Herman Wouk

The Novelist as Social Historian

Arnold Beichman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351515856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Arnold Beichman's comprehensive study of the writings of Herman Wouk, one of America's leading writers, shows how Wouk's plays and novels exemplify an extraordinary and often highly perceptive preoccupation with American society in war and in peace. Situating Wouk in the same literary tradition as Cervantes, Richardson, Balzac, and Dickens, Beichman demonstrates that Wouk's novels have strong plots, moralist outcomes, and active--essentially positive--characters. The new introduction serves to bring Wouk's work over the past two decades into the reckoning.

Making extensive use of Wouk's personal papers and manuscripts as well as personal interviews with him, Beichman's focus is on the social and literary qualities of Wouk's work. In particular, he examines eight novels including War and Remembrance and The Winds of War; The Traitor, one of his three plays; and two moral tracts on Judaism. Wouk has written four more novels, including his latest, A Hole in Texas, his twelfth.

Beichman portrays Wouk as one of the few living novelists concerned with virtue, and sees his work as against the mainstream of contemporary American novelists. These, he argues, have eschewed such elements of the traditional novel as invention, coincidences, surprises, suspense, and a moral perspective more presumed than examined.

1
Early Influences

Herman Wouk, novelist, playwright, essayist, screen writer, was born on East 167th St., The Bronx, a borough of New York City, on 27 May 1915. His parents, Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk, were Russian Jews. Although they had emigrated from the same city, Minsk, in the early 1900s, they met and married in America. In Czarist Russia, Wouk's father had been a Socialist agitator under police surveillance.

His father's first job was as a three dollar a week laundry worker. Eventually he became a successful entrepreneur in the power laundry field. Like many immigrants, the family in 1931 moved from the rather depressing Bronx neighborhood to Manhattan's West End Ave., later to be one of the backgrounds of Wouk's novel Marjorie Morningstar.¹ (The disesteem in which this northern borough of New York City was held was expressed by a terse couplet of Ogden Nash: “The Bronx ?/ No thonx.”)

Wouk was the youngest of three children, a brother, Victor, and a sister, Irene. He attended Townsend Harris High School, an elite public school for high IQ New York youngsters, later abolished in the interests of egalitarianism. At age fifteen, after a semester at Yeshiva High School, he entered Columbia College in Fall 1930 where he majored in comparative literature and philosophy.

For a teenager raised in a traditional Jewish family and with a strong grounding in the Scriptures and Talmud, Columbia was a powerful cultural influence which collided with Wouk's strongly religious background.² He fell away from his Orthodoxy and it was not until 1940, he has said, that he began the return, the tshuba, to Jewish Orthodoxy.

Grandfather versus Professor

Two intellectual influences were in conflict during his late teens. The first was that of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Mendel Leib Levine, who arrived from Russia in 1928 after early years of study for the rabbinate at the Volozin Yeshiva, Lithuania. The opposing influence was that of Professor Irwin Edman, Columbia's philosophy department chairman. Poet, essayist, disciple of John Dewey, and friend of George Santayana, Edman was a polished and popular lecturer and friendly to the young people around him.³ Edman died in 1954 and Wouk's grandfather three years later in Israel.

“You might say that my career,” Wouk once told a newspaper interviewer, “has been a sort of vector of these two forces—Edman and Grandpa.”⁴ In the same interview he described Edman as “a naturalistic skeptic of the deepest die—quite a contrast to my old Orthodox grandfather.” Rabbi Levine, on the other hand, “came into my life with an assumption that the only important thing was to study the Talmud, and so great was the force of his personality that I bought the notion.” In one of the folders in his Columbia archive I found some handwritten notes by Wouk which explicate perhaps a little more dramatically these influences: “The two teachers who most influenced my life were a man without a trace of Western culture and a man who is its embodiment.”

This is how he describes his grandfather “who in twenty-three years of living in the United States never used the English language although he learned it.” Wouk writes:

During a lifetime stretching through ninety-four years, he did not read a novel, hear a symphony, see a play or movie, or look at a painting, classical, modern. Plato or Aristotle were shadowy names, figures more remote than Confucius or Lao-Tze are to me, a man who without question never heard of Sophocles, Dante, Cervantes, Michaelangelo, Galileo, Milton, Da Vinci, Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Twain, or Shaw, and who, though Yiddish-speaking, never read a word of one of the world's great humorists, the equal of Molière in power and copiousness but outside of Western culture because of his Yiddish language, meaning Sholem Aleichem. This was my grandfather, Rabbi Mendel Levine, a single-minded rabbinic sage of deep wisdom and compelling charm, who cared about and taught me only one thing, the Torah.⁵

In the same folder, he described Edman whom he first encountered in a course on comparative religion, which Wouk took in his sophomore year, “but I had heard about him since the first day I had reported to Morningside Heights as a singularly crude, singularly young freshman from The Bronx.”

