The Wouk Mutiny

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The desk is bare except for a well-thumbed dictionary, a picture of the novelist's wife and an old-fashioned gold watch with Roman numerals and a heavy lid. For five years the watch has lain open on the desk while its owner listened to its ticking and wrote steadily, using the same aging desk pen and yellow lined pads. Says Herman Wouk (pronounced woke) :

"I reported in to my boss, the desk, five or day." six Out days of a this week, at unflinching least six writing hours a stint came some of the U.S.'s most success ful fiction. Wouk's total output to date:

three plays, a movie and four novels, including The Caine Mutiny, the biggest U.S. bestseller since Gone With the Wind.

Last week the gold watch (brought to the U.S. from Russia 27 years ago by Novelist Wouk's grandfather) was shut and resting in the desk drawer. Novelist Wouk was taking his first vacation in nearly a decade from the job of writing -- "the loneliest job in the world." Wouk, a tall, darkly handsome man of 40, was relaxing at his ocean-front home on New York's Fire Island, trying to fix a 30-year-old reading lamp, lolling on the sand, teaching his five-year-old son how to float.

He was formidably calm about a D-day as unnerving as any faced by that old rust-bucket, U.S.S. Caine -- the publication this week of his latest novel, Marjorie Morningstar. Months ago, Fellow Author J. P. Marquand warned: "The critics will be waiting for you with meat cleavers the next time around."

Much to Live Down. Wouk knows that he will have to live up to The Caine Mutiny before he can ever live its fame down. The Caine's total sales figures to date are of heroic proportions: in all editions, some 3,000,000 Americans bought the novel; it sold more than 2,000,000 copies in Britain, and it has been translated into 17 foreign languages. The play based on the book, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, packed in Broadway theatergoers for two seasons and grossed about $2,500,000. The movie piled up a box office take of $12 million and is still going. Like many a giant industry, the Caine even spawned byproducts, e.g., the manufacture of "Queeg balls," modeled on the two steel bearings that the skipper of the Caine obsessively rolled in his left palm whenever his nerves were shaky.

To Herman Wouk himself, The Caine Mutiny brought the Pulitzer Prize (1951), nearly a million dollars in cash, countless autograph hunters (whom he loves), countless requests for speaking engagements (most of which he declines), and several thousand letters (all of which he answered). But to Novelist Wouk, a cool customer in a superheated profession, The Caine is simply "Novel No. 3" (No. 1 was Aurora Dawn; No. 2, City Boy), and he does not worry for an instant that Marjorie may be lost in the undertow of The Caine's popularity. This unique assurance is typical of Herman Wouk, a unique figure in American letters.

Chipless Shoulder. Wouk, a man of paradox, seems like an enigmatic character in search of an author. He is a devout Orthodox Jew who has achieved worldly success in worldly-wise Manhattan while adhering to dietary prohibitions and traditional rituals which many of his fellow Jews find embarrassing. He is an ex-radio gagwriter who severely judges his own work by the standards of the great English novelists. He is a Columbia-educated (class of '34), well-read intellectual with an abiding faith in "the common reader" ("They're good enough to elect our Presidents, aren't they?"). Although he is a highly sensitive member of a religious minority, he is one of the few living U.S. writers who carries no chip on his shoulder and who gives the U.S. straight A's in his fictional report cards.

In The Caine Mutiny, Wouk defied recent literary fashion and loosed some real shockers by declaring his belief in

1) decency--in language as well as deeds, 2) honor, 3) discipline, 4) authority, 5) hallowed institutions like the U.S. Navy. In Marjorie Morningstar, Wouk will set more teeth on edge by advocating chastity before marriage, suggesting that real happiness for a woman is found in a home and children, cheering loud and long for the American middle class and blasting Bohemia and Bohemians. Wouk is a Sinclair Lewis in reverse. His chief significance is that he spearheads a mutiny against the literary stereotypes of rebellion--against three decades of U.S. fiction dominated by skeptical criticism, sexual emancipation, social protest and psychoanalytic sermonizing.

