Thom Jones; janitor turned literary (and his) world around with vivid
stories . By Sam Roberts New York Times . NEW YORK - Thom Jones grew up
in a gritty Illinois factory town. His father abandoned the family and
was later committed to a mental institution, where he hanged himself.
When Thom was a teenager, he joined the Marines. Savagely beaten in a
boxing match at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and mistakenly given a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, he was discharged - to his great good
fortune: All of the members of his reconnaissance unit but one were
killed in Vietnam. Mr. Jones worked on the Betty Crocker Noodles
Almondine line at a General Mills plant. He was fired as an advertising
copywriter because, he was told, a client would not countenance his
proposed slogan for the Jolly Green Giant - which was more or less,
with an expletive inserted, "These are the best peas I ever ate.
Recovering from alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs, Mr.
Jones was 47 and working nights as a janitor in a Lacey, Wash., high
school when he mailed a fictionalized Vietnam War story to The New
Yorker. It was admired so immediately that it bypassed the usual
vetting by multiple editors and sailed into print in late 1991,
receiving critical acclaim and the O. Henry Award in 1993 for best
short story. Thus did Mr. Jones, who died on Friday at 71 in Olympia,
Wash., burst from obscurity to become an idiosyncratic literary
sensation. His ferocious, semiautobiographical stories about boxers,
custodians, soldiers, crime victims, cancer patients, and asylum
inmates coupled a fateful machismo - the eternal pessimist Arthur
Schopenhauer was his hero - with grim humor. "These are people you
wouldn't want living next door to you," he said in an interview with
The Mississippi Review in 1999. "Even I wouldn't want them living next
door. But it's fun to drop in on them occasionally and see what sort of
preposterous activities they are up to. Cautioning readers that one of
his anthologies, "Cold Snap," required "strong nerves and an even
stronger stomach," the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote in The New York
Times Book Review in 1995, "Reading Thom Jones' fiction is like
speeding in an open car: The landscape blurs, the momentum becomes
intoxicating - and then the brakes are applied, with no warning. His
first published short story, "The Pugilist at Rest" (the title was
inspired by a well-known ancient statue of an aging boxer), described a
Marine buddy who had just been bayoneted in the heart by an enemy
soldier. "I was able to see Jorgeson's eyes - a final flash of glorious
azure before they faded into the unfocused and glazed gray of death,"
he wrote. "A pair of Phantom F-4s came in very low with delayed-action
high-explosive rounds and napalm. I could feel the almost unbearable
heat waves of the latter, volley after volley. I can still feel it and
smell it to this day. Mr. Jones's first anthology, published in 1993,
included that story and shared its title. "I frankly wonder whether
anyone has written better about this war or better caught its
terrifying otherness," the novelist Thomas McGuane wrote in The Times
Book Review. The collection was a National Book Award finalist. In
1999, Mr. Jones ended a meteoric decade with another well-received
anthology, "Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine. He later worked on
screenplays and a novel. "I channeled my obsessive-compulsive behavior
into my writing and soon found that if I wrote a lot each and every
day, a kind of psychological integration took place within me and a
form of peace became available," he told The Mississippi Review. "I
wasn't good at anything," he continued, "never had a job I liked, but
there were books and writers that essentially saved my life, kept me
going. He read them in the school library on breaks from his job as a
janitor. Mr. Jones survived a Dickensian childhood, self-hate, and a
brain injury from boxing that resulted in temporal lobe epilepsy. He
died of complications of diabetes. "Before my injury, I wasn't inclined
to be a reader, or obsessed with God and the meaning of life," he told
The Times in 1993. "Ever since this happened to me, I've been a more
introspective guy, constantly reading philosophy, studying world
religions, and then having a fever, literally a fever, to write. "It's
a lust, an obsession, to put it down, and in the act of writing I'm not
Thom Jones. And it's such a relief to not be Thom Jones.
