Sure, it’s got guts … sure, it’s got gore … but what it’s got most of is GLORY!”
—BATTLE CRY, DUST JACKET (1953)
DESPITE ITS APPEARANCE after The Naked and the Dead, Guard of Honor, From Here to Eternity, and The Caine Mutiny, Battle Cry stood alone.1 Among these original novels of the Second World War, Uris’s was the only one to express a positive, supportive view of the military despite the carnage, confusions, and loss of life inherent in war. Patriotism not nihilism, heroism not cowardice, defined its themes, which were welcomed by the marines and the public. The writing and publication of the book were more of a challenge, however. And even though he wrote some six or seven years after the fighting in the Pacific, Uris was still able to re-create the intensity and danger faced by marines in battle, as well as their lives at home.
Uris and Betty moved to 62 Piedmont Road in Larkspur, California, in 1947, a step up made possible by his first full-time job, at the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, and made necessary by the birth of their daughter, Karen, earlier that year. As a district circulation manager (formal title: division manager) responsible for some twenty-six paperboys, he earned seventy-five dollars a week, plus a car and expenses. But if he were approved as a union member (which he later was), his salary would go up. Competing with the San Francisco News, the afternoon Call-Bulletin had a large circulation, although the rivalry was cutthroat. Working in the city, Uris had to, first, increase circulation in a black neighborhood, then in a “hoodlum” district, and finally in the Sunset District, “where all the middle classed peasants dwell.”2 To his delivery boys, he was both “a father confessor and boss,” but he always found time to play ball and entertain them.3 In the same letter, he suggests that he might attend school next fall, “perhaps law.” A touch of asthma, however, possibly related to his malaria, slowed him down, but the flare-up, plus the need for more room, accelerated his search for brighter and larger quarters across the bay in Marin County.
Larkspur, a small town fifteen miles north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge, just west of Corte Madera and south of San Rafael, was their choice. Magnolia Avenue, the single main street, contained a three-block commercial area, with a mission-style city hall and fire station at one end and the popular art deco Lark Theatre at the other. One mile south of town and up secluded Piedmont Road, redwoods surrounded the two-story Uris home with its modest front porch, lawn, and garden. Mount Tamalpais loomed behind, and Madrona Canyon, with even greater stands of redwoods, was nearby.4 The pastoral location and drier weather made Uris’s frequent trips to San Francisco to oversee deliveries, subscriptions, and routes bearable.
Uris was now earning ninety dollars a week, and Betty was completing a “6 month hitch at the Warden’s Office at San Quentin Prison” not far away.5 He soon started gardening and took great pride in his roses and home repairs: “Kid, this is it! I don’t know if you can picture an old slum bred alley rat like me puttering in the garden, but that’s just what I do on my days off.” Betty remained a delight: “She is all anyone could ever dream of as a wife, mother and companion and one of these grand days I hope to pay off the way I feel in minks, diamonds, maids and Buicks.” He had never been happier, he says, and was “writing immortal classics destined for the waste basket,” noting that he had completed approximately one-third of a book. He was also pleased to learn that he would be transferred from San Francisco to county circulation in Marin, so he wouldn’t have to commute.
But Uris was having problems with his mother: “My Doctor tells me I have hidden complexes concerning her.” He felt sorry for her and called her “pathetic,” although any regrets he had were “hidden someplace in back of my mind … but I do not regret my choice in making my break and finding a new life away from that former gruel.” Uris’s estrangement from his mother may have been related to her withholding of love, persistent creation of guilt, and inability to respond emotionally to her son. His marrying a non-Jewish woman and remaining on the West Coast may have also been factors. He told Essie that while he loved his mother a great deal, “every time I wrote to her she came back with attacks and sob stories I just couldn’t stomach. Maybe when she sees Karen [his daughter] we can patch up and try again.”6
Admitting that Betty’s parents were, “to put it bluntly, Jew haters before we married,” he reported that after they met him, they grew quite fond of him and vice versa.7 He added: “Betty is quite proud of the Jewish people and me.” As for himself: “I’ve worked out problems that I guess only time and experience would conquer—and I can understand my place now as a Jew and what it means. You can bet your bottom dollar if I weren’t married, I’d be over there shooting A-rabs.”
Uris wrote this in 1949, the year after Israel’s declaration of independence, and it illustrates how his Jewish identity was taking on a more activist character. Unlike his indifference or avoidance of his Jewishness in the marines, he was now prepared to acknowledge, defend, and celebrate it.
While working for the paper and watching his family grow—Karen was born in 1946, Mark in 1950, and Michael in 1953—Uris started to work consistently on his first book. He had begun writing what would become Battle Cry shortly after his marriage; during the war, he had written down some slang expressions but lost the notes.8 In the summer of 1946, before and after his move to Larkspur, he began to shape the work originally called The Beachhead, which originated in prose accounts of selected war experiences.
A letter dated 23 September 1946 summarizes his early efforts with the manuscript, and an undated letter (ca. 1953) provides additional information on the book’s progress. He also stresses Betty’s important role. It is a lengthy but helpful summary. After noting that the work in progress is titled The Beachhead, and emphasizing the support of literary agent, he reports:
I’ve completed five hundred pages and have three hundred more to go of rough copy and then translate the whole works. I get home from work at eight thirty at night and generally go up to the garret about nine thirty and with my beret, wine and bread work past mid-night, depending on what section I’m tackling. At current rate I do about four thousand words a night; on my two days off, I knock over eight or nine thousand. The completed book will run over two hundred thousand words—or roughly six hundred pages in print. Some fun huh! Betty is wonderful—besides keeping the house, the kids and the garden … she cooperates a hundred percent in keeping everything clear for me to work. And she works right along side of me on the editing etc. She reads as many as six books a week and is invaluable in aiding of working out various problems.9
Uris committed himself to such labor because he saw success ahead: “Frankly, I sometimes wonder if I’m off my rocker—but I keep seeing $$$$$$$$ and fans and all the junk that goes with it—(Why lie about it—that is what I want among other things).”