Yet Wouk is no tractmonger. He is first and last a topnotch storyteller, and his readers know it. Marjorie seemed slated to be a runaway bestseller. It was the unanimous choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club judges for September, and the publishers, Doubleday, took the hard-headed gamble of an initial printing of 100,000 copies.

The Caine was a story of action and adventure; Marjorie is a love story, and beyond that, a girl's quest for her own identity. The Caine was a clear-eyed account of life aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in World War II; Marjorie is a clear-eyed and warmhearted account of Jewish family life in the 19303. Marjorie is overlong, sometimes graceless, often plodding, but like The Caine, it has a compelling sense of reality, as if the novelist had planted hidden microphones in the house next door and poked a zoomar lens down the chimney.

Who is Marjorie? Marjorie Morgenstern is an American Everygirl who happens to be Jewish. She is, says her creator, "Betsy Jones, Hazel Klein, Sue Wilson." She is every girl who ever dreamed of seeing her name on a Broadway marquee, who fell in love and set out to land a man.

She is every girl who ever pooh-poohed her parents' stodgy, old-fashioned precepts about life, who ever yearned for Don Juan and settled for Steady John.

From Hunter to Sodom. On the first of the book's 565 pages, Hoover is still President, Marjorie is 17, and the Morgenstern family has just made the great social leap from the Bronx Park East to Manhattan's Central Park West. Marjorie is a blue-eyed, brown-haired beauty who can scarcely see past her next prom date. But eagle-eyed Mama Morgenstern is already shopping in the marriage mart.

First, there is a holdover from Bronx days named George Drobes, who intrigues Margie because he has a jalopy named Penelope and his kisses tingle. But to Mama, George is just a snuffling auto mechanic. When the wealthy son of a department-store owner brings Margie home after a horseback-riding spill in Central Park, Mama lights up. But her social grasp exceeds the Morgenstern economic reach, and the new romance fades. Margie doesn't really care. Her destiny, she feels, is to be an actress. She has long since scribbled her stage name on a scrap of paper--MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR.

When she wants to talk about what is closest to her heart--the glorious career of Marjorie Morningstar--she goes to the West gos brownstone flat of her dearest friend, a' fat, good-natured girl with intellectual pretensions named Marsha Zelenko. Marsha lives with her parents in an apartment decorated with Mexican copper plates, Chinese screens and African masks. Papa Zelenko strums the balalaika: Mama Zelenko pounds out Bach on the piano. After Margie scores a hit in a Hunter College production of The Mikado, Marsha gets her a job as dramatic coach at a children's camp in the Adirondacks. Across the lake is an adult-resort camp named South Wind, and South Wind, Mama Morgenstern snorts, is nothing less than Sodom.

Virgin on the Verge. To Sodom, of course, the girls surreptitiously go. There Marjorie meets Noel Airman (real name: Saul Ehrmann), who has red hair, a handsome profile and the glamorous job of putting on revues at South Wind. To the despair of Noel's aspiring, pimply assistant, Wally Wronken, Airman is a triple-threat man--an artist, a libertine and an intellectual who can shred phony highbrows "like a flame thrower."

When Noel gets around to shredding Margie's shirtwaist in his cabin one cozy evening, Margie does a sudden uncooperative freeze. Noel turns eloquently nasty and, incidentally, states the main theme of the book: "Your name is Shirley," he tells Marjorie, "the respectable girl, the mother of the next generation, all tricked out to appear gay and girlish and carefree, but with a terrible threatening solid dullness jutting through, like the gray rocks under the spring grass in Central Park . . . What [Shirley] wants is what a woman should want . . . big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs--but she'll never say so. Because in our time those things are supposed to be stuffy and dull . . . She's Lady Brett Ashley,* with witty, devil-may-care whimsey and shocking looseness all over the place. A dismal caricature, you understand, and nothing but talk . . . To simulate Lady Brett, however, as long as she's in fashion, Shirley talks free and necks on a rigidly graduated scale . . . She can find no guidance anywhere . . . In literature her problem doesn't exist. The old novels are all about Jane Austen and Dickens heroines ... And the new novels are all more or less about Brett Ashley, who sleeps with any guy who really insists, but is a poetic pure tortured soul at heart. This leaves Shirley squarely in the middle. What can she do . . .?"

