In a short essay written for the English weekly Tribune in 1945, George Orwell resurrected a wonderfully useful oxymoron of Chesterton’s—“good bad books.” This mischievously perverse genre, in Orwell’s reckoning, included not merely adventure stories and thrillers, meant only to distract, but the work of more serious-minded writers “whom it is quite impossible to call ‘good’ by any strictly literary standard, but who are natural novelists and who seem to attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste.” What distinguished such books above all was their irresistible power to please, because “there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.” On this ground, Orwell confidently predicted that Uncle Tom’s Cabin would in the long run outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf.
As this last remark indicates, the subject of popular fiction—both good-bad and bad-bad—is pitted with booby traps of prejudice and temperament, individual values and taste. Since Orwell despised the “aesthetes” of Bloomsbury, the abolitionist fervor of Mrs. Stowe would in his view endure as the innovations of Mrs. Woolf would not; and he was wrong. But when Orwell speaks of “natural novelists” and “sheer skill,” he has caught that element of good-bad fiction which is indispensable and unarguable—a narrative moving with such dramatic urgency that it takes possession of the reader, snaring one’s curiosity and excited attention so imperiously that, at least while one reads, disbelief is suspended. The most glaring deficiencies of style and characterization dwindle to irrelevance, and austere literary standards crumble before the lust to find out what happens next and how it will all turn out. Readers are seized with a variety of tricks. One stock device of such fiction is the cliff-hanger, in which a character is plunged into a situation of extreme peril at the end of a chapter, and is left dangling while the writer shifts abruptly to a different scene. Or someone who is supposed to be in Singapore or Moscow miraculously pops up in Marseilles to the astonishment of wife, lover, brother, father. No matter what else such a writer has in mind, the unbreakable rules of good-bad fiction are variety and surprise.
But a curious change has occurred in recent examples of this sub-literary species, and it would seem on the face of it to violate the very heart of such books, which is compelling readability. In former days a romantic narrative like Anthony Adverse or Gone With the Wind was its own excuse for being, in the sense that it was the invented story that mattered far more than the perfect accuracy and fullness of the historical background. But now, along with his familiar manipulation of the unexpected, a conscientious popular novelist seems to feel that the story alone is insufficient, somehow too frivolous, and along with the make-believe excitements he must serve up encyclopedic slabs of information—about the automobile industry (Arthur Hailey’s Wheels), about the history and prehistory of Colorado (James Michener’s Centennial), about Australian sheep stations (Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds), medieval Japan (James Clavell’s Shogun), and the rag trade (Judith Krantz’s Scruples).
None of these overstuffed geese, however, can rival the prodigious research and concern for facts that Herman Wouk has lavished on War and Remembrance,1 a “historical romance,” as he labels it, of World War II from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. His huge new book chronicles the wartime fortunes of the imaginary and actual persons who appeared in The Winds of War, published in 1971, and many, many more. In the foreword to War and Remembrance, Wouk calls that earlier volume a prologue—at 885 pages!—to his main tale, which is nevertheless self-contained. And in characteristically didactic tones he tells us that “I have put this theme [the end of war] in the colors and motion of the fiction art, so that ‘he who runs may read,’ and remember what happened in the worst world catastrophe.”
The odd biblical phrase raises uncomfortable questions. How well and how much do we remember a story made for “he who runs”? Wouk makes no bones about the reader he aims to please, and this places War and Remembrance unequivocally in the bin of good-bad books—an undemanding vividness and ease take precedence at all times over any daunting complexities of thought, craft, or human behavior. This was particularly true of The Winds of War, which, for all its heft and soap-opera crudities, I could not, as the saying goes, put down. Unfortunately this obsessive magic is largely absent from War and Remembrance. For one thing, its burdensome thousand-page bulk is a lot harder to pick up than to put down. For another, the model navy family we first encountered in the “prologue” seven years ago is essentially so cinematic and stereotyped that the characters, subjected to a relentless dose of domestic familiarity, have become acutely tedious.
