Leon Uris is one of the best commercial storytellers among American writers.
—EXECUTIVE EDITOR, HARPERCOLLINS, 2005
FOLLOWING THE DEATH of Margery Edwards, Uris was lost. He went to Southern California for three weeks after the inquest to recover some balance, and then returned to Aspen. But resuming a writing life was difficult until his editor Ken McCormick flew out to encourage, cajole, and remind him that his readers were expecting a new work. This provided a much-needed focus.
Uris had by now perfected the Uris style, summarized in a Writer’s Digest article as “short titles, long books, big sales.”1 His novels of vivid prose and strong plots based on historical events became a popular staple. To enhance the drama, he included occasional superstars from the world stage: Charles de Gaulle (as Pierre La Croix in Topaz), David Ben-Gurion (Mitla Pass), Sir Winston Churchill (Redemption), and even Ernest Hemingway (Mitla Pass). The characters express themselves in terse, often stagy dialogue. Well-drawn, condensed settings form backdrops for an awkward treatment of romance, which is either sentimentalized or unintentionally caricatural, as when macho posturing replaces honest behavior. Characterization is conventional and undeveloped.
QB VII (1970), which was based on Uris’s own 1964 trial for libel in London, illustrates these features clearly. The suit, brought by Dr. Wladislaw Dering, had offended Uris’s sense of literary freedom and history, and the resulting novel combined the best aspects of Uris’s style. His own experiences provided the plot, while London and its grand history provided the setting:
Jesus, Solomon, and King Alfred rated status over the front entrance of the Royal Courts of Justice, which fronted five hundred feet where the Strand becomes Fleet Street at Temple Bar. These three were joined by twenty-four lesser bishops and scholars.
Moses brought up the rear entrance on Carey Street, a block away. (QEVII, 273)
After supplying more concise details, Uris weighs in with a simile: “The court stands as a giant planet of law with its satellites, the surrounding Inns and Chancery Lane” (QBVII, 274). Before describing the barristers’ arrival and preparations for the first day of trial, Uris gives a history of England’s first law court, which was located in Westminster Hall.
Uris turned to recapturing the experiences of his libel trial at the same time he became involved with a new woman, whom he met three months after his second wife died. In late April 1969, still reeling from Margery Edwards’s suicide, he called an Aspen photography center to find someone to teach his son how to take pictures and use a new movie camera. A short while later, a tall, dark-haired woman stood at his door. He was instantly attracted to her.2 At the time, she was associate director of Center of the Eye, a photographic institute in Aspen. Her pedigree was impressive: the scion of a Boston Brahmin family, she had attended the Concord Academy, come out as a debutante, attended Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and studied photography at New York University. She went to Aspen in 1965 at age seventeen, partly because of an uncle who worked there. Her name was Jill Peabody.
Ten months after meeting and then courting intensely, Uris and Jill Peabody married at the Algonquin Hotel in New York on 15 February 1970, four days short of the first anniversary of Margery’s suicide. Jill was six months younger than Uris’s oldest daughter. Rabbi Herbert Friedman presided, and Oscar Dystel was the best man. Jill’s parents and three sisters attended. Topping the wedding cake was a pair of skiers. Uris and Walt Smith wrote the wedding march, which was later incorporated into Uris’s musical Ari (based on Exodus). Uris and Jill had arrived in New York earlier in the month so that Uris could review galley pages of QB VII and Jill could prepare for the wedding. Beforehand, Uris asked Doubleday to open charge accounts for both of them at Lord & Taylor, Mark Cross, Steuben Glass, Bonwit Teller, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bergdorf Goodman.
After the challenges of publishing Topaz—including supposed threats on his life—the reason for his acquiring guns—and a court fight over royalties with his French source, Philippe de Vosjoli—Uris turned to his own life for literary material: the Dering trial and the attendant story of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering. To this, he added autobiographical details, notably similarities between the writer-hero, Abraham Cady, and himself. Each was a Jewish writer who lacked a formal education, wrote as a solitary pursuit, and had a strong appreciation of and need for romance. They also wrote similar types of novels: Exodus for Uris, The Holocaust for Cady. Uris began to work on QB VII in mid-1969 and completed it in April 1970, two months after his marriage to Jill.
Uris’s ideas about the writer and his practice are particularly acute in the novel; indeed, it would not be until Mitla Pass (1988) that he would again be so candid on how a writer functions. Cady’s wife is witness to the process, which is, quite clearly, work: “There was no inspiration that people always look for and imagine in the writer. What there was was a relentless plodding requiring a special kind of stamina that makes the profession so limited” (QBVII, 146). But she also became a liability, and at one point Cady angrily exclaimed, “I HAD REMAINED A WRITER DESPITE HER” (QBVII, 185).
