I’m over 70 now. I don’t know how many 800-page novels I have left.
—LEON URIS, 1996
HIS TRIP TO EASTERN EUROPE rekindled Uris’s writerly identity and sense of self-importance. Ambassadors, ministers, fans, and the press had turned out to greet him. Given the personal difficulties he was facing at home, it was reassuring for his image and ego to receive the attention he found in Finland, the USSR, Poland, and Hungary. He was seen throughout Eastern Europe as a writer of importance who had revived the Jewish identities of hundreds of thousands. His confidence returned, and he identified himself as a Jewish Hemingway. Shortly after he returned, he told an interviewer: “I am mainly a man’s writer. I write about war, violence, sex … the type of things that men like to read about.”1 He drove the point home: “None of my books can be called a woman’s book. I do think that my female characters are getting better. In the beginning, women weren’t a strong part of my writing.” In Mitla Pass, the character of Ben-Gurion makes this into a joke, telling his adviser Jacob Herzog that “we are entitled to a poor man’s Hemingway” when permitting the writer Gideon Zadok to join the Lion Battalion: “God knows he doesn’t write like Hemingway, but I hear he drinks as well” (MP, 9).
Uris returned to New York at the beginning of November 1989 rejuvenated and ready to write, although he needed cash. He decided to try the lecture circuit, giving talks about his Soviet adventures for Jewish organizations in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. He was eager to restart his writing, although his first effort was as unexpected as it was unplanned: a children’s story, the first he had attempted.
The story is set on Shelter Island, where Uris had gradually been spending more and more time. He rented a house owned by Ralph Kast on North Ferry Road for $25,000 a year, but soon bought it. The small, modern, three-bedroom home had a study for Uris upstairs in the back, facing Chase Creek. A small dock led to his boat, Kitty’s Wake. This became the setting for “Secrets of Forever Island,” a barely disguised allegory of his children’s time at Shelter Island. It grew out of long letters to Rachael and Conor, which were filled with stories he made up.
Channing Thieme was to illustrate the work. Uris had met her in 1989, and by the early nineties, she had become a vital part of his life. She saw the film Exodus at thirteen and learned the song by heart to play on the piano. In her early twenties, she decided to read the novel, and it awakened her to the horrors of the Holocaust. She then went on to read everything Uris wrote. At dinner parties in the 1970s, when playfully answering the question of whom would she like to have dinner with, her first response was always “Leon Uris.” In the late 1980s, she read The Haj, and on a whim she wrote to Uris, offering to do a pencil portrait in gratitude for his books. She and her then husband were planning a visit to Aspen, and she wrote to him there.2
Some months later she received a phone call from Priscilla Higham, Uris’s assistant. He wanted to speak to her, and he got on the line to tell her how amusing he found her sample sketch: a drawing of the back of her head holding a pencil. Uris, by then in New York, agreed to meet her, and what had been scheduled as a two-hour meeting lasted for six. Soon to be divorced, she found in the intense, exciting Uris a natural friend. She took a series of photographs at their first session, and a wonderful pencil portrait of Uris emerged, which he admired. They remained friends for a year or so, and then for the next four enjoyed a relationship described as very great when it was great (more than 80 percent of the time) and very bad when it was bad. Although she never moved in with him, she did visit him almost every other week in New York—Boston was her home—and spent long periods with him on Shelter Island. She also became very close with Uris’s young children, Conor (four) and Rachael (six). Her own two sons also became part of the extended group, all six traveling at one point to Cancun.3
Once Uris had the idea of a storybook, he enlisted Channing to illustrate the semiallegorical adventures. Lengthy and often hilarious phone calls took place between the two as Uris outlined the arabesque-like plot to Channing. She would then fax drawings to him to illustrate the adventures, something new for her, since she was essentially a portrait artist.4
Channing found the time with Uris stimulating, partly because he had such a high regard for her art. He constantly encouraged her and often had articles and essays for her to read when she arrived at his New York apartment. His intensity was unavoidable and magnetic, and he had a way of looking right through you, into the depths, she said. He also loved to be shocking, although he was reluctant to do so. And even in New York, he was recognized on the street, which was both a bother and a compliment. One night at the end of a meal at a Long Island restaurant, the entire kitchen staff came out to greet him.5
In “Secrets of Forever Island,” Uris is Barnaby Appleseed who had recently moved from Colorado to New York and who wrote “books about war, injustice, tyranny and other miserable subjects because some one had to … let people know these things existed” (“SFI,” 1). Atty and Luke are his children. Their adventures during the summer and on vacation make up the bulk of the text, and they are aided by several fantasy machines, such as a fancy car with an “Automatic Trip-Tracker” (like a GPS) and voice-activated directions. Following their first and not entirely happy summer in Manhattan, the children return for a trip to Forever Island, Uris’s Shelter Island home.
Forever Island is special because it encourages people to be what they want to be. But it is also a world of temptation, and in Chapter 2, the children disobey their father and cross the bridge onto the Orange Trail, where they are captured. Uris employs a simple style that is strong on imagery and supported by his characteristic sense of detail. Action, however, trumps character, and the work thins out as the story progresses and the children explore the green part of the island, Peekaboo Preserve, a wildlife sanctuary. Kitty’s Wake, Uris’s small motorboat, is rechristened Rosebud in the story, and Chase Creek becomes Izzupada creek. And the animals talk to the children.
