What Makes Herman Run?
FIEDLER, LESLIE A.
WRITERS and WRITING What Makes Herman Run? Marjorie Morningstar. By Herman Wouk. Doubleday. 565 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by Leslie A. Fiedler Author, "An End to Innocence"; Professor of English...
...This time he is Noel Airman ("Ehrman" by birth, but he has changed his name from "man of honor" to Luftmensch), actor, pianist, playwright, Don Giovanni--but, above all, turncoat Jew and Bohemian...
...and I can hardly keep from crying out, "I was there...
...Wouk, who has boasted of portraying sailors without profanity, can also boast of having written about love without referring to the sexual organs, and of religion without pain...
...Under cover of their single name, they compete not only for the markets and the mass audience, but also for the allegiance of authors...
...There is historic justification for replacing Lovelace with Airman...
...It is more characteristic of Wouk than Keefer that he says "happiness" where he means "success...
...Such a book is not bad in this sense by mistake...
...You pay your money and you take your choice...
...The ghosts of Faulkner and Hemingway and Proust, which haunt the bourgeois un-novel, haunt him with especial fury...
...Before all this glory, the protagonist, Willie, accepts for himself a humble lot, teaching English in a second-rate college...
...No longer does she choose to die when her honor (in which Mr...
...Wouk still tells us he believes) is lost, but prefers to marry an athletic lawyer and endure middle-class comfort...
...Wouk does not honestly believe what has turned out to be so rewarding for him to express...
...The trouble really lies in the ambiguity of the word "novel...
...And it is a sad reflection upon American Judaism, that the latest last Puritan turns out to he, in the guise of Herman Wouk, a Jew...
...while the only declared Jew made his entry as a pilot, war hero and chauvinist, and exited spoiling for a slugfest with the corrupt reader of James Joyce and Hemingway...
...There is, however, a horrifying smugness which exudes from the writing of one who knows, like Mr...
...The entry of the newly rich into the house of culture demands for its full savor the presence of the dispossessed owner, at the window looking in...
...It is to this debased class that Marjorie Morningstar belongs...
...and from Werther have descended all the portraits of the artist as a young seducer down to our own time...
...The novel, which had begun as the invention of the middle classes, had gone arty on them...
...That, indeed, is how we know it as virtue...
...Clarissa has become Emma Bovary...
...at their worst, they reflect the maudlin self-congratulation of Molly Berg's radio serial...
...The only "esthetic" demand on such a provisional form is that it provide the illusion of literacy (to which shreds of prestige still cling) without demanding the effort of real reading...
...And so the "intellectual," who before had testified to the superiority of defeat to "happiness," had once more to emerge, this time as Noel Airman-Geoffrey Quill, to tell the reader that victory also is sanctified, and to exit an aging, balding failure...
...No longer could a Dickens, a novelist both popular and great, happen half by accident...
...Professor of English Literature, Montana State University By the time these remarks appear, the second or third printing of Marjorie Morningstar will have rolled off the presses...
...What he is after is to demonstrate once and for all that what our fathers have so long believed is heaven is heaven, despite what the intellectuals say...
...Wouk in writing Marjorie: to make the inhabitants of Central Park West (as well as those who only aspire to such heights) feel "warm, safe and good...
...The struggle is superficially over the same prize as in Richardson, the virginity of a girl...
...Wouk will already be planning to introduce another caricature of the gutless intellectual--even more devastating than his portraits of Keefer or Noel Airman or Geoffrey Quill...
...for on the model of the former, Rousseau made St...
...In general, the point of such transformations is to suggest that we live in an age of rootlessness and alienation and terror, in which the condition so long thought of as peculiar to the Jew becomes indistinguishable from the common lot...
...To the honest woman, each whore seems a reproach...
...Through the rose-trellis and down the rose-strewn steps of the Lowenstein Catering Company's top-price wedding, Marjorie-Wouk must walk into the arms of the suburban bourgeoisie to his accommodation with middle-class comfort and vulgarity...
...Lovelace and Airman are alike seducers and free-thinkers, with a beauty and grace beside which middle-class manners and morality seem grubbily and unpleasantly safe...
...and it is for this reason that the critics' comments on the schoolgirl insipidness of its language, the unconvincingness of its characters, the general flaccidity of its form are beside the point...