Later in the novel, he tells his son that a writer is always alone, a prelude to a chauvinistic speech about the Hemingwayesque nature of men who want to be around other men and who prefer locker rooms, bars, fight clubs, and places “where we don’t have to listen to female dribble” (QBVII, 399). Defensively, Cady explains to his son that women don’t deserve to “take the crap of being a writer’s wife. I busted your mother. If a woman’s got anything to give, I drain her”—a remark that was more accurate than Uris might have realized (QBVII, 400). Earlier, Cady had told Lady Sarah Wydman that he wasn’t capable of “giving all the love I have to a woman, only my children. And I’m not capable of receiving the kind of love a woman like you has. I can’t commit, even in a game” (QBVII, 243).
“Basic storytelling was the key most authors never learn,” the publisher David Shawcross tells Cady at one point in the novel (QBVII, 127). For Uris, this was a guiding principle—along with Shawcross’s view that the novelist must know “what his last chapter is going to say” and always work toward that end (QBVII, 127). Borrowing the language of the theatre, Uris would call this dictum his “curtain line.” In QB VII, Uris also incorporates an incident involving his editor Ken McCormick and the writing of Exodus. At the end of the novel, in a farewell conversation with his lawyer, Bannister, Cady explains that he accepts the new violence erupting in the Middle East. Cady then says when he was writing The Holocaust, his editor would “get into a dither every time a new crisis came up and he’d badger me for the manuscript. I told him, don’t worry, whenever I finish the book, the Jews will still be in trouble’” (QBVII, 500). Uris said almost the identical thing to McCormick when he was writing Exodus.
By mid-February 1970, Uris was sending in large sections of QB VII to his publisher, but made it clear he wanted no criticism of the manuscript until the entire novel was finished, an important aspect of his writing practice. Piecemeal editing he called “very annoying.”3 In the same letter, he noted that the heart specialist Dr. Christiaan Barnard had married a nineteen-year-old woman, ironically adding: “I think that is awful. What is the world coming to? I have already been picked up twice as a child molester,” humorously referring to the ages of both Margery (twenty-five) when she married him and Jill (twenty-two).
Editorial comment on QB VII, however, did not pause for Uris’s wedding. A day after the ceremony, Ken McCormick wrote a two-page critique of the manuscript, suggesting that Uris begin the novel by introducing Dr. Kelno (instead of waiting until Chapter 2 to do so) and save the panoply of the English courts until the trial began, later in the book. McCormick added that the current opening (focusing on the courts) might work in a film, but not in a novel: “The thing is to hook the reader almost immediately with a human problem, which is what you’re going to do with Kelno.”4 Uris listened and made the change. Other questions dealt with structure and what Uris might do to sustain doubt about Kelno’s guilt. An internal memo by McCormick identifies actual people and the characters who represent them in the book, an especially important source for determining the counterparts of the doctors and medical aides in the story.5 Most interestingly, McCormick notes that Dr. Mark Tesslar was based on Dr. Elena Brewda, who was alive and in London at the time.
He adds that the publisher David Shawcross is William Kimber, Thomas Bannister is Lord Gerald Gardiner, and Jacob Alexander is Uris’s close friend Solomon Kaufman, a solicitor. McCormick also points out that the weakest section is the second part of the book: it was hard for Uris to write about himself. He adds that Herb Schlosberg, although not in the book, was at the trial and has the three-volume transcript. McCormick ends by noting that Uris will visit Israel in the spring and then New York, spending the summer working on the musical version of Exodus. McCormick hoped that Doubleday could finalize the project with Schlosberg “rather than with Lee [Uris] who tends to be a little explosive on this subject.” The original draft also had “a lot of sex stuff that simply doesn’t belong.”6
While McCormick and others worried over the text of QB VII during the year leading up to its November publication, Uris spent that spring with Jill at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, then moved on to the Hilton in Tel Aviv. On 2 May, he wrote to McCormick that it was a wonderful visit, the “first time I’ve seen the old city relaxed and without deadlines.”7 Part of the purpose of his trip was to research a “Russian novel,” but he was disappointed at not finding the kind of information that could raise his story above the level of cliché. Editorial communication included the news that Ernest Gann had recently published a novel on Masada, The Antagonists, a development that could have interfered with Uris’s plans—at one point he had thought of writing a novel on the Roman siege and the sacrifice of the Jewish defenders. Uris replied that Masada was getting a lot of attention but that one should play it cool for now.