But danger lurks, and escape from a water buffalo occurs only after Atty and Luke find the courage to punch the buffalo in the nose. They return to their father and tell him the truth about their adventure, but he doesn’t believe them. They are grounded but soon meet a friendly, “effervescent” swan, Ernestine, from the Isle of Primavera. Other figures appear, like One-Note Rodman, the singing pirate; Mr. Beachfront, a real estate agent; and Angelo Crescendo, who owned an Italian grocery and gas station. The secretary of the yacht club is F. Liberty Endeavor III. Uris is remarkably playful with the characters but not his lesson: the importance of always telling the truth (“SFI,” 30).
Later adventures include a hurricane that threatens the island, and a performance of Swan Lake in San Francisco in which Ernestine has to substitute for the principal dancer. There is also a battle with a group of outlawed mosquitoes in Jordan Springs, Colorado. The story ends with the children arriving for another summer at Forever Island and learning that their father has finished a new “war and justice novel” but is now thinking of writing a “mature kid’s novel” about a brother and sister whose parents are divorced but who get to visit their father on an enchanted island (“SFI,” 99).
The writing in “Secrets of Forever Island” is simple and affectionate. Details like the Grapefruit Blossom ferry, commanded by a female pirate, capture reader interest. Even the comments on divorce in the story are gentle, emphasizing that both parents love the children so much that they feel thankful. There is a wistful moment when the children, misled by parental affection, contemplate the parents reuniting—what “all divorced kids dream about. But if it happened, they’d just be unhappy again. Both of them are happy now” (“SFI,” 90).
“Secrets of Forever Island” projects Uris’s own self-image in the early nineties, a figure who enjoys the isolation and peace of Forever Island. It is a place to feel good, where difficult times become easier to endure. He also portrays himself writing, talking out both the male and female parts of a story (“SFI,” 22). The illustrations by Channing are natural and lively, reflecting the fanciful and imaginative text, an example of what Uris could do when freed from fact. The book was an interlude from his other writing obligations, but it remained unpublished, despite the efforts of his new agent, Nancy Stauffer. The problem was how to identify its target audience. Editors could not determine whether it was for six- or sixteen-year-olds, and Uris was typically reluctant to alter any part of the text.
Despite his residences in New York and Shelter Island, Uris missed Aspen, and on two or three occasions he took Channing there to see the area. Once, they even went to look after Rachael and Conor. During this period, there were also important moments of recognition for Uris. The first took place in New York at a literary-awards dinner when James Michener presented Uris with an honor. Michener paid him a supreme compliment when he said that after Trinity, it would be impossible for him to write about Ireland because Uris had done it so well. Washington, D.C., was the site of the second event. At an evening ceremony for the 150th anniversary of B’nai B’rith, held at the Jefferson Memorial, President Bill Clinton introduced Uris, the featured speaker. Uris was deeply honored. Mrs. Clinton—as well as Channing—was also present.
At the ceremony, Uris addressed the question of life on the Lower East Side of New York. His remarks reflected his current interest in immigration, which would become a key theme in Redemption. More than a thousand people attended the Havdalah service, which marks the end of the Jewish Sabbath, at the Jefferson Memorial. In a comic footnote to the event, after the pageantry and ceremony, Uris and Channing could not get a ride back to their hotel. They had taken a cab and did not realize there would be no cabs available when they needed to return. They had to flag down a bus and join a surprised group of travelers. The next day, they had a private tour of the U.S. Holocaust Museum from the director, who told Uris that his books were a catalyst in the drive to establish the institution.
In 1990, Uris replaced his longtime lawyer and business manager, Herb Schlosberg, with Michael Remer, a New York attorney, and hired Nancy Stauffer as his literary agent. She was the former director of foreign rights at Doubleday. In April 1990, he became upset over layoffs as Doubleday dismissed editors and marketing people who had aided various best-selling writers. The beleaguered publisher was under pressure from Bertelsmann, its corporate boss, which was disappointed in the U.S. bottom line—in 1989, Doubleday supposedly lost $5 million–6 million.6 Stephen Rubin soon replaced Nancy Evans as president, and Uris and others publicly expressed their unhappiness with changes at the company. Uris was particularly upset at the dismissal of Joan Ward, an administrative assistant to Harry Gollob, a senior vice president and editor at large who worked with Uris after Sam Vaughan moved on. Ward had worked with Uris for twenty-four years as an assistant and adviser to his editors and publisher.
Uris’s status with his publisher, however, created its own problems, because there were sizeable time gaps between the publication of his works. There were eight years between Trinity (1976) and The Haj (1984). Four years later, Mitla Pass appeared (1988), and seven years later, Redemption (1995). A God in Ruins was published in 1999, and O’Hara’s Choice appeared posthumously in 2003. These lengthy breaks meant publishers were hesitant to offer large advances: Uris’s ability to deliver became uncertain, and his sales were uneven.
For Uris, this was a period of both renewal and strain. His divorce, the trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the attempt to write a theatrical version of Trinity overtook his obligation to complete a new novel for Doubleday. Distracted from immediate work, he concentrated on Broadway, his children’s story, and also a possible screenplay of Mila 18, while considering potential new subjects for his fiction. But finally, and perhaps in desperation—the children’s book could not find a publisher, the Trinity play failed, and the movie version of Mila 18 collapsed—he turned to a sequel to Trinity. His work on the play probably renewed his interest in Ireland as well as the possibility of revisiting the novel. Trinity provided the spark for a new story, appropriately titled, given its personal connotations, Redemption.
