French novelist Romain Gary, known by the pen name Emile Ajar, was the first and only man to win the Prix Goncourt twice: once under his own name, once under his pseudonym. A World War II hero, Gary was also awarded the Croix de Guerre, serving as a pilot in the Free French Air Force Squadron. Fighting for the Americans, James Jones was also enlisted in the war, but unable to fly due to poor eyesight. War was a predominant topic in both of their works, and the two writers collaborated on the screenplay adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, about the Normandy landings on D-Day. Months before the film’s release, Gary wrote Jones about Jones’ fourth novel, The Thin Red Line. Upon receiving his letter, Jones wrote a friend, “I don’t have to tell you what this made me feel. I was sitting on the bed laughing and crying like an idiot…I value it too much to be used for publicity without his permission specifically. Should he say okay, it might be a good thing to put on the original jacket before reviews.”
April 22,1962
My Dear Jimmy,
Just to prove that I mean it, to whom it may concern:
The Thin Red Line, the line between man and beast, so easily crossed, is a realistic fable, symbolic without symbols, mythological and yet completely factual, a sort of Moby Dick without the white whale, deeply philosophical without any philosophizing whatsoever. Touched by a weird, resigned and yet lighthearted, ironic, and even optimistic acceptance of our animal nature, with constant flashes of a sly, dark, peculiar humour, written with a deceptive facility that is the mark of truly great writing, this extraordinary novel achieves epic proportions through the magic of a joyful love of life and humanity, absolutely unique in contemporary literature. The book belongs to that vein of poetical realism which is the rarest and to me the most precious thing in the whole history of the novel; it is essentially an epic love poem about the human predicament and like all great books it leaves one with a feeling of wonder and hope.
Romain Gary
From To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones. Edited by George Hendrick; New York: Random House, 2007.