In April 1970, he had completed the revision of QB VII, dedicating the novel to Jill on her twenty-third birthday and to Charlie Goldberg, his Denver friend. The date was 16 April 1970. By September, the book was being advertised as another blockbuster. Nine weeks after its appearance, in November 1970, it was number one on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list, ahead of Erich Segal’s Love Story, Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, and Irwin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man. By March 1971, it was number one on the New York Times list, having sold more than 306,000 copies in hardback, aided by a Literary Guild edition in January 1971. Bantam prepared to print 1.3 million copies of the paperback for January 1972; eight years later, it had gone through twenty-two printings.
Getting the novel published in England, however, was problematic. His UK publisher, William Kimber, required several legal opinions on the matter of libel and the identities of actual justices and lawyers. At one point during the negotiations, Ken McCormick wrote to a lawyer that Kimber’s hesitancy gave no credit to their efforts at “cleaning it up” for England.8 But McCormick added that Uris was “overboard on this business of integrity. The fact remains he will not give an inch [as far as altering the text]. In view of this I have a terrible feeling we can’t publish this book in England.” At one point, an incensed Uris, angry at proposed changes, threatened to pull the manuscript from Kimber.
QB VII was an opportunity not only to reaffirm Uris’s fight against injustice and anti-Semitism, but also to outline, again, his idea of the writer and his role in society, which was, essentially, to stay isolated in order to stay objective (QBVII, 399). The work was also a chance for Uris to show his familiarity with areas like legal practice, medicine, British society, and, of course, Holocaust history.
The novel also reiterated Uris’s skill in fictionalizing history, a practice with predecessors ranging from medieval romances to Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. Uris used survivors’ memories and recollections to form the tragic core of the book, the center of the story he wanted to tell. By merging autobiography with history in this instance, Uris was able to use the London trial as a background for retelling and remembering horrific concentration-camp experiments.
He divides the novel into four parts: “The Plaintiff, “The Defendants,” “Brief to Counsel,” and “The Trial.” Time shifts occur in each section: the novel opens in November 1945 with the surrender of the Polish doctor Adam Kelno, followed by his story in England. There, he is accused of being a war criminal because of his acts at the Jadwiga concentration camp; he defends himself but spends two years in prison in Brixton. After his release, Kelno departs to practice in Sarawak, in northern Borneo. These events announce Uris’s theme that the past cannot be escaped. The first six chapters of QB VII foreshadow what is to come: although Kelno moves to the practice of social medicine in Borneo, the remoteness of the island does not ensure his anonymity.
There emerges a parallel story involving Dr. Mark Tesslar, a former accuser of Kelno’s living in Oxford, and the curious figures from the past who will be central to the trial, in the fourth part of the novel. Besides Tesslar, these include Justice Anthony Gilray and a series of camp survivors scattered across Europe and Israel.
Knighted for his activities in Borneo (Dering worked in British Somaliland), Adam Kelno reluctantly returns to England to work for the National Health Service in Southwark. Shortly afterward, he is shown a passage in Abraham Cady’s novel The Holocaust that libels him, and the court challenge is underway. Kelno stresses his constant persecution by the Jews and even the English (Chapters 17–18). With that, the first part of the novel concludes.
Part Two restarts the novel with the story of Abraham Cady and his life in Norfolk, Virginia, where Uris spent his own youth. Details of Uris’s father appear as the story proceeds, and Abraham Cady becomes a romantic figure, a fighter pilot (with a brother who died in the Spanish Civil War) and noted war hero who lost an eye in combat. Cady marries an Englishwoman as he begins his career as a writer. His early writing efforts and a separation from his wife take the plot to the point where the first part of the novel ended.
Uris concentrates on character, not events, to tell his story. His conservative narrative style—other than the simultaneous focus on the development of diverse characters, the structure remains orderly—satisfied readers’ demands. Such narrative conventionality—such as the use of flashbacks and realistic settings—is at the core of popular fiction that remains unthreatening in its generic or linguistic method (for a contrast, see John Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A. [1930–1936], which uses impressionistic devices such as those he dubbed “Newsreel” and the “The Camera Eye”). And by concentrating on individual characters, the novel makes it easy to absorb the historical background, a practice Uris used in his earliest novel, Battle Cry.
“Brief to Counsel,” the third part of the novel, begins with a well-drawn, concentrated history of the Royal Courts of Justice, starting with formation of the Inns of Court. Uris then introduces the legal adversaries who will carry much of the novel until its conclusion. Sir Robert Highsmith, based on Peter Colin Duncan, QC, represents Adam Kelno. Thomas Bannister (Lord Gardiner), who is to represent Cady, is a man of impeccable integrity, a former cabinet minister touted as a possible prime minister. The lines of conflict are drawn against a backdrop of financial threats to Shawcross and his publishing firm. The militant nature of the determined Cady, not cowed by the libel suit but eager to fight it, overshadows any possibility of compromise: “I’M ABRAHAM CADY, WRITING JEW,” he declares at one point (QBVII, 227).