His life now mixed self-promotion with an effort to write. He lived mostly on Shelter Island, having given up the New York apartment, and found new momentum in preparing what would become Redemption. His relationship with Channing Thieme continued, although it began to hit a few snags: he was hesitant about any permanent association, and she maintained her independence. Two new research assistants—Jeanne Sillay Jacobson and Jeanne Randall—replaced Priscilla Higham, and they would be followed by a third, a Shelter Island resident, Marilynn Pysher, who worked with him on his last two novels, A God in Ruins and O’Hara’s Choice. Fees for lectures supplemented a dwindling income, although declining health limited his productivity. By the time he was writing his last novel, his eldest son, Mark, assisted in providing both physical comfort and literary advice. But while working on his new project, originally called Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: An Irish Novel, Uris continued to speak out on Jewish matters.7
For his seventieth birthday party, held at Shelter Island, Channing Thieme organized a lively affair that was attended by Michael Neiditch, Michael Remer, neighbors, and a former New York Jets football player. The group of twenty-five or so enjoyed the “roast,” which comically exposed Uris’s foibles. But despite his youthful manner, Uris was not aging well: he was becoming overweight and suffering from the ingestion of excess alcohol and occasionally soft drugs. He turned to such remedies as Rolfing (a system of soft-tissue manipulation intended to align the body), although he did not follow a diet or even eat proper meals. A housekeeper came one day a week to cook for him, but he preferred packaged, frozen food. He also did little reading, nothing more than newspapers, and watched television. The only books on display, as was the case in his New York apartment, were ones he had written.
Rachael and Conor continued to visit, and he installed an intricate jungle gym for them, as well as a swimming pool. He also hired a captain for his small boat to guide the children about the island. They also loved Channing and enjoyed being with her when she visited.
In preparing his new novel, he again relied on research assistants, as he had done throughout his career. For Redemption, he had two, and they did everything from locate source material and confirm details to provide summaries of the story and characters as it proceeded so that duplication could be avoided. Uris loved doing research and would spread books, maps, letters, and even ledgers around his second-floor study as he wrote. His models, he later told another researcher, Marilynn Pysher, were the military campaign books that outlined detailed plans before a battle. Preparedness was everything: it would determine whether you won or lost—or in Uris’s case, whether you had a best seller.
Uris called Redemption “an unplanned pregnancy.” He did not initially anticipate a sequel to Trinity, but a question emerged: what happened after the end of that novel, which covered only the years 1885–1912? The Easter Rebellion was no more than a postscript, but as time passed, Uris realized he had not done justice to the uprising, which “was the beginning of the end of colonialism.”8 He began to draw a parallel between the impact of this “small uprising” and that of the Warsaw Ghetto, noting that the meaning of the Easter Rebellion came to him only years after Trinity. He wanted to present the uprising more clearly and reengage with the same characters, not so much from a historical perspective, “but as they related to each other.”9
As he worked on Redemption, he consulted multiple drafts of his stage version of Trinity. Working intently on the play, which had two elaborate readings in New York in anticipation of a Broadway production, had renewed Uris’s interest in the characters from the novel and the possibility of another epic account.
The setting for Redemption is New Zealand, not Ireland, although the novel extends the story line from the earlier book. The book opens in 1895 as Irish immigrants sail to New Zealand, courses back to Ireland, and then moves on to the outbreak of the First World War. It ends in 1916, first with a postscript on the Easter Rebellion, delivered by his character Theobald Fitzpatrick (son of Atty and Desmond Fitzpatrick), and then a final section on Roger Casement and treason, set in August 1916. Historical figures appear or play a role—notably the young Winston Churchill, Arthur Griffiths, and Prime Minister Herbert Asquith—as well as a cast of characters from Trinity. The Gallipoli campaign is one of several historical events presented in the story, and Uris treats it empathetically. He also cites incidents and battles in Cairo, Dublin, and Belfast. Such a mix of the historical and fictional was now a Uris trademark.
Redemption became his first novel written for HarperCollins. After years with Doubleday, Uris found the publisher unwilling to postpone his contractual obligations, because of his persistent involvement with the proposed Broadway production of Trinity. He broke with them unforgivingly, defending his actions as a response to their new bottom-line attitude, the reshuffling of senior editors, and the new sense of corporate oversight exercised by their German owners, Bertelsmann.10 HarperCollins, by contrast, was eager to publish Uris, seeing him still as a bankable popular writer. It expected large sales of Redemption, which was given a marketing budget in excess of $200,000 and a print run of 350,000 copies, partly based on the assumption that the novel would become a Literary Guild selection.11 As a gesture to his youngest children, Uris dedicated the book to Rachael and Conor, “with love from Daddy.”
Sections of Redemption expand on particulars in Trinity. For example, details on Jean Tijou, the late seventeenth-century French Huguenot ironworker who designed the great screen at Hubble Manor, were fleshed out in Redemption. His presence signals that Uris gave attention to artists, as well as to politicians and rebels, in the novel. Tijou arrived in England around 1689 when William and Mary, his lifelong patrons, began their reign. His notable gates and railings adorn the grounds of Hampton Court (1689–1700), and he fashioned the screens and grilles of St. Paul’s Cathedral for Sir Christopher Wren.12 Uris transposes Tijou’s work to Ireland, where, in Redemption, it is treated as inspired art (RD, 152).
“Research to me is as important or more important than the writing,” Uris said just before Redemption appeared.13 The comment is apt because it identifies his skill but also his weakness. His earlier novels established their authority through such detail, but it generally stayed subordinate to character and drama. This is clear in Exodus, Mila 18, and Trinity. But with Redemption and The Haj, his research dominated character, narrative, and plot. And at 827 pages and ninety-one chapters, Redemption is Uris’s longest work. Its anticipated success, however, did not materialize, and he was caught again in a cycle of work and debt.
