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Herman Wouk (1915-2019) |
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American bestseller writer who dealt in his work with moral dilemmas and the Jewish experience. Nerman Wouk's epic war novels were tremendously popular. Several of them have been filmed, including The Caine Mutiny (1951). Wouk's two-volume historical novel set in World War II, The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), could be called an American War and Peace, which set individual values, actions, and fates against a panoramic, all-embracing picture of the world. "Rhoda asked questions about the Jews, as Pug Henry mixed more martinis. Tollever assured her that the newspaper stories were exaggerated. The worst thing had been the so-called Crystal Night when Nazi toughs had smashed department store windows and set fire to some synagogues. Even that the Jews had brought on themselves, by murdering a German embassy official in Paris. As an embassy official himself, Tollever said, he took rather a dim view of that!" (from The Winds of War) Herman Wouk was born in New York into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia.
He entered Columbia University,
New York where he studied philosophy and comparative literature, and
edited the college humor magazine, the Jester.
After completing a BA degree at Columbia University, he became a radio
scriptwriter, working from 1936 as staff writer for the comedian Fred
Allen and making soon in the middle of the Depression $400 a week. In
1941, Wouk wrote radio scripts for U.S. Treasury's Defense Bond
Campaign, in Washington, D.C. Probably through his work on writing
radio scripts, Wouk made friends with the librettist and lyricist Alan
Jay Lerner. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the United States Navy,
graduated from midshipman school, Columbia University, and U.S. Naval
Academy's communications school. He then served in the Pacific. This period he credited later as a major part of Wouk's education. "I learned about machinery, I learned how men behaved under pressure, and I learned about Americans." Wouk began his first novel during off-duty hours at sea. His first ship was the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Zane. His last post was second command of the U.S.S. Southard, a ship of the same type. The ship struck a reef in a typhoon. In 1945, Wouk married Betty Sarah Brown, a navy personnel executive; they had three sons. Their first son, Abraham Isaac, died at the age of five in a tragic accident in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In 1954, he established The Abe Wouk Foundation, in memory of Abraham Isaac Wouk. Betty, his first reader, eventually became his literary agent. Since 1946 Wouk worked as a full-time writer. He was a visiting professor of English at Yeshiva University,
New York, in 1958-58, and scholar-in-residence at Aspen Institute, Colorado, in 1973-74. From 1961 to
1969 he was a Trustee of the College of the Virgin Islands, and in 1969-71 he was a member of the Board
of Directors of Washington National Symphony. In 1974-75 he was a member of the Board of Directors of
Kennedy Center Productions. Wouk's wife died in 2011. Aurora Dawn (1947), which Wouk wrote in longhand while he was in the Navy, was selected by the
Book-of-the Month Club.
Wouk's satire about the New York advertising business was inspired by a wave of post-war
experimentation. Kurt Weil's plans to make a musica adaptation of the book were never realized. City Boy (1948) was a partly autobiographical story of a Bronx boy.
The Lomokome Papers, a science fiction story which Wouk wrote in the late 1940s,
was published in Collier's in 1956 and in a Pocket Books paperback edition in 1968. Wouk's first two books were written for Simon & Schuster. The Caine Mutiny was awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for fiction; it
has been translated at least into seventeen languages, made into a major film, starring Humphrey Bogart,
and staged by Charles Laughton at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway.