Betty constantly encouraged him. She was his first reader and was especially helpful with grammar, something he never mastered. Indeed, his later research assistants spent a great deal of time correcting his typescripts. When writing, Uris’s intensity and imagination allowed little time for editing. He had a story to tell, and he told it quickly. But Betty was more than a grammarian. She also shaped the content, at one point telling Uris, after he announced that he was going to kill the character Andy Hookans, the lumberjack who falls in love with a New Zealand war widow, that if he did, she would never sleep with him again. Uris restored marital harmony by having the character lose only a leg in battle.
In an April 1953 article about Uris, a reporter wrote that if “Mrs. Uris hadn’t been a Marine Sergeant herself, I don’t think she could have stood it—caring for kids, Leon, enduring his moods, his exultations.”10 The day before yesterday, the reporter wrote, Uris took some of his advance and bought a new car and gave the keys to Betty, “a small down payment on her sacrifices.”
While drafting early portions of the novel, Uris sporadically sought to break into print. He finally succeeded in late 1950 with an intemperate article on the selection process for the all-American football teams. He sent off his short essay to Esquire. To his amazement, it was accepted:
9 June 1950
It was certainly refreshing to hear Gus F. Fan blow his top—and do it with such eloquent conviction as you did in ALL AMERICAN RAZZ MATAZZ. Instead of having the office boy or night watchman initial the rejection slip, as you suggested, we thought that you would be even more pleased if we bought this article for an early publication. How does a price of $300.00 strike you?
As soon as I receive an okay on the price from you I will air mail you our check.
Cordially,
Donald Cormack11
Uris was stunned.
The article appeared in the January 1951 issue, with a long paragraph on Uris (and his photo) in the “Backstage with Esquire” section, which emphasized his outspokenness. It additionally noted that the twenty-six-year-old had spent four years with the marines and that he had been with the Call-Bulletin since 1947. There was no mention of future literary work. In the article itself, Uris opposed the unsystematic method of selecting all-Americans, which he found unrepresentative. It falsely imposed regional balance, to the detriment of a section of the country that might have a surfeit of talent. Concern for the overall failure to acknowledge first-rate football players from secondary schools, plus the duplication of all-American team selections, resulted in his indictment of “NON AMERICA teams.”12 He offered his own solution of a single selection board for the country. The detail and research Uris exhibited in his article, expressed through the confident tone of reform, suggest the style of writing that would characterize his fiction.
The acceptance of his article, along with the payment for it, convinced Uris that he could write, and he began to type his novel enthusiastically, working nightly in a small alcove—an enclosed second-story porch—in the house. Betty was again crucial to his work: “She never forced me to write, [but] neither did she discourage me against it and she always harbored the faith that I would do it…. The entire thing was stored up in my head and just came out when I sat at the typewriter.”13 Betty remained his editor telling him to rewrite and rewrite some more. And she recalled her words to the marine commanding officer who told her not to marry Leon Uris because he was a lazy, no-good fellow: “I know someday he’s going to be a great writer.”14 Uris dedicated Battle Cry to her.
It took Uris nearly three years of after-work and weekend writing to complete the book—and he was frank “in crediting the union’s contract with the pay and conditions that gave him the time and freedom from financial burden to complete it.”15
Uris wrote the ending of Battle Cry at the Call-Bulletin during a press run. “Someone had left a free typewriter,” and while he waited for the paper to come off the presses, he completed the manuscript on the vacant machine.16 He explained: “If I write too much one day, I can’t write the next. Don’t ask me why but my best hours seem to be between 5–8pm. I wrote Battle Cry by working from 9–12pm every night and 16–18 hours on my day off.” The massive final manuscript was replete with repetitions, awkward sentences, structural problems, and incorrect punctuation. A steady stream of rejections arrived at his home, one letter arriving the day Uris and Betty received word that Karen had contracted polio.17 The illness and the news devastated him.
In a 1966 interview, Uris admitted that this was the low point of his life, the convergence of the Battle Cry rejections and Karen’s battle with polio. He vowed to God that if she were not crippled, he would never ask for anything again. But he didn’t entirely keep his promise: as she recovered, he admitted that he continued his search for fame and fortune.18 A scene in Mitla Pass replays the moment, although in the novel his daughter has had an accident rather than polio. In a hospital chapel, the writer-hero, Gideon Zadok, pleads with God to let his daughter live. In turn, he declares: “I’ll work at that fucking newspaper the rest of my life and I won’t complain, okay? I swear I’ll never complain about not becoming a writer … man, that’s all I can give you. Please don’t take my baby” (MP, 65).
Betty was again the rock. She continued to encourage him, tend to their small son Mark, and take the bus into San Francisco to visit the hospitalized Karen—all while pregnant with her third child, Michael. After Karen came home, she would exercise her daughter’s atrophied muscles daily on the kitchen table and take her to the hospital three times a week for physiotherapy. She did what needed to be done.
Uris did not give up his faith in Karen’s recovery or in his book, not even when he carried the manuscript to Howard S. Cady, the West Coast editor of Doubleday: “I took it to him—2200 pages in a suitcase—and he told me—‘Cut this down to 3 lbs.’”19 Uris did, and Cady thought there were possibilities. The novel was then known as “Blood My Battle Cry” and had made a powerful impression on Cady in spite of its obvious need for tightening and cutting. Cady had already started Uris on revisions when Doubleday New York notified him, however, that with The Caine Mutiny a steady best seller for them, they would not acquire Uris’s book.