In Redemption, Uris offers a series of remarks about art and artists, something absent from his earlier writing except for Mitla Pass. Characters discourse on the theatre, the logic of art, and, quoting Uris in an interview, the importance of the “curtain line.” Ironically, Seamus O’Neill, a childhood friend of Conor’s and now a journalist, gets a lesson from Conor on writing. Essentially, Conor tells him that he has to know where he is going and that there has to be a logic to his art. In addition, he needed to know his “curtain line,” what the dramatists call the through-line in a play. Uris had made the same point in talking about novel writing to a Columbia University journalism student shortly after Mitla Pass appeared.14 Another passage repeats a favorite Uris expression, which appeared in Mitla Pass and in various interviews: “We all seem to spend the second half of our lives getting over the first half,” Georgia Norman, a nurse, tells young Rory Larkin (RD, 49). A variation of the line appears later in relation to a soldier’s experience (RD, 431).
Uris’s concern with art was not a surprise. Mitla Pass suggested some of this in Gideon’s discussions about becoming a writer and the motivations of his art. But there is always a high price. Caroline tells Conor in Redemption that “no man has ever taken on a greater work of art without paying a terrible price and creating terrible pain for those he loves the most” (RD, 190). In Redemption, the sacrifice demanded by art receives new prominence, a kind of self-conscious awareness of the surrender required, as well as the importance of aesthetics and artistic direction. Furthermore, references to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Shakespeare, and Cezanne in the novel allude to the theme of the inspired artist. The title of the novel might mean, indirectly, Uris’s acknowledgment or redemption of his sense of aesthetics and art, which he previously had consciously avoided. Earlier, he had distanced himself from the idea of the artist, preferring to be identified by the more workmanlike term “writer,” a kind of journeyman who accomplishes a task. But at this stage of his career, he seemed ready to accept, and seek, an identity as an artist.
Uris was also ready to acknowledge the ambiguities of art. Andrew Ingram, the Scottish schoolteacher, reminds Lady Caroline at the great screen in the Long Hall of Hubble Manor that while it may be a masterpiece by Tijou, it is also a symbol of oppression to Catholics (RD, 133). It was used as a prison, and almost five hundred women and children died of torture and hunger behind it. She responds, “That’s in the long past.” “There is no long past in Ireland,” he replies, articulating a historical thesis to which Uris had long subscribed (RD, 133).
Redemption dispenses with a logical chronology, which might be surprising given the numerous statements by characters about the validity of logic in art. Time shifts backward and forward, revisiting the past from different angles. Events in Trinity find expansion and development, as if Uris now wanted to take his time with the experience. He starts with dramatic suspense, opening with a memo from Winston Churchill in 1894 that seals his papers until 2050 (although they reappear in Chapter 34).
The novel proper opens in 1895 with the arrival in New Zealand of Liam Larkin, the outcast son of Tomas and the brother of Conor. We follow his adventures and successful marriage and rise to become owner of a sheep station, and a reference is made to a visit from Conor in 1904 during a period of exile from Ireland. There is also a reminder of Conor’s martyrdom in the raid against Lettershanbo Castle at the end of Trinity. At that point (RD, 341), Liam’s son Rory flees his father and goes off to fight in the First World War. He ends up at Gallipoli and, in one of many improbable coincidences, finds himself serving with Lady Caroline Hubble’s two sons. After the war, Rory makes his way to Ireland, where he joins forces with Lady Caroline to battle the British again and also undermines the efforts of the Protestant Orangemen to stamp out the Catholics. Uris’s sympathies for the republicans are again restated. Uris also continues to attack the British, showing the middle class and the Ulster aristocracy to be hypocritical and senseless; they order Anzacs (Australian and New Zealander soldiers) to their deaths at Gallipoli, destroy rural Irish villages, and pursue young boys in Hong Kong.
Big scenes interrupt the novel’s progression. Two of them are the rebuilding of the impressive Tijou screen at Hubble Manor and the Gallipoli campaign, one of Britain’s greatest military blunders in the First World War. Uris cannot resist the opportunity to dramatize crucial moments of personal or national history. Neither does he forget lines from the earlier novel that reinforce the nationalist cause. “The Brits have the guns and we have the words, and now the stage to shout them from,” Atty tells Jack Murphy early in Redemption (RD, 91). Uris also makes sure that the title is explained. Andrew Ingram, the Scottish teacher who educates Conor and Seamus, tells Lady Caroline that he must finally leave Ireland: redemption is “the greatest of all human qualities,” and he must redeem himself in Scotland (RD, 131). Furthermore, he explains to her that everything that happened in the past is with them in the present (RD, 133). Later in the novel, Lady Caroline hopes that “a redemption” might be possible between herself and her husband, whom she is disowning, and her sons (RD, 365).
Individual sections are definite successes, but the novel ends up being fragmented into parts that do not form a whole. The fight between Rory Larkin and the Australian boxing champ aboard ship is effective (RD, 418–420), as is the socially engaged life of Lady Caroline when she goes to London to run her father’s expanding shipbuilding empire in Belfast. A private meeting with Churchill in her office, which involves political blackmail, is especially dramatic (RD, 379–386). Similarly, a chapter set in Cairo, where the Anzac troops train and where pleasure and anger intermingle, exhibits convincing detail, another Uris hallmark. But stylistic fluency, seen most effectively in the dialogue, contrasts with the disjointed overall structure. Sections seem out of place or tacked on or thrown in to explain the historical past.