The play, which opened on January 20, 1954, ran for 415 performances. Its
original director was Dick Powell, but he was replaced
by Laughton, after disagreements with the actors. Henry Fonda played the naval attorney Lt. Barney Greenwald –
"Relaxed, thoughtful, taciturn, quiet of voice and manner, Mr. Fonda makes a heroic character out of unheroics,"
said Brooks Atkinson in his review (The New York Times, Jan 21, 1954). Wouk
began writing the work during a Naval reserve training cruise
abroad the aircraft carrier Saipan. His agent, Harold Matson, had about
150 pages from the book and wanted his client an advance that was too high for
Simon & Schuster and Knopf. The contract was signed with Doubleday, where Wouk's manuscript was read with enthusiasm. (The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors by Al Silverman, 2008, p. 187) The story concerns the events leading up to and following from a mutiny onboard a destroyer-minesweeper, the USS Caine. Willie Keith, the main character, is a rich New Yorker, who comes of age as he witnesses the fall of authority. In the center of the events is the neurotic Captain Queeg, who suffers from acute paranoia, incompetence, and cowardice. Queeg becomes obsessed with petty infractions and even conducts a full-scale investigation to determine who pilfered a quart of strawberries. "There are four ways of doing things on board my ship," he says. "The right way, the wrong way, the navy way, and my way. If they do things my way, we'll get along." However, his way leads to a dead end. Lieutenant Tom Keefer, the villain of the novel, persuades loyal Lieutenant Steve Maryk to take over command of the ship, which happens during a typhoon. In the court-martial Keefer testifies that he always though Queeg was in full control of his faculties. Maryk's legal defender, Lieutenant Greenwald, does not support the mutiny, yet he still believes Maryk acted according to his best judgment. The unstable Queeg eventually breaks down completely while undergoing interrogation. "Ah, but the strawberries! That's where I had them. They laughed and made jokes, but I provided beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist. And I'd have produced that key if they hadn't pulled the Caine out of action. I know now they were out to protect some fellow officer." Although the jury acquits Maryk, the verdict is deliberately ambiguous. The deposed Captain Queeg, who had been a hero, but on whose mind too much combat has had an effect, is suddenly seen in the novel's resolution as a tragic figure. Humphrey Bogart had wanted to play Captain Queeg after reading Wouk's original novel. This untypical role for him is one of his greatest, with the scenes of him giving evidence, ball-bearings in hand, being one of the most memorable moments in the movies. However, Edward Dmytryk's direction is stagy – one never feels that the men are actually on a ship in mid-ocean. None of the feature films based on Wouk's novels were produced from his own adaptation, or, as the director Otto Preminger said: "A novelist writes dialogue to be read. A scriptwriter writes dialogue to be heard." In Europe, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial has been adapted for television in Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, and France. A Chinese-language production of the play, directed by Charton Heston, opened in 1988 in Beijing at the People's Art Theatre. Marjorie Morningstar (1955) was considered reactionary by some reviewers.
The story depicted a beautiful Jewish girl, who rebels against the confining middle-class values
of her family. Marjorie has great ambitions for herself as an actress, but she ultimately gives
up her illusions and marries a conventional but successful man, accepting social conformity. When Jack Warner acquired the rights to the bestseller, he wanted Elizabeth Taylor to play the lead.
Also Natalia Wood had read the novel, and she said it was a role she
was destined to play. She even met Wouk, who first told Warners, that she was not his concept of the heroine.
After the screen test Wouk said, "You have your Marjorie Morningstar." Paul Newman turned down the role
of Noel Airman, a dramatist, whom Marjorie leaves at the end. Youngblood Hawke (1962) examined the obsession of a writer who is caught up in the intrigue of the publishing world. Basically a classical Kunstlerroman, the work was partly based on the life of the American writer Thomas Wolfe, but it also gives insight into the political hysteria and the Communist witch hunt of the 1950s. "Now, Tom," says Gus Adam, a lawyer, to the Senator Tom Breckinridge, "you know perfectly well that in the present climate to be named as a communist or ex-communist is to incur substantial character damage at once, and probable financial damage. Maybe former communist deserve that damage. I don't know." This Is My God (1959) introduced the reader to Jewish orthodoxy. "Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine," Wouk wrote. "My two sons speak Hebrew, and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live." The Winds of War (1971) was a large canvas of the
relationship between the actions of individuals and the events leading
up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No longer satisfied with the way
Doubleday payed his royalties and issued the books, Wouk asked his agent to find a new
publisher who would take him in as a partner rather than as an author.
He entered into an agreement with Little, Brown and Company. The narrative focused on the various members of the Henry family, famous for its naval heroes. Captain Victor "Pug" Henry, the patriarch, is a military man, scholar, translator, and advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and other statesmen. He was portrayed in the ABC mini-series by Robert Mitchum – Ali McGraw played the role of Natalie Jastrow, Henry's daughter-in-law. Wouk wrote the screenplay for the production. "Discount my partiality, but my report is that so far The Winds of War is looking good," Wouk said in an interview. "The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War. Sixteen hours!" (Herman Wouk in The New York Times, June 14, 1981) Wouk's sweeping attempted to explain the causes and implications
of the war was concluded with War and Remembrance (1978). "Life was a colorful painful pageant to her, in which right and wrong were wobbly yardsticks.