Cady, however, would not relent; he believed in the talent of the young novelist who had written his war novel some ten years after the events, allowing him to process and reevaluate what happened. Unlike Norman Mailer, who wrote The Naked and the Dead soon after returning from the war, Uris took time to digest his military experience, although, as he said, it was always present as “a slow burn.”20 He mentally started the novel many times while in the corps, but “because of the flops I had after the war—a veteran’s newspaper, magazine—I developed a fixation about writing and went out of my way to avoid it. All the time though, it was doing a slow burn inside me.”21
The novel was a kind of delayed response to his war experiences, as he made clear in an interview: “I’d been feeling my way along in writing since I was a kid, long before I joined the Marines.”22 Because of the time that elapsed between his combat experience and the writing of the book, “the heat of battle was gone and I probably was not so impassioned about it, less confused than if I had begun it earlier.” He added that his best buddy in the marines was Carlisle J. Mendez, of New Orleans, who was killed on Saipan. He based a character in the book on him. Uris also wanted “to decipher Marines as individuals, to explain this strange hold the Corps has on them or why retreat is worse than [fighting].” He hoped it would be a “factual biography” of the corps, with the “Corps itself as the composite hero,” that would focus on a “normal group of enlisted officers… telling their romances, personal problems and their feelings on being welded into a fighting unit.”
In an unusual sign of literary cooperation, after Doubleday turned down the manuscript, Cady wrote to Ted Purdy, Putnam’s editor in chief, describing the work. Purdy wired Uris, asking to see the manuscript. Purdy liked it and gave it to his associate, Virginia Carrick, to read. She, in turn, told her husband, Lynn Carrick of Lippincott about it, and he, having been an officer in the marines, contributed advice on some points of marine lore. Editors of three publishing companies “thus had a hand in preparation of the story.”23
A telegram from New York dated 15 September 1952 reported the good news: Putnam would publish the book.
A contract arrived three weeks later, and he signed it on 10 October 1952. It called for delivery of a 200,000-word manuscript not later than 15 December 1952. He would receive a $500 advance on signing and another $500 on delivery and acceptance of the completed and revised manuscript. On the first 7,500 copies, Uris would receive a royalty of 10 percent of the retail price, 12.5 percent on the next 2,500 copies with 15 percent thereafter.24 The contract also contained an option for Uris’s next novel, and he later reportedly signed a contract for a second work, a newspaper story set in San Francisco, although it was never written.
A book contract, however, did not guarantee control over the manuscript, especially for a new novelist. When Uris received the first galleys of his novel, he immediately noted a change. The first-person narrator, Mac, who begins the book and then introduces four of the six parts, had disappeared. Without consultation, Putnam had removed him from the novel. Incensed, Uris wanted the narrative returned to its original form. A journalist friend at the Call-Bulletin who had once been a novelist told him he was at a crossroads: if he rejected the change, the book might be cancelled. If he accepted it, he would be compromised.
His friend then confided that in a similar situation, he had remained silent and accepted his publisher’s suggestions, admitting to Uris he had been a fool, “because a man can never go back once he compromises his personal integrity.”25 Uris then made up his mind: “I sucked in a deep breath and after several days of agonizing, I told the publisher the deal was off unless he returned my galleys in the original version. One day after the deadline, the publisher gave in. The trench warfare and gut-wrenching decisions never end, and you must learn to hang tough early.”26 He retells the story in Mitla Pass (MP, 67–69).
Cady had been critical to the publication of Battle Cry, and Uris never forgot him. He acknowledged his role by naming his third child Michael Cady Uris, born in 1953, the year the novel came out. Uris further acknowledged Cady’s help by naming the writer accused of libel in QB VII Abraham Cady.
With the narrative question settled, the book went into production, and excerpts and galleys received advance praise. Banking on the success of previous war novels like The Caine Mutiny and From Here to Eternity, and on an early endorsement from the Marine Corps, which allowed the use of its insignia on the dust jacket, Putnam authorized a print run of 25,000 copies. Within the first two weeks of publication, it received 5,000 reorders and gambled on printing another 10,000 copies. Initial sales were higher outside New York, probably because out-of-town papers gave it better reviews. Within six weeks of publication, Battle Cry was number two in the nation and had gone through seven printings, eventually appearing in fourteen languages. In August 1953, the Sunday editions of the San Francisco Examiner printed a complete serialization of the novel.
Putnam thought so highly of the novel that it prepared an unusual incentive for readers: a money-back guarantee if readers were not satisfied, the first, it claimed, in modern American book publishing. But shortly after publication, Putnam received a testy letter from a reader named Noel Siru, who told the publisher the book was nothing but “rotten tripe”—and demanded replacement with From Here to Eternity by James Jones, published by Scribner’s. The letter, however, was a hoax. Reversing the letters of the author’s name revealed the writer’s true identity: Leon Uris, who was echoing a comment from one early editor that the novel was the “worst piece of tripe written in the English language.”27 His sense of humor, confidence, and even arrogance were on display.