...keeping for himself "truth, freedom and form...
...Wouk's main effort here is directed not toward proving that the intellectual is an inauthentic Jew, but to convincing us that the authentic Jew is the girl next door, the Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, the Pure Maiden of bourgeois romance...
...This Wouk can write, but, alas, he cannot really believe...
...Civil war had been declared...
...Is Mr...
...it is, for him, the ultimate sin, to shake off the "Schwartz" or "Shapiro" to which one was born...
...In the serious novel, this process has been going on for a long time, with Joyce's re-embodiment of Ulysses as Leopold Bloom, with Kafka's revelation that the Wandering Jew is really Everyman, and with Saul Bellow's metamorphosis of Huck Finn into Augie March...
...Wouk has created...
...so that he could no longer pretend to believe the always incredible legend that in our society Joyce plus sex and cynicism hits the big money, while a humble devotion to the more battered platitudes produces only righteous poverty...
...Here, at last, is the real subject of the book, its underground theme...
...The whole notion of "style," with its implication that there is something beyond its message in a novel, is foreign to this function and this duty...
...but the universally unfavorable reviews must have wounded him...
...At best...
...A form which grew progressively more vulgar and debased (ignoring all the great modern masters as obscene or morbid or formless), and one whose function was no longer to refer, however imperfectly, to life, but only to remind its readers of odder examples of the same kind...
...The emphasis is not on what one believes, but on what one eats...
...To the popular novel, he opposed something called "The Art of Fiction...
...Wouk is a step closer to frankness in Marjorie than he was in The Caine Mutiny, where the obviously "Jewish" intellectual, Keefer, was passed off quite unconvincingly as a Gentile...
...In the end...
...as in Richardson, the sexual struggle is intended to be symbolic as well as physical--in the older book, a contest between the representative, of middle-class piety and the spokesman for aristocratic cynicism, the class struggle in the boudoir...
...of course, the joker--a word nearly as offensive to the middling reader as "art": "too frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting moreover priggish, paradoxical and superfluous...
...What, then, is Wouk trying to prove...
...There is instruction, too: a kind of Cook's tour of comfortable bourgeois Judaism, a supplement to the Life article on the religion of the Jews...
...It is not enough, however, for Wouk to bring his artist-villain down to defeat...
...Let me ask you," the most sympathetic male character in the book demands of our Marjorie, "didn't you feel...
...Whom is he bothering...
...Lest this seem "a blaze of silly costly glory," he must find Keefer-Airman-James Joyce looking up at him, not in the expected scorn, but with a "baffled, vacant" stare, his "eyes wet...
...This is a lie...
...Wouk, despite his best efforts to see only the sales reports, will read bitterly through the reviews...
...And though nothing goes off perfectly at any of these events, the complications are never more serious than in Henry Aldrich...
...not on what is, but on what one chooses to dream: the particular "psychic shelter" behind which one hides from the problematical and horrible...
...What, meanwhile, did they have to call their own...
...but, on the other hand, we cannot accuse him of undermining the commonwealth...
...and the critics will have demonstrated to their own satisfaction what they always knew--that they can tell a bad book from a good one...
...And the middle classes soon discovered to their horror that in the colleges and schools the texts of the "Great Revolt" (from Flaubert to Faulkner, from Joyce to Hemingway) were being taught as classics to their impressionable, discontented children...
...Wouk the answer of the old Jewish convert in the Yiddish joke to the small Jewish boys who heckled his streetcorner sermons, "Heathen, go away and let a Jew make a living...
...Such bloody and barbarous survivals as the Brith, the feast of the circumcision, are not portrayed...
...On the contrary, it is characteristic of the sub-novel that it come from the heart, a heart ignorant of humanity and society, but incapable of subterfuge...
...With the growing vulgarization of culture, its median of morality and technique had sunk lower and lower, until the serious writer felt driven to dissociate himself...
...Morality and entertainment"--what else can a resonable man ask...
...and Mr...
...Preux, from whom Goethe concocted Werther...
...But this is not all we get...
...Form" is...
...For he is intended to be an intellectual--miserable imitation of Noel Coward that he actually is--the equivalent in the lower-middlebrow imagination of the Dandy and the poete maudit...
