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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. Herman 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!" (The Winds of War by Herman Wouk, Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1971, p. 10) Herman Wouk was born in the Bronx, New York, the son of Abraham
Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. His parent were Jewish immigrants from
Minsk, Russia. Wouk's father made his living in the laundry business.
Before entering Columbia College in 1930, Wouk spent a semester at
Yeshiva High School. At Columbia University he studied philosophy and
comparative literature, and edited the college humor magazine, the Jester. After completing a BA degree, 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
radio scripts, Wouk made friends with the librettist and lyricist Alan
Jay Lerner. Fallowing 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 and took part in eight invasions. This period he credited later as a major part of Wouk's
education. "I found out more that I ever had about people and the
United States. I had always been a word boy, and suddenly I had to cope
with the peculiar, marvelous world of the machine." (quoted in Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian by Arnold Beichman, New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Books, 1984, p. 14)
Wouk began his first novel during off-duty hours at sea. His first ship
was the destroyer-minesweeper U.S.S. Zane, which swept mines off the
Marshalls, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, the Marianas, Guam, Saipan, and
Tinian The last post was second command of the U.S.S. Southard, a
ship of the same type. It struck a reef in a typhoon, and was abandoned
before he took command. In 1945, Wouk married Betty Brown, a navy personnel executive; she took the Hebrew name Sarah Batya after converting to Judaism. They met when theU.S.S. Zane was undergoing repairs in San Pedro. Abraham Isaac, their first son, died at the age of five in a tragic accident in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In 1954, Wouk established The Abe Wouk Foundation, in memory of him. Betty, his first reader, eventually became his literary agent. She died in 2011, at the age of 90, after suffering a stroke. 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. He was a member of the Board
of Directors of Washington National Symphony (1969-71) and the Board of Directors of
Kennedy Center Productions (1974-75). Wouk lived in Palm Springs, CA, where he first went have the chance to
write in peace and quiet, and eventually settled there permanently. 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 musical 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. 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. "I thought it was a
gamble," Lee Barker at Doubleday said, "but might sell 50,000 in the
trade. I was wrong." The Caine Mutiny sold over a million copies in hardcover. (The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors by Al Silverman, New York: Truman Talley Books, 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. He says: "Now, there are four ways of doing a thing aboard ship—the right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. I want things on this ship done my way. Don’t worry about the other ways. Do things my way, and we’ll get along—— Okay. Now, are there any questions?" (The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II, Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday & Company, 1951, p. 127) 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. "Now, you take that strawberry business—why, if that wasn’t a case of outright conspiracy to protect a malefactor from justice—Maryk carefully leaves out the little fact that I had conclusively proved by a process of elimination that someone had a key to the icebox. He says it was the steward's mates who ate the strawberries but if I wanted to take the trouble I could prove to this court geometrically that they couldn't have." (Ibid., p. 433) 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. When asked how he prepared for the character, he answered: "Simple. Everybody knows I'm nuts anywy." (Classic Film Guide by Simon Rosen, Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 58) 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 from Central Park West, who rebels against the confining middle-class values
of her family. Marjorie has great ambitions for herself as a Broadway 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. Gus Adam,
a lawyer, says to the Senator Tom Breckinridge: "Now,
Tom, 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." (Youngblood Hawke: A Novel, London: Collins, 1962, p. 536) This Is My God (1959) introduced the reader to
Jewish orthodoxy. "Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine,"
Wouk wrote in the prologue. "It is part of my life and my family's
life. My older son at eight reads the Old Testament in Hebrew and
knows Jewish laes and customs. That is the way we live. With this
background, I may be able to sketch the faith so as to give the
interested reader information and pleasure, using what writing skill I
have learned to keep from boring him with detail, or with my own not
very relevant theories." (This Is My God, Garden Coity, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1961, p. 17) 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: 'A faithful adaptation'', 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).
"Pamela was slow to answer. She had no political, social, or religious
certainties. 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." (War and Remembrance: Volume One, Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1978, p. 68)
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. "In writing an epistolary novel like The Lawgiver, a sort of extended radio script with no descriptive passages whatsoever, Wouk has returned to his roots." ('How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk A 65-year Injustice, Rectified' by Michael Lewis, Commentary, February 2013) 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 Emanuel Feldman said that "Wouk has the Midas touch: everying he writes is a best seller – even a tract on Judaism. To those for whom a spot on the best seller list is an unpardonable sin, Wouk is a constant transgressor: he is popular, than which there there can be no greater evil." (Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought, Vol. 2, No. 2, Israel Issue, Spring 1960, p. 333) 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."" (Inside, Outside: A Novel, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985, p. 5) During the summer of Watergate, Goodkind also writes Nixon's 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.
Herman Wouk died on May 17, 2019, in Palm Springs. For further reading: 'Understand the Process: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk,' in The Admiral's Bookshelf by Adm. James Stavridis (2024); '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); 'Herman Wouk Is Still Alive' by S. King, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 307, No. 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) Selected works:
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