One question raised by Uris’s novel, however, was its purported accuracy: was it fact or fiction? Anticipating the question, Uris included a disclaimer that addressed what would become a feature of his work: the fictional use of historical fact. At issue was whether to fictionalize the names of “units, ships, battles and places.” He could not, of course, fictionalize the entire Pacific war, so he concluded that “to do justice to a story of the Marine Corps … a sound historic basis would be the only fair avenue of approach.” However, he admitted that “there are many instances where events have been fictionalized for the sake of story continuity and dramatic effect” (BC, 1). Importantly, “story continuity and dramatic effect” were concepts borrowed from screenwriting. History remained the basis of his novel, but it was adjusted to fit the demands of his narrative. Uris repeatedly explained his fictional use of fact, telling one interviewer that “the book is historically true as far as the maneuvers of the troops are concerned but the plot is fiction based upon my own experiences.”28
In his prefatory statement, Uris identifies his actual unit, the Second Marine Division and, more specifically, the Sixth Regiment, Second Battalion, Fox Company. However, he wants to be clear that the officers in these units did not resemble the “imaginary characters in the book,” whose personal habits and outlooks derive from his imagination alone (BC, 1). With this set out, his story begins.29
The novel pits inexperience against experience. Framed by the personal narrative of Mac, a grizzled sergeant with thirty years in the marines, the story outlines how a group of recruits are changed from green young men into a fighting unit that was tested by Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan. They are led by the almost superhuman Major Huxley, nicknamed Highpockets, who thinks nothing of leading a grueling, sixty-mile march with heavy packs in order to best another unit and prove his men the fittest (BC, 358–372). They succeed, but then he insists that they march back in record-setting time as well.
The traditional plot of shaping the untested into effective marines begins at boot camp in San Diego, which Uris presents with vivid empathy. Drawing on his own training and experiences, he spends the first two parts of the novel concentrating on the physical and mental education of the men and their escapades, since women figure importantly in the story.
Drinking and fighting are the main predeployment activities, and Uris provides the details, and when necessary, the sentiment. This is evident when the former high school football star Danny calls his girl back in Baltimore just before Fox Company ships out and each member gets on the phone, drunk and happy (BC, 189–191).
Wellington, New Zealand, becomes the focus of part three as the marines prepare for battle and unhappily leave normal life. Romances begin and end; Uris fictionalized several of his own encounters through the character of Andy Hookans and the widow Pat Rogers. Marion Hodgkiss, another member of the squad, was a short-story writer who timidly brought books and language to the company. His drunken encounter with Major Huxley, however, is one of the more comic episodes in the novel (BC, 221–223). The competition among the diverse set of men, set against preparations for battle, provides tension until they ship out. Botched practice landings at New Caledonia foreshadow their landings at Guadalcanal.
Uris describes battles well, especially their grimness, danger, and triumph. Meeting no resistance at first, the squad is nervously excited to be at last at war, but fear and panic soon take over. Displaying independence and determination, Huxley stands up to General Pritchard of the army by requesting that his men undertake a beachhead assault rather than land after the fighting (BC, 246). Denying Huxley’s request but aware of the antagonism between the army and the marines, the general privately admits to his aide that if he were on the lines “fighting for my life,” he would call for a couple of marines: “I suppose they’re like women … you can’t live with ’em and God knows you can’t live without ’em” (BC, 246).
Uris then shifts to a diary form to tell part of the story, opening on 19 January 1943 as the fighting on Guadalcanal unglamorously begins. Strafed by Kawasaki Ki-108s, the marines are forced to find additional cover. Malaria and jungle rot then begin to ravage the men. When a Japanese soldier tries to infiltrate the marineline, Danny shoots him and then goes out to bayonet the wounded soldier. Uris’s writing is disturbingly vivid: “The Jap’s hand made a last feeble gesture. Danny plunged the Steel into the Jap’s belly. A moan, a violent twitch of his body…. It seemed to Danny that his belly closed tight around the bayonet. Danny tugged at his rifle, it was stuck. He squeezed off a shot, which splattered him with blood and insides of the Jap. The eyes were still open. He lifted the gory weapon and with its butt bashed madly again and again until there were no eyes or face or head” (BC, 260). Horror and action mix in this passage, equaled by later passages describing Marion’s desperate hand-to-hand combat when surprised by a Japanese soldier (BC, 266–267).
An interlude in the battle opens part four, but the men have been changed by the jungle fighting. Despite their exhaustion, Huxley restores full discipline, forcing them at one point to march seventeen miles in the sun. Their return to New Zealand following Guadalcanal allows for romance as well as self-renewal, and Uris interjects opera (Georges Bizet’s Pearl Fishers), as well as literature (War and Peace; BC, 324). Uris’s own experience with Betty Cogswell forms part of the story as L. Q. Jones, on a ten-day leave, unexpectedly meets a family and is invited to their home. New characters enter, notably a draftee named Jake Levin, a Jew who must prove himself to his new outfit by accepting every menial task and yet perform them well. When they discover he was once a Golden Gloves boxer, however, he suddenly gains respect. His heroic death while directing a landing craft at the battle of Tarawa is an act that unites him with his comrades (BC, 422–424).
But the return to war soon becomes the focus as another new character appears, Captain Max Shapiro, who is also Jewish; though he has an erratic but courageous record, he shortly proves himself to be a brilliant and brave strategist. A troublemaker and a legend, he is, nonetheless, useful for Uris’s revision of the stereotype of Jews as weak and easy victims. Shapiro is brave and tested by battle. Uris at this point also begins to include real names in his fiction: two islands in the atoll the men are about to attack are named “Betty” and “Karen,” after his wife and daughter (BC, 388).