But the main reason Wouk’s imaginary persons now seem so preposterous and irritating is that the backdrop for their crises of love and war is the harrowing reality of history between 1941 and 1945. Juxtaposed against Wouk’s masterly recreations of the Pacific naval battles of Midway and Leyte Gulf; his angry account of American bureaucratic callousness, high and low, toward Jewish refugees from Hitler; his knowledgeable descriptions of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz—the fictional creatures playing out his romance seem not merely trivial but offensively so. Time and again, Wouk the student of history writes a brilliantly evocative account of battle—he has mastered every maneuver, knows exactly how submarines, aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, dive bombers work, how the vast machinery of war was deployed during a particular operation—only to return with a dismaying thump to his super-Lanny Budd hero, Captain (eventually Admiral) Victor (Pug) Henry, USN, globe-circling troubleshooter and trusted confidant of Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Nimitz, Halsey, and high-ranking Russian generals; a paragon of probity, character, common sense. What the polymathic Captain Henry does not know about nuclear fission, landing-craft couplings, military history, and the grave burdens of command is not, Wouk would have us believe, worth knowing.
Wouk’s large design, of course, is to dramatize both the nobility and the horror of World War II by means of the tragic experiences endured by one ordinary, typical American family. Yet there is hardly a genuinely ordinary person among them, from the plastic perfection of Victor Henry to his conveniently Jewish daughter-in-law, who brings the fate of the European Jews into the Henry family circle. When her submarine-officer husband is sent to the Pacific, Natalie Jastrow Henry finds herself trapped in Italy with her uncle, Aaron Jastrow, a best-selling historian—born in Poland, educated at Harvard, living a splendid expatriate life in Siena—whose resemblance to Bernard Berenson is no accident. Once the United States and Italy are officially at war, Aaron and Natalie, who by now has an infant son her husband has never seen, are interned as enemy aliens. Desperate, they run from one false haven to another in Italy and France until the Nazis spring the final trap and they are imprisoned first in Theresienstadt, and then in Auschwitz, where Aaron dies in the gas chamber. Natalie and her child survive and are reunited with young Byron Henry to the strains of “Rozhinkes mit Mandlen.”
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Invariably, the sentimentality that blights his fictional episodes is absent from Wouk’s straightforward use of the historical record, and it is very much to his credit that he does not reduce the Nazi destruction of the Jews to the mawkish platitudes of Gerald Green’s Holocaust. Particularly in his account of the so-called Great Beautification in Theresienstadt, the supposedly privileged camp for Prominente, he writes with bitter and moving restraint. Before the visit of Danish Red Cross observers, the SS constructed a hoax in the camp, a bogus façade of Gemütlichkeit that fooled the Danes completely. While they announced to the world that Theresienstadt was indeed what the Nazis claimed—“a comfortable and happy residential town”—the stage-set was struck and the inmates of the “Paradise Ghetto” were shipped to Auschwitz.
Wouk is far less assured in dealing with Roosevelt’s refugee policy of inaction. Committed as he is to historical facts, Wouk can scarcely overlook Roosevelt’s disgraceful silence and procrastination, particularly his failure to act on the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which could have prevented the slaughter of thousands of Jewish children by admitting them into the United States. But Wouk, like his stalwart creature of fantasy, Victor Henry, cannot shake off his affection for Roosevelt. When the President persuades Captain Henry to undertake a difficult mission to Moscow, Wouk adds: “A love for President Roosevelt welled up in his heart as they shook hands. He tasted the acrid pleasure of sacrifice, and the pride of measuring up to the Commander-in-Chief’s opinion of him.” Despite his faith in documents and records, Wouk cannot bring himself to acknowledge the full shame of Roosevelt’s failure to deal with the refugee problem.