What indeed? For 417 pages, Margie is a virgin on the verge. Then, on the eve of Noel Airman's first Broadway opening, Lady Brett Ashley wins out over Shirley, in a Central Park South hotel room. This may well be the longest to-do over the loss of a girl's virginity since Richardson's Pamela. Says Wouk defensively: "Some people may get impatient and think, 'She's going to sleep with this guy, what's all the fuss?' But it's still a great suspense thing to a girl. If you don't think so, take a poll. The question may be more serious to Marjorie because of her Old Testament upbringing. But it is a key problem for any girl. It's a general American dilemma."

The "Gilded Ghetto." When Margie is not coping with her dilemma, she is occupied with shyster theatrical producers, a pedestrian suitor named Dr. Shapiro, and the diehard devotion of little Wally Wronken. A character who warms Marjorie's heart, and the reader's, is her uncle, Samson-Aaron, a robustious clown, a seam-splitting glutton, and a lovable dead-beat ("But a nickel, Modgerie, a nickel I always had, to buy you a Hershey bar ven I came to this house"). In his simple way, he shows Marjorie how close she really is to the faith she once brashly dismissed as a Stone Age relic.

Author Wouk is at his best when he pictures the rarely described world of Manhattan's Upper West Side, which one of his characters calls the "gilded ghetto." Wouk knows its customs, prejudices, social gradations, e.g., West End Avenue is a worse address than Central Park West; mothers run a secret service on eligible suitors as efficiently as any conducted in Junior League territory. Most amusing and effective are Wouk's accounts of big family occasions, e.g., the mammoth bar mitzvah* with its ostentatious but somehow touching banquet that finds Marjorie's brother making a grand entrance to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, flanked by a cauldron of flaming brandy for the grapefruit appetizers.

In such scenes Wouk gives his people a special tang and zest. A Passover dinner at the Morgensterns' is turned into a hilarious romp by a progressively raised brat named Neville ("The Devil") Sapersteen, who bites little girls in the rump and needs 47 toy airplanes handy at all times in an open suitcase because, as the mother explains, they're "a sort of security symbol." ("Morris, leave the lid up or he'll get a trauma.")

On to Mamaroneck. When Noel's play and his affair with Margie both turn out to be flops, he flees to Paris, but Margie follows him, still determined to lasso the cad with a wedding ring. Aboard ship she meets another charmer, Mike Eden, who has a bad case of nerves, but for good cause: he is playing Scarlet Pimpernel in Nazi Germany and smuggling out persecuted Jews. Still, Noel has a fatal hold on her, and she finally catches up with him, only to find him living with and off a lady photographer.

Noel as a brilliant, devastating heel--a West Side version of a Scott Fitzgerald hero--rarely rings true. But his deterioration and his ultimate meaning are convincing. "He takes the current myths for solid facts," says one character about him. "It never occurs to him that the Oedipus complex really doesn't exist, that it is a piece of moralistic literature. He's as orthodox as your own father, Marjorie, in his fashion . . . making a life's work out of being dogmatic, clever, supercilious--and inwardly totally confused and wretched."

Author Wouk builds up real suspense about the question of whom Marjorie will finally marry--a reformed Noel, a romantic Eden, a successful Wally, or plain Dr. Shapiro. The last chapter finds her a contented matron of Mamaroneck, who in her memory has revamped the past to suit the present. As she gets a little high and waltzes alone to the strains of Falling in Love with Love, she seems for a moment like the dream girl of old. But the moment passes. An old beau who is visiting her decides: "You couldn't write a play about her that would run a week, or a novel that would sell a thousand copies."