The men of the Sixth Marines want to fight, but they are prevented from doing so by the military command. Instead, they back up the assault teams. But as the fierce battle for Tarawa is about to begin, setbacks and confusions dog the landing teams, catastrophic errors that Uris dramatically retells. Many soon die near the island’s pier and beach as “Huxley’s Whores” finally go in to fight (BC, 399–400, 404ff.). Uris repeats the vivid style he used earlier in the novel, and the Tarawa sections are gripping in their violence. Danny again finds himself alone with a wounded Japanese soldier, although this time he does not bayonet him (BC, 407). Huxley, however, is embarrassed that his men were not in the first assault but the cleanup. Yet stunning images of death and destruction still dominate the scenes, like the description of the radio operator, killed while in position, frozen “erect, his earphones on and his hand on the key of the smashed radio” (BC, 433). Once the battle is over, heat and monotony lead to demoralization and illness.
Part six of the novel opens with “Huxley’s Whores” still “bringing up the rear,” as Mac complains (BC, 473). Huxley, now a lieutenant colonel, confronts his superior to request a beachhead assault in the next campaign. General Snipes at first refuses but, recognizing Huxley’s grit, reluctantly agrees (BC, 448–479). The chance to fight in a new battle lifts the men’s spirits. Red Beach One on Saipan is their target, and the remainder of the novel focuses on the landing and violent fighting there: “The blood ran deep under a murderous staccato of careening bomb bursts and geysers of hot metal mixed with spurting sand and flesh” (BC, 488). Death is everywhere. Huxley is wounded after his orderly dies when he throws himself on a live grenade to protect his commander. Huxley loses a leg, but he still tries to command, ordering Mac to return to the command post when the sergeant tries to help the seriously injured Huxley (BC, 491). A final scene at the medical tent reinforces the carnage, which a coda contrasts: Mac, returned to the States, surveys a group of new recruits enthusiastically boarding a train in Baltimore and heading out to war.
Throughout the novel, the dramatic voice of the experienced Mac vies with lapses into sentimentality. Mac’s account of the battle of Guadalcanal shows the former. A letter from Huxley’s wife and the reunion of Danny with his sweetheart, Kathy, illustrate the latter tendency. But Uris also tricks the reader: early on in the fighting, we conclude that the badly injured Danny dies after being carried to the medical tent on Saipan. Surprise! He is alive. The alternation between irony and sentiment can disorient a reader, creating both alienation and involvement with the characters. Uris’s style is often taut, dramatic, and off-color when he is writing about battle, but mawkish and maudlin when writing about romance. And cliché always verges close to overstatement, as this sentence illustrates: “The tingling anticipation of pending action dampened my palms as I plodded on toward the channel which would bring our journey to a close” (BC, 435). Uris strives for transparency, but rhetoric distracts him. In the novel, Uris shows two related worlds, one of hope and romance, the other of reality and death.
Uris is uncritical of the marines and their bureaucracy. In fact, his aim is to present them in a positive light even when the issue is anti-Semitism. Uris shows very little of this prejudice in the novel other than a few comments made to Levin, who will die a hero. His opposite, the legendary Captain Max Shapiro, also dies heroically, showing that Jews are as brave as anyone else in war. Both figures are prototypes of the “tough Jews” who will soon populate Exodus, Mila 18, and Mitla Pass.30
A bloody encounter at Saipan is the climax of the novel, although Uris never fought there. He was sent home to the States because of malaria and dengue fever but felt guilt over the loss of many of his buddies in the fighting. The Saipan section honors the bravery of these men while addressing his remorse for not having been part of the battle. The novel ends with a newspaper account of the American victory on Iwo Jima and the photo of the marines planting the U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi.
Uris’s first fan letter, mounted in one of his scrapbooks, indicates early reaction to the book.
Congratulations, buddy on an authentic novel about the Marines. Sorry it couldn’t have been written about the best outfit like the 4th Raider Battalion or the 4th Marines; but you did the best you could with the outfit you know.
Seriously, you have done a first rate job, and I’m telling the reader of the Chattanooga “Times” that you have. I think I know what I’m talking about in a literary way. I know damned well what I’m talking about in a Marine Corps way.
Very truly yours,
John McCormick
Roosevelt’s Raiders
4th Marine Regiment
32 months in the Pacific
2 Purple Hearts31
For Uris, this was exactly the kind of praise he sought. Lieutenant Colonel C. S. Nichols, of the Historical Section of the U.S. Marine Corps, praised the novel in Military Affairs, adding that “the dialogue is hard-lipped and an authentic record of Marine jargon of the period, cleaned up just enough to remove it from the realm of smut—not enough to render it unrealistic.”32
Other reviews were equally positive. The poet, physician, and wartime editor of Yank, Merle Miller, claimed in the Saturday Review of Literature that Uris may have started “a whole new and healthy trend in American war literature.”33 There was clearly a difference, Miller writes, between novels of the First and Second World Wars. The former expressed hatred for war but not the men and officers who fought in them. The latter seemed to despise both war and warriors. Uris wrote a very different kind of war novel because he was “not angry or bitter or brooding. He obviously loves the Marine Corps, even its officers.” This established a new pattern that could influence later writers.
The marines honored Uris for his writing with a medal and a citation at the February 1954 Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association meeting at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. The award was for the person who had contributed the most in 1953 to “public appreciation of the spirit and ideas of the US Marine Corps.”34 Uris was just thirty.
Battle Cry was second in coast-to-coast balloting by book critics for the best novel of 1953, losing to Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope but coming in ahead of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. A readers’ poll in the Saturday Review of Literature likewise named Battle Cry one of the best American books of 1953, and it remained on best-seller lists for fifty-two weeks.35 As proof of its popularity, Bantam Books released 600,000 copies of the paperback in October 1954. Battle Cry quickly became the fastest-selling paperback of the year.
