“DON’T TELL ME YOU bought the purple house!” Georgetown acquaintances would exclaim at first. The previous owner, an eccentric spinster, had so empurpled it throughout that it had been on the market for years, unsalable.I Sarah’s decorative demon awoke. We bought the place, and she was in the racketing upheaval of restoring it when my writing stopped dead. I moved out to seek peace in a room at the Cosmos Club. One evening I came home for dinner, and I was reading my day’s work to her afterward amid the disorder, when she burst out, “You can’t do that!” A German general, writing in prison, was explaining that Hitler’s invasion of Poland had all been England’s fault. “Who is this general? You can’t stop the story dead like that! He doesn’t even sound German. What are you thinking?”
I tried to explain that the big war book wasn’t working, that my plan to scatter characters around the world to convey the global aspect (my first Hilberg’s “structure”) was in collapse. She did not understand. I could not make her understand. I could only say in desperation, “Look, I do this or I quit.” That she understood, grumbling, “Oh, don’t quit.” Down the years she had seen me back out of many a narrative blind alley. Now I had to grope my way out of this one.
In point of fact, I had groped my way forward into Hilberg’s structure! The grand narrative scheme that would carry me through so many years of war writing had at last come in sight. I was a while getting the general straight. At first he was “General von Goethe” (a Princeton historian had to talk me out of that), and he was a jarring intruder, not in any way related to the story, for Victor Henry as his translator was a later idea. Yet if I had to submit to a court of angels a sample of my stuff, it might well be General Armin von Roon. Only in his retrospect on the global war, written in prison during twenty years of enforced leisure—a former insider in Hitler’s entourage, a professional soldier with strong informed judgments on all the campaigns including the Pacific sea fights—only so, I say, could the story structure come clear as the brightly lit drama of the Henrys and the Jastrows, played out against the dark cyclorama of General Armin von Roon’s military history.
Byron Henry, the hero of the central love story, is a good-looking charming loafer, a drifter, a do-nothing who slides along the low track in life, barely passing examinations or, if they don’t matter that much, flunking them. He goes not to Annapolis but to Columbia. The only subject that interests him at Columbia is a known gut course for athletes, art history. The easygoing old professor discerns quality in Byron and befriends him, which fires Byron up to pursue a master’s degree in Florence, but he gets bored and drops it. His mentor then sends him a letter of introduction to Professor Jastrow in Siena, where he encounters Jastrow’s niece Natalie.
Within a few pages we find Byron Henry in a small Polish town, utterly transformed: a leaping bounding Gentile in a yarmulke, joining a wild wedding dance of bearded Jews young and old, while Natalie cavorts with the dancing women. The bridegroom is the son of Professor Jastrow’s cousin Berel Jastrow, and this shtetl is their birthplace, where when they were boys they had been yeshiva buddies. Hitler has declared war on Poland, the Germans have already invaded, but the hinterland does not yet have the word. Bright and early next morning Byron, heavily asleep on the floor in the rabbi’s house, is shaken awake by Berel Jastrow, a tall Jew with a long brown beard. “De Chormans,” he says.
“The Germans?” Byron is up like a cat. “What about them?”
“Dey comink.”
It is Natalie Jastrow’s doing, of course, that has Byron Henry capering at an old-time Jewish wedding in the Polish countryside. Natalie is a hard charger, headstrong and heedless, working for her uncle in Siena just to be near a Rhodes scholar, Leslie Slote—now a Foreign Service officer in Warsaw—with whom she has been having a turbulent on-and-off affair. Storm clouds are gathering in August 1939 when she drags Byron with her in a harebrained excursion to Warsaw to pursue Leslie Slote. Her uncle lets her go only because Byron agrees to accompany her. So the reader too is dragged, as it were, into the siege of Warsaw, where Byron shows a trace of his father’s mettle, performing feats of endurance and bravery that he shrugs off as fun. His thick-skinned insouciance under bombardment both repels and attracts Natalie. Callow though Byron is, and lovesick though she remains for the preoccupied Slote, the Henry mettle catches her eye.