The recounting of the Battle of Gallipoli, 115 pages long, moves almost step-by-step through the briefings, errors, and deaths. Uris tells readers the locale is the site of ancient Troy and the Iliad, as well as of the Odyssey (RD, 567), but then vivid and graphic scenes of mayhem and death quickly replace history. Despite a British naval bombardment, the Turks decimate the Anzac force. Ill equipped or underequipped, the troops face a slow but steady slaughter; the description is supplemented by graphic details of a truce to recover bloated and bloodied bodies (RD, 620–621). The discovery of Rory Larkin’s identity by Christopher Hubble precedes his encounter with Dr. Calvin Norman, Georgia’s husband (RD, 630). Coincidence, once more, reigns, followed by insurrection as some of the leaders refuse to allow their men to be massacred (RD, 670). The blunders by the general staff lead to further deaths until the final evacuation order and the execution of an original plan to divert the Turks (RD, 679–680).
But jumps in the plot deflect the emotional intensity of the concluding Gallipoli section. What follows is, first, “A Retrospective on the Easter Rising of 1916,” written by the son of Atty and Desmond Fitzpatrick; it is essentially an account of the nationwide wake held for Conor Larkin. Then comes a condensed history of Ireland, leading to the drive for independence and the introduction of Sir Roger Casement and his secret plans to gain money from America and arms from Germany. Easter Monday, in April 1916, then receives the treatment it did not get in Trinity, as Uris details the unprepared Home Army’s determination to face down British authority, including the seizure of the General Post Office. The deaths of the arrested leaders follow.
The fifth and final part of the novel shifts supposedly to Roger Casement’s treason (Chapter 87 dramatizes his imprisonment and hanging), but it is a pretext for the characters to take revenge on General Brodhead, who was sent to pacify Ireland after bungling the fight for Gallipoli. Rory Larkin, living in Dublin and honored with the Victoria Cross, joins Brodhead’s staff, although his Larkin roots lead him to play a new role. With the help of Lady Caroline, he plots to kill the incompetent general, who was responsible for the deaths of Lady Caroline’s two sons in battle. Here, content and character are again in conflict, creating an extra plot twist that acts more as a postscript than a conclusion to the novel. In a prolonged chapter, the general meets his end with the assistance of Rory Larkin. A chapter in which Lady Caroline confronts Churchill with the mistakes of the preceding decade lends a political, even if not historical, stamp to the book—and confirms Churchill’s aid in expunging evidence of Rory’s presence in Ireland and ensuring his return to New Zealand, which the final chapter rather sentimentally sums up.
Response to Redemption was surprisingly modest; the Uris formula of history and grand romance seemed to be losing its appeal. The confusing plot and lack of focus led one critic wittily to declare that with its contrivances, digressions, and shifting time lines, Redemption “resembles the Irish countryside—full of twists and turns, replete with bogs and quagmires.”15 Other critics treated the book as just another Uris blockbuster with history rather than character as the central subject. Exaggeration from the Associated Press—“Uris is to the twentieth century what Charles Dickens was to the nineteenth”—did little to boost sales. Ireland again? Critics felt Uris had done that better in Trinity and that the new novel was just a recycling of earlier material. Nevertheless, Redemption debuted on 2 July 1995 at number twelve on the New York Times best-seller list, but within two weeks it fell to fourteenth, and by the end of the month it was gone. Competition included The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller and The Rainmaker by John Grisham. However, the appearance of Redemption as a mass-market paperback in May 1996, where Uris traditionally had strong sales, saw its numbers soar. Hardback sales were 167,000, but nearly 400,000 copies of the paperback were sold (although 700,000 copies were shipped).16 Respectable but, for Uris, disappointing numbers.
Uris was unsure of his next step. He had by now given up his New York apartment and was spending most of his time on Shelter Island, becoming more reclusive than social. Only a small circle of nonliterary friends formed his network; his relationship with Channing Thieme had unraveled by late August 1994. He then invited Ray Diffley, the former wife of his Irish friend, to join him, but she declined. Difficult relations with his older children, who rarely if ever visited him, continued. Mark Uris described his father at one point as a “one way street”: he made the rules and you agreed or not.17 And if not, you were out. He could not understand or even accept other peoples’ weaknesses. His younger children came for their summer vacations, but as they grew older, they became anxious at his quick-tempered behavior. He did, however, turn up unexpectedly at Rachael’s bat mitzvah in Aspen but had health difficulties because of the high altitude. He took little action to resolve them, which upset Mark and his wife, Pat, a nurse.18
The paradoxes of Uris’s character became more apparent as he grew older. He could be gracious or mean. He would repay those who helped him generously, but act frugally toward those closest to him. He had a temper and angered quickly. For over a year, he and his son Mark did not talk. However, as he grew more infirm, Uris tried to make amends, calling each of the children to say good-bye as his health declined. “I think I’m checking out tonight” was how he started the conversation with one of his children.19 Many demons plagued him, according to his New York literary agent, beginning with his father, who had always seemed to compete with him and whom he could never satisfy.20 Other demons included the memory of his failed marriages and his lack of respect from the literary establishment, which he, of course, despised.
Even Uris’s Judaism was contradictory. He did not celebrate the Jewish holidays and was nonpracticing, yet he accepted the pedestal Jews put him on and used it. And while he had a wide readership and received plenty of popular attention, he never won a major literary prize, which angered him. He wanted to be the center of attention, but found himself shunned by critics and the literati. On one hand, he felt in competition with this group and those historical novelists taken seriously, like Gore Vidal, but, on the other, he rejected their company and society. Even though his signature gestures, notably travel and research, became dormant in the last few years of his life, politics continued to interest him, as did his favored Denver Broncos football team.
