THE TOP TEN BEST-SELLERS ACCORDING TO THE SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES AS OF JANUARY 7, 1973
“Shit has its own integrity.” The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient that spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so were we); yet he also truly believed that children in jeopardy always hooked an audience, that Lana Turner was convincing when she rejected the advances of Edmund Purdom in The Prodigal “because I’m a priestess of Baal,” and he thought that Irving Thalberg was a genius of Leonardo proportion because he had made such tasteful “products” as The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Marie Antoinette.
In my day at the Writers’ Table (mid-Fifties) television had shaken the industry and the shit-dispensers could now…well, flush their products into every home without having to worry about booking a theater. In desperation, the front office started hiring alien integers whose lack of reverence for the industry distressed the Wise Hack who daily lectured us as we sat at our long table eating the specialty of the studio, top-billed as the Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup with Matzoh Balls (yes, invariably, the dumb starlet would ask, What do they do with the rest of the matzoh?). Christopher Isherwood and I sat on one side of the table; John O’Hara on the other. Aldous Huxley worked at home. Dorothy Parker drank at home.
The last time I saw Dorothy Parker, Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio I asked the driver, “How’s the fire doing?” “You mean,” said the Hollywoodian, “the holocaust.” The style, you see, must come as easily and naturally as that. I found Dorothy standing in front of her house, gazing at the smoky sky; in one hand she held a drink, in the other a comb which absently she was passing through her short straight hair. As I came toward her, she gave me a secret smile. “I am combing,” she whispered, “Los Angeles out of my hair.” But of course that was not possible. The ashes of Hollywood are still very much in our hair, as the ten best-sellers I have just read demonstrate.
The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous—golden. For any survivor of the Writers’ Table (alien or indigenous integer), it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut reverently repeating or echoing or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first time around with a good deal of “help” from our producers and practically none at all from the directors—if one may quickly set aside the myth of the director as auteur. Golden-age movies were the work of producer(s) and writer(s). The director was given a finished shooting script with each shot clearly marked, and woe to him if he changed MED CLOSE SHOT to MED SHOT without permission from the front office, which each evening, in serried ranks, watched the day’s rushes with script in hand (“We’ve got some good pages today,” they would say; never good film). The director, as the Wise Hack liked to observe, is the brother-in-law.
I think it is necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties as a preface to the ten best-selling novels under review since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly. Certainly none of the ten writers (save the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn and the classicist Mary Renault) is in any way rooted in literature. For the eight, storytelling began with The Birth of a Nation. Came to high noon with, well, High Noon and Mrs. Miniver and Rebecca and A Farewell to Arms. Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler–Hitchcock style with some sado-masochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books. But with the movies…ah, the movies!
Let us begin with number ten on your Hit Parade of Fiction, Two from Galilee, by Marjorie Holmes. Marjorie is also the author of I’ve Got to Talk to Somebody, God and Who Am I, God? Two from Galilee is subtitled significantly, “A Love Story of Mary and Joseph.” Since the film Love Story really took off, what about a love story starring the Mother and the Stepfather of Our Lord? A super idea. And Marjorie has written it. We open with the thirteen-year-old Mary menstruating (“a bloody hand had smitten her in the night”). “‘I am almost fourteen, Father,’ she said, ‘and I have become nubile this day.’” She is “mad for” Joseph, a carpenter’s son; he is mad for her.
Shrewdly Marjorie has taken two young Americans of the lower middle class and placed them in old Galilee. I recognize some of the descriptions as being from the last version of Ben-Hur to which I made a considerable contribution. “The couches covered with a silken stuff threaded with gold. The glow from a hanging alabaster lamp….” Luckily, I was on the set at the beginning of the shooting and so was able to persuade the art director to remove tomatoes from Mrs. Ben-Hur Senior’s kitchen. Otherwise, Marjorie might have had Hannah prepare a tomato and bacon sandwich for her daughter Mary.
Since Miss Holmes is not an experienced writer, it is difficult to know what, if anything, she had in mind when she decided to tell the Age-Old Story with nothing new to add. True, there are some domestic crises and folksy wrinkles like Joseph’s father being a drunk. Incidentally, Joseph and Mary are known by their English names while the other characters keep their Hebrew names. Mary’s mother Hannah is fun: a Jewish mother as observed by a gentile housewife in McLean, Virginia, who has seen some recent movies on the subject and heard all the jokes on television.
Hannah worries for her daughter. Will Joseph get into Mary before the wedding? “Hannah had no idea what it was like to be a man—this waiting. No woman could comprehend physical passion.” Helen Gurley Brown and Germaine Greer will no doubt set Miss Holmes straight on that sexist point. But perhaps the author is reflecting her audience (Who are they, by the way? Where are they? Baptists in Oklahoma City? Catholics in Duluth suburbs?) when she writes that Hannah “did not have the faintest concept of the demon-god that entered a youth’s loins at puberty and gave him no peace thereafter.” Yes, I checked the last noun for spelling. Joseph, incidentally, is such a stud that when Mary is with him “the thing that was between them chimed and quivered and lent discomfort to all.”
Suddenly between that chiming, quivering thing and Mary falls the shadow of the Holy Ghost. “Mary’s flesh sang,” as she experienced “the singing silence of God:” Miss Holmes rises to lyricism. “The Holy Spirit came upon her, invaded her body, and her bowels stirred and her loins melted.” Obviously entry was not made through the ear as those Renaissance painters who lacked Miss Holmes’s powerful realism believed. Mary soon starts wondering why “the blood pumps so painfully in my breast and my bowels run so thin?” She finds out in due course. Joseph has a hard time believing her story until the Holy Spirit tells him to get it together and accept his peculiar role as the antlered saint of a new cult.