Thus the tale is launched, moving forward to Berlin, Warsaw, Italy, Washington, and the Pacific, at key points thundering ahead with von Roon interpolations. Berel Jastrow gradually comes forward, an indomitable man of faith who grows and grows until in War and Remembrance he all but takes center stage.
I woke from a seven-year creative trance, as it were, to tell my wife that it was time to submit the manuscript for publication. Her sensible response was “How can you? The story is just beginning.” I said jocosely that if I started to write the rest now, I would have to publish a novel with wheels on it. My Doubleday editor suggested usable ways to tie off the incomplete story, pending the writing of a second book; but he thought Armin von Roon was a mistake, and he seemed bearish about the whole thing. I went to talk to him in New York and found him in a smaller office, no window. On the Meltzer book, final title Don’t Stop the Carnival, he had missed errors in book design, had not fought the ugly jacket, and the publisher had rushed the novel into print to meet a book club schedule. Now my agent conveyed a perfunctory offer for my war books that amounted to a turndown. As to why Doubleday so acted, I may offer my surmise in the Fiddler part of this book. Here I write of my adventures in the narrative art, and as in the sundial motto, “I tell only sunny hours.” (Well, by and large sunny.)
In those days there was, in the book business, a dwindling breed of gentleman publishers who relied on editors rather than marketers in buying and promoting new books. My agent largely redeemed himself by steering me to Arthur Thornhill Jr. of Little, Brown. I flew to Boston to meet his editor in chief, Larned Bradford; and in short, having read the Gulf script, Bradford strongly recommended to Thornhill that he publish my war works. Writing the next book took another seven years, and Thornhill stood by his editor’s judgment to see the enormous novel through to success. Let me here record my respects to the memory of Ned Bradford, the editor, and Arthur Thornhill Jr., the publisher, who together shepherded my Main Task to the light of day.
Calder Willingham, who wrote me the best letter about Marjorie Morningstar that I ever received, now wrote me the worst letter about The Winds of War that I ever received. True, it most accurately predicted the novel’s early reception by critics, but I had expected better of old Calder. He found my script uninteresting, empty, old-timey, hard to read. His single editorial comment was that Victor Henry’s wife, Rhoda, was “a thing to stick pins into,” not another word about the Henry family; nothing about the Jastrows, nothing about von Roon, nothing about the portraits of the historical characters: Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, not a word! The letter is now filed in a warehouse with the yellowing correspondence of other days. Months later he came to see me bringing a big wooden turtle, my totem, with a brass plaque on it: “To Herman Wouk, the fastest turtle in the west.” Such was the gracious wry retraction of a Southern gentleman. I’m not sure Calder ever grasped, or at least conceded, that historical romance was not a dodo literary form. Our friendship lasted until he died.
A month to go, and still no title! The Gulf was just a working title, and I had not yet thought of another. I was leafing through my work journal and my eye caught a line or two, something like, “just a family story, but the winds of war sweeping through it may give it some . . .” At that moment the telephone rang. My British publisher, Billy Collins, had bought the novel through my agent’s London associate and was calling for an update. “Do you have a title yet?”
“Well, I don’t know, what would you say to The Winds of War?”
“Eh, eh, what? What’s that?” A gasp, “STROKE OF GENIUS!” That is exactly how it happened. Ned Bradford, delighted and much relieved by the title, invited me a few days later to come and look at a proposed jacket. I found the staid Boston publishing firm a-fizz, and a cover that was, for a book of mine, something new in dignity and beauty. He disclosed over lunch at his haunt, the famed old Locke-Ober restaurant, that the first printing would be a hundred thousand copies. What a dizzying swing up from the Calder letter!
I had trouble getting to sleep the night before publication day. Seven years of work on the line . . . The morning light brought three early reviews: the New York Times daily book column, the advance Times Sunday book section, and Time magazine.