Values and morals varied with time and place. Sweeping righteous views, like Victor Henry's Christian morality
and Rule's militant socialism, tended to cause much hell and to cramp what little happiness there was to be had.
So she thought." (from War and Remembrance)
While researching the atom bomb for his work, Wouk met the physicist Richard Feynman. They became friends and
spent hours talking at the Aspen Institute. Feynman told him that calculus is "the language God talks,"
Decades later Wouk returned to their encounter and portayed in the autobiographical The Language God Talks
(2010) an imaginary conversation between Feynman, a sceptic and
scientist, and himself, an Orthodox Jew. At the age of 97, Wouk
published The Lawgiver
(2012), a comedy in epistolary form about a writer named Herman Wouk,
his wife, a Jewish filmmaker, and other characters. By the time of publishing This Is My God (1959), a nonfiction portrait of Jewish life written for a general readership, Wouk adopted Orthodox Judaism and began to spend part of each day at synagogue prayers and at home studying sacred Jewish texts. In his review in Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Emanuel Feldman said that "Wouk has the Midas touch: everying he writes is a best seller – even a tract on Judaism." The book remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for several months. Inside, Outside (1985) is the story of a Jewish
presidential advisor, Israel David Goodkind, a tax lawyer. It moves in
time from the early 1900s to the 1970s and looks at the importance of
religious roots to American Jews. President Nixon, a side character, is
portrayed in an ironic light, when he shows some interest in Talmud.
"The President has a quick and able mind, though not everybody gives
him that, not by a long shot. His face lit up. He shot me a sharp
glance and said in his most nearly natural voice, 'And you really
understand this stuff?' 'Well, I scratch the surface, Mr. President. I
come from a rabbinic family.'" Goodkind also writes Nixon's Watergate
speech. The Hope (1993), a plunge into Israeli life in its early years, began another epic story, which mixed fictional characters with real-life figures. The 1948 war of independence, the 1956 Suez war, and the 1967 Six Day War are seen through the lives of three families. The protagonist is Zev Barak, a soldier who can quote Shakespeare, and whose military career reflects the wars. In the sequel, The Glory (1994), Wouk continued the story from the late 1960s to the bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. A highly popular writer around the world, Wouk's books have been translated into some 30 languages. Although
many reviewers have criticized his works as sentimental, they
display narrative
skill, satire, and humor, and are meticulously researched. For
historical accuracy, his fiction has won admiration from a wide variety
of readers. In the cover blurbs on Wouk's World War II novel Henry
Kissinger has been quoted saying, "Brilliant. . . An outstanding novel
and at the same time a great work of history." Professional scholars in
history have remarked that Wouk seldom offers evidence for his facts. Between 1965 and
1975, Wouk made several trips to do on-the-spot research in Europe,
Israel, and Iran. In 1967, he spent three weeks on the U.S.S. Sirago, a
fleet submarine cruising around the Virgin Islands. Wouk received
several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize (1952), Columbia
University Medal of Excellence (1952) Hamilton medal (1980); American
Academy of Achievement Golden Plate award (1986), Washingtonian award
(1986), U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation award (1987), Kazetnik award
(1990). He also had several honorary degrees from American and Israeli
universities. In 2008, the Library of Congress honored Wouk by giving
him its first Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Writing of Fiction.
Wouk lived in Palm Springs, CA, where he first went have the chance to
write in peace and quiet, and eventually settled there permanently. He died on May 17, 2019, in Palm Springs. For further reading: 'Julie Klam on Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk,' in The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians, and Other Remarkable People, edited by Bethanne Patrick (2016); 'How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk A 65-year Injustice, Rectified' by M.J. Lewis, in Commentary (Feb 2013); 'Herman Wouk Is Still Alive' by S. King, in The Atlantic Monthly (Vol 307, Numb 4, 2011); Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian by Arnold Beichman (1984/2004); The Historical Novel: A Celebration of the Achievements of Herman Wouk, edited by Barbara A. Paulson (1999); 'The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity' by Edward S. Shapiro, in American Jewish History 84:4 (1996); Herman Wouk by Laurence W. Mazzeno (1994) - See also: Leon Uris's Exodus Selected works:
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