At census time the young marrieds set out for Bethlehem, where the local Holiday Inn is full up or, as a passer-by says, “‘The Inn? You’ll be lucky to find a corner for the ass at the inn.’” As these quotations demonstrate, Miss Holmes’s style is beyond cliché. But when it comes to scene-making, she is sometimes betrayed by the familiarity of her subject matter. If the Story is to be told truly there must be a birth scene, and so she is obliged to write. “‘Some hot water if you can get it,’” adding, “‘Go no further even to fetch a midwife.’” To which a helpful stranger replies, “‘I’ll send one of them for one,’” reminding us of the Joan Crawford interview some decades ago when the living legend asked with quiet majesty, “Whom is fooling whom?” Finally, “Each night the great star stood over the stable’s entrance. Joseph had never seen such a star, flaming now purple, now white….”
I am told that religioso fiction has a wide audience around the country, and though these books rarely appear on best-seller lists in sinks of corruption like New York City, their overall sales in the country remind us that the enormous audience which flocked to see Ben-Hur, The Robe, The Ten Commandments is still waiting to have its simple faith renewed and stimulated with, as the sage at the Writers’ Table would say, teats and sand.
Number nine, The Eiger Sanction, by Trevanian (just one name) is light years distant from Two from Galilee. For one thing, it is sometimes well-written, though hardly, as the blurb tells us, “vintage Huxley.” Actually The Eiger Sanction is an Ian Fleming byblow and of its too numerous kind pretty good. Fleming once remarked that he wrote his books for warm-blooded heterosexuals. I suspect that Mr. Trevanian (Ms. Trevanian?) is writing for tepid-blooded bisexuals—that is to say, a majority of those who prefer reading kinky thrillers to watching that television set before whose busy screen 90 percent of all Americans spend a third of their waking hours.
Mr. Trevanian’s James Bond is called Dr. Jonathan Hemlock. A professor of art, he “moonlights” as a paid assassin for the Search and Sanction Division of CII, an aspect (presumably invented) of the CIA. Dr. Hemlock is engaged to kill those who kill CII agents. With the proceeds from these murders, he buys paintings to hang in the renovated church where he lives on Long Island. He drinks Pichon-Longueville-Baron, worships his “beloved Impressionists” (his taste in pictures is duller than the author suspects), and as for sex, well, he’s a tough cookie and finds it temporarily satisfying, “like urination” or “a termination of discomfort, not an achievement of pleasure.” This drives women mad.
Mr. Trevanian has a nice gift for bizarre characters. The chief of Search and Sanction is an albino who lives in darkness; he must also undergo periodic changes of blood because he is “one of nature’s rarest genealogical phenomena,” presumably related to a cadet branch of the Plantagenet family. It seems only yesterday that Sidney Greenstreet was growing orchids in a most sinister greenhouse and chuckling mirthlessly. Actually, that was thirty years ago and writers are now having a difficult time thinking up unlikely traits…not to mention names. Unhappily the mind that created Pussy Galore cloned before it went to ashes, and Mr. Trevanian brightly offers us Felicity Arce, Jean-Paul Bidet, Randie Nickers, and a host of other cute names.
But he is also capable of writing most engagingly. “His line of thought was severed by the paternal and the plebeian voice of the pilot assuring him that he knew where they were going.” Or, “He intended to give [the book] a handsome review in obedience to his theory that the surest way to maintain position at the top of the field was to advance and support men of clearly inferior capacities.” More of this and Mr. Trevanian will write himself out of the genre and into Quality Lit, Satire Division. But he must refrain from writing beautifully: “mountain stars still crisp and cold despite the threat of dawn to mute their brilliance,” not to mention “organic viscosity of the dark around him”—an inapplicable description of a night in the high Alps worthy of Nathalie Sarraute, as is “Time had been viscous for Ben, too.”
It is sad to report that Mr. Trevanian cannot resist presenting in thin disguise Mr. and Mrs. Burton and Mr. and Mrs. Onassis. There is nothing wrong with this if you have a point to make about them. But he has nothing to say; he simply mentions them in order to express disdain. No doubt they deserve his Olympian disgust, but he should leave to Suzy the record of their doings and to the really bad writers the exploitation of their famous legends. It is interesting, incidentally, to observe the curiously incestuous feedback of the so-called media. About a dozen people are known to nearly everyone capable of reading a simply written book. Therefore the golden dozen keep cropping up in popular books with the same insistence that their doings dominate the press, and the most successful exploiters of these legends are the very primitive writers like Harold Robbins who not only do not know the golden dozen at first or even second hand but, inexcusably, lack the imagination to think up anything exciting to add to what the reader has already learned from gossip columns and magazine interviews. At times while reading these best-sellers I had the odd sensation that I was actually reading a batch of old Leonard Lyons gossip columns or a copy of Photoplay or anything except a book. But then it is a characteristic of today’s writers (serious as well as commercial) to want their books to resemble “facts” rather than fiction. The Odessa File, August 1914, The Eiger Sanction are nonfiction titles.
Mr. Trevanian has recourse to that staple of recent fiction the Fag Villain. Since kikes and niggers can no longer be shown as bad people, only commies (pre-Nixon) and fags are certain to arouse the loathing of all decent fiction addicts. I will say for Mr. Trevanian that his Fag Villain is pretty funny—an exquisite killer named Miles Mellough with a poodle named Faggot. In fact, Mr. Trevanian in his comic mood is almost always beguiling, and this bright scenario ought to put new life into the Bond product. I think even the Wise Hack would have applauded the screenplay I automatically started preparing in my head. LONG SHOT the Eiger mountain. DAY. As titles begin, CUT TO…
On the Night of the Seventh Moon belongs to a genre I know very little about: the Gothic novel for ladies. But I do recall the films made from the novels of Daphne du Maurier, the queen of this sort of writing. In fact, I once wrote the screenplay for one of her most powerful works, The Scapegoat, in which the dogged (and in this case hounded) Alec Guinness played two people. Although Miss du Maurier had written an up-to-date variation on The Prisoner of Zenda, she had somehow got the notion that she had written the passion of St. Theresa. She used to send me helpful memos; and though she could not spell the simplest words or adhere to any agreed-upon grammar, her prose surged with vulgar invention and powerful feeling of the sort that cannot be faked.
