that was going to be his existence. It wasn't something he was going to get out of necessarily. And so his book, I felt, went deeper into the nature of what it was like to be a soldier. So I thought, yes, it was a better book than I had written.
--
Norman Mailer

 

James Jones

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Nathaniel Branden

 

He thought for a moment, brought back from his reflections. "It was only possible for me to do it," he said, "because it was necessary. I either had to write the book or be reduced to despair; it was the only means of saving me from nothingness, chaos and suicide. The book was written under this pressure and brought me the expected cure, simply because it was written, irrespective of whether it was good or bad. That was the only thing that counted. And while writing it, there was no need for me to think at all of any other reader but myself, or at the most, here and there another close war comrade, and I certainly never thought then about the survivors, but always about those who fell in the war. While writing it, I was as if delirious or crazy, surrounded by three or four people with mutilated bodies — that is how the book was produced."

 

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