“Edman was legendary,” writes Wouk, “and looked legendary, acted legendary. He was not larger than life, indeed, he was a good deal smaller by ordinary standards but he was more vividly colored than life. Professor Edman was little more than five feet tall. He must have been an albino. All his hair was pallid, virtually colorless, including his eyebrows and lashes, blue eyes very prominent and they oscillated back and forth all the time most disconcertingly. He was so near-sighted that when he read a book or paper, he held it practically at the end of his nose with a curious and quite characteristic sidelong glance.”⁶

Wouk's Literary Ambitions

At Columbia, Wouk's literary aspirations, already noticeable in high school and at summer camps,⁷ flourished thanks to his own talents and to the help of a fellow student, Arnold Auerbach, who was a year ahead of him. (Years later, Auerbach wrote two well-known Broadway musicals, “Call Me Mister” and “Inside USA.”) By graduation in June 1934, Wouk had written two varsity shows (one with Auerbach in 1933), edited the college humor magazine, the Jester, and had contributed a thrice-weekly humor column to the college daily, the Columbia Spectator.

Wouk graduated in the middle of the Depression, a period where jobs for college graduates were sparse, let alone for anyone else. Here Auerbach came to the rescue with an offer of fifteen dollars a week from David Freedman, a famous radio writer of the time. Wouk's assignment was to copy jokes out of old magazines and onto file cards and to clean up off-color gags and transmute them into radio jokes through Freedman's Formula, as it was called in “Make it with Kissing.”⁸ This was the title of a magazine article which Wouk wrote in 1947 when his first novel, Aurora Dawn, had been selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Freedman's enterprise was really a joke factory for such famed radio comics as Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, Lou Holtz, and others. Wouk believed that the job would give him writing experience but it was rather dull work—and he began looking for something better. After two years, he found himself a niche as scriptwriter for Fred Allen. He and Auerbach each made $100 a week, a good wage in those Depression years. It was not long before they were each making $400 a week.⁹

Radio Comedy

In the magazine article Wouk defends radio comedy but in rather ironic terms, conceding that radio comedy “is a vulgar art in intention and performance… which, in general, is pursued with zeal, discipline, and much technical skill.” He mocked the “big guns of intellectual analysis” whose attacks on radio comedy usually “end by proving triumphantly that vulgar art is vulgar.” Wouk revealed a populist streak in this article by arguing that vulgar was a loaded word—“Franklin Roosevelt was the vulgar choice for President; it is vulgar to believe in free speech, a free press, and freedom of religion. And it is vulgar to enjoy Fred Allen, Fibber McGee, Jack Benny, and Bob Hope. That is to say, most of the people do it.” Here was Wouk, sensitive so early in his as yet unborn career as a novelist, to intellectual elitism, a characteristic of “new sensibility” critics who would hound him in his later life as an outstandingly successful writer of novels, plays, films, and most recently, television drama.

Wouk defended himself and his fellow gag writers on the ground that “much serious criticism of radio seems to me that of judging one art by the standards of another…. Radio comedy is vaudeville. It is often judged as writing.” And here Wouk became autobiographical in a far more personal sense. Referring to the “muddle of standards”—radio writing and serious writing—Wouk said, gagmen like himself were sometimes afflicted with “a sense of guilt about their profession, as though it belonged on the twilight edge of society, along with bookmaking and the selling of liquor after curfew.”

During their years of gag writing, he and his collaborator, Arnold Auerbach, “devised a curious, self-deceiving fiction: We were not really gagmen, but playwrights, and what we did in radio was a sort of ditchdigging to provide food and shelter for ourselves while we pursued the high dramaturgic art.” Wouk and Auerbach set themselves this ritual: Twice weekly “we would set aside an evening and talk about The Play. This served to keep alive the fantasy and refresh our spirits for a few more days of the drudgery of gag writing.” Ruefully, Wouk added: “As of the moment, neither of us has written The Play.”