I suspect Victoria Holt is also serious about her work. The publishers tell us that she is very popular; certainly she has written many books with magical titles. This one starts rather like Rebecca: “Now that I have reached the mature age of twenty-seven I look back on the fantastic adventure of my youth and can almost convince myself that it did not happen….” A sense of warm security begins to engulf the reader at this point. Even the heroine’s name inspires confidence: Helena Trant…so reminiscent of Helen Trent, whose vicissitudes on radio kept my generation enthralled, not to mention the ever so slight similarity to the name Trapp and all that that truly box-office name suggests; we are almost in the same neck of the woods, too, the Black Forest, 1860. And here is Helen, I mean Helena, asking herself a series of fascinating questions. “Did I suffer some mental aberration? Was it really true—as they tried to convince me—that I, a romantic and rather feckless girl, had been betrayed as so many had before?…”
Helena’s mother was German (noble); her father English (donnish). Mother dies; girl goes to school in Germany. On a misty day she gets lost in the Black Forest. She is nubile, as Marjorie Holmes would say. Suddenly, riding toward her, “like a hero of the forest on his big white horse,” was a godlike young man. He was “tall, broad, and immediately I was aware of what I could only describe then as authority.” (How right she was! Though Maximilian is incognito he is really the heir to the local Grand Duchy and—but we are ahead of our story.)
He offers to take her to his hunting lodge. She sits in front of him on his horse (“He held me tightly against him which aroused in me a strange emotion which I had never felt before and which should, of course, have been a warning”). A nice old woman retainer gets her into dry things (“my hair fell about my shoulders; it was thick, dark and straight”). She wants to go back to school but “the mist is too thick.” Supper. “‘Allow me to serve you some of this meat,’” says the randy prince. “He did so and I took a piece of rye bread which was hot and crusty and delicious. There was a mixture of spicy pickle and a kind of sauerkraut such as I had never tasted before.” Miss Holt knows her readers like a good din from time to time along with romance, and terror. As it turns out, Max doesn’t lay Helena despite the demon-god in his loins. A virgin, Helena departs not knowing whom it was she met.
Back to England. Father dead, Helena lives with two aunts. A couple arrive from Germany; they say that they are cousins of her late mother. She goes back to Germany with them. Festival in a small town known as The Night of the Seventh Moon. He appears; takes her away with him into the forest. He sends for the couple. They witness his marriage to Helena. She is in a state of ecstasy. For one thing, she is well-groomed. “My best dress; it was of a green silky material with a monk’s collar of velvet of a slightly darker shade of green.” Remember Joan Fontaine at Manderley? The new clothes? And, ah, the mystery? But Helena has done better than Joan’s Max de Winter. She is now Countess Lokenburg. She gloats: “I wondered what the aunts would say when they heard that I had become the wife of a count.”
But almost as good as social climbing, there is lust. Max’s kiss “made me feel exalted and expectant all at once. It was cruel and yet tender; it was passionate and caressing.” Can such happiness last? Certainly not. A mysterious illness; she is out of her head. When she recovers, she is told that on the night of the seventh moon she was taken into the forest and…“there criminally assaulted.” Those blissful days with Max were all a dream, brought on by a doctor’s drug. Meanwhile, she is knocked up. She has the baby; goes back to England. A clergyman falls in love with her and wants to marry her but Helena feels that her past will ruin his career. He is noble: “‘I’d rather have a wife than a bishopric.’”
The plot becomes very complex. Hired to be governess to children of what turns out to be a princely cousin of Max who is married to Wilhelmina because he thinks Helena dead because Wilhelmina’s colleagues the supposed cousins of Helena were in a plot to…Enough! All turns out well, though it is touch-and-go for a while when her child, the heir to the principality, is kidnapped by the wicked cousin (Raymond Massey in The Prisoner of Zenda) who then attacks her. “‘You are mad,’ I said.” He cackles: “‘You will not live to see me rule Rochenstein, but before you die I am going to show you what kind of lover you turned your back on.’” (Mailer’s American Dream?)
Finally, Helena takes her place at Maximilian’s side as consort. Each year they celebrate the night of the seventh moon, and in the year Cousin Victoria Regina dies, “What a beautiful night! With the full moon high in the sky paling the stars to insignificance…” Those stars keep cropping up in these books, but then as Bette Davis said to Paul Henreid in the last but one frame of Now Voyager, “Don’t ask for the moon when we have” (a beat) “the stars!” FADE OUT on night sky filled with stars.
I have never before read a book by Herman Wouk on the sensible ground that I could imagine what it must be like: solid, uninspired, and filled with rabbinical lore. After all, one knows of his deep and abiding religious sense, his hatred of sex outside marriage, his love for the American ruling class. I did see the film of The Caine Mutiny (from Queequeg to Queeg, or the decline of American narrative); and I found the morality disturbing. Mr. Wouk has an embarrassing passion for the American goyim, particularly the West Point–Annapolis crowd who stand, he would seem to believe, between him and the Cossacks. In his lowbrow way he reflects what one has come to think of as the Commentary syndrome or: all’s right with America if you’re not in a gas chamber, and making money.
I did see the film Youngblood Hawke four times, finding something new to delight in at each visit. When James Franciscus, playing a raw provincial genius like Thomas Wolfe, meets Suzanne Pleshette in a publisher’s office, he is told, “She will be your editor and stylist.” Well, she pushes these heavy glasses up on her forehead and, my God, she’s pretty as well as brilliant and witty, which she proves by saying, “Shall I call you Youngy or Bloody?” The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table always maintained that when boy meets girl they’ve got to meet cute.