Hollywood, also, did not waste any time. Seeing the immediate appeal of the novel, Warner Bros. bought the film option only a few months after the book appeared. The studio had built its reputation on a series of gritty successes like The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and now wanted to capture the audiences that were flocking to From Here to Eternity. Rumors then started to fly, Louella Parsons writing that Jack Warner wanted John Wayne for Battle Cry (in the event, Lex Barker and Guy Madison would test for roles).
Uris, alert to the possibility of new creative challenges and a larger income, negotiated a contract for film rights that saw him hired as the screenwriter, a task entirely new to him. Warner Bros. purchased the rights to the novel in July 1953 for $25,000, a tiny sum by Hollywood standards. But Uris negotiated the right to do the screenplay, which was worth more in prestige, experience, and future dollars. This was also a Hollywood first: the first time a first-time novelist had managed to gain script rights, although the inexperienced Uris would not find the transfer of the book to the screen easy.
Uris began work at the studio on 15 August 1953, moving his family from Larkspur to 5174 Woodley Avenue in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, not far from the 110-acre Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. He needed to be close to the studio, and at the same time he was gambling on future Hollywood employment and a possible career as a screenwriter. He was contracted to work on the screenplay for a minimum of four weeks at a salary of $750 a week.
Uris had an office on the lot; in fact, writers were required to work on the lot, and had to report at a certain time and stay until the day was over. This discipline reinforced Uris’s own sense of writing as a daily assigned task. As a former marine, he took to the discipline with ease. But on his first or second day, he had a surprise when his secretary casually mentioned that there had been another screenplay with the same title done about ten years earlier. “What? Where is it?” he asked. She retrieved it a day later, and he was doubly shocked when he saw the writer’s name on the blue cover page: William Faulkner.
Faulkner had been hired by Warner Bros. in 1942 after working in Hollywood on and off since the 1930S. Money, not art, kept him coming back. Warner Bros. hired him at a salary of $300 a week, which was shamefully low for someone of his stature. But fiction writing did not pay, and he needed money, telling Bennett Cerf a month earlier that he had only sixty cents in his pocket. He had just sent in a new short story, but he worried that it might not sell, and his creditors were getting anxious. Furthermore, options in his contract obligated him to Warner Bros. for the next seven years.36
Faulkner authored, first, an original screenplay based on the career of Charles de Gaulle and the Free French movement; it was never produced. His next assignment was “The Life and Death of a Bomber,” which was to portray civilian involvement in the building of American bombers. It went nowhere, and for two months Faulkner did little until Howard Hawks chose him for his next war movie, to be called “Battle Cry.”
This big-budget film—reported to cost three and half million dollars—was to be an epic with separate sections depicting American, British, French, Russian, Chinese, and Greek resistance to the Axis powers.37 The film originated with Hawks and his agent, Charles Feldman, who tried to meld five separate properties they owned.38 A single script would be unique in that it would be an original work rather than an adaptation.
Initially, Faulkner worked alone with Hawks on an outline, which was at one point summarized as the “Defense of Liberty all over the world.”39 The first 140-page treatment was scrapped, however, and a new one started, which eventually extended to 232 pages. But Hawks now felt another writer had to be brought in. Twenty-six-year-old Steve Fisher, who wrote Destination Tokyo, joined Faulkner, but at a salary of $800 a week. Fisher did the Russian sequence, Faulkner the Chinese. Faulkner also had the principal role of pulling the separate threads of the story together.40 Unexpectedly but happily, Faulkner’s option was picked up by the studio for another year at $400 a week. He continued to work on the script, writing the French section, and by July a revised 117-page version existed.
The experimental arrangement of the separate episodes in the initial treatment of “Battle Cry” suggests the complicated plot intersections of The Sound and the Fury or Light in August.41 In the midst of revisions and memos, Steve Bacher, an assistant to Hawks, defined the title for him, emphasizing that it is “the sound that wells up out of the human spirit when you attempt to take away from man all those things with which he lived.”42 When such things are threatened, free men will resound with “a defiance, an affirmation and a challenge against which lust and ruthlessness shall not stand,” words incorporated into the voice-over that opens the film.
As Faulkner continued to revise with Fisher’s assistance, Hawks began the production process; Lauren Bacall screen-tested for one of the roles. But by August 1943, escalating costs had sunk the project. With no production underway, Hawks was about to miss some important deadlines. Faulkner’s credited time on the film ended 13 August, but the four-month project had stimulated him to write hundreds of pages. No other studio project before or after would generate so much enthusiasm from Faulkner. But he responded badly to its cancellation, returning to heavy drinking and brooding over his being rejected for a military commission because of his age and lack of education.43
Uris must have been startled to discover Faulkner’s script, although it differed widely from his own proposed treatment. To find that a writer of Faulkner’s reputation (he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949) had preceded him was a challenge that made him determined to avoid embarrassment. In Mitla Pass, Uris praises Faulkner, at that point identifying with the shabby treatment he had received in Hollywood MP, 89–91).
Early publicity for Uris’s movie, before he got down to drafting any pages, mistakenly drew from the outline of Faulkner’s film, emphasizing the absence of story continuity: Battle Cry would be a series of episodes connected by the common thread of the causes that impelled “the united nations of the world in the fight for freedom.”44 This likely resulted from confusion in the publicity department over which film was being prepared.