...And it is this aura of assured success which gives to Marjorie the pharasaical air which so infuriates the critics...
...Yet, no one will be really happy...
...I do not mean to imply that Mr...
...Everyone will have his reward...
...Just as it is the function of the sub-novel to be "good" rather than beautiful, it is its duty to be "honest" rather than true...
...The transformation of the Jew from a bugaboo to a sentimental hero of the enlightened has influenced all levels of society and of the arts...
...along with Marjorie Morgenstern, from dreams of glory and disillusion alike--to save us from the Seducer for happy endings in Mamaroneck...
...Suppose Noel was, after all, right...
...The Goldbergs...
...Certainly, by the close, Marjorie has succeeded and has been given her reward: along with the inevitable sorrows of her life, a good husband, a "nice home," a daughter just like herself and, above all, faith--everything which Noel has all along predicted as the final horror which awaits her...
...To the lower type, he surrendered "'morality, amusement and instruction...
...My Dear Bella" turns out to be the heroine of the first great novelist of the Western world: the incomparable Clarissa of Samuel Richardson...
...For this reason, the portrait of Marjorie does not develop out of the rich highbrow Jewish literature of the United States, in which the Jew stands for the rebel, the artist, the outsider...
...The question will not be downed: Is the conclusion of Marjorie, the fate of Herman Wouk, Happy Ending or Bitter Collapse...
...For beside his soft-hearted, handball-playing slobs and ladies'-magazine secret agents of "good Jews," there are his "bad Jews...
...he is compelled also to shame and humiliate him, as he shames and humiliates his double...
...At that, Mr...
...Wouk, that he has the best of two worlds: that he is at one and the same time being good and making good...
...That one man's hell is another's heaven...
...but where Lovelace was an aristocrat, a survivor of a dying but clearly defined class, Airman is not sure where he belongs...
...Everyone had fallen from the old ignorance...
...Or perhaps it is better to put the case in the metaphor of Wouk's own book...
...Indeed, such books as Marjorie appear in print only out of respect to the past, as a sentimental gesture...
...How else...
...The moment of the most outrageous assaults on traditional morality and form coincided with the triumph of the novel as a genre over all other kinds of literature...
...How dare he be so sure, so undisturbed in our uncertain and anxious world...
...For writers like Wouk, book-form is an almost archaic survival, a not-quite-dispensable stage on the way to becoming a movie...
...more at home in the world, warm, safe, good, while you were observing your laws...
...There are two kinds of books referred to by this word, though their ambitions, techniques and traditions are utterly different...
...Actually, just as he provides a literature with all the pleasures of illiteracy, and a religion with all the joys of non-belief, so also Mr...
...Wouk carefully labels such villains for us by giving them assumed Anglo-Saxon names--Geoffrey Quill, Noel Airman...
...The critics will begin early plotting to cut down his next novel, into which Mr...
...All the time, of course, a kind of bowdlerization has been going on, probably not even on the level of consciousness...
...He wants to protect us...
...No longer is she an almost mythic source of power, a secular Saviour, with a piety and sexuality both fell, for all their absurdly conventional dress, as real and terrible: she has become a silly girl who turns into a dull suburban lady, a ghost who is head of her Hadassah chapter...
...and it is, therefore, not surprising to find the sub-novel of Herman Wouk substituting for it its precise opposite: the contention that the Jew was never (or has, at any rate, ceased to be) the rootless challenger, the stranger, which legend has made him, but instead is the very paragon of the happy citizen at home, loyal, chaste, thrifty--and successful...
...Wouk, who had glorified failure and condemned his mythical highbrow opponent to success, had now the more difficult task of coming to terms with his own triumph...
...Behind the mask of self-complacency which begins by offending us, we discover terrible depths of insecurity...
...for in Wouk's world virtue is rewarded with success...
...It is easy enough to distinguish between the sort of book written by Mr...
...Indeed, it takes Marjorie some 400 pages to be deflowered: but it takes her nearly 200 to eat a strip of bacon, and so intent is Mr...
...and that is why each of his books must become, behind its avowed subject--whether a mutiny on a minesweeper or marriage on the West Side of New York--still another version of a conflict of values which neither success nor failure can settle once and for all...