The Winds of War: 885 pages of small type in which Herman Wouk describes the family of a naval captain just before America enters the Second World War (there is to be a sequel). As I picked up the heavy book, I knew terror, for I am that rarest of reviewers who actually reads every word, and rather slowly. What I saw on the first page was disquieting. The protagonist’s name, Victor Henry, put me off. It sounded as if he had changed it from something longer, more exotic, more, shall we say, Eastern. But then Henry was the family name of the hero of A Farewell to Arms so perhaps Mr. Wouk is just having a little fun with us. Mrs. Henry is called Rhoda; the sort of name someone in New York would think one of them would be called out there west of the Hudson. “At forty-five, Rhoda Henry remained a singularly attractive woman, but she was rather a crab.” This means that she is destined for extramarital high jinks. “In casual talk [Rhoda] used the swooping high notes of smart Washington women.” I grew up in Washington at exactly the same period Mr. Wouk is writing about and I must demur: smart Washington ladies sounded no different from smart New York ladies (no swooping in either city).
Captain Henry is stationed at the War Department. He is “a squat Navy fullback from California, of no means or family.” Mr. Wouk quotes from the letter he wrote his congressman asking for an appointment to the Naval Academy. “My life aim is to serve as an officer in the U.S. Navy.” We are told he speaks Russian learned from “Czarist settlers in Fort Ross, California.” Anyway he got appointed; has risen; is gung ho and wants to command a battleship. The marriage? “Rhoda returned an arch glance redolent of married sex.” Elsewhere—the Nazis are on the march.
There are three children. Son Warren was involved in “an escapade involving an older woman and a midnight car crash. The parents had never raised the topic of women, partly from bashfulness—they were both prudish churchgoers, ill at ease with such a topic….” Son Byron is in Siena carrying on with one Nathalie, niece of a famed American Jewish writer, author of A Jew’s Jesus. Byron has recently turned against his Renaissance studies because “‘I don’t believe David looked like Apollo, or Moses like Jupiter.’” Further, “‘The poor idealistic Jewish preacher from the back hills. That’s the Lord I grew up with. My father’s a religious man; we had to read a chapter of the Bible every morning at home.’”
At this point my worst fears about Mr. Wouk seemed justified. The Russian-speaking Victor Henry who reads a chapter of the Bible every morning to his family and is prudish about sexual matters is, Mr. Wouk wants us to believe, a typical gallant prewar goyisher American naval officer. If I may speak from a certain small knowledge (I was born at West Point, son of an instructor and graduate), I find Mr. Wouk’s naval officer incredible—or “incredulous,” as they say in best-seller land. There may have been a few religious nuts here and there in the fleet but certainly a naval officer who is about to be posted as an attaché to the American embassy in Berlin would not be one of them. In those days Annapolis was notoriously snobbish and no matter how simple and fundamentalist the background of its graduates, they tended toward worldliness; in fact, a surprising number married rich women. West Pointers were more square but also rowdier. Mr. Wouk’s failure to come to terms with the American gentile is not unusual. Few American Jewish writers have been able to put themselves into gentile skins—much less foreskins. With ecumenical relish, Mr. Wouk tells us that son Byron (who marries a Jewish girl) is circumcised.
With an obviously bogus protagonist, Mr. Wouk must now depend upon the cunning of his narrative gift to propel these characters through great events: Berlin under Hitler, Poland during the Nazi invasion, London in the Blitz, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; and not only must he describe the sweep of military and political action but also give us close-ups of Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini. It is Upton Sinclair all over again and, to my astonishment, it is splendid stuff. The detail is painstaking and generally authentic. The naïve portraits of the great men convince rather more than subtler work might have done.
Henry’s reports from Berlin attract Roosevelt’s attention. Mr. Wouk’s portrait of FDR is by no means as sycophantish as one might expect. No doubt the recent revelations of the late president’s sexual irregularities have forced the puritan Mr. Wouk to revise his estimate of a man I am sure he regarded at the time as a god, not to mention shield against the Cossacks. With hindsight he now writes, “Behind the jolly aristocratic surface, there loomed a grim ill-defined personality of distant visions and hard purpose, a tough son of a bitch to whom nobody meant very much, except perhaps his family; and maybe not they either.” This is not at all bad, except as prose. Unfortunately, Mr. Wouk has no ear for “jolly aristocratic” speech patterns. I doubt if FDR would have called Pug “old top” (though when my father was in the administration the president used to address him, for some obscure reason, as “Brother Vidal”).
Also, Mr. Wouk makes strange assumptions. For instance, FDR “wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent made this heartiness somewhat ridiculous.” The pince-nez was worn by a good many people in those days, but if FDR was consciously imitating anyone it would have been his mentor, the pince-nezed Woodrow Wilson. T. Roosevelt’s voice was not booming but thin and shrill. FDR’s accent was neither prissy nor Harvard but Dutchess County and can still be heard among the American nobles now, thank God, out of higher politics.
With extraordinary ease, Mr. Wouk moves from husband to wife to sons to daughter, and the narrative never falters. His reconstruction of history is painless and, I should think, most useful to simple readers curious about the Second War. Yet there is a good deal of pop-writing silliness. We get the Mirror Scene (used by all pop-writers to tell us what the characters look like): “the mirror told her a different story, but even it seemed friendly to her that night: it showed…” We get the Fag Villain. In this case an American consul at Florence who will not give the good Jew Jastrow a passport because “people don’t see departmental circulars about consuls who’ve been recalled and whose careers have gone poof!” Sumner Welles is briefly glimpsed as a villian (and those who recall the gossip of the period will know why).