Uris thought that by adapting his own novel, he would be able to sharpen his skill at storytelling, visualization, and dialogue. He worked assiduously on the project, having frequent meetings with the producer, Henry Blanke, and the director, Raoul Walsh. But his first efforts were not a success, as an unsigned seven-page Warner Bros. memo makes clear. The first problem was length: although it was 167 pages long, it lacked the necessary scene or shot-for-shot breaks of speech, which, when added, would undoubtedly increase its size. “The first urgent need is for cutting,” writes the reader, although he finds no ready remedy: “The various episodes seem too meshed and interwoven to give a quick clue to this kind of trimming.”45 This sort of tight construction was a holdover from a novelist’s, not screenwriter’s, approach. The only effective cutting would be “a dogged, ruthless snipping, page by page, eliminating the scores of small dissolves with their overly-documented facts and dispensing with all the repetitious scenes and situations, of which there are many.”
The problem was clear: “The author actually has attempted to transfer bodily from one page to another almost the entire contents of the book.” The “sprawling nature” of the story is unsuited for film, which requires a discipline of shape. Actions that could not be dramatized were “still being carried along in exposition,” creating tedium and lack of interest.46 Other points made by the reader: conflicts lack development; there is a great deal of excess emotionalism; the early training scenes could be eliminated because of the familiarity of similar sequences in many other films; Mac’s narrative should be reduced and his diction made consistent (he quickly goes from sententiousness to barroom belligerence); figures completely slip out of character at convenient moments; and the general theme of presenting an authentic history of the Sixth Marine Division is obscured. An extensive rewrite was the advice.
Uris renewed his efforts, adjusting the script to the criticism, making the necessary scene changes, and altering the dramatic pacing and dialogue. Yet the studio wanted the script to be like the book and so discouraged any deviation. There was one departure, however, done more to mollify the marines than the studio. In the novel, Danny Forrester has an affair with a navy officer’s wife. In the movie, the naval officer was changed to a dollar-a-year man. It was OK to philander on the screen but not above one’s rank, commented one critic.47 In From Here to Eternity, however, it seemed acceptable: there, Burt Lancaster had an affair with his commander’s wife, Deborah Kerr.
While Uris was revising the Battle Cry script, he decided to write a second novel, more or less to see whether he could still do it. He also had fresh material that extended his interest in the Second World War and fighting: an autobiography by his uncle Aaron Yerushalmi, which arrived at Uris’s San Francisco apartment in early 1947, secretly smuggled out of British-controlled Palestine. He immediately thought it could be published on its own. Acting as his uncle’s literary agent, Uris attempted to place the work. No one was interested.
The 219-page penciled manuscript on onionskin paper was difficult to read: his uncle had filled every bit of every page with text in his small, cramped handwriting. Uris found it a challenge to prepare a synopsis of the material. He later told his Putnam editor, Ted Purdy, that he had been unsuccessful in placing it, but, he added, “I know you’ll agree that this is one of the most amazing accounts you have ever laid eyes on and for many years I’ve begged my uncle to let me retain possession of the MS to use as the basis for a future novel. Right now I feel several years and a couple of books from trying a job the proportion of this.”48
Uris let the work sit from roughly 1947 to 1953, but still asked Purdy for some advice: “Would the book have any value as is? I could write it up straight and do a clean job in six or eight months. Would it have a decent sale?”49 Impatient, he decided to act: while working on the screenplay for Battle Cry, he wrote a first draft of what was originally called “Hellenic Interlude.” And he wrote it in six weeks. Why? As he told another editor at Putnam, “First, to prove to myself I could still write and second, against a deadline. I admit it is very sloppy and agree that the final drafting must be done with a great deal of care to tighten up the story.”50
The result was uneven at best. Drawing only partially from the autobiography—his statement at the beginning of The Angry Hills (the published version) suggests a more thorough dependence on that work—he fashioned an espionage novel that essentially focuses on capture and escape. He also concentrates the action in Greece, neglecting the autobiography’s account of a German prisoner-of-war camp followed by a move to Germany, another internment camp, and a final transfer and escape by Aaron Yerushalmi in Yugoslavia.
Bob Amussen at Putnam was unenthusiastic about Uris’s first draft, explaining that much of the plot was implausible.51 Why was Michael Morrison, a doctor from San Francisco with no espionage training, given the job of getting a micro-film out of Nazi-occupied Greece? Second, at the point in the war during which the novel is set, the Nazis had not made any progress in the development of the atomic bomb, so would have had no interest in the secrets he was removing; perhaps the plans could involve radar or sonar. An episode involving amnesia was also not believable. Amussen also suggested changing the ending.
Uris’s literary agent, Willis Wing, was also skeptical about the story, suggesting the material Morrison retrieves in Greece should not deal with nuclear fission, but neither should it be radar or sonar.52 He also objected to Morrison’s fanciful, even comic, method of secreting the microfilm capsule by shooting himself in the buttock, placing the capsule in the wound, and then cauterizing it with a heated nail. Could this be done, he asked? Uris answered that that he went over it with several doctors, although he admitted to not ever having tried it. “From the look of the two reports,” Uris quipped to Amussen, “I write a hell of a lot better in Greek than in English.”53
While Putnam’s editorial group had reservations about the manuscript, the publicity department did not. The fall 1954 catalogue advertised Hellenic Interlude as a forthcoming title, stating, “The material for HI is authentic. It is drawn from the diaries and notes of Uris’s uncle who was in Greece during WWII and was captured by the Germans and had many of the experiences attributed to the hero of the book.”54 Catalogue copy also noted that Uris had recently put the finishing touches on his screenplay for Battle Cry.
