Some Questions About Herman Wouk
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
SPRING BOOKS Some Questions About Herman Wouk By Stanley Edgar Hyman "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Jeanne had all but fallen in love with the author on reading the first seven...
...He can compete with the worst of television because he is the worst of television, without the commercials, a $7.95 Pay-TV...
...Elinor Glyn...
...The first words she saw in Frieda's letter sent a red-hot stinging through her body...
...Frieda crackled out a filthy word" is the way he typically handles the problem in Youngblood Hawke...
...Properly trimmed and cared for it gave plenty of charming light from one end, for a long long time...
...He stands for conventional American patriotism, and the proud conviction that "This country has no toiling masses...
...Frances Hodgson Burnett...
...Guests eat a buffet supper "like sharks at a dead whale," Hawke enters the suite of a Hollywood actress "like an ape let loose by a bored king in a French drawing room," unsuccessful playwrights are avoided during the first-night intermission "as though they were covered with the pustules of smallpox," Frieda cries with a look "like a little girl's when she has been struck by an indulgent father...
...Having exhausted his Bronx background, his Navy experience, and his family in earlier novels, Wouk has no subject left but his own inexhaustible narcissism...
...But doesn't Wouk offer himself to the world as a religious man...
...Is Wouk's prose always Victorian-girlish...
...No, sometimes it is Swiftian—Tom Swiftian...
...Nothing...
...Have we reached bottom yet...
...The minor characters are equally conventional...
...Perhaps...
...It is not really a novel but what Hawke calls one of his best-sellers, "a yarn," and an extraordinarily mawkish and boring yarn it is, written with the most dazzling ineptitude...
...He has a long stormy affair with a married woman, but is kept from popping into bed with the sweet true girl he loves, as she loves him, by 783 pages of the most desperate contrivance, the longest tease since Richardson...
...Is there really nothing good about the book...
...Hadn't you better synopsize the plot...
...although Wouk economically turns it off after a few lines and only recurs to it in moments of passion...
...Doesn't Wouk stand for anything but venality...
...Wouk does not know much, but he has been around publishing long enough to know what would happen to a publisher's bookkeeping if he wrote checks personally, and to know that vintage champagne is not the beverage at expensive lunches...
...Sure...
...She kissed him with shy tentative excitement, with cutting sweetness...
...Is that the worst Wouk can do...
...Ouida...
...Speech mannerisms are the caricatures of boys' books: Hawke is from Kentucky, so that he speaks Amos 'n' Andy ("Mand ef Ah smoke uh see-gaw...
...When he breaks with her he feels "as though he had stumbled out of a cave into the sunlight," or "as though he had just tunnelled up out of a prison...
...Her body in his arms was angelic...
...a sophisticated European woman is identifiable by Consonant Mangle ("Vare is ze young genius...
...The sunlight love, Jeanne Green (Winter and Green—get it...
...Hardly...
...Some life in the characters, perhaps...
...Youngblood Hawke gives Wouk an opportunity to produce an Advertisement for Myself more grandiose than Norman Mailer's, to tell us for hundreds of pages that he is a literary genius who has "read almost all the important plays and novels in the world" and is a paragon of generosity and charity...
...a crooked Southern businessman shows his hand by saying "binness" for "business" and "sumbitch" for some unidentifiable obscenity...
...But the panting reader expects a check on the spot and the flow of lovely bubbles, and Wouk pants along with him dutifully...
...S. J. Perelman...
...No, see what happens when some bored king lets him loose on the famous trope about burning one's candle at both ends: "The candle was invaluable, it was one's single sure / possession...
...Frieda's tawdry self-defense about Paul disgusted him to his core...
...None whatsoever...
...A lot of empty mumbling is passed off as devotion," he wrote in This Is My God...
...he was a humorist in college and has a characteristic college-humor wit...
...When she seems game for a roll in the hay with Youngblood, you can be sure that it is "the opiate in her cough medicine— she had taken a large dose upon coming home—" that has temporarily weakened her moral fibre, and that she will be saved in the nick of time...
...Peyton Place is more honest...
...The mistress, Frieda Winter, is a rich older woman of 39, beautiful, passionate and hedonist...
...His readers really are the boobs Hawke describes, so "starved for an interesting story" that they will ignore the reviews to read him...
...The world of the rich successful writer eventually becomes the only world a rich successful writer knows, unfortunately...
...Hawke replies to a producer's obscenities "with some far rougher language from the Seabees or the Letchworth miners," at which "the producer was quite taken aback," although he later ripostes with "------------!," glossed: "It was the dirtiest epithet that current English affords...
...Hawke himself is big, strong, handsome in a homely fashion, and wellnigh (it is hard to keep from falling into Wouk's language) irresistible to women...
