Herman Wouk was not beloved of our city’s literary establishment. The writer, who died last week 10 days short of his 104th birthday, was pretty much the opposite of novelists who won the praise of our elites.
While the likes of Norman Mailer and Philip Roth challenged everything about post-World War II America, including its faith, morals and patriotic pieties, Wouk honored those same qualities.
That’s why his best-selling books that endorsed conventional middle-class existence and celebrated old-fashioned patriotism and religion didn’t inspire the same kind of respect given to those writers whose purpose was to expose what they considered to be the hypocrisy and shallow nature of the kind of life to which most Americans aspired.
But 60 years after books like “The Caine Mutiny” and “Marjorie Morningstar” and many others that followed made Wouk a fixture on the best-seller lists, that’s exactly why we should be celebrating his legacy.
Born in The Bronx in 1915 to immigrant parents and a graduate of Columbia University, Wouk would serve as an officer in the US Navy during World War II. But his experiences did more than provide the backdrop for the book, play and movie about the doomed commander of the USS Caine immortalized by Humphrey Bogart in the film.
Wouk emerged from the war determined not just to write about that cataclysm but also to tell the stories of 20th-century Americans.
The abuse of critics notwithstanding, Wouk thought of himself as a storyteller, not a literary immortal. Though his narrative epics about the war in which he fought — “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” which also became popular TV miniseries — inspired some comparisons to Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” neither his prose nor his insights sustained that analogy.
But his straightforward narrative style won him not just book sales but readers who understood and identified closely with his characters.
None did that more than “Marjorie Morningstar,” the tale of a New York girl who wants to be an actress. She sheds her Jewish-sounding name as well as the faith and morality of her family to pursue sex and fame but in the end settles gladly for a life as a suburban wife and mother.
Marjorie may not rank with Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina as a heroine for the ages, but her struggles and ultimate happiness won the hearts of generations of American girls and women who still see themselves in her saga.
Wouk’s conservative outlook may have struck some as hopelessly outdated in the postwar era, as the country was transformed into the cynical America of our own time, where nothing is sacred.
But as we survey the damage that the collapse of belief in conventional middle-class values has had on our society, perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that Marjorie’s journey is one that should still be honored.
While more fashionable authors derided service to our nation as exploitative or morally unserious, Wouk thought differently. He cheered the patriotism of his main characters rather than mocking it.
He treated religion the same way. Whereas faith was largely banished from popular culture for decades, Wouk, an Orthodox Jew, not only treated it with respect but as essential to a moral life. His book “This Is My God” helped introduce Judaism to many Americans who knew nothing of it and gave secular Jews a primer in their own faith.
Wouk traveled far from his humble Bronx beginnings and continued writing until the end. In that sense he was not only the quintessential upward striving New Yorker but also one who never forgot or ceased to celebrate the values bequeathed to him by his city and his community.
As we look back now on his remarkable century, a more sober assessment of his place in our literary history would reveal that while he was no Tolstoy, his stories are essentially all of our stories. New York should remember and salute him for that achievement.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review. Twitter: @jonathans_tobin