Uris borrowed the title “Hellenic Interlude” from his uncle’s autobiography, in which it ironically conveys disillusionment with British military power. The autobiography documents the deprivation, malnutrition, disease, and danger the British army faced in Greece in 1941. Essentially an account of the Palestinian Brigade, Palestinian Jews who joined the British army to fight in the Second World War and were sent to Greece, the autobiography explores the tension between nature and war, beauty and destruction. After a preface that questions the value of war, it opens with this sentence that sets the register for the work: “From the day we arrived [in] Greece (on 13 April 1941), until we were gallantly taken prisoners of war, only sixteen days elapsed.”55 The work inverts ideas of heroism and action, as Uris had done in Battle Cry.
The other register is a lyrical appreciation of the natural beauty of the country, which the autobiographer cannot easily integrate with the brutality of the attacking Stukas, the machine-gunning of innocent people, and the destruction of villages far from the major conflicts. Descriptions of horrible conditions in cells, trucks, trains, and camps alternate with the quiet pastoral beauty of the countryside. Uris reproduced this aspect in The Angry Hills, which similarly alternates between brutality and beauty. The cruelty portrayed in Europe oddly balances what he described in the Pacific in Battle Cry and prepared him for what he vividly narrates in Exodus. The autobiography also contains a great deal of material about life as a prisoner of war, since the uncle was captured several times.
The role of Jews as soldiers is another crucial topic in the autobiography, and it would be instrumental in shaping Uris’s own sense of the Jewish hero, a man of action unafraid to risk his life for the right cause. In the autobiography, Jews are fighters, courageous and willing to do battle. But the fighters present a dilemma for the Germans: are they Jews or soldiers, and would the Geneva Conventions apply to them? The answer was not clear.
In the first draft of the novel, there is a great deal of brutality and violence involving Yichiel and his wife, provoking this remark from an editor: “Overdone, even for Belsen—and I don’t think US public is much interested now (even if they should be).”56 Uris, in the early draft, went on to write that by the ninth day of interrogation, Yichiel had spoken “no more than two words since he’s been here. There is a constant fire burning in his eyes. I don’t think that even death can quench it. Yichiel is a Jew and through his silence I think I’ve learned more about the Jews than any words or any books. His spirit is beyond defeat.”57 Such determination and intensity will appear more strongly in the Jewish heroes of Exodus.
The Angry Hills extends Uris’s presentation of Jews, which began with Levin and Shapiro, the two marines in Battle Cry. In “Hellenic Interlude,” the presence of Yichiel and his doomed wife Elpis, two persecuted Palestinian Jews, anticipates the death and danger experienced by numerous Jews in Exodus, Mila 18, and Mitla Pass, but also prepares readers for the reverse: the politicized “tough Jews” who became the hallmark of Uris’s later writing. Since Uris wrote the novel while he worked on revisions to the script of Battle Cry, the two experiences played off each other: the techniques of screenwriting influenced the writing style of The Angry Hills, and the subject matter of the novel (Jewish fighters) influenced Uris’s approach to his next work: Exodus.
Uris acknowledged the importance of the autobiography as a source and imported numerous events from it into the novel: a train ride, an escape, a haunting dead horse in a village square, the massing of soldiers on a beach for an aborted rescue, the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, and the destruction of villages. But he dropped the ironic tone and the POW experience, which were essential to the first half of his uncle’s account. Uris translated the singular survival of Aaron, however, into the adventure of Michael Morrison, now an American journalist who spends the entire novel escaping from German agents. Also, Uris did not visit Greece before writing the book, although his later practice was to tour extensively the countries where his novels were to be set.
One of the most significant changes involved the object given to Morrison to smuggle out of the country. In “Hellenic Interlude,” it is a capsule of microfilm listing possible troop displacements and scientific data. In the published novel, it is a list (“the Stergiou list”; AH, 88) of Greek double agents working for the Germans. In the novel, the threatened Morrison memorizes the list and rips up the remains. In the first draft, as mentioned earlier, Uris was more ingenious and unwittingly comic.
Oscar Dystel, the president of Bantam Books and soon to become a close friend of Uris, warned him not to publish the novel, believing it inferior to Battle Cry. Putnam offered the same advice and turned the book down. Uris did not listen, although at the last moment he questioned the value of its appearance to his new publisher, Bennett Cerf of Random House.
On 22 September 1955, days before publication and on stationery from Hal Wallis’s production company—by then he was working on Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—Uris sent a night letter to Cerf. With a mixture of cynicism and irony, it read:
ON THE EVE OF THIS INCONSPICUOUS EVENT THE PUBLICATION OF “THE ANGRY HILLS” LET ME OFFER MY SINCERE CONDOLENCES ON A DATE THAT WILL LIVE IN LITERARY INFAMY.58
Cerf replied a few days later:
YOUR CONDOLENCES ARE MISPLACED. WE LOVE OUR BABY. THINK HE’S BEAUTIFUL AND HOPE HE WILL HAVE A LOT OF LITTLE SISTERS AND BROTHERS IN THE YEARS TO COME. BEST. BENNETT
Uris was the more accurate of the two: the reviews were devastating, as Harper’s Magazine made clear: “As one who had not read his best-selling Battle Cry, I approached this novel with anticipation and excitement. I put it down with astonishment and disappointment. There is a plot here and quick narrative but no writing at all.” There were no transitions between events and no “literary quality.”59 A Virginia paper neatly summed up the problem: “Uris now divides his time between writing novels and writing for film. He did not divide it sharply enough here. It is simply the time-worn fable of a native American being caught in the web of international intrigue.”60
Uris responded to these negative views by continuing with his screenwriting career and with his script of Battle Cry. He would soon tackle a project in a genre that would strongly influence his fiction writing: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a western. And then, through his new agent, Ingo Preminger, Otto Preminger’s brother, he would sell a new script to MGM before he even wrote a word of what would become, in revised form, his third novel, Exodus.