Next day, the Sabbath, I sat in the synagogue plunged in despair. I had taken Thornhill’s money to write another, even longer book that nobody would read! Monday morning I phoned Ned Bradford. Advance orders had stopped at forty thousand, with some returns. “The usual thing, we just sit tight,” said Ned cheerily. He thought the reviews weren’t bad at all.
My wife more or less agreed with him, but did not argue when I decided to go and sit tight in a cabana on St. Maarten. Star Pines was long since sold. We passed a tense time in retrograde island idleness: sailing, sunning, swimming, dancing, drinking. One morning, a call from the office: telegram for me at the desk, also a letter. I found penciled on a scrap of yellow paper (telegrams came to the island by phone): “Over one hundred thousand ordered and shipped. Ned.” The three-page letter was from the novelist Jan de Hartog:II The Winds of War was a breakthrough for me, a new thing in current literature, and so on. Returning to Georgetown, we found sales and reviews tending away from Calder toward de Hartog.
That was the turn. I was sixty-one. Rothschild’s clock was striking a late hour.
In The Winds of War America is at peace, President Roosevelt candidly rooting for England, and pushing Lend-Lease through a balky Congress torn between isolationists and interventionists, while marchers outside the White House carry placards and shout slogans for both views. War and Remembrance picks up the story at Pearl Harbor, and we are in the war up to our necks.
The main task I had set for myself was to bring the Holocaust to life in a frame of global war. Here now was the frame, “the great globe itself,” and here was the Task itself. The Russians had borne the brunt of Hitler’s assault on civilization. Research could do only so much; extensive travel had to be part of the job, starting with the Soviet Union. Sarah and I traveled in that bleak miserable dictatorship for two months: no fun at all, but fully as compulsory as going to Germany had been. We went twice to Auschwitz. We visited Terezin (Theresienstadt), the Czech locale of the “Paradise Ghetto.” In Iran we managed to go to Tehran, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met and forged the grand alliance that won the war; and we saw the three embassies where it all happened. We traveled the track of Natalie Jastrow, fleeing a German SS pursuer with her baby and her uncle, down from Siena to the ferry to Corsica, and from there by ship to Marseilles; all this while I wrote a novel more than a thousand pages long.
When Ned Bradford read the typescript he soberly commented, “Herman, this novel was a religious obligation, wasn’t it? The Winds of War was just a warm-up.” There was an editor for you. In my own mind, Winds was, and has remained, the pedestal, Remembrance the Memorial.
Meantime, an unlikely brief glory had opened up in American popular art: a twelve-year window when cable channels were few, the three major networks had the airwaves to themselves, and they fell to battling for ratings with long spectacular films they called “miniseries.” Into that window The Winds of War lucked, and with a lot more luck, so did the Memorial. Encouraged by my wife, I ventured on this once-in-a-lifetime shot and ended up writing the screenplays myself, ensuring that at least the history was accurate and the plot and characters true to my books. The two huge movies commanded world audiences; today, viewed on reruns or played at home on disks, they remain in robust life for those who do not enjoy reading long novels.
And here is how all that came about. I was immersed in writing the tragic last chapters of the new book, as usual ignoring commercial TV as a trivial waste of time, when Barry Diller, then the head of ABC, and Michael Eisner, his associate, came to our Georgetown home to try to buy the television rights to The Winds of War. Sarah was now virtually my agent, hence this odd house call to negotiate. She and I had resolved, when Winds became a bestseller, that the film rights would never be for sale; the scope and the truths of the book were far too serious for the Hollywood meddling that my earlier novels had undergone. On this we had been adamant. The television rights were doubly unthinkable, given the commercial interruptions; nevertheless, after Roots, Diller’s twelve-hour blockbuster miniseries, the format was red-hot, and they had come to persuade us to think again.
“What do you want?” Diller asked.
“No commercials,” Sarah said.