The reason for Wouk’s generosity toward FDR is clear: in unabashed dissent from the mainstream of American novelists today, for whom the only credible hero is the anti-hero, he remains an unembarrassed believer in such “discredited” forms of commitment as valor, gallantry, leadership, patriotism. Such unfashionable convictions will predictably strike many reviewers of War and Remembrance as at best naive, at worst absurdly out of touch with the Catch-22 lunacy of all war, including the war against Hitler. It is precisely to confute such facile and ahistorical cynicism that Wouk devotes so large and sober a part of his novel to the Final Solution and the ideological poison that overwhelmed the German people during Hitler’s twelve years of power. In an ingenious device, Wouk interrupts his romance and naval battles at intervals with excerpts from a military history of the war written in prison by the imaginary German general Armin von Roon, which Victor Henry translates and edits after his retirement from the navy. In this brilliant simulation of the Nazi military mind, Wouk includes an unforgettable image of Hitler in the last weeks of the war, snarling and raging, uncontrollably flatulent, cackling maniacally at the execution films of the generals who failed in their plot, blaming everyone for Germany’s defeat but himself.
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But the most powerfully rendered episodes in War and Remembrance are not the portraits of historical individuals but the meticulously documented accounts of the great navy victories at Midway and Leyte Gulf. Even when he is simply ticking off the different kinds of vessels engaged in a single huge operation, Wouk’s proud voice swells into a hallelujah chorus, with text from Jane’s Fighting Ships. Describing the armada that sailed from Britain to invade North Africa in 1942, he exults:
Not since the Japanese Imperial Fleet had set out for Midway, and before that never in all history, had the oceans of earth borne such a force. Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, troop transports, and newfangled landing ships crammed full of small craft, tanks, trucks, and mobile guns; also destroyers, minesweepers, submarines, and assorted supply vessels; from several directions, in far-flung formations, these warships of frowning shapes and many sizes, painted gray or in gaudy camouflage colors, were crawling the watery curve of the planet.
It is a piquant irony that Wouk intends his saga of World War II to demonstrate that “war is an old habit of thought . . . that must now pass as human sacrifice and human slavery have passed,” yet nothing stirs him to such rapture as the complex choreography of great ships in combat. The paradox is not lost on him. As he remarks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Victor Henry “was filled with exaltation that was half-guilty because the business was only slaughter, and many Americans might die, and yet he was so damned happy about it.” At such moments all thought of ends and means is dissipated in the exhilaration of battle, and the elegies must wait until later.
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Herman Wouk dedicated The Winds of War to his sons with the somber Hebrew injunction zachor—remember. It is impossible to deny the dignity and decency that inform Wouk’s sense of this moral obligation, which sustained his prodigious effort of research and writing between 1962 and 1978. Yet War and Remembrance still cannot by any valid standard be judged a successfully realized work of literature. What is bad about this often very good bad book is not Wouk’s passionate conviction that the defeat of Nazi Germany and its Japanese ally was the just cause of the war, but the sad evidence that he cannot free his imagination from the stale and debilitating conventions of popular fiction. The factual accuracy that Wouk guarantees his readers is admirable in a work of history, but does it also enrich the imaginative human life in a work of fiction? I very much doubt it, since with all the good will, moral passion, and finicky adherence to the facts displayed in Herman Wouk’s epic of the war, the drama enacted by his navy family never rises above the sentimental level of best-selling romance.
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For every buyer willing to part with fifteen dollars for War and Remembrance—all things considered, it’s a bargain—there seems to be another shelling out only two-fifty less for Mario Puzo’s Fools Die
2. Nothing succeeds like success, and on the strength of Puzo’s phenomenal killing with The Godfather (along with the two, soon to be three, movies spun from that monstrously absorbing romance of murder) the fountain seems unlikely to run dry. One doubts whether government regulations about consumer fraud apply to the “gentleman’s trade” of publishing, but it must be time they did. Like some brands of radial tire, this book should be recalled. What buyers of Fools Die will discover before they’ve yawned through ten pages is the dismaying fact that it is no Godfather—not even a good-bad book but a slovenly dud. There is no plot, no action beyond an inexplicable suicide early on, which is, I think, meant to swell in deep symbolic resonance throughout the book. But what it symbolizes beyond Puzo’s inability to figure out what it symbolizes remains an untantalizing mystery.