Then, of course, there is the problem of Mr. Wouk and sex. Daughter Madeline rooms with two girls and “both were having affairs—one with a joke writer, the other with an actor working as a bellhop. Madeline had found herself being asked to skulk around, stay out late, or remain in her room while one or another pair copulated…. She was disgusted. Both girls had good jobs, both dressed with taste, both were college graduates. Yet they behaved like sluts….” But then to Madeline, “sex was a delightful matter of playing with fire, but enjoying the blaze from a safe distance, until she could leap into the hallowed white conflagration of a bridal night. She was a middle class good girl, and not in the least ashamed of it.”
Incidentally, Mr. Wouk perpetuates the myth that the SS were all fags. This is now an article of faith with many uneducated Americans on the ground that to be a fag is the worst thing that could befall anyone next to falling into the hands of a fag sadist, particularly the SS guards who were as “alike as chorus boys…with blond waved hair, white teeth, bronzed skin, and blue eyes.” Actually the SS guards in 1939 were not particularly pretty; they were also not fags. Hitler had eliminated that element.
Mr. Wouk’s prose is generally correct if uninspired. The use of the ugly verb “shrill” crops up in at least half the best-sellers under review and is plainly here to stay. Also, I suppose we must stop making any distinction between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” The book ends with Pearl Harbor in flames and…yes, you’ve guessed it. The stars! “Overhead a clear starry black sky arched” (at least the sky was overhead and not underfoot), “with Orion setting in the west, and Venus sparkling in the east…. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief.”
The films Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Life come to mind; not to mention all those March of Times in the Trans-Lux theaters of the old republic as it girded itself for war. But for all Mr. Wouk’s idiocies and idiosyncrasies, his competence is most impressive and his professionalism awe-inspiring in a world of lazy writers and TV-stunned readers. I did not in the least regret reading every word of his book, though I suspect he is a writer best read swiftly by the page in order to get the sweep of his narrative while overlooking the infelicities of style and the shallowness of mind. I realize my sort of slow reading does a disservice to this kind of a book. But then I hope the author will be pleased to know that at least one person has actually read his very long bestseller. Few people will. There is evidence that a recent best-seller by a well-known writer was never read by its publisher or by the book club that took it or by the film company that optioned it. Certainly writers of book-chat for newspapers never read long books and seldom do more than glance at short ones.
Number six on the best-seller list, The Camerons, by Robert Crichton, is a mystifying work. One understands the sincerity of Herman Wouk, number seven, as he tries to impose his stern morality on an alien culture, or even that of the dread Marjorie Holmes, number ten, exploiting Bible Belt religiosity with what I trust is some degree of seriousness (all those chats with God must have made her a fan). But Mr. Crichton has elected to address himself to characters that seem to be infinitely remote from him, not to mention his readers. A UK mining town in what I take to be the 1870s (there is a reference to Keir Hardie, the trade unionist). With considerable fluency Mr. Crichton tells the story of a miner’s sixteen-year-old daughter who goes to the Highlands to find herself a golden youth to give her children. She captures a Highland fisherman, locks him up in the mines for twenty years, and has a number of children by him who more or less fulfill her “genealogical” (as Trevanian would say) dream.
Of all these books this one is closest to the movies. The characters all speak with the singing cadences of Burbank’s How Green Was My Valley. Another inspiration is None But the Lonely Heart, in which Ethel Barrymore said to Cary Grant, “Love’s not for the poor, son.” Mr. Cameron plays a number of variations on that theme, among them “Love, in everyday life, is a luxury.”
One reads page after page, recalling movies. As always the Mirror Scene. The Food Scene (a good recipe for finnan haddie). There is the Fever Breaks Scene (during this episode I knew that there would have to be a tracheotomy and sure enough the doctor said that it was sometimes necessary but that in this case…). The Confrontation between Mr. Big and the Hero. Cameron has been injured while at work; the mine owner will give him no compensation. Cameron sues; the miners strike. He wins but not before the Confrontation with the Mob Scene when the miners turn on him for being the cause of their hunger. There is even the Illiterate Learning about Literature Scene, inspired by The Corn Is Green, in which Bette Davis taught the young Welsh miner John Dall to read Quality Lit so that he could grow up to be Emlyn Williams. Well, Cameron goes to the library and asks for Macbeth and reads it to the amazement of the bitter drunken librarian (Thomas Mitchell).
There is the Nubile Scene (“For a small girl she had large breasts and the shirt was tight and made her breasts stand out, and she kept the jacket near at hand because she didn’t want to embarrass her father if he came into the room. She had only recently become that way and both she and her father weren’t quite sure how to act about it”). Young Love Scene (the son’s girl friend is named Allison—from Peyton Place). At the end, the Camerons sail for the New World. The first night out Cameron “wouldn’t go down to her then and so he stayed at the rail and watched the phosphorescent waves wash up against the sides of the ship and explode in stars.”
There is something drastically wrong with this smoothly executed novel and I cannot figure out what it is other than to suspect that the author lacks the integrity the Wise Hack insists upon. Mr. Crichton has decided to tell a story that does not seem to interest him very much. At those moments when the book almost comes alive (the conflict between labor and management), the author backs away from his true subject because socialism cannot be mentioned in best-seller land except as something innately wicked. Yet technically Mr. Crichton is a good writer and he ought to do a lot better than this since plainly he lacks the “integrity” to do worse.
Can your average beautiful teen-age Persian eunuch find happiness with your average Greek world conqueror who is also a dish and aged only twenty-six? The answer Mary Renault triumphantly gives us in The Persian Boy is ne! Twenty-five years ago The City and the Pillar was considered shocking because it showed what two nubile boys did together on a hot summer afternoon in McLean, Virginia. Worse, one of them went right on doing that sort of thing for the rest of his life. The scandal! The shame! In 1973 the only true love story on the best-seller list is about two homosexualists, and their monstrous aberration (so upsetting to moralists like Mr. Wouk) is apparently taken for granted by those ladies who buy hardcover novels.