...No one answer will do...
...Isn't "sumbitch" pretty bold for Wouk...
...Who wrote that posy...
...Really...
...They are cereal-box cut-outs...
...The solitary ring of honesty in the book is Hawke's recurrent plea that the income of popular writers be more gently taxed as capital gains, and the long discussions of the vulnerability of tax dodges are more apt to bring tears to the reader's eyes than are the death scenes...
...Why then the enormous popularity of this book, which earned a million dollars before publication —serialized in McCall's, Book-of-the-Month Club selection, sold to Reader's Digest Condensed Books and Warner Brothers, a first printing of 125,000...
...He stands for old-fashioned morality: female chastity is right, and Jeanne will be rewarded with the love of a good man for preserving her long-tried virginity...
...Here are a few other examples: "Being with this man, discussing his work, feeling that she was useful to him, was as close to heaven as she expected to come in this world...
...So Hawke ignored all the warning signs that Jeanne's mood was, to say the least, not attuned to a declaration from him...
...Nastiest of all, Wouk panders to the conviction of his moron-audience that the world of culture is homosexual, and that homosexuals are ludicrous and disgusting...
...he even buys his meat in Jewish delicatessens...
...SPRING BOOKS Some Questions About Herman Wouk By Stanley Edgar Hyman "It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Jeanne had all but fallen in love with the author on reading the first seven pages of his manuscript...
...Yes, but he hadn't seen Wouk's similes, which manage the miracle of being bizarre and shopworn at the same time...
...Like Wouk he has written a best-seller about the Navy which won the Pulitzer Prize, and another about a girl who might be his sister, and has made an immensely successful play from the trial scene of one of his novels...
...Yes, "I think you can report conversations realistically without going overboard on obscenity," Wouk told a hagiographer...
...Hawke's mother Sarah, for example, is a stock Yiddisher Momma, bossy but wonderful, disguised as a mountain woman by the shrewd expedient of having her make a fabulous vegetable soup instead of chicken soup with noodles...
...Wouk is now a phenomenal merchandising success, sold like a detergent...
...Is that the worst...
...But look what he does with the scene when Hawke is given a contract for his first book...
...Couldn't these be Wouk's own feelings, not a pandering to his audience...
...Hawke's mother speaks quite another dialect, apparently Dogpatch ("get aholt of t'other end of that bed, I cain't get it downstairs myself...
...Wouk has announced that the figure of Youngblood Hawke was suggested by Balzac, he resembles Sinclair Lewis in a few details, and there is a positive effort, in the first and last chapters of the book, to identify him with Thomas Wolfe...
...is a brainy young girl, equally beautiful and passionate, but chaste...
...Didn't Aristotle say something about mastery of metaphor as a sign of genius...
...A young genius of a novelist and playwright has an early meteoric success, gets over-committed financially, drives himself to superhuman efforts, and dies...
...A chorus of laughter showed the choice was popular," he writes...
...The head of the publishing firm writes out a check at his desk for the advance, and the editor takes Hawke to a place like Twenty-One for lunch and orders him a bottle of "vintage champagne...
...It is a morality less interested in honesty (those tax dodges) and charity (those chirping faggots) than it is in virtuous American womanhood...
...It is from his enormous new novel, Youngblood Hawke (Doubleday, 783 pp., $7.95...
...Why dissemble...
...They are yahoos who hate culture and the mind, who want to be told that Existentialism means that "you do what you goddam please," that current theatrical fashion is "pseudo-Freudian reconstruction," that young actresses offer themselves "with all the casualness of a housewife opening a can of soup...
...Through his pages parade an endless stream: "Greenwich Village perverts," a "talented young sodomite" whose writing calls to mind "soiled nylon underwear," "a Hollywood pederast," "a notorious homosexual novelist about five feet tall," "sissies with bleached hair," "faggots in their skimpy Italian suits,' simpering "pretty boys," tittering "homos," "fairies" uttering "little squeaks of carnal delight," a "fat old sodomite with red-dyed hair," "chirping and screeching faggots," and so on...
...It even allows him to write fan letters to himself (or to quote fan letters he has received) that class him with Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac and Twain...
...It is the most fraudulent and worthless novel I have read in many years...
...adultery is wrong, and Frieda will be punished for it by the death of her beloved son (he hangs himself in shame at the news...
...But these are transparent disguises—Hawke is unmistakably Herman Wouk...
...There is, in addition, a melodramatic subplot in which the hero's mother outwits the scoundrelly coal barons who have defrauded her and recovers a fortune...
...The cool feel of the tears on her cheeks aroused him in a bitter very strong way...
...No, it is the work of Herman Wouk, sometime Professor of English at Yeshiva University...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 10