Lady Sarah Wydman, an ally of Cady’s, plays a pivotal role in gaining access to society and providing stature for the Cady camp during the trial. Minidramas—will so-and-so testify, can a key witness be located, will enough evidence emerge?—run throughout the scenes leading up to the fourth and final part of the book, “The Trial.”
Uris expertly presents the trial, focusing on taut and dramatic exchanges between the key witnesses and the lawyers. He constructs the scenes with a definite sense of legal strategy and direction. Direct and cross-examinations are re-created professionally and without resorting to description of the characters’ internal thoughts or the jury’s reactions.
Bannister reveals that Kelno misrepresented the number and method of sterilizations he performed in the camp. Tesslar, who also worked in the camp, had disputed Kelno’s claim. The scene climaxes when Bannister asks whether Kelno ever struck a woman on the operating table “and called her a damned Jewess.”
“No, it is my word against Tesslar’s.”
“As a matter of fact,” Bannister said, “it has nothing to do with Tesslar’s word. It is the word of the woman you struck who is alive and at this moment on her way to London.” (QBVII, 331)
At that dramatic point, the chapter ends.
Contrasting the tension of the trial are moments of romance, which are generally contrived and wooden in both action and dialogue. When Cady’s remarried former wife visits him in London during the trial, she proposes they make love for old times’ sake. He refuses because of her husband, although she dismisses him as too English to be suspicious. Cady still refuses, as sentiment battles morality (QBVII, 306).
Taut with legal and medical drama, the novel succeeds in displaying the best and often the worst of Uris’s style. At the end, he can’t resist letting the preachy Cady lecture readers and others on man’s inhumanity. The best lines and speeches belong to the lawyers. In the structured world and language of the court, they eloquently express the arguments and facts of the world of survivors.
Interspersed with the legal drama are horrific accounts of torture and medical experimentation at Jadwiga, retold by a series of witnesses gathered from Europe and beyond. Uris writes movingly here, basing his characters’ remarks on actual stories and details from Holocaust survivors (QBVII, 448–456). Suicides, executions, and madness were common.
The final bit of testimony depends on a silent witness, a surgical registry that survived the war. This document, thoroughly examined and confirmed through testimony, corroborates Kelno’s direct involvement in medical experiments and his brutality as a doctor. The summation speeches of the two barristers are not outstandingly dramatic, but how could they be after the testimony of the witnesses? Highsmith tells the jury that Kelno was “not a madman, but an ordinary man in an insane situation” (QBVII, 491). By contrast, Bannister cites the immorality and inhumanity of Kelno’s actions, asserting that “anti-Semitism is the scourge of the human race” (QBVII, 495). Kelno has done nothing, he argues, to receive society’s compassion. He should be rewarded with nothing more than “the lowest coin of the realm” (QBVII, 495). Justice Gilray addresses the jury, and they leave to deliberate. Within ninety minutes, they return with a verdict in favor of Adam Kelno, but they award him damages of only a halfpenny. The novel ends with a brief follow-up with the characters and an even briefer communiqué reporting that Cady’s son has been killed in the Six-Day War of June 1967.
One thing that the novel leaves out of the posttrial events is any parallel to Uris’s actions after his own libel trial. Dering won contemptuous damages of a halfpenny, the smallest amount possible, but also had to pay court costs for both sides. A year after the trial, Dering died of stomach cancer. His survivors still had an obligation to pay the court costs, but Uris chose not to burden Dering’s widow with the loss of her inheritance and did not press for payment. His victory had been moral, and that was enough. In the novel, there is no indication of a similar act by Cady.
Of Uris’s novels to that point, QB VII had the second-highest hardback sales, after Exodus, despite critical complaints about its predictable plot and cardboard, one-dimensional characters. But storytelling was its virtue, as a New York Times review emphasized: “Quicker than you can say Uris you are caught up at once in the unfolding conflict.”9 Others easily catalogued its faults, the largest being the dissolution of character, story, feeling, or idea into cliché. Martha Duffy called Uris’s style “illiterate shorthand.”10 The novel was neither social history nor literary art.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, also in the New York Times, was even less generous. The book, he writes, is very undemanding: “One can read it and simultaneously work out tables of actuarial statistics … or iron out the snags in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.”11 How did Uris manage to make so few demands on readers in five hundred pages? The key was to know the ending first, an approach attributed to the publisher David Shawcross in the novel. But doing so keeps Uris’s mind off the problems of language. And with his plot so carefully mapped out, Uris never needed to worry about his characters’ taking on independent lives. This careful plotting, however, is what makes popular fiction popular. According to Lehmann-Haupt, deciding on the ending first took the story away from the author, preventing him from letting real conflict emerge naturally: “Mr. Uris is always satisfied with what first came to mind, as well as with what probably never got there at all.” The final sentence of the review offers a particularly malicious verdict: “You can do anything you like while reading it. In fact, you needn’t even bother to read it at all.”
