Jones, Madison 1925–

(Madison Percy Jones, Jr.)

PERSONAL: Born March 21, 1925, in Nashville, TN; son of Madison Percy (in business) and Mary Temple (a homemaker) Jones; married Shailah McEvilley (a homemaker), February 5, 1951; children: Carroll Jones Bevan, Madison Percy III, Ellen Jones Green, Michael, Andrew. Education: Vanderbilt University, A.B., 1949; University of Florida, A.M., 1951, doctoral study, 1951–53. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Cattle farming, fishing, making sculptures.

ADDRESSES: Home—Auburn, AL. Agent—Harold Matson Company, Inc., 276 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: Farmer and horse trainer in Cheatham County, TN, during the 1940s; Miami University, Oxford, OH, instructor in English, 1953–54; University of Tennessee, Knoxville, instructor in English, 1955–56; Auburn University, Auburn, AL, assistant professor, 1956–68, professor of English, 1968–87, professor emeritus, 1987–, alumni writer-in-residence, 1966–87, distinguished faculty lecturer, 1980. Military service: U.S. Army, Military Police, 1945–46; served in Korea.

MEMBER: Fellowship of Southern Writers, Alabama Academy of Distinguished Authors, Alabama Writer's Forum (honorary life member).

AWARDS, HONORS: Sewanee Review, fellowship, 1954, Andrew Lytle Prize for short fiction, 1992; book award, Alabama Library Association, 1967; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1968; Guggenheim fellow, 1973–74; Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction, U.S. Civil War Center, 1998; T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, Ingersoll Foundation, 1998; Harper Lee Award for Alabama distinguished writer, Alabama Writer's Symposium, 1999.

WRITINGS:

(With Thomas Davidson Dow) History of the Tennessee State Dental Association, Tennessee State Dental Association (Nashville, TN), 1958.

Work represented in anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, 1953, edited by Martha Foley, and Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway. Contributor of short stories, essays, and reviews to Perspective, Sewanee Review, Arlington Quarterly, Delta Review, Southern Review, Chattahoochee Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, and New York Times Book Review.

NOVELS

The Innocent, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1957.

Forest of the Night, Harcourt Brace (New York, NY), 1960.

A Buried Land, Viking (New York, NY), 1963.

An Exile, Viking, 1967, published with illustrations by Dean Bornstein, Frederic C. Beil (Savannah, GA), 1990, published as I Walk the Line, Popular Library (New York, NY), 1970.

A Cry of Absence, Crown (New York, NY), 1971.

Passage through Gehenna, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1978.

Season of the Strangler, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1982.

Last Things, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1989.

To the Winds: A Novel, Longstreet Press (Atlanta, GA), 1996.

Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light: A Novel, J.S. Sanders (Nashville, TN),1997.

Herod's Wife: A Novel, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2003.

Some of Jones's fiction has been published in Dutch and Japanese.

Jones's manuscripts are collected at Emory University and Auburn University.

ADAPTATIONS: An adaptation of An Exile was filmed by Columbia Pictures in 1970 as I Walk the Line, starring Gregory Peck, Tuesday Weld, and Johnny Cash, directed by John Frankenheimer.

SIDELIGHTS: Although Madison Jones has a devoted and enthusiastic following in certain (mostly Southern) circles, widespread critical and popular acclaim have proved elusive through much of his career. In the eyes of his admirers, however, he has been favorably compared to the classic Greek tragedians as well as to more "modern" writers. For the most part, Jones has made use of traditional themes, what Jonathan Yardley called in Partisan Review "good, solid, 'Southern' material": small towns, fundamentalism, moonshine, racial tension, and loyalty to the Confederacy. Guilt—or hubris—and retribution are common preoccupations, as is the conflict between past and present and the destruction that can result when people refuse to accept what cannot be changed. The typically Southern concerns of place, community, and history also figure prominently in Jones's fictional world.

The Innocent introduces themes of innocence corrupted by experience and the insinuation of past evils upon the present, as well as a symbolic and allegorical quality that would also mark Jones's later work. The protagonist of Jones's first novel, Duncan Welsh, seeks to break with his past transgressions committed during a seven-year residency in the North and start a new life after he inherits farmland near his boyhood home in rural Tennessee. An allegory of the Agrarian movement of the first half of the twentieth century in which a Southern economy based on farming rather than industry was championed, The Innocent portrays the battle of idealism over reality. Welsh, an agrarian, tries to create an idealized pastoral community, but ultimately his hubris causes his downfall. Symbolism abounds: Welsh's growing obsession is reflected by his Godlike but futile attempts to stop the extinction of a breed of horse; meanwhile he must confront the more sinister side of his own nature in the person of a local moonshiner who ultimately involves him in murder.

Jones's second novel, Forest of the Night, is set in the American frontier during the early part of the nineteenth century. Jonathan Cannon, an innocent, albeit enlightened, product of the philosophy of Rousseau, Paine, and Jefferson, follows the Natchez Trail from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi, in hopes of discovering men living untouched by civilization in a Rousseauian "state of nature." What he discovers instead are the outlaw Harpe brothers—brutal, psychotic killers whom Jonathan eventually comes to resemble in his effort to survive. Jones's protagonist "becomes the very thing he abhorred in theory," noted Sandy Cohen in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. "Eventually, Cannon, like John Locke and Edmund Burke, comes to the conclusion that society is a civilizing force."