Island of Normalcy. Herman Wouk obviously disagrees. To him, Marjorie is a story he felt he had to tell: "This person has haunted me for years. It's not a girl I was in love with. It is a lot of girls I knew, since I grew up in all this."

Like.Marjorie, Wouk was born in The Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac and Esther Levine Wouk. Both parents came from Minsk, Russia. Papa Wouk started washing clothes in a basement, rose to be president of one of New York's largest power laundries. One of Herman's earliest memories is playing hide and seek among the machines. The Wouk family was "restless, like most New Yorkers," and while Herman was still a child, made four moves, from one canyonlike apartment house to another, all within what Wouk calls "that romantic, and much overcriticized borough," The Bronx.

Though he was later to toss a nostalgic valentine to his Bronx boyhood in his novel, City Boy, little Herman got off to a depressing start. He was the neighborhood fat boy, forever guzzling chocolate milkshakes. In street fights, "I was clobbered." But he had two powerful consolations: the Wouk home life and books. As soon as he learned to read, he would sprawl on the floor for hours with a tattered old dictionary, glorying in big words like anthropomorphism.

The love that Mama and Papa Wouk lavished on him, his sister Irene and his brother Victor warms Herman to this day. Best of all he liked the Sabbath. As a rabbi's daughter, "Mama was treated rather like a princess around the house." But when Friday afternoon came, "she scrubbed the kitchen on her hands and knees until the place shone. The candles were lit, and we sang the joyful Sabbath hymns and drank the sacramental wine; the children, too. My father usually talked about the Bible." As in Marjorie Morgenstern's home, the menu was always gefilte fish,* chicken noodle soup, roast chicken, stewed prunes, tea and sponge cake. Those evenings, says Wouk, made for "an island of normalcy. Home seemed to be the place where everything happened as it should happen."

All Wouk & No Play. At school, says Wouk, he was "criminally lazy," but he got good grades by cramming for exams.

When his grandfather, Rabbi Mendel Leib Levine, came to the U.S. from Russia, he took over Herman's religious training. Rabbi Levine, now an alert 90-year-old living in Tel Aviv, is one of the two men who, Wouk believes, have most influenced his life (the other: Columbia's late Philosopher Irwin Edman). "For 23 years," recalls Wouk, "my grandfather never ate any meat except fowl, because he insisted on personally seeing the slaughtering done according to the prescribed ritual."

At Columbia, Wouk worked for the college daily, edited the humor magazine (sample humor: "Have you heard of the guy who read Dante's Inferno just for the hell of it?"). He wrote two varsity shows (wrote a collegiate critic: "All Wouk and no play").

The Gag Factory. Wouk majored in comparative literature (like The Caine's Willie Keith) and in philosophy (like Marjorie's Noel Airman). This was the period of what Wouk now calls "the great sophomoric enlightenment ... I discovered the 18th and 19th centuries, and, for a time, I didn't observe my religion very carefully." In time he went back to his faith. His return was not caused by any particular crisis, only "the crisis of living as an adult. I felt there's a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I'd be a jerk not to take advantage of it."

Before graduation, Wouk had announced that he was going to be a writer. His sister Irene still remembers the family powwows that ensued: "Father said if Herman wanted to write, why not write advertising copy for the Fox Square Laundry? Mother twisted her apron in anguish and insisted that he go to law school." (Years later proud Mama Wouk was seen carrying The Caine Mutiny almost everywhere she went.)

Herman found an out. A friend had landed a writing post at a resort camp, Copake, and Herman tagged along as his unpaid assistant. Copake was a less imposing facsimile of South Wind, the camp in Marjorie Morningstar, and Herman's was roughly the Wally Wronken post.