At this point I find myself wishing that one had some way of knowing just who buys and who reads what sort of books. I am particularly puzzled (and pleased) by the success of Mary Renault. Americans have always disliked history (of some fifty subjects offered in high school the students recently listed history fiftieth and least popular) and know nothing at all of the classical world. Yet in a dozen popular books Mary Renault has made the classical era alive, forcing even the dullest of book-chat writers to recognize that bisexuality was once our culture’s norm and that Christianity’s perversion of this human fact is the aberration and not the other way around. I cannot think how Miss Renault has managed to do what she has done, but the culture is the better for her work.
I am predisposed to like the novel dealing with history and find it hard to understand why this valuable genre should be so much disdained. After all, every realistic novel is historical. But somehow, describing what happened last summer at Rutgers is for our solemn writers a serious subject, while to re-create Alexander the Great is simply frivolous. Incidentally, I am here concerned only with the traditional novel as practiced by Updike, Tolstoi, George Eliot, Nabokov, the Caldwells (Taylor and Erskine) as well as by the ten writers under review. I leave for another and graver occasion the matter of experimental high literature and its signs.
In The Persian Boy Miss Renault presents us with Alexander at the height of his glory as seen through the eyes of the boy eunuch Bagoas. Miss Renault is good at projecting herself and us into strange cultures. With ease she becomes her narrator Bagoas; the book is told in the first person (a device not invented by Robert Graves as innocent commentators like to tell us but a classroom exercise going back more than two millennia: write as if you were Alexander the Great addressing your troops before Tyre). Bagoas’s father is murdered by political enemies; the boy is enslaved; castrated; rented out as a whore by his first master. Because of his beauty he ends up in the bed of the Great King of Persia, Darius. Alexander conquers Persia; sets fire to Persepolis. The Great King is killed by his own people and Bagoas is presented by one of the murderers to Alexander, who, according to historical account, never took advantage sexually of those he captured. Bagoas falls in love with the conqueror and, finally, seduces him. The love affair continues happily to the end, although there is constant jealousy on Bagoas’s side because of Alexander’s permanent attachment to his boyhood friend Hephaestion, not to mention the wives he picks up en route.
The effect of the book is phantasmagoric. Marvelous cities, strange landscapes, colliding cultures, and at the center the golden conqueror of the earth as he drives on and on past the endurance of his men, past his own strength. Today when a revulsion against war is normal, the usual commercialite would be inclined to depict Alexander as a Fag Villain-Killer, but in a note Miss Renault makes the point: “It needs to be borne in mind today that not till more than a century later did a handful of philosophers even start to question the morality of war.” Alexander was doing what he thought a man in his place ought to do. The world was there to be conquered.
The device of observing the conqueror entirely through the eyes of an Oriental is excellent and rather novel. We are able to see the Macedonian troops as they appeared to the Persians: crude gangsters smashing to bits an old and subtle culture they cannot understand, like today’s Americans in Asia. But, finally, hubris is the theme; and the fire returns to heaven. I am not at all certain that what we have here is the “right” Alexander, but right or not, Miss Renault has drawn the portrait of someone who seems real yet unlike anyone else, and that divinity the commercialites are forever trying for in their leaden works really does gleam from time to time in the pages of this nice invention.
As a fiction, August 1914 is not as well managed as Mr. Wouk’s Winds of War. I daresay as an expression of one man’s indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author. Fortunately the Nobel Prize is designed for just such a purpose. Certainly it is seldom bestowed for literary merit; if it were, Nabokov and not the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn would have received it when the Swedes decided it was Holy Russia’s turn to be honored.
Solzhenitsyn is rooted most ambitiously in literature as well as in films. Tolstoi appears on Novelists and Critics of the 1940s and Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud. In a sense the novel is to be taken as a dialogue between the creator of War and Peace and Solzhenitsyn; with the engineer opposing Tolstoi’s view of history as a series of great tides in which the actions of individuals matter not at all. I’m on Solzhenitsyn’s side in this debate but cannot get much worked up over his long and wearisome account of Russian military bungling at the beginning of the First World War. The characters are impossible to keep straight, though perhaps future volumes will clarify things. Like Winds of War, this is the first of a series.
The book begins with dawn on the Caucasus, towering “so vast above petty human creation, so elemental…” The word “vast” is repeated in the next paragraph to get us in the mood for a superspectacle. Then we learn that one of the characters has actually met Tolstoi, and their meeting is recalled on Tarzan Revisited. “‘What is the aim of man’s life on earth?’” asks the young man. Tolstoi’s reply is prompt: “‘To serve good and thereby to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.’” How? “‘Only through love! Nothing else. No one will discover anything better.’” This is best-seller writing with a vengeance.
In due course we arrive at the Mirror Scene: “She was not even comforted by the sight of her naturally rosy skin, her round shoulders, the hair which fell down to her hips and took four buckets of rain water to wash.” The Nubile Scene: “She had always avoided undressing even in front of other women, because she was ashamed of her breasts, which were large, big and generous even for a woman of her build.” Wisdom Phrases: “The dangers of beauty are well known: narcissism, irresponsibility, selfishness.” Or “Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” Like Hitler and Stalin? Also, Christian Wisdom Phrases: “There is a justice which existed before us, without us and for its own sake. And our task is to divine what it is.” Not since Charles Morgan’s last novel has there been so much profundity in a best-seller.
As for the movies, the best Russian product is recalled, particularly Battleship Potemkin. Also, boldly acknowledging the cinema’s primacy, Solzhenitsyn has rendered his battle scenes in screenplay form with “=” meaning CUT TO. These passages are particularly inept. “Mad tearing sound of rifle fire, machine-gun fire, artillery fire!/ Reddened by fire, THE WHEEL still rolls./ = The firelight glitters with savage joy/” and so on. The Wise Hack would have been deeply disturbed by the presumption of this member of the audience who ought to be eating popcorn in the second balcony and not parodying the century’s one true art form that also makes money. From time to time Solzhenitsyn employs the Dos Passos device of random newspaper cuttings to give us a sense of what is going on in August 1914. This works a bit better than the mock screenplay.
