Posted on Sun, May. 22, 2005
Can a storyteller sell the scholars? A Pulitzer winner in
1952, still productive at 90, Herman Wouk may yet
convert his critics.
Inquirer Book
Critic
Like all sophisticated sorts, young writers have
never needed a local hook to get excited by what they're reading.
Even so, the literary moment that changed the life of Herman Wouk, the reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Caine Mutiny and other enduring novels, who turns
90 Friday, stands out as extra exotic.
The native New Yorker, whose distinguished World War II Navy career included
eight Pacific invasions, four campaign stars, and promotion to
second-in-command of a minesweeper, found himself in
Browsing in a secondhand bookstore, Wouk bought a
bunch of novels and soon found himself mesmerized by Don Quixote,
"the key to my entire career."
"I read it for the first time at 29," he later explained,
"and that was when I decided I should try to write novels."
Critics for whom Wouk has always been a discordant
note - not Bellow, not Malamud, not Roth, not Potok - might read the anecdote against him.
So the windy Winds of War began with the windmills of Sancho Panza! And the tawdry
fantasies in Marjorie Morningstar, that cautionary tale of a Barnard
College Bovary, should properly be pondered as a stab at dreaming the
impossible dream!
But as Hoover Fellow Arnold Beichman argued last year in a new edition of
his against-the-grain study, Herman Wouk: The
Novelist as Social Historian (Transaction, $24.95), the marginalizing of
this still-productive writer - his latest novel, A Hole in Texas, came
out last spring and arrives this month in paperback - bears political as well
as literary hallmarks.
Wouk's career may be understandably remote to
readers who already view Dave Eggers as an elder statesman. A moment, then, for
the long view of a man who made the cover of Time nearly 50 years ago (
Born in 1915 in the
After college, Wouk became a "gag man"
for radio comedians, including that most literary of the bunch, Fred Allen. He
joined the Navy in 1941, and began writing fiction after his
Aurora Dawn, his now rarely read first novel about the world of radio
advertising, appeared in 1947, followed by his second novel, City Boy
(1948), about a
But it was The Caine Mutiny, winner of the
1952 Pulitzer Prize and later a classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart, that lifted Wouk to fame.
The story of Capt. Queeg, a neurotic Navy commander
whose incompetence triggers a complex tale in which honor, loyalty and
responsibility play out in unexpected ways, it first suggested Wouk's conservative impulses - respect for authority, pride
in the Navy, distaste for vulgarity.
That estranged critics for whom a war novel meant antiwar novel on
the order of such later books as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Then, to make matters worse, came Marjorie Morningstar (1955), the first novel on
Jewish American themes to become a mainstream best-seller. That one irritated
1950s
At the time, the Partisan Review crowd eagerly sought to emphasize its
admission into
If a later generation's iconic phrase for love at first sound-bite became
"You had me at 'Hello!'," you could sum up the rift between Wouk and the Jewish literary establishment as, "You
lost me at Bloomingdale's."
The success of Youngblood Hawke (1962), Wouk's
partly autobiographical 878-page novel of a Thomas Wolfelike
writer who takes New York by storm, confirmed its author as a writer to be
grouped with such fellow Jewish horsemen of the best-seller list as Irving
Stone and Irving Wallace, even if Wouk might have
preferred to see his pedigree marked as Cervantes to Dickens to Tolstoy to Wouk to (with foresight) John Irving to Tom Wolfe.
Thus, by the time Wouk published the World War II
epics for which younger (we mean middle-aged) readers know him best - the more
than 1,900 pages of The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance
(1978) - his literary portrait seemed ossified: popular novelist, epic
storyteller and entertainer, made-for-TV guy (both those books became huge
multi-part TV events).
Wouk's four subsequent novels - Inside/Out
(1985) (about a Jewish presidential adviser), The Hope (1993) and The
Glory (1994) (historical novels about modern
Yet Beichman, who studied the novelist's private papers stored at
For Beichman, Wouk's religious faith, longtime
anti-Marxism, devotion to
Beichman may be right. Wouk's traditionalist
rejection of deep Freudian approaches to character, his refusal to follow his
protagonists "into the land of Nod" (as he once put it) to mine their
motivations, now fits well with the cinematic bent of much literary fiction.
If Wouk lacks Bellow's pointillist wit, Malamud's moral ambiguity, or Roth's bold boundary-testing,
he retains that outsized reportorial ambition that Beichman identifies with
Balzac, who once wrote, wearily, "I have carried an entire society in my
head."
In an odd review years ago of The Winds of War, scholar Pearl K. Bell
decried the book's "sentimentality" and "soap-opera
crudities," then confessed she couldn't put it down. Perhaps as life in
the 21st century continues to resemble emotional soap opera more than the
coolly modernist constructs of mid-20th-century literary luminaries, Herman Wouk will yet have his day with the professors.
Contact book critic Carlin Romano at
215-854-5615 or cromano@phillynews.com.
Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/carlinromano.