Next, Wouk went to work (at $15 a week) for a cigar-chomping "czar of gagwriters" who ran a joke factory supplying gags to Fanny Brice, Lou Holtz, Eddie Cantor et al. Wouk's job was to clip and card-index old jokes and to clean up the off-color items. Two years later he was hired as a radio gagwriter by Fred Allen. His special chore for the Allen-program: the "People You Didn't Expect to Meet" interview, for which he unearthed weirdies, e.g., a goldfish doctor, a worm salesman and "the man who inserts the cloves in the hams you see in Lindy's window." Allen also credits Wouk with such skits as "Detective One Long Pan Was Disguised as a Girdle So They Knew He Was Closing In."

The Greatest Experience. Though he was making $200 a week during the depths of The Depression, squiring showgirls around town and living in a swank apartment at Manhattan's Essex House, Wouk began to feel that "gags were not the answer to the riddle of existence." He talked to his grandfather, and put his probings into a diary (he still keeps it, so far has filled 20 volumes--6,000 pages). When Pearl Harbor came, Wouk enlisted in the Navy. At midshipman's school he graduated in the top 20 in a class of 500, further distinguished himself by writing a paper on "The Responsibilities of Naval Leadership" in verse and in the meter of a French ballade. At school and throughout his Navy career, Wouk held fast to Jewish law and custom. On the Liberty ship taking him to the Pacific in 1942, Wouk often ate nothing but bread and potatoes, because the ship's menu was dominated by pork. One day he posted a satirical poem on the bulletin board:

Of all God's creatures small and big We owe most to our friend, the pig . . . Yeoman, record this in the log:

Twenty-one-gun salute--the hog!

A senior officer saw the verse and issued an order: "Give this man something he can eat."

For Wouk, the wartime Navy was "the greatest experience of my life ... I had known two worlds, the wise guys of Broadway and the wise guys of Columbia--two small worlds that sometimes take themselves for the whole world. In the Navy, I found out more than I ever had about people and about the United States. I had always been a word boy, and suddenly I had to cope with the peculiar, marvelous world of the machine."

In Love with the Boss. Unlike the Caine, the destroyer-minesweeper Zane, to which Wouk was assigned, swept mines aplenty--off the Marshalls, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, the Marianas, Guam, Saipan, Tinian. In two years Wouk was successively assistant communications officer, communications officer, ship's first lieutenant and navigator. Later he was reassigned to another minesweeper, the Southard, saw action in six Pacific campaigns. He rose to executive officer, had been recommended to become captain of his ship when it was wrecked in a typhoon at Okinawa.

One night late in 1944, when the Zane put in at San Pedro for repairs, Lieut. Wouk and a few fellow officers went out on the town. After all the bars had closed, one of the men remembered a birthday party being given for the boss of a file clerk he knew. "So we all barged in. I made a date with one of the file clerks for lunch the next day. All through lunch the girl raved about her boss, this beautiful, witty, talented creature. Naturally I went back to her office to take a second look, and I made a date with the boss."

The boss was Betty Brown, a trim, pretty redhead and a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Southern California. For Wouk, it was a clear case of love at second sight. Betty was a Protestant, but not a practicing one. She thinks now that part of Herman's appeal for her was that he made her see "that one didn't have to be a stupe to be religious." When Herman went back to sea, Betty Brown began studying Judaism, and a year later, on her 25th birthday, became a Jewish convert. Betty's Hebrew name is Sarah Batya: Wouk picked Sarah, and Batya (chosen for its resemblance to Betty) means "daughter of God." When Herman broached the idea of marrying Sarah, "Mama thought the end of the world had come," but "Grandfather understood."

Through the years on shipboard, Wouk had been pecking away at a novel. Aurora Dawn was written in an 18th century style as quaint as a minuet, but it dealt with a 20th century subject, "the contrast between the rat-race values of the radio-advertising world and the stable values of an Old Testament hillbilly prophet who gets mixed up with it." Wouk thinks of it as "a compendium of first-novel errors," but the Book-of-the-Month Club grabbed it. From that day to this, Wouk has pursued "the hard, borderline trade" of writing with monastic dedication.