At the book’s core there is nothing beyond the author’s crypto-Christianity, which is obviously not going to please his masters; they will also dislike his astonishing discovery that “the best social order is not susceptible to being arbitrarily constructed, or even to being scientifically constructed.” To give the noble engineer his due he is good at describing how things work, and it is plain that nature destined him to write manuals of artillery or instructions on how to take apart a threshing machine. Many people who do not ordinarily read books have bought this book and mention rather proudly that they are reading it, but so far I have yet to meet anyone who has finished it. I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is goré vidal (a Russian phrase meaning “he has seen grief”).
A peculiarity of American sexual mores is that those men who like to think of themselves as exclusively and triumphantly heterosexual are convinced that the most masculine of all activities is not tending to the sexual needs of women but watching other men play games. I have never understood this aspect of my countrymen but I suppose there is a need for it (bonding?), just as the Romans had a need to see people being murdered. Perhaps there is a connection between the American male’s need to watch athletes and his fatness: according to a W.H.O. report the American male is the world’s fattest and softest; this might explain why he also loves guns—you can always get your revolver up.
I fear that I am not the audience Mr. Dan Jenkins had in mind when he wrote his amiable book Semi-Tough, but I found it pleasant enough, and particularly interesting for what it does not go into. The narrator is a pro football player who has been persuaded “that it might be good for a pro football stud to have a book which might have a healthy influence on kids.” Question: Do young people watch football games nowadays? It seems to me that “jock-sniffers” (as Mr. Jenkins calls them) are of Nixonian age and type—though few have the thirty-seventh president’s nose for such pleasures. The unfat and the unsoft young must have other diversions. One wonders, too, if they believe that “a man makes himself a man by whatever he does with himself, and in pro football that means busting his ass for his team.”
Semi-Tough tells of the preparation for the big game. Apparently, training involves an astonishing amount of drink, pot, and what the narrator refers to as “wool,” meaning cunt. There is one black player who may or may not like boys and the narrator clams up on what is a very delicate subject in jock circles. I am not sure Mr. Jenkins is aware of all the reverberations set off by the jokes of one of his white players. Asked why he is an athlete, the stud says, “‘Mainly, we just like to take showers with niggers.’” It is a pity Mary Renault did not write this book. And a pity, come to think of it, that Mr. Jenkins did not write August 1914, a subject suitable for his kind of farce. No movie in Semi-Tough. As the Wise Hack knows all too well, sports movies bomb at the box office. Perhaps the Warhol factory will succeed where the majors have failed. SHOWER ROOM—LONG SHOT. CUT TO: CLOSE SHOT—SOAP.
At first glance The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth, looks to be just another bold hard-hitting attack on the Nazis in the form of a thriller masked as a pseudo-documentary. But the proportions of this particular bit of nonsense are very peculiarly balanced. First, the book is dedicated “to all press reporters.” The dust jacket tells us that the author worked for Reuters in the early 1960s; it does not give us his nationality but from the odd prose that he writes I suspect his first language is not English. Also the book’s copyright is in the name of a company: a tax dodge not possible for American citizens. Next there is an Author’s Note. Mr. Forsyth tells us that although he gives “heartfelt thanks” to all those who helped him in his task he cannot name any of them for three reasons. Apparently some were former members of the SS and “were not aware at the time either whom they were talking to, or that what they said would end up in a book.” Others asked not to be mentioned; still others are omitted “for their sakes rather than for mine.” This takes care of the sources for what he would like us to believe is a true account of the way Odessa (an organization of former SS officers) continues to help its members in South America and the Federal Republic.
After the Author’s Note there is a Foreword (by the author). We are told who Adolf Hitler was and how he and the Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 and how they organized the SS in order to kill fourteen million “so-called enemies of the Reich,” of which six million were Jews. When Germany began to lose the war, “vast sums of gold were smuggled out and deposited in numbered bank accounts, false identity papers were prepared, escape channels opened up. When the Allies finally conquered Germany, the bulk of the mass-murderers had gone.”
Well, one knows about Eichmann, and of course Martin Bormann is a minor industry among bad journalists; so presumably there are other “important” SS officers growing old in Paraguay. But do they, as Mr. Forsyth assures us, have an organization called Odessa whose aim is “fivefold”? Firstfold is “to rehabilitate former SS men into the professions of the Federal Republic” second, “to infiltrate at least the lower echelons of political party activity” third, to provide “legal defense” for any SS killer hauled before a court and in every way possible to stultify the course of justice in West Germany; fourth, to promote the fortunes of former SS members (this seems to be a repeat of the first of the fivefolds); and, five, “to propagandize the German people to the viewpoint that the SS killers were in fact none other than ordinary patriotic soldiers.”
This is food for thought. Yet why has one never heard of Odessa? Mr. Forsyth anticipates that question: “changing its name several times” (highly important for a completely secret society), “the Odessa has sought to deny its own existence as an organization, with the result that many Germans are inclined to say that Odessa does not exist. The short answer is: it exists….” We are then assured that the tale he is about to tell represents one of their failures. Obviously fun and games; presumably, there is no such thing as the Odessa but in the interest of making a thriller look like a document (today’s fashion in novels) the author is mingling true with “false facts,” as Thomas Jefferson would say.