Fools Die opens in Las Vegas, and Puzo does write at length about gambling, but that is not what this novel is about. What stirs Mario Puzo the writer is not the luck of the draw but rage against the high-handed literary big shots who have denied him the stature of an artist. In an effort to settle the score with these emperors of sensibility, he draws up a list of the ten “most ridiculous” books ever written (Proust, all of Hardy, no surprises here), pelts the reader with pithy aperçus about the labor of literary creation (“It was fucking hard work and a pain in the ass in the bargain”), and grinds out the obligatory caricature of Norman Mailer (is there a hack left who hasn’t hacked away at Mailer?). Though he makes some halfhearted feints at probing “the evil that lurked in the heart of man,” Puzo is mired in the frustration boiling away in the heart of the millionaire shlockmeister who yearns for the sweet cultural delights of serious critical attention.
Since even the author of The Godfather can scarcely be cynical enough to assume that millions of readers will uncomplainingly swallow a novel that is nothing but a long and boring howl against the “classy literary world,” Puzo stops gnashing his teeth now and again to grind out the expected goodies about sex, Hollywood, and gambling in Las Vegas. His novelist-narrator, modestly named Merlyn, has a doomed affair with gorgeous Janelle, a Barbie-doll actress who is bisexual and a feminist to boot; I can’t remember whether she can cook too. Nothing he writes about Hollywood could not just as easily be happening in Flatbush, give or take a swimming pool or two. Indeed, the book is such a disorderly grab bag of random anecdotes that practically any of these nuggets could be omitted without making a particle of difference.
The single exception to all this floundering is Puzo’s familiar pop-novelist urge to teach us things we would otherwise not easily learn. Like his fellow mavens, Puzo believes that specialized information about the customs of an arcane country, preferably lurid—first the Mafia, now gambling in Las Vegas—is a negotiable substitute for talent and bestows an air of high seriousness on low-minded kitsch. Thus The Godfather was not only a riveting story but a guided tour through the Sicilian “families” gunning each other down for control of the rackets. The fact that Puzo had no first-hand knowledge of the bloody underworld he charted with such seeming authenticity, that it was by hearsay out of imagination and much of it probably spurious, is beside the point of such books. If it sounds right, it is right.
In Fools Die the expert informs us at length about the inner workings and devious mores of the garish Vegas oasis. Since Puzo is apparently a Las Vegas regular, this time the lecturer is not in the least dependent on invention, and he tells us a great deal, often in impenetrable argot, about baccarat, roulette, crap shooting, scamming, hookers, and the protocol of croupier behavior. Soon dispelled, however, are any Dostoevskyan parallels which the wealth of gambling lore and Puzo’s effort to explore the psychology of a “degenerate gambler” may be meant to suggest, for despite all the information he generously deals out, he does not begin to confront Dostoevsky’s real subject, which was not the game itself but the tormented soul of the gambler.
Except for these gobs of fact, Fools Die is a tedious fake. The calculus of Puzo and his publishers, therefore, may have gone something like this: if multitudes could gobble up The Godfather without a qualm about its sentimental pornography of violence, why should the public balk at simple dullness? Yet it is precisely the crashing bore that may turn away customers looking for escape and excitement, not moral niceties. It will be interesting to see what effect the frenetically exorbitant prices that paperback publishers are paying these days—Fools Die went for $2.2 million—will eventually have on pop fiction. Since the bidding takes place months before the hard-cover edition is published and reviewed, what actually goes on the block is not a particular novel but its author’s proven ability to sell. At this rate, there may be so many duds like Puzo’s littering the counters that the secret will out—these novels do not entertain—and no one will want to buy them. Popular novelists would then once again be forced to do the job right, with some measure of the “sheer skill” Orwell admired, because the iron law of diminishing returns would make it harder for the likes of Mario Puzo to get away with a book more accurately titled Fools Buy.