The Craftsman. His day does not begin at his desk, but in prayer, for which he dons the traditional black-and-white prayer shawl and straps phylacteries (small leather cases containing texts from the

Pentateuch) to his left arm and his forehead. He prays twice more each day, just before and just after sundown. He also reads from the Pentateuch for an hour daily. He tries to start writing by 9 o'clock, takes a lunch break at i, sometimes naps for a while, but gets back to his desk in time to turn out about 1,500 words a day. He rarely rewrites.

Wouk, a meticulous researcher,* tries for "plain style, clarity of expression, as I'm not a poet, and not a high stylist." He shuns obscenity in his books: "You don't use dirty language in someone's home. When a reader holds my book, we are in an even closer relationship than a guest's." Pinpointing his own faults, he says: "I overwrite. I fail to achieve the standard of excellence I strive for, and fall into mediocrity." He reads and rereads Shakespeare, but Dickens is his all-time favorite author ("He could create reality with a stroke").

At day's end Wouk relaxes with a martini and a long Havana cigar ("They are like lollipops"), plays with his boys Nathaniel, 5, and Joseph, 17 months. The

Wouks' first son, Abraham, was drowned in a Mexican swimming pool in 1951, when he slipped out of the house early one morning to sail a toy boat his father had given him.

Built-in Engine. One night a week Wouk gives a course in advanced rhetoric at New York's Yeshiva University to a class of rabbinical students. He owns no car and no boat ("Possessions are disastrous"), but he does own two homes. In addition to the Fire Island summer place, he has a fashionable cooperative apartment in Manhattan's East 60s. He and his wife are homebodies; they love to read and listen to records.

Somewhere inside Herman Wouk there plays a permanent recording of The Little Engine That Could. He has at various times doggedly tackled flying, boxing, aquaplaning, and taught himself to type, play the piano, and do the breast stroke. When Wouk saw Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, he went home in despair: "You worm! You thug!" he raged at himself. "Get out of this business'" But next morning he was still in business, lifting the court-martial sequence out of The Caine. He wrote the whole play in "three horrible weeks."

Accent on Form. From Babbitt, to The Grapes of Wrath, to The Naked and the Dead, a generation of talented but angry men has been bending the ear of U.S. readers, almost suggesting that thinking men should secede from the U.S. Wouk is not an angry man. But there is more than artless optimism or patriotism beneath the surface of his stories. Wouk denies taking stands for or against anything, but the evidence of the books contradicts him. There is an indictment in The Caine Mutiny--not, ultimately, of Queeg, the maniacal martinet, but of Keefer, the phony intellectual. There is an indictment in Marjorie Morningstar--of Noel Airman, the restless Bohemian.

These characters are not indicted because they are intellectuals, but because they are irresponsible. What Wouk is saying, in effect, is that if everyone acted like Keefer, armies would fall apart, and wars would be lost. If everyone acted like Airman, marriages, families and society would crumble. These are platitudes, but they are the platitudes (as Wouk has Willie Keith say) of "growing up."

To Wouk, rebellion for rebellion's sake is an outmoded adolescent cliche. Friends find him a hard man to know, perhaps because he is without capacity for the sustained and often neurotic introspection in which writers often indulge. If all this makes him a conformist, he is willing to bear the tag, provided that the accent is on the second syllable. Says Wouk: "One must impose a form on life."

The critical meat cleavers may indeed be out for Herman Wouk this time around, but though they cut up the work, they will miss the man. Novels No. 5 and No. 6 are already in the mental blueprint stage ("I wouldn't even tell my wife what they're about"). Says Wouk earnestly: "I'm going to write novels for the rest of my life, each one better than the last."

* The promiscuous heroine of Hemingway's "lost generation" novel The Sun Also Rises.

* The ceremony at which a boy of 13 assumes adult religious responsibility.

* Balls of chopped fish, egg, onion and seasoning, boiled with vegetables.

* While collecting weather data for the Caine in Washington, he stumbled on a movie idea about hurricane-hunting pilots; the movie (Slattery's Hurricane) netted him $85,000.

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