Now for the story. But, no, after the Dedication and the Author’s Note and the Foreword there comes a Publisher’s Note. Apparently many of the characters in the book are “real people” but “the publishers do not wish to elucidate further because it is in this ability to perplex the reader as to how much is true and how much false that much of the grip of the story lies.” The publishers, Viking, write suspiciously like Mr. Forsyth. “Nevertheless, the publishers feel the reader may be interested or assisted to know that the story of former SS Captain Eduard Roschmann, the commandant of the concentration camp at Riga from 1941 to 1944, from his birth in Graz, Austria, in 1908, to his present exile in South America, is completely factual and drawn from SS and West German records.” So let us bear this Publisher’s Note in mind as we contemplate the story Mr. Forsyth tells.
After the fall of Hitler, Roschmann was harbored at “the enormous Franciscan Monastery in Rome in Via Sicilia.” There is no such establishment according to my spies in the order. “Bishop Alois Hudal, the German Bishop in Rome” (Mr. Forsyth seems to think that this is some sort of post) “spirited thousands [of SS] to safety.” “The SS men traveled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Vatican.” After a period in Egypt, Roschmann returns to Germany in 1955 under a pseudonym. Thanks to Odessa, he becomes the head of an important firm. He conducts secret research “aimed at devising a teleguidance system for those rockets [he] is now working on in West Germany. His code name is Vulkan.”
Why is Roschmann at work on the rockets? Because Odessa and its evil scientists “have proposed to President Nasser” (whose predecessor Mr. Forsyth thinks was named Naguil), and he “accepted with alacrity, that these warheads on the Kahiras and Zafiras be of a different type. Some will contain concentrated cultures of bubonic plague, and the others will explode high above the ground, showering the entire territory of Israel with irradiated cobalt-sixty. Within hours they will all be dying of the pest or of gamma-ray sickness.”
This is splendid Fu Manchu nonsense (infecting the Israelis with bubonic plague would of course start a world epidemic killing the Egyptians, too, while spreading radioactive cobalt in the air would probably kill off a large percentage of the world’s population, as any story conference at Universal would quickly conclude). Next Mr. Forsyth presents us with the classic thriller cliché: only one man holds this operation together. Roschmann. Destroy him and Israel is saved.
The plot of course is foiled by a West German newspaperman and its details need not concern us: it is the sort of storytelling that propels the hero from one person to the next person, asking questions. As a stylist, Mr. Forsyth is addicted to the freight-car sentence: “This time his destination was Bonn, the small and boring town on the river’s edge that Konrad Adenauer had chosen as the capital of the Federal Republic, because he came from it.” (Adenauer came from Cologne but Mr. Forsyth is not one to be deterred by small details: after all, he is under the impression that it was Martin Bormann “on whom the mantle of the Führer had fallen after 1945.”) What is important is that Mr. Forsyth and Viking Press want us to believe that the Vatican knowingly saved thousands of SS men after 1945, that six of the ten high-ranking Hamburg police officers in 1964 were former SS men, that President Nasser authorized a clandestine SS organization to provide him with the means to attack Israel with bubonic plague, and that when this plot failed, the Argentine government presumably offered asylum to Captain Roschmann. Caveat emptor.
The boldness of author and publisher commands…well, awe and alarm. Is it possible now to write a novel in which Franklin Roosevelt secretly finances the German American Bund because he had been made mad by infantile paralysis? Can one write a novel in which Brezhnev is arranging with the American army defectors in Canada to poison Lake Michigan (assuming this is not a redundancy)? Viking would probably say, yes, why not? And for good measure, to ensure success, exploit the prejudices, if possible, of American Jewish readers, never letting them forget that the guilt of the Germans (“dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power”) for having produced Hitler is now as eternal in the works of bad writers and greedy publishers as is the guilt of the Jews for the death of Jesus in the minds of altogether too many simple Christians. Exploitation of either of these myths strikes me as an absolute evil and not permissible even in the cheapest of fiction brought out by the most opportunist of publishers.
The number one best-seller is called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is a greeting card bound like a book with a number of photographs of seagulls in flight. The brief text celebrates the desire for excellence of a seagull who does not want simply to fly in order to eat but to fly beautifully for its own sake. He is much disliked for this by his peers; in fact, he is ostracized. Later he is translated to higher and higher spheres where he can spend eternity practicing new flight techniques. It is touching that this little story should be so very popular because it is actually celebrating art for art’s sake as well as the virtues of nonconformity; and so, paradoxically, it gives pleasure to the artless and to the conforming, to the drones who dream of honey-making in their unchanging hive.
Unlike the other best-sellers this work is not so much a reflection of the age of movies as it is a tribute to Charles Darwin and his high priestess, the incomparable creatrix of The Fountainhead (starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal), Ayn Rand.
There is not much point in generalizing further about these best-sellers. The authors prefer fact or its appearance to actual invention. This suggests that contemporary historians are not doing their job if to Wouk and Solzhenitsyn falls the task of telling today’s reader about two world wars and to Forsyth and Trevanian current tales of the cold war. As Christianity and Judaism sink into decadence, religioso fictions still exert a certain appeal. It will surprise certain politicians to learn that sex is of no great interest to best-selling authors. Only Semi-Tough tries to be sexy, and fails. Too much deodorant.
Reading these ten books one after the other was like being trapped in the “Late Late Show,” staggering from one half-remembered movie scene to another, all the while beginning to suspect with a certain horror that the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table will be honored and remembered for his many credits on numerous profitable pix long after Isherwood (adapted “The Gambler,” with Gregory Peck), Faulkner (adapted The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart), Huxley (adapted Pride and Prejudice, with Greer Garson), Vidal (adapted Suddenly, Last Summer, with Elizabeth Taylor) take their humble places below the salt, as it were, for none of us regarded with sufficient seriousness the greatest art form of all time. By preferring perversely to write books that reflected not the movies we had seen but life itself, not as observed by that sterile machine the camera but as it is netted by a beautiful if diminishing and polluted language, we were, all in all, kind of dumb. Like Sam, one should’ve played it again.
The New York Review of Books
May 17 and May 31, 1973