The novelist Larry McMurtry was equally caustic. In a review titled “Prose Isn’t the Worst of It,” he notes that although Uris was again number one on the best-seller list with QB VII, no one need respect his writing, which was “cheap.”12 He quotes passages that he labels crude and easy, but the prose was not the worst thing about the novel. The problem, he believes, was that Uris lost his nerve halfway through. For example, he slips in a Freudian flashback of Kelno witnessing a primal scene and wishing that he could castrate his father. This was not basic storytelling or suspense, but a simple device “to telegraph, crudely, the ending.” There was also an absence of memorable characters in the novel.
According to McMurtry, Uris relied on what “might be called the Radio Principle. He gives us names and voices and lets the reader’s imagination fill in the figures.” So why did the novel reach number one? “In brief, Jewish agony. He has the concentration camps to offer; he is an atrocity monger, the first of the Big Sellers to think of writing about laboratory castration.” QB VII laid to rest the view that the success of Love Story might have heralded a return to romantic conventions in popular fiction. Love Story was the convention. Now, instead of emotional masochism, as in Love Story, there was real sadism, as in Mickey Spillane. And, crucially, it was real sadism delivered in short paragraphs. McMurtry ends with this assessment: “If the Big Sellers have one thing in common, it is their commitment to the short paragraph, five sentences or under, three sentences whenever possible. … Unredeemed suffering is a difficult if not an impossible literary subject. Dostoevsky or Kafka might have brought it off. Uris just splashes the blood around.”
Nonetheless, QB VII caught the public’s attention, especially when it became one of the earliest (possibly the first) television miniseries. The cover of TV Guide (27 April–3 May 1974) pictured the courtroom scene from the series. The six-hour movie, then the longest in television history, further increased sales of the novel. The cast included Ben Gazzara, Anthony Hopkins, Leslie Caron, and Lee Remick. The drama ran on two nights, Monday and Tuesday, 29–30 April 1974, three hours each night. The show had an immense viewership, although a speech by Richard Nixon about Watergate (preparatory to handing over transcripts to a congressional committee) on Monday night, 29 April, delayed the broadcast by forty minutes.13 The show received thirteen Emmy nominations, including ones for best script, best music, and best dramatic special; it won six.14
Uris’s life had gradually reassembled itself. He had met and married Jill Peabody; QB VII was selling well. And now came a chance to return to his first love, the theatre. At the end of 1969, two young Broadway producers, Ken Gaston and Leonard Goldberg, became interested in Ari, Uris’s musical version of Exodus, and backed the show. Following a belated honeymoon trip to Israel, Cyprus, and Europe, partly to research the production, Uris and Jill returned in June 1970 to New York to attend rehearsals and work on the script. Walt Smith soon joined them.
Uris had always loved the theatre, hoping, from his youth, to be a dramatist. His productions in the marines had furthered that desire. Although his career as a novelist and screenwriter flourished, he still wished for a Broadway success. As he said in a late interview: “The stage is to me the ultimate form of writing … On the stage, it’s from this mouth to that ear, and there’s very little room for movement.”15 In a novel, he could “put a million men on a battlefield,” but in drama, “it’s still the playwright’s words, and I find this is a challenge that I can’t let go by.” Ari was his chance to show others he could write for the stage.
Before rehearsals were to begin that August, Uris and Jill vacationed for a few days at Gurney’s Inn on Montauk, Long Island, where sand dunes surrounded the resort. But Jill was seriously injured when she was thrown from a beach buggy that overturned. She was rushed to a hospital in Port Jefferson with a fractured skull and required emergency brain surgery. She lay in a coma for several days. Uris moved into a nearby motel to monitor her recovery; he saw this episode as another case in which his singular will would help beat the odds. He had written about this on a historical scale in Exodus and Mila 18, but he was now experiencing it personally. And after weeks of recovery, Jill held the first copy of QB VII in her hospital bed, clasping the author photo to her cheek and saying, “So much love!” (quoted in ITB, 284). Within eighteen months, she was fully and vibrantly recovered.