...In the end, one is left with the impression that the prophets and the Talmudists had engaged in a writing job whose ends, whatever their awkward archaic means, were not very different from those of Mr...
...Yet, what better way, after all, to put our neighbors at ease than to report that our religion, too, has dispensed with the absurdities of faith and suffering and God...
...To make matters even more confusing, the two forms are packaged the same way: bound in the same covers, wrapped in the same bright jackets, peddled through the same advertising media--even translated, when successful, into the same paperback reprints...
...We must not let the common ancestry of our two sorts of novel bewilder us: at a certain point in the nineteenth century, a split that had been growing for a long time reached self-consciousness...
...Noel must end up weeping for all he has thrown away, at the $6,500 wedding where Marjorie enters into her own, confessing by that act that in the whole garish spectacle there is a good greater than any he has dreamed...
...Between Richardson and Wouk falls the shadow of Flaubert--who has taught him, as he has taught us, what bourgeois life has become, what dreams and frustrations the daughters of Clarissa have inherited where the bourgeois revolution has become business-as-usual...
...and the novelist was not only busy biting the hand that fed him, but had joined the outcast poets in declaring that this was his raison d'etre...
...It is equally irrelevant to protest that the book is not true, to point out that Marjorie attends Hunter College in 1935 and apparently finds no more trace of Communists there than she does in the theater during the years that immediately follow...
...One does not have to accept his morality...
...What else does this corrupted world offer one resolutely anti-avant garde and committed to middle-class values...
...if he tells us that religion is good (but does not quite tell us what religion is, beyond keeping a kosher house), that virginity is good, that even money and success cannot destroy these goods--we do not have to believe him...
...And he must fall even from that ritual recantation to his final fate as a third-rate television actor, married to a woman who was probably a Nazi...
...It is an utter defeat he endures, set against the assurance of the book itself, whose success, one realizes, would mean nothing without the vanquished highbrow to grant it the recognition of his tears...
...These--cynical, Bohemian, negative, neurotic, given to talking of books and Freud--we recognize as the "typical Jew," who has played the hero in scores of anti-bourgeois books and done even better as the villain of hundreds of bourgeois ones...
...Nothing so relativistic as that...
...Wouk on keeping it clean that the latter fall seems realer and more moving...
...but it is important to bear in mind that their difference is not one of degree, but one of kind...
...But...
...But Mr...
...The novel, which (in England and America at least) had been able to bumble along without theories and manifestoes, winning friends by pretending to be much less artful than it really was...
...But, of course, I was not really there at all...
...At any rate, by the time of The Caine Mutiny his sense of rejection and bitterness have been embodied in the character of Keefer, the novelist-cynic-mutineer, who wins success ($1,000 down from "Chapman House" plus a forecast of fame and a marriage to Hedy Lamarr) by writing a novel full of cynicism about the Navy and "hair-raising sex scenes" in a style derived from "Dos Passos and Joyce and Hemingway and Faulkner...
...After all (the Gentile reader learns), the Jews are "just folks," too--just like everybody else, only less so...
...But how poor Clarissa is fallen...
...Then what...
...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of his book is its celebration of the strange new detente between the Jews and middle-class America...
...His is the genteelest of beliefs, a little quaint sometimes but never disturbing...
...and of Marjorie herself we never learn whether along with her two sets of dishes she has also embraced the Mikvah, the ritual bath after menstruation required of the orthodox...
...Wouk makes possible a philo-Semitism with all the comforts of anti-Semitism...
...But Keefer, proved a coward at the Caine court martial and faced down by the fighting Jew, Greenspan, exits with his "face distorted as though in a spasm of pain," crying out: "Don't envy my happiness too much, Willie...
...and no high-brow has ever managed to counterfeit it in a desire to turn a dishonest buck...
...but it soon developed an anti-bourgeois program: attacking hypocrisy, wealth, thrift, cleanliness and the distrust of art, and espousing sexual freedom, radical political ideas--or simply skepticism...
...One is tempted to give for Mr...
...Politically as well as sexually, the book is expurgated...
...It is not merely a matter of making Judaism simply its "dietary laws" (all religions have them), but of making those laws only a way to "peace of mind...
...Wouk would not, granted the most improbable improvement in linguistic skills, write The Sound and the Fury...