"The story is largely imagined," Jones once explained to CA, describing the historic backdrop of Forest of the Night. "There is a little about the Harpe brothers on record, but very little. We know what kind of men they were and a few things they did, but we don't even know with certainty what their end was. But I hope this much is clear: the virgin forest has become a forest of the night for the enlightened hero and the confrontation issues in the near extinction of his real humanity. It's the fatality of badly misreading the nature of things."

A Buried Land, considered one of Jones's best novels, echoes the themes of Forest of the Night, but in a more modern setting. Taking place in the Tennessee River Valley as the historic Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) dam projects were reshaping the Southern landscape, the novel follows a young attorney as he returns to the land of his youth, intent upon changing those around him to accommodate his more sophisticated attitudes. "He attempts," noted M.E. Bradford in Contemporary Novelists, "to bury the old world (represented by a girl who dies aborting his child) under the waters of the TVA; but its truths (and their symbol) rise to haunt him back into abandoned modes of thought and feeling."

Jones's fifth novel, A Cry of Absence, tells the story of Hester Glenn, a well-to-do, middle-aged woman whose obsession with decorum and "tradition" cause her to reject the changes taking place in the South during the post-World War II years. After learning that her youngest son was instrumental in stoning a young black civil-rights activist to death, Hester at first denies his involvement, then suppresses the evidence. Eventually, however, as her old-fashioned attitudes become less and less acceptable to her peers, Hester is forced to reassess both her own and her son's behavior. Joseph Catinella of Saturday Review attributed the success of A Cry of Absence to Jones's mastery of the tragic style. In short, he wrote, reading A Cry of Absence is particularly affecting "not only because racial conflicts still exist but because Mr. Jones dramatically places our national turmoil in a poignant framework. Seldom have I found a novel this formal in structure, one so perfectly plotted and harmoniously designed, such a moving experience." The result, observed Catinella, is "a novel that in many respects is an astonishing technical performance by an impressive artist, a writer whose Southern themes transcend their region and embody universal truths."

Jones's next novel, Passage through Gehenna, tells the story of the fall of Jud Rivers, a young man who decided early in life to renounce sin and live as an ascetic. He is lured away, however, by three hedonistic sinners, and then saved when a young woman, Hannah, literally dies for his sins, and frees him from his newfound evil ways. Highly allegorical and symbolic, this novel is "less successful than its predecessors," according to Cohen. She compared the novel to Faulkner's A Fable because the characters represent ideas rather than people, and thus are not sharply drawn or developed.

Last Things, takes the modern South as its setting. While living conditions may have improved with time, the ills of modern society—adultery, drug trafficking, murder, cynicism, and an increasing sense of alienation, to name a few—have more than cancelled out such improvements. Through the moral breakdown of a poor white Southerner named Wendell Corbin, Jones illustrates contemporary society's efforts to discard the moral precepts that once cemented the country's social fabric. As with his other works, Last Things mirrors Jones's view that, as Cohen explained, "not only will innocence always be corrupted by experience but … the innocent deserve some blame for their ignorance of the reality of evil."

In Contemporary Novelists, Jones discussed the themes at work in his fiction: "Generally, on a more obvious level, my fiction is concerned with the drama of collisions between past and present, with emphasis upon the destructive elements involved. More deeply, it deals with the failure, or refusal, of individuals to recognize and submit themselves to inevitable limits of the human condition."

Jones consistently sets his fiction in a Southern locale; as he once told CA: "I feel a strong attachment for the country of my childhood. Most people do in the South, probably more than people from other parts of the nation. Our sense of history has a lot to do with that, and for me as a writer this attachment to place has been indispensable. The familiar place offers inspiration and images to embody my ideas. Some images I remember from my childhood, and they retain a certain mystery for me.

"I could, of course, have seen fields of briars and buck-bushes stretching to the horizon in other places. But I saw them in Tennessee, and for me they will always be associated with the country of my childhood. I hope that the mystery I feel in connection with the remembered images has been retained in my fiction."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 11, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 4, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1975.

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152: American Novelists since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby, Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence, International Specialized Book Services (Portland, OR), 2005.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, October, 1979, review of Passage through Gehenna, p. 24.

Chattahoochee Review, fall, 1996, entire issue devoted to Jones's work.

Chicago Sunday Tribune, February 24, 1957, review of The Innocent.

Commonweal, March 22, 1957, review of The Innocent; August 9, 1963, review of The Buried Land.

Harper's, October, 1967, review of Exile, p. 115.

New Republic, June 26, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 29.

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, March 13, 1960, review of Forest of the Night.

New York Herald Tribune Books, May 19, 1963, review of The Buried Land.

New York Times, March 10, 1957, review of The Innocent; June 24, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 37.

New York Times Book Review, September 3, 1967, review of Exile, p. 22; July 4, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 7; December 5, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 82; September 24, 1989, David Finkle, review of Last Things, p. 48.

Partisan Review, spring, 1973, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 286.

Saturday Review, February 23, 1957, review of The Innocent; November 27, 1971, Joseph Catinella, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 46.

Southern Humanities Review, spring, 1991, Daphne Day, review of Last Things, pp. 194-196.

Time, February 25, 1957, review of The Innocent; June 21, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 86.

Times Literary Supplement, October 4, 1957, review of The Innocent.

Washington Post, January 27, 1982, review of Season of the Strangler.

Washington Post Book World, July 18, 1971, review of A Cry of Absence, p. 2; October 15, 1989, review of Last Things, pp. 4, 11; December 7, 1997, Jonathan Yardley, review of Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light, p. 12.