Uris understood their uniqueness: “Jill and I are unusual in that we are two people who literally owe each other our lives,” he remarked in 1984.16 In 1989, he elaborated: “We were two people who were very badly hurt and we saved each other…. We’re both people who crave affection, and crave giving affection and we caught each other at the right moment.”17 He also angrily sued Gurney’s Inn for being at fault in the accident and won a $250,000 settlement.
This near tragedy following on the suicide of his second wife welded the couple together. His first marriage of twenty-three years had had rocky periods and long separations. He later claimed that the trouble had been nobody’s fault and that the bitterness had faded, “but when I was just coming up as a writer, I don’t know if anybody could have handled me. It was impossible to get through to me, and too traumatic for her [Betty], with too many difficult decisions to make and crazy places to travel to.”18 Jill, however, respected Uris’s work ethic: “Photography is my minor, the writer is my major” (ITB, 285).
After some six weeks of recovery, a period when Uris was going back and forth to New York, since Ari was in rehearsal, Jill was able to join Uris in Philadelphia for tryouts. But the play was running into financial difficulties, and Uris requested and received a $50,000 advance from Doubleday to meet expenses. Early critics were not friendly, the Philadelphia Inquirer calling Ari “a potboiler of a musical” and noting that “the harder it tries, the less it succeeds.”19 As a writer, Uris did “not let a cliché disturb his serene confidence in the yarn.” The Philadelphia Bulletin observed that Ari had “a still life quality that pins the show to the stage and keeps it from becoming the epic musical it would like to be.”20 Characters spoke in “watered down epigrams, as though hoping for some passing stone mason to whip out his chisel and record every word for posterity.” The overall treatment of the romantic and dramatic scenes was more in the style of an operetta, with “snapshot-like action” alternating with “heavy exposition and unclear story line.”
A tryout in Washington preceded its New York opening on 15 January 1971, which also received harsh reviews. Clive Barnes in the New York Times wrote that it could be “praised more easily for its aspirations than its achievements.”21 The error seemed to be in Uris’s writing. He tried to write both the book and the lyrics for the musical, tasks that at this point in his career he was temperamentally unsuited for. A musical demands a clear and direct style, which Ari lacked; a novel, with its large canvas, can be diffuse and digressive and yet succeed. The caustic review also noted that there was not a single showstopper tune—which might have been a good thing, for Ari “does seem the kind of show that once stopped would have difficulty in getting started again.”
Nevertheless, nearly forty of Uris’s friends came from Aspen for opening night, ending the evening at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center for a party. But the negative reviews forced Ari (directed by Lucia Victor and starring David Cryer as Ari) to close after nineteen performances. Although Uris’s dream of theatrical success was shattered, he did not give up his love of the theatre. In later years, he hoped to revive Ari and would later attempt to write a stage version of his novel Trinity. He still believed that the theatre was “the ultimate form of writing” because it relied more on language and action than narrative.22
With Ari closed and Jill still fragile, Uris needed new work. His first thought after QB VII was a short novel (initially on the theme of the Jewish heroes of Masada), but he revised this into a major effort, first referred to as his “Russian novel.” Ken McCormick told Uris’s British publisher, William Kimber, that the proposed novel lacked a plot, but Uris was planning an elaborate research trip related to the project.23 And he wouldn’t do so if he didn’t know that he had a story line. To his peers at Doubleday in September 1971, McCormick wrote that Uris’s Russian novel was taking shape but would not be short: “This growing enthusiasm makes me very optimistic because, as you know, he is not a shoot-from-the hip man when it comes to his own books and tends to down-play his ideas until he is sure of them. He is beginning to be very sure of the Russian book.”24
Uris, however, needed help. And in a letter to the chief of military history at the Department of Army, he requested source materials dealing with the activities of the U.S. armed forces in the Vienna area in 1945–1946. A reply said that limited staff could conduct only a brief research foray and that only unclassified records would be made available—and only in their office at the Washington National Records Center.25
Uris was insulted. He made this clear in a reply, first characterizing the help he had received, “in conjunction with my writing,” over the past two decades as unlimited cooperation from all branches of the military.26 He claimed to have been offered the post of “Marine Corps Historian”—an undocumented assertion. In full dudgeon, he imperiously ordered Colonel Fechtman to “rectify this situation immediately” by assigning him a competent historian or researcher “who will be at my service as I need.” If the matter was not attended to promptly—he would be leaving the country on 26 September—“I will take the matter up with a member of the White House Staff, who is a personal advisor to the President and see that this comes to the attention of Mr. Nixon.” No action on either side appears to have occurred, despite Uris’s characteristically belligerent tone.