Uris soon began to pay more attention to what he saw as the social and political deterioration of the United States, becoming increasingly concerned about its future. Though a patriot, he had, since adolescence, hesitated to acknowledge the existence of oppression in his country. Approached by blacks and women to address such issues, he refused, explaining in a colorful phrase to his son Mark that “you don’t shit in your own backyard.”21 But anxiety over the state of America led to his first novel to be set in the United States, A God in Ruins. The novel, he predicted, would create a reaction in the country because of its dire forecast of violence and upheaval.
A God in Ruins (1999) deals with a presidential election in 2008 in which an Irish candidate for the presidency discovers he is, in fact, Jewish—a fantasy Uris had long nurtured. To him, all Irishmen were Jews, echoing some fanciful eighteenth-century histories of Ireland (the Irish were supposedly a lost tribe of Israel). This discovery is set in a plot driven by the effort to repeal the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms. The hero, appropriately, is a marine, a subject Uris returns to in his final novel, O’Hara’s Choice, a historical work ranging from the Civil War to 1900. Uris’s return to the marines as a theme in these last two works, especially the second, may have been stimulated by the gift, from his son Mark, of a coffee-table book on the marines, a picture history of the service. Both of these late novels also continue the moral clarity that shadows all of Uris’s work.
Uris wrote A God in Ruins throughout 1998, a period when the United States was awakening to the danger of terrorism, international security threats, and the dominance of computers. In the novel, he combines a series of stories in an unbalanced but urgent way: an all-American-style marine hero of remarkable talent, who grew up on a ranch in Colorado, has a series of love affairs and succeeds, however improbably, in becoming the governor of Colorado and then a candidate for the presidency. The initial setting is days before the 2008 election. However, Quinn Patrick O’Connell, who seems headed for victory because of his campaign of moral integrity, unexpectedly learns that he was the orphan of Jewish parents. The book opens as he prepares to announce this revelation to the nation, unsure of its impact on his candidacy.
This summary does not do justice to several overarching Uris themes in the book, including genealogy, fathers, Jewish heroism, and the need for social reform. Two persistent themes stand out: the need to know one’s past, and the troubled relationship between fathers and sons. As one character notes, we are all looking for something to make our fathers proud (AGR, 139–140). Jewish military accomplishments also receive praise. When Jeremiah Duncan, a rugged marine major general, presents the president and others with a plan to strike back at Iranian terrorists—this is the Tom Clancy portion of the novel, which stresses the use of a new lighting strike force and an ultralight fighting aircraft—he cites the tactics the Israeli Air Force used when attacking Egypt in the 1967 war (AGR, 149). A few pages earlier, he celebrates the work of the Mossad in tracking down the Iranian terrorists responsible for blowing up a U.S. Air Force Learjet carrying an ambassador and a NATO general (AGR, 142, 150). He then parlays the certainty that the United States will be perceived as weak if it does not strike back against Iranians into the action plot of the novel.
Another theme is the decline of the arts in America and the need for their constant support. Here, Uris cites the “Disneyfication” of 42nd Street as the sanitized ideal of America (AGR, 129). Uris had witnessed the very cleanup he criticized. The novel also manages to address both the decline of writing and the importance, for every writer, of working everyday and to working hard, the core of Uris’s own professional practice. When the hero’s wife recognizes her failings as writer, she espouses Uris’s solution: “A large part of the writer’s being, of his talent, could only emerge through hard, hard work” (AGR, 242). Uris referred to this as learning by the seat of one’s pants.
In some ways, however, the novel is eerily prescient. Reference is made to a terrible massacre that occurs when a militant group of white supremacists repel an attack on their fortification by what they believe to be a group of invaders. The “invaders” turn out to be a troop of Boy Scouts, who are mercilessly mowed down. The government covers up the incident by claiming it was a rare natural disaster, since the explosions in the canyon in which the boys are killed cause an immense rockslide. The Four Corners Massacre, as it was known, nearly unseats the incumbent president. Uris uses the issue to argue for gun control, which he strongly supported, while the action chimed with such events as the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, which occurred just a few months before the book was published. Uris also refers to the likelihood of the United States being subject to a severe terrorist attack, since so many of its overseas facilities and citizens were being targeted. By 1999, the U.S. had already suffered the first World Trade Center bombing (1993) and the destruction of the federal building in Oklahoma City (1995). The narrator predicts that it will only be a matter of time before an even worse event occurs, a prediction some two years before 9/11 (AGR, 142).
A further disaster scenario involves the violence unleashed across the country when O’Connell announces that he is Jewish, just before the presidential vote. The backlash, fueled by belief in a Jewish conspiracy, leads to Kristallnacht-like actions (Uris uses the term), which the sitting president does nothing to stop until his top aides threaten to leave him. The outbreak of virulent anti-Semitism across the United States, which only a few groups, notably blacks, oppose, anticipates the fears and events depicted in Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004) and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (2008).
Uris, however, cannot resist inserting the autobiographical into the story, beginning with the life of the protagonist’s father, Daniel Timothy O’Connell. A few of the details taken directly from Uris’s life: Dan O’Connell is a marine veteran who fought at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He comes down with dengue fever on Tarawa. Quinn O’Connell, the adopted son, admires John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men for its depiction of loneliness (AGR, 431). Uris also includes a disguised reference to his son Mark when he has Rae, Quinn’s daughter, work at the Atmospheric Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Mark Uris, a computer specialist like the character, worked at the similarly named National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Uris also includes a brief section (in Chapter 14) on the history of the marines, which would become the foundation of his last novel, O’Hara’s Choice.