...The anti-bourgeois novel did not remain content with simply being more serious-frivolous than the middle classes could stomach...
...And if he manages to spice his sermons with a little humor, provided chiefly by poor, old-country Jews with hearts of gold, we have no grounds for complaint...
...Wouk not striking a blow for tolerance and intergroup understanding...
...The bourgeoisie has won its fight against the old nobility, and the last item on its Bill of Plights is the Freedom from Seduction...
...Who is the Seducer in Wouk's novel, the modern counterpart of the irresistible Lovelace, whose struggle with the unmovable Clarissa all of Europe once followed through a million words...
...Wouk's notions of Jewish family life and courtship seem derived from the mocking (and only slightly sentimental) example of Arthur Koher's My Dear Bella...
...After all, what harm is he doing...
...That is to say, the sub-novel has taken upon itself the functions of middle-class religion in its most degenerate form...
...and the popular writer produced, instead of the old comfortable bourgeois novel, only an anti-anti-bourgeois one...
...it is not from the work of Delmore Schwartz or Samuel Roth or Saul Bellow that her world is derived, but from fictions of the mass arts, the area of "entertainment...
...This is neither a cheery nor a reassuring point...
...reached a crisis...
...But he is fighting a personal battle, too--seeking in his own eyes forgiveness for his virtues...
...In the literature of recent years both in the United States and Europe, authors Jewish and Gentile alike have begun to portray the Jew as a figure symbolizing our common fate...
...The book is cannily arranged to provide a Bar Mitzvah, a Jewish funeral, engagement, wedding, even a Seder--the works...
...There is infinitely more dishonesty in the pages of any fashion-ridden, pretentious little magazine--but also infinitely more passion, insight, complexity and terror...
...Wouk and one written by, let us say, William Faulkner...
...Geoffrey Quill, a highbrow author with an assumed name and no audience--who is mean to his old father...
...I do not know whether he read at that time Diana Trilling's advice to slough off his pretentiousness and settle down to writing nice "light literature...
...and no softening of the brain or loss of nerve could lead Faulkner to produce a Caine Mutiny...
...He could conceivably write worse and worse Sanctuarys, but at no point would they turn into anything remotely resembling Marjorie Morningstar...
...But chiefly, such a book is intended to console and sustain the middle classes, by spiritualizing their worldly ambitions without in any way inhibiting them, and without disturbing those who hold them...
...In a not unprecedented irony, this sublimation of envy and celebration of failure led Wouk to one of the most astonishing successes of recent publishing history...
...the Hunter campus where I attended the student strikes against war, the New York theater where I applauded agitprop plays sponsored by the WPA--these are not on the map of the world of his heart's desire that Mr...
...The author will have learned what he already suspected--that clean language and kashruth can make a profit...
...Not that Wouk doubts his success--but he is not sure that success is not a final failure...
...We are in the honeymoon of this relationship, and Marjorie must be permitted the warm sentimental glow proper to such an occasion...
...His supreme punishment is not in writing for TV, but in not being successful at it...
...to the successful middle-brow literary man, every highbrow failure a threat...
...on the contrary, that (as my twelve-year-old son likes to say) is the object...
...It is in this sense the last Puritanism of all...
...the movie rights will have been sold, and the reviewers will have finished saying just how bad the book is...
...I know...
...In the struggle between Clarissa as "My Dear Bella" and Lovelace as a Jewish Noel Coward, there can be only one outcome: the temporary victory of the Enemy (Marjorie is deflowered and turned into Morningstar) and his final defeat (he proposes marriage, which she rejects to become true Morgenstern again...
...We remember that Wouk was not always the acclaimed author of The Caine Mutiny, that he began as the brash, uncertain writer of Aurora Dawn, a "highbrow" book, though one based not on the practice of Proust or Kafka, but on Fielding...
...Finally, it embraced what seemed to be an endless series of experiments: shaking up syntax, challenging punctuation, despising logic and clarity...
...But suddenly, from among its own sons, a new enemy appears to cry that there is no seduction, that all is permitted, that the values for which the fathers fought are lies...
...The reviewers, try as they will to concentrate on their own notices, will find themselves staring glumly at the best-seller list...
...But this truth, which his facts insist on telling, Wouk's "honest" resolve to lift up our hearts censors...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 39