Not known for his graciousness, Uris at this time surprised Ken McCormick by writing to thank him for his support in the battle with Kimber to publish QB VII.27 Uris admitted that he felt badly about the “few unkind cuts” he had made at McCormick: “I think you ought to know that next to Jill, you have been the strongest influence on the continuation of my career.” He then reported that his current project, the “Russian novel,” was giving him a hard time: “It took me a long time to lose my ‘youthful’ idealism and knowing I can do little any more about the agony of man is dejecting to my spirit.” He would try to locate some inner peace, admittedly not his forte, by writing his new book.
Uris and Jill were to begin their research trip with a stop in Sweden: he wanted to see a mining operation north of the Arctic Circle. However, a motorcycle accident in Aspen in September delayed the trip by a week. Even after his leg was out of a cast, he needed some therapy before he could undertake the journey. McCormick told Doubleday’s Swedish agent that Uris wanted to stay in the Grand Hotel, the best, and also to see travelogue films depicting folk festivals, summer resorts, and the aurora borealis.28 After arriving in Sweden, Uris went to the north to visit the mines and to meet with the head of the Jewish refugee society in order to learn details and information about Jewish exiles. He also planned to go to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Uris’s trip involved a great deal of planning, and he was happy to have McCormick make all the arrangements, beginning with a book order for Nagel’s Encyclopedia-Guide: USSR and Arnold Fletcher’s Afghanistan: Highway of Conquest. McCormick then wrote to the U.S. ambassadors of the countries Uris planned to visit, asking for support. He also wrote to the Ministry of Information in each country. In his letter to the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan, McCormick explained that Uris “depends heavily on accuracy. When he describes a scene or creates a character you believe in the place or man…. One thing that separates Mr. Uris from many other writers is his scrupulous respect for fact and that he never misrepresents.”29
Covering all his bases, Uris even asked McCormick to write to the Chinese ambassador to Canada (the United States had no formal relations with China at the time) and ask for permission for Uris to travel to China. McCormick explained to the ambassador that “the role of the novelist in America is a strong one, particularly where he is writing with a basis of fact.”30 He continued: “People who otherwise find themselves ideologically uninterested are drawn out and educated by the role of the intelligent novelist,” revealing how Uris’s editor conceived of his writer’s work.
A week before this note, McCormick had recorded a phone conversation with Uris, who talked about the new novel this way: “There is a balance of good and evil in man as there is a balance in nature. The main character is good but capable of evil. It is an ecological war waged on a psychological level. When expanded to a nation, it can be catastrophic.”31
As with his other novels, Uris had to see and experience the world he was to write about, in this case the Soviet-Afghanistan connection, understood as part of his proposed story about exiled Russian Jews. Uris was also not bashful about contacting experts. Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, for example, provided a mass of detail about life in Vienna during the last hundred days of the Second World War.32 As McCormick explained to Sam Vaughan, another Doubleday editor, “Uris is hot and that’s what excites me because this was what was going on when he finally saw where he wanted to go on QB VII.”33
In a prearrival note regarding Uris’s stop in Australia, which was also on his itinerary, Paul Feffer, a publisher’s exporter, explained to his Australian counterpart that Uris was writing a novel “about a man who flees Sweden and in seeking refugee [status] goes from Scandinavia to Afghanistan to Pakistan, down to Australia and finally settles in New Zealand.”34 Feffer then explained that “for Mr. Uris to feel he has authenticity in what he is writing, he wants to spend some time in each of the countries that the fictional character supposedly traverses.” John Sargent, an executive at Doubleday, summarized the plot to Ken McCormick as being “about a character in 1939 who is on the lam from Sweden.”35
At one point in the planning, Uris thought he would be going through India. McCormick wrote ahead to the consul general of India, explaining that Uris was “always interested in accuracy” and was “a friendly witness” who would “write with an eye to fairly representing what he sees. You can trust him.”36 It is a revealing remark, emphasizing Uris’s attributes as a writer.
On 11 November 1971 from Kabul, his stop after Sweden, Uris wrote to McCormick, “This trip is pure gold as far as research and background for the novel is concerned.”37 Before Uris’s arrival, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Robert Neumann, made it clear to McCormick, however, that “Mr. Uris is something of a controversial personality in Afgh. because of strong feelings aroused by his book Exodus in this Moslem and quite pro-Arab country. However, that is more than sometime ago and I do not anticipate any great difficulties.”38 In Kabul, where he stayed at the International Hotel, his host was a Professor Kahar from Kabul University, who met him at the airport on 23 October 1971 with a car and driver. Uris loved it.