A few years later, both of them had written successful plays. After his World War II navy experience, to which I will return later, he went back to gag writing and he tells of how he ran into an old friend, Nat Hiken, then Fred Allen's leading gag writer, at his Radio City office. Wouk describes the meeting: “Nat's tired face lit with a genial smile when he saw me. ‘Ah!’ said he, with genuine warmth, ‘Welcome back to prostitution.’”

Popular Culture

Wouk's article is a serious examination, though written with a light touch, of American popular culture during what was the pretelevision age. For all the apologies pro sua vita, Wouk was already signalling his interest in how to achieve a degree of popular acceptance without compromising serious artistic standards, the problem faced by novelists from Cervantes through Richardson, Defoe, Scott, Trollope, and Dickens to the present. The Wouk article was serious in another fashion—he refused to recognize the trashy politico-cultural issue of the late 1940s about capitalist culture and its discontents, the whole argument about masscult, midcult, and high culture.

Wouk said that radio humor was a way of solving a particular problem: “Given an invention which enables millions of people to enjoy a vaudeville act all at once, instead of a few hundred at a time over a period of years, how shall the amusement be maintained week in, week out? The solution is to keep the form of the vaudeville act but renew its substance each week.” To illustrate the point, Wouk used a sprightly metaphor. Radio is a sort of “doughnut machine of vaudeville, using fresh ingredients in each operation but always producing the same kind of doughnut. The renewable ingredients of comic vaudeville are jokes.”

The period during which Wouk worked as a radio humorist (according to him there were never more than about 200 gag writers at any one time) was the golden age of famous radio comedy stars, an era not likely to be duplicated in the television era, whether commercial or cable—comics like Ed Wynn, Jack Pearl, Bert Lahr, Burns and Allen, Milton Berle, Henry Youngman, Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, and, of course, Fred Allen.

Farewell to Radio

In the article Wouk felt it necessary to explain why he was saying farewell, after thirteen financially rewarding years, to “gag writing as a useful and rewarding trade.” (At the end of that career, he was earning about $500 a week in those memorable preinflation dollars.) Although the pay was good, if uncertain, “the life of the gagman, with its tension, its long, irregular hours… its color and excitement, is really bachelors’ work—young bachelors preferably—and I, a family man entering the sere and yellow thirties, was already feeling, at some postwar gag conference, a little like the Last Leaf.”¹⁰ And there was also the desire “of wanting to see my work in print, and the career of refueling vaudeville acts is one of perpetual anonymity.”

The War Years

In 1941, the Auerbach-Wouk partnership broke up as the war neared American shores. In June of that year he went to Washington as a dollar-a-year man to write radio scripts for the war-bond selling campaign of the U.S. Treasury. He had earlier attempted to join the navy but was unable to get into officers’ training school because an engineering background was a prerequisite. With Pearl Harbor, the standards for entry were lowered and he entered midshipman's school at Columbia University, a different kind of “return.”¹¹

He graduated from midshipmen's school in the top twenty of a class of 500. By now he had returned to Orthodox Judaism and throughout his four years in the navy, he held to Jewish laws and customs, particularly about kashruth, i.e., food prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws. On the Liberty ship which took him to the Pacific in 1942, Wouk often ate nothing but bread and potatoes, because the ship's menu emphasized pork almost exclusively. One day he posted a poem on the bulletin board:

Of all God's creatures small and big
We owe most to our friend, the pig…
Yeoman, record this in the log:
Twenty-one-gun salute—the hog!

A senior officer saw the “four-liner,” found out who had written it, and issued an order to the kitchen: “Give this man something he can eat.”¹²

In the Wouk archive, I found a handwritten entry dated 11 April 1965 describing a White House dinner given by President Lyndon B. Johnson in honor of the president of Upper Volta and to which Wouk and his wife had been invited:¹³ “We couldn't eat anything at the White House...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the 2004 Edition
• Preface
• Chronology
• 1 Early Influences
• 2 A Good Start: Aurora Dawn
• 3 Caribbean Carnival: A Tragicomedy
• 4 The Boys of Summer
• 5 The Caine Mutiny: Authority versus Responsibility
• 6 Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: Marjorie Morningstar
• 7 Youngblood Hawke: “Young Man from the Provinces”
• 8 A Writer and His Ideas
• 9 The Greatness: The War Novels
• 10 Looking Forward: A Nonconclusion
• Bibliography
• Index