But unlike Mitla Pass, A God in Ruins is not a disguised autobiography. O’Connell was a policeman from Brooklyn who, after returning from the war and recovering from his wounds (though he is left with a limp), marries his Catholic girlfriend and then heads west, settling in Colorado. Perhaps the biggest nonautobiographical detail is that the O’Connells, father and son, love each other.
The need for moral reform and a restoration of the humane in a world dominated by computers, information, and impersonality are additional concerns. The hypocrisy of the response to the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton affair receives repeated criticism by Uris when certain elements of Quinn’s past are dredged up but do no harm. The two-year affair of President Thorton Tomtree’s wife (he is a computer billionaire who manages to become elected) is seen as a sordid reminder of the Clinton past. O’Connell’s commitment to honesty and decency is intended to provide a new direction for America, the claim for a new “Moral Imperative” reflecting Uris’s own hopes for a decent society, one also freed from racial bigotry. The irony of his protagonist’s claim is that Uris’s own personal life did not support such a position, his own moral behavior being frequently more hypocritical than ethical.
The replacement of personality by computer-generated information is another bête noire of Uris’s. A reliance on data rather than people, which is the key to the incumbent president’s success, receives strong criticism throughout the novel. The success of Quinn’s challenge, despite his revealed Judaism, shows that, for Uris, character and morals can overpower sheer information and polls.
The Second World War and, more specifically, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising also appear. To trace the true origins of Quinn O’Connell, who is actually Alexander Horowitz, the narrative moves back to 1945 (in another of the quick chronological shifts) in order to reveal the child’s origin. The son of the Russian Zionist Marina Geller, who married a hero of the Warsaw Ghetto, Uri Sokolov (who was sent to Siberia and is presumed dead), Alexander is the product of Marina’s affair with a Russian professor in New York, David Horowitz. When, after more than five years, she learns that her husband has survived the Gulag, she gives up her son for adoption to a Catholic agency that she is put in touch with by a rogue priest who is a close friend of David Horowitz. She then leaves her partner and returns to Israel, where she had first gone after the war, to meet her formerly lost husband. This condensed story, which forms Chapter 43, unites Uris’s traditional themes of loss, resistance, and Jewish identity.
The possibilities of the story, which blends romance with politics, and warfare, sink under an improbable plot involving the question of race (the president’s success depends on a black adviser; Quinn’s wife is a Mexican American), and wooden, often awful, dialogue. Characters speak awkwardly, in a style that manages to be both overwritten and tired. Women are predictably formulaic and unimaginative, and sex is only referred to, never enacted. The language is exhausted and clichéd: “Hearing his voice was like eating chocolate” (AGR, 217). Uris is at his stylistic best when writing swift, action-filled scenes, as when a small team of marines rescues an Iranian double agent from a mountain hideaway (Chapter 16). The combination of macho military behavior and action results in tense, tight writing.
One sign of the undisciplined mix is the presence of poetry in the text. On two occasions poems appear, although they were not written by Uris. He commissioned work from the New York poet Anna Stoessinger, although she received no credit in the novel, despite an agreement stating that she would. Uris blamed his publisher for the slip. He did pay her a thousand dollars, however.22
A God in Ruins—the title is taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature”—was Uris’s first novel set entirely in the United States, and it suffers because he tries too hard to make it American. Although he strives for accuracy, the authenticity that marked his earlier work is absent. It is as if he only skimmed the culture and its contemporary history. Replacing in-depth research, a strength that dominated works like Exodus or QB VII, is an almost glib knowledge of American life, which is treated generally and superficially. Yet he is attuned to, and disturbed by, new developments, especially the growth and power of the computer industry. The need for encryption and new security systems only intensify the paranoia dominating America. But beneath the questionable plot and characters, a moral urgency remains. With his strong criticism of the gun lobby and the power of corporations to control government, which encourages greed, not morals, Uris manages to maintain a powerful tone of calamity.
Reaction to the novel was predictably cool, the complaints ranging from poor characterizations to fearmongering and an exaggeration of the dangers of the computer age.23 Yet despite lukewarm reviews, A God in Ruins did reasonably well as Uris’s name still attracted readers. Printed hardback copies numbered 127,000; paperback copies numbered 336,000.
In an interview shortly after the novel’s publication, Uris, then seventy-four, felt depleted and let down, since he had to let go of characters he had been living with for some five years (his last book, Redemption, had come out in 1995).24 His ailments were under control, and he had started to lose weight and feel better. Pugnacity, however, still characterized his attitude as he listed obstacles he had encountered, including a difficult childhood, his daughter Karen’s bout with polio, and the suicide of his second wife. Yet his passion for heroism in the face of injustice remained. The absence of gun control and acts of terrorism by American militias are at the heart of his new novel, he explained. He repeated the story of how he had stood by the original version of Battle Cry, again intoning his mantra: “Once you compromise your integrity, you can never go back.” He also emphasized the necessity of a purpose, a mission, when writing: “You have to get mad and stay mad, and then write from your guts.” The need to write A God in Ruins had emanated from his sense of the millennium and a desire to write out what troubled him at that moment in American history.