Pakistan was the next stop. Uris hoped to meet people familiar with the 1939 period, especially regarding the Jewish community of Karachi. He began in Peshawar and then wanted to drive to Karachi. After that, Australia and then New Zealand, where McCormick, writing ahead, told a G. S. Bryant that “Mr. Uris is a man who does not believe writing fiction about things he doesn’t know first-hand.”39 Uris was expected to arrive on 14 November.
Meanwhile, Jill was having something of a revelation in Ireland. While Uris was traveling across Asia, Jill visited her sister and brother-in-law in London (Afghanistan and Pakistan were considered too rugged for her still-fragile condition). She then went to Ireland for five days with her stepsister and brother-in-law, visiting Counties Kerry, Galway, and Clare. She stayed on for a couple of extra days by herself, and was quite taken with the country and its photographic possibilities. Her letter to Uris expressing her enthusiasm and suggesting he visit prompted the idea of a possible new subject.40
Uris later said he discovered Ireland in Afghanistan. He had been traveling with his son Mike, “who had long hair and a bag of tofu draped around his shoulders, and wore sandals,” when he received Jill’s letter.41 Dramatizing only slightly, Uris claimed to be looking over the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan for a possible “underground railroad story” when he got her “report.” “This is the place,” she told him, and “in Kabul is where I discovered Dublin,” he claimed.
Reunited with Jill back in Aspen after his adventures in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Uris considered his options for his story. But first was skiing. He had won an apprentice ski instructor’s pin from the Fred Iselin Ski School clinic in April 1969. He now took up the sport again with new enthusiasm. He also developed a fervent interest in the Denver Broncos football team, attending many games with his friend Charles Goldberg of Denver. For a time, Uris and Jill owned a condominium in Denver. In Aspen, Uris would often rent a room at the Holiday Inn at the base of Buttermilk Mountain so that he could watch the Broncos on cable television. The jacket photo of Uris for Mitla Pass shows him in a Denver Broncos cap.
Uris had to get on with a new project for financial reasons as well as to satisfy his psychological need to prove his talent once again. By Easter 1972, an Irish trip had been arranged, sponsored by the Irish government and tourist board. David Hanley, a writer, became Uris and Jill’s tour guide. They started in Dublin, staying at the Shelbourne Hotel, and traveled to Galway for an Easter Sunday memorial service in a graveyard that Jill photographed in the rain. The next day was sunny, and they went to Belfast for an Easter Monday Protestant rally. The trip lasted less than a week, Jill photographing as they traveled. On their return, they stopped in New York, where they showed her photos and some notes by Uris to Oscar Dystel of Bantam Books. Jill said she had started out doing photographs for a magazine piece, but when the publisher saw them, he was excited and interested in doing a book—if she could get a decent writer. The writer was present. Uris quickly understood that this was an opportunity to narrate and absorb Irish history as well as to promote Jill’s career. He could also then integrate his notes into a novel almost simultaneously. Dystel offered them a contract for a photo book on the spot. It would be her first book; until then, her photos had appeared only in the Aspen Daily News. Uris also began to see real possibilities for a novel.42
In May 1972, they returned to Ireland, renting an apartment in Rathgar, the Dublin suburb where James Joyce was born, from Kevin and Ray Diffley, who became close friends. The apartment later became the setting for a scene in Trinity. Their chief researcher and assistant was Geraldine Kelly, who also organized their travels. She had previously been an archeologist. She scheduled photo shoots, gathered information, and arranged interviews for Uris with Irish Republican Army members. They stayed approximately nine months, until January 1973. On their return to Aspen, Jill printed the black-and-white photos, working closely with Uris on the text. Diane Eagle, Uris’s assistant, did most of the research for what would become Ireland: A Terrible Beauty and for Trinity. Uris worked on both books at the same time, but completed Ireland: A Terrible Beauty (dedicated to Oscar Dystel, Ken McCormick, and John Sargent) before the novel. Afghanistan and the “Russian novel” disappeared before the sectarian violence and rich history of Ireland (for details, see ITB, 286–286).
Jill had become increasingly more important to Uris. With her, there was a meeting of minds. Her photography and creativity and her willingness to help Uris made it possible for him, through mutual encouragement and curiosity, to pursue new ideas and possibilities. She had aided him in completing QB VII, which he dedicated to her; she became his partner on Ireland: A Terrible Beauty (1975) and Jerusalem: Song of Songs (1981). Working with someone this closely was something new for him. He was proud of her and her beauty (although sometimes chauvinistically so, calling attention to her short skirts or figure) and constantly encouraged her in her projects. His connection to her differed from his union with either Betty or Margery. With the former, he had built a family and a writing career. With the latter, he had had little time to build much of anything except an appreciation for her good looks. With Jill, he built a new identity, resulting in another major triumph, one that brought renewed worldwide attention to his work: Trinity.