In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “A good man is hard to find.” During the last century, many literary tastemakers and trendsetters did not stop to wonder whether a great writer even had to be a good man.
There were many “bad boys” of literature, including William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Ernest Hemingway. They achieved greatness despite the notoriety that was not only tolerated but, in some ways, rewarded.
Happily, there was until recently a figure on the American literary scene whose moral imagination was as potent as Hemingway’s, whose way with words was far superior to Burroughs’, and whose historical understanding was at least as sure as Mailer’s, but whose life was not marred by unattractive addictions, ugly divorces, and the like.
The steadfast example of Herman Wouk, who died last month at age 103, gives the lie to the notion that personal flaws or dependencies are a precondition for the creation of lasting works of art. Wouk, who was responsible for such iconic novels as The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar, led a life of principle, devotion, and contentment.
At Columbia University, from which he earned a degree in 1934, Wouk was busy contributing to the student humor magazine, and upon graduation, he got a gig as a writer of jokes for radio personality Fred Allen. “That an insignificant gagman like me could ever write a book at all, let alone a novel, was not in my plans or my dreams,” Wouk wrote in his memoir, Sailor and Fiddler.
It took the Second World War to steer Wouk onto a new course. In the Navy, Wouk resolved to set aside one-liners and pen what became his debut novel, Aurora Dawn, published by Simon & Schuster in 1947. Aurora Dawn and its follow-up, City Boy (1948), counted as good tries, but neither had the heft or depth of top-flight literature.
Fortunately, Wouk proved himself a noble striver. The same impulse that guided him from gags to novels led him from youthful divertissements to works of consequence, urged on by the woman who became his first and only wife, the mother of his three children, and his eventual literary agent, Betty Sarah Wouk. “I think you should write that crazy captain book first,” she told him, as recounted in Sailor and Fiddler, referring to two ideas that her husband was toying with for some time.
That turned out to be The Caine Mutiny, a tale of the unsteady leadership evinced by, and the ultimate persecution of, the aforementioned crazy captain, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Francis Queeg, on the USS Caine. The basic plot was ported over to a dazzling play and a sturdy film adaptation boasting Humphrey Bogart. Reading the original book is to be reminded of Wouk’s talent for creating crazy quilts of characters within a plausible historical infrastructure. Decades later, Wouk brilliantly deployed the same strategy in his World War II diptych, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.
Wouk’s novels, no matter how enormous, always have a beating heart at their center. In The Caine Mutiny, after abundantly illustrating the weirdness of Queeg — his choice to deprive water from his underlings and his launching of an inquiry into the purloining of strawberries — Wouk surprises us with a last-minute maneuver. Toward the close of the novel, Lt. Stephen Maryk, who has self-righteously relieved Queeg of his duties, is court-martialed but let off the hook after his able attorney, Lt. Barney Greenwald, does a demolition job on the captain.
However, in a justly famous speech near the close of the book, Greenwald, who is Jewish, reveals he cannot abide what would today be called the politics of personal destruction. “The reason I’d make Old Yellowstain a hero is on account of my mother, little gray-headed Jewish lady, fat, looks a lot like Mrs. Maryk here, meaning no offense,” Greenwald says, referring to Queeg’s nickname. Greenwald continues, “See, the Germans aren’t kidding about the Jews.” And then he says, “Old Yellowstain, for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours.”
In the same speech, Greenwald commends the guts and smarts of those who serve in the armed forces, even though they may not be “up on Proust ‘n’ Finnegan’s Wake and all,” as he puts it. This expression of admiration for the ordinary, the average, is more fully enunciated in the majestic Marjorie Morningstar, which tracks its titular character as she first eagerly pursues, but eventually comes to turn down, the free love and notoriety offered in a life in showbiz. Though she once styled herself Marjorie Morningstar, in the end she feels grateful to be known as Mrs. Milton Schwartz. “Contented, she obviously is,” a friend of hers observes. “There was no mistaking the look she gave her husband when he came in with their two boys from a father-and-son softball game, in old clothes, all sweaty and dirty.”
Marjorie, who now attends synagogue, even comes to defend religious belief against professors who poked and prodded at a creed but could never grasp it: “They could take a religion apart and show it how it ticked, but they couldn’t put it back together so it would work for anybody.” As a sideline to his novels, Wouk wrote compelling accounts of Judaism, This Is My God and The Will to Live On, and considered the formation of Israel in his last essential novels, The Hope and The Glory.
In the end, Wouk tipped his hat to the likes of Queeg and Marjorie because they stood up for the things that made his own life a blessing. He saw something in Queeg, who helped quell tyranny in the war, and Marjorie, who was attuned to the power of family and faith.
In Sailor and Fiddler, Wouk is cagey and reticent, alluding to a diary running over a hundred bound volumes, but adding, “It will remain private.” About the accidental drowning death of his four-year-old son, Abe, Wouk states, “I have not written, nor will I, about this catastrophe, from which we never wholly recovered.” And in his last televised interview on CBS “Sunday Morning” in 2017, Wouk was urged to discuss his wife, who died in 2011, but firmly replied, “I’ll say no more about Sarah.”
Maybe, after spending thousands of pages explaining who he was and what he loved, Wouk finally felt there was little left to say.
Peter Tonguette has written about the arts for the Wall Street Journal, Humanities, and the New Criterion. He is the editor of the book Peter Bogdanovich: Interviews.