A God in Ruins, dedicated to his brother-in-law Harry Kofsky, was the second book due under the lucrative HarperCollins contract negotiated by Nancy Stauffer. He approached the work confidently while enjoying the paperback success of Redemption. He continued to live well and travel in style and did not seem to be too worried about money. He thought matters would just work themselves out and that he could sustain what his son Mark called “the Imperial Roman habits of living large,” his grandiose manner a mixture of entitlement and success.25 According to his children, he behaved more like a proconsul than an author. He also continued to take people on, remaining argumentative and passionate, almost belligerent. He felt deeply about things, so if the wrong button were pushed, he would explode. When Nancy Stauffer was unsuccessful in placing his last novel, O’Hara’s Choice, with a publisher, they parted. He went to Owen Laster, at the William Morris Agency, who negotiated a modest, single-book deal with HarperCollins. Laster was experienced: his client list included James Michener, Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, and the estate of Margaret Mitchell.
Uris was by now known to be cantankerous, difficult, and demanding to work with. He also still carried on his misogynistic ways, at one point telling the editor Marjorie Braman at HarperCollins to procure him some women. “Those days are over for people like you,” she answered. He tried to reassert his macho image, but it didn’t work, even when he reminded her of his pleasure in getting roughed up by a black prostitute in New York.26
But Uris, who never undertook a book without a contract, was finding writing itself difficult, his physical ailments distracting from and even interfering with the task. His pleasure in research diminished. Earlier, he had taken great pride in being accurate and knowing all the key works that might provide an understanding of historical conflict and detail. His approach was more an assault than a study. Now, he became impatient with the work, relying increasingly on others. But he was bothered by the question of how could one have ownership over information without bothering to read it. Errors in A God in Ruins caused him to rewrite two chapters; his new editor, Gladys Carr at HarperCollins, who had worked on Redemption, demanded the changes.27
His insomnia also increased, and he would often rely on sleeping pills, wine, or even marijuana to help him rest. A psychologist visited several times to teach him self-hypnosis, and it seemed, for a while, to work.28 When it didn’t, he would sleep late and often not descend from the study-bedroom on the second floor of his house. His flirtatious, even outrageous interest in women, however, did not abate. On one occasion, he startled a substitute nanny by coming downstairs in bikini underwear and making suggestive remarks. She ran shrieking out of the house. He often competed with his Denver friend Charles Goldberg as to which was the bigger “joker and stroker.” He always seemed to proposition the most inappropriate women, who were usually married and entirely uninterested in him.29
As his mobility lessened, he stayed in bed more, although the bed was now on the first level of his house. With pulleys and a ski towrope, his son Mark arranged a system by which Uris could swing up and out of bed to sit upright. It was laborious but welcome. For amusement, he watched sports on television (mostly tennis, which he had once avidly played); he read little except for the newspapers and rarely kept up with his literary contemporaries, although he constantly felt overlooked, and deprived of a Pulitzer Prize. He considered himself “the people’s writer,” a streetwise author who offered more reportage than creativity. Storytelling was his trade, not writing in any literary sense. Despite his ailments, he considered moving to Switzerland, largely for tax reasons, and had Rachael and Conor study French in anticipation of a possible change.30
He continued to write, now on his first love, the marines. He expanded references and details in A God in Ruins into a historical novel about the evolution of the corps. O’Hara’s Choice blends a history of the marines with a renewal of their purpose: to be an effective and essential amphibious landing force that combined prowess at sea with extraordinary fighting skill on land. Chronology organizes his story: he begins in 1888, although other sections are set as early as 1861. It concludes thirty years later, in 1891.
Zachary O’Hara, the hero, is a true marine, committed to the discipline, brotherhood, and the command structure. Sounding much like Uris, he says, “I never felt a weight of orders and discipline because the Corps was my life” (OHC, 389). His personal conflict, however, is his love for Amanda Blanton Kerr, the daughter of an industrialist who is a fierce opponent of the corps. Echoing some of the conflicts outlined in Trinity, Uris traces in parallel the history of the marines and the way personal feelings conflict with military obligations.
O’Hara, Uris stresses, is not an extraordinary man but simply a well-disciplined and organized thinker who understands that the future of the corps resides in amphibious warfare. His senior officers grudgingly admire him, and one tells another: “A twenty-four-year-old Marine captain who won’t bullshit. That’s a hell of a piece of personnel for the Corps. Don’t lose him” (OHC, 354). The conflict in the novel becomes how to preserve a separate corps, a political as well as a military challenge.
The writing is again flaccid and displays an especial fondness for romantic clichés: “The lovemaking, from fierce to subtle glance across the room, did not begin or end but was in motion all the time…. Bold and shy, they answered the curiosities of rich minds. Bold and shy they loved each other’s raw naked beauty” (OHC, 345). Even the battle scenes seem tired. Uris writes that a soldier preparing for the raid on Fort Sumter “girds for battle with fear and fantasy” (OHC, 30). The confusion in the battle that follows, however, emphasizes the need for a disciplined, well-organized strike force, which only the marines can offer. History is Zachary’s teacher, and one of the more effective scenes occurs when Zachary explains to Major Boone the tactics used at the Battle of Marathon in 49 BCE. Here, the writing becomes dynamic and active (OHC, 201). Uris is also strong on setting, especially Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1890s, which he carefully researched.
Uris faced the usual narrative conflict, however, between history and character, fact and fiction. He found the history and men of the Marine Corps irresistible, (recalling his first novel, Battle Cry), but he still had to balance personality with information. He remained conscientious about facts, but inadequate in detailing relationships. As a group of Civil War veterans tries to propel the marines forward, Zachary O’Hara rises from the enlisted ranks to become an officer. Bright and educated, he writes a report on the future of amphibious warfare; he also marries the daughter of a shipbuilding robber baron and enemy of the marines. The lