Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage . . .
THIS LINE FROM SAMUEL JOHNSON’S solemn poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” was haunting me long after The Glory came out to lackluster sales and reviews. Quite predictable for a sequel, to be sure; but I had put heart and soul into that book, and the account of land battles on Sinai sands, and the turnaround victory with the Canal crossing, were my special pride. All the same, “Superfluous . . . superfluous . . .”
Out of the blue Cy Rembar phoned. One Jimmy Buffett was inquiring about the stage rights to Don’t Stop the Carnival; I had not heard of the man, and, assuming I was dead, he had approached my lawyer. Not an auspicious start, but Jimmy Buffett came to see me in Palm Springs and in his easy-going fashion blew “superfluous” right out of the water. A chat before lunch under an old olive tree, and I was agreeing that I might do it, and might even write the libretto. My laconic wife, rather to my surprise, approved as agent. “It might be fun” was all she said. “Superfluous” had never surfaced between us. It did not have to.
The show was all Buffett. He composed the lively Caribbean score, raised the money, and produced it. It did not reach Broadway, after some years of on-and-off revision, while he continued his popular tours and I wrote my next book. On the whole my agent was right, it was fun.
The Will to Live On is a sequel, and for readers deeply interested in Judaism, perhaps more substantial, but a sequel it is, an assignment on my to-do literary list. In good heart, I could go back to writing a novel, though “the impossible novel” I had talked about within my family remained a phantom. A Hole in Texas is my foray into science and politics. American scientists during a rare détente had once actually, if briefly, helped the Chinese with their atomic efforts. When I read or heard about this I thought, Well, there’s a theme for a lightweight amusement. The “hole in Texas” is a real eighteen-mile tunnel dug for the Superconducting Supercollider, a giant project in high-energy physics, abandoned by Congress in favor of the Space Station. The American physicist, the Chinese lady scientist with whom he has had an early, serious love affair, the congresswoman who leans on him for advice on science, and his slightly jealous wife are all totally fabricated to make a story. The other big fabrication is the whole premise—namely, that the Chinese had beaten America to the Higgs boson. From Publishers Weekly and such advance notices came friendly hurrahs for this figment, and the sales were satisfactory.
Remained now the last to-do challenge, my science and religion meditation (the one that took three years, mentioned in my foreword to this book). My editor had been highly hopeful and patient for more than three years, and his reaction over the phone was a charming relief. He had read the pages pen in hand, had made not one comment or change, and would be proud to publish it as is, even naming the pub date! I hung up before I quite realized that he meant a year later. My works, even nonfiction, had hitherto been rushed to press when finished. This was modified rapture, take it or leave it, but then what to do for a whole empty year? How did I know I would live until then?
And so I bethought me of “the impossible novel,” an historical saga about the life of Moses. It remained impossible, of course; Scripture had beat me to it some time ago in the Torah. But in my vein of rowdy comedy, could I not try what the French, who have precise terms for belles lettres, call a jeu d’esprit or, more exactly, a sotie? Was I not, in my high school Latin, in extremis?
There came rolling into my life in a wheelchair, one leg up on a board, Louis Gluck, an Australian uranium billionaire. A very Orthodox old Jew, Gluck is determined to have produced a great accurate movie about Moses—money no object—and he is sure I am the only one who can write it. In the end, what’s more, he almost has his way. I perforce become part of the story, Sarah too, in my actual last novel, called The Lawgiver, about an imaginary film called The Lawgiver. I much enjoyed sending up the movie people in this maze of a tale; and my picture of the devil-dance in Hollywood over such a pot of money is far from wholly fictitious. In changing publishers, I found myself back at Simon & Schuster, publishers of Aurora Dawn. Dick Simon is gone, Max Schuster is gone, nobody is there from the old days; but corporations that do well can last indefinitely, unlike centenarians.
Until recently I kept a frank private diary, which ran to more than a hundred bound volumes. It will remain private. Call it my nature, or a pose, or what you will, the adjective most often attached to my name has been “reclusive.” Now it must stand. Rothschild’s clock has stopped.
The view from 100 is, to this centenarian, illuminating and surprising. With this book I am free: from contracts, from long-deferred to-do books, in short, from producing any more words. I have said my say, done my work. At thirty, I was retiring from the U.S.S. Southard, an old destroyer-minesweeper, to go ashore, claim my bride, and set out for fame and fortune. She was six years younger and irreligious; she took on my Judaism with me. She saw me through most of my hundred years. Our first meeting and our lifelong love are the spine of my longest novel, Youngblood Hawke, transmuted by fiction to a nightmare tale of what might have happened to me had we not met and loved. In general, I am rather a head-in-the-clouds fellow; Betty Sarah, beautiful and deep, with an unshakably level head, saw me through the multifarious temptations and traps for a writer in publishing, theater, and films. Her lifelong task done, she left me at ninety. I will join her in God’s good time, to rest on the other side of our firstborn son, Abe.
We have had three sons. I have written briefly in this book, never before or since, of our firstborn son, Abe, a radiant memory. Wherever in my works I have written of death, it has been, in one way or another, about Abe. Natalie’s threatened son Louis, in War and Remembrance, is close to Abe’s portrait, but that little boy I allowed to survive. Our youngest son passed the bar in New York and California, then elected to go to Israel and volunteer for the Navy. He lives now in Eilat, and we learn the Talmud each Sunday morning, face-to-face on Skype. The son closest to me here in Palm Springs is a writer with a variegated tale of his own to tell. He once saved several early volumes of my diary that I wanted him to destroy. I hope he will edit my diary, if both sons agree to publish any of it.
In it, for anyone interested, there is the whole Herman Wouk story. How, for instance, when I turned forty, Columbia, my alma mater, put on a public exhibit of my manuscripts, which I thought kind of premature. I wrote a wry article about it, “On Being Under Glass.” By fifty I had acquired the knowledge and the maturity to attempt the Main Task, a global panorama of World War II, in which I meant to embed the Holocaust. I did not know whether I would live to complete it or whether people would read it if I did. My sixties and seventies went to finding that out. Other things in the literary life may have ceased to matter that much, but I have always loved the work.