Diller patiently explained that the budget would be far too huge to be spent just for prestige, ABC had to make money. We cited a short NBC miniseries called Holocaust, in which commercials for laxatives, feminine hygiene products, even the Ronald McDonald clown had fouled the tragedy. The notion emerged of a short list of prestigious sponsors that we might approve. Sarah did not reject the proposal outright, and they left on an upbeat note, Diller saying at the door, “Well, you’ve got the power. It’s a challenge, anyway.” Money was not mentioned, since he had long been offering us increasing sums for those rights in vain.III
Enter Charles “Cy” Rembar, my literary lawyer. It was Cy who had suggested that Sarah become my literary agent when my agent retired. Himself an able author on law, Cy backed up her negotiating instinct with his publishing know-how; they made a tough duo, coping with the treacherous intricacies of Hollywood dealing. Beside the slippery question, “which sponsors?” there was the difficulty in defining exactly what we wanted in faithfulness to plot, characters, and history. When Cy was through with that element, no character could so much as kiss another unless it was there in the book.
Then there were straightforward decisions. Who would write the films, who direct, who produce? Again we had luck which today looks like providence, in a veteran producer and director, Dan Curtis. Dan had created a groundbreaking daytime vampire series, Dark Shadows, and was noted for producing adapted horror classics like Dracula and The Turn of the Screw on time and on budget. He was Jewish, and passionate about the Holocaust. We asked for a British TV writer, Jack Pulman, who had done an excellent serialized War and Peace, and in London I conferred with him on the history for a month; but he had scarcely gotten to work when he sickened and died of heart failure. Sarah said that rather than start over with someone else, I had better take on the writing myself. With Dan Curtis’s guidance and help, I did my best. Years later, when The Winds of War ratings hit a record high, Diller acquired the TV rights to War and Remembrance, and much the same contract governed that far grander production, which in 1988 shut the window for good. Cable TV had by then fragmented the audience; yet Curtis’s masterly mounting of the 25-hour global panorama held most viewers and won an Emmy, the Oscar of TV.
So much for the irruption of television into my literary life, two years off and on during the sixteen years of the Main Task. No regrets! The cushion of those earnings has enabled me to publish books at five-to-ten-year intervals under no pressure, right down to this book, which I had better get on with.
Sequels seldom match the first book’s success, all the trade knows that. Here was a book longer than the first, heavier with history, darkened by stern Holocaust realities. A month before publication in 1983, I decamped to Israel with my wife. Newspapers in those days did not reach Israel on pub date, nor did Internet news exist. Time magazine did arrive, and BSW picked up a copy in the hotel lobby. “Grudging, grudging,” she said, handing it to me. Ned Bradford sent a telegram of congratulations. I had never asked him about the advance printing, and he had not mentioned sales. When we changed planes in London on the way home, I telephoned him at last, and he assured me that things were going “swimmingly.” In fact, the novel had a remarkably quick rise in the marketplace, maintained that momentum well into the next year, and with The Caine Mutiny, is generally regarded as my best work.
Graham Greene once observed that after sixty, a novelist writes only for money or for fun. At sixty-eight, however, I had not the slightest sense that I was through with the serious stuff. When Sarah and I visited Ned Bradford in Boston to savor the success, I told him I had two more books I wanted to write before I died: an autobiographical novel and a novel about Israel’s wars. “Oh, the Israel book by all means,” he said. “It’s expected of you.” As we talked about it, he calmly reversed himself. “No, wrong. Autobiographical first, then Israel. Change of pace.” As simply as that the decision was taken, and I next wrote the novel closest to my heart, a kaddish for my father, at once the funniest and the saddest of my works, Inside, Outside.
I. Full disclosure: there was also the matter of a floor that had fallen through.
II. A popular Dutch novelist and playwright, who switched to writing in English, living with his wife on a houseboat. His Broadway hits were The Four Poster and the musical version, I Do! I Do!
III. The offers had been urged on us with ever greater intensity by the late Swifty Lazar, my sometime film agent who shows up in two of my other novels as “Jazz Jacobson” and “Ferdie Lax.”