Thom Jones, who died this past Friday, at the age of seventy-one, was a unique writer. Each story that he wrote thrummed with his distinctive, idiosyncratic voice. The subjects—boxing, crime, the Vietnam War—may have been “gritty,” but the experience of reading his work is unfailingly buoyant, uplifting. We met only a few times, usually by chance. But I felt like a friend of his, a writer-friend, at least.
We were connected, perhaps bonded, in a way probably not generally known: sometime in 1990, I think, I received a quite hefty story manuscript submitted to Ontario Review, which I co-edited with my late husband, Raymond Smith. The story was remarkable—especially since the author seemed not to have published fiction previously. He introduced himself as an admiring reader of my “On Boxing” who thought that I might appreciate this story. From the first paragraph onward, I certainly appreciated it—“The Pugilist at Rest” seemed to me a small masterpiece, vividly imagined, wonderful in all ways. It does daring things with narrative structure that one is taught not to do in many writing workshops, I’m sure. But when with much excitement I gave the story to the editor-in-chief, my dear husband Ray, with whom I rarely, virtually never disagreed on literary or editorial matters, Ray said that it was overlong and digressive; he did not want to publish it. What a surprise! When I think of it now, Ray’s decision is still somewhat shocking. I did try to argue with him, of course. But I could not prevail.
And so I wrote back to Thom, telling him that the story was excellent but “overlong.” Thom thanked me for considering the story and told me the unexpected news that it looked as if The New Yorker was going to publish it; evidently, he’d sent it to more than one magazine. I congratulated him, and assured him that being “rejected” by _Ontario Review _would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him, which is certainly true. The story won an O. Henry Award, and Thom went on to publish several more stories in The New Yorker.
Yes, for years, as Thom Jones published books to critical acclaim, I could not resist teasing my husband, who’d clearly made a glaring mistake. Yet, oddly, Ray still felt that the story was “overlong and digressive”—so stubborn are some editors, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Later, I included “The Pugilist at Rest” in “Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers,” at the very back of the volume—and I never fail to assign it to my writing students at Princeton.
I’ve so admired all of Thom’s stories—I believe that I have read every word he published, for sadly he had not published so very many—and can’t quite believe that his voice has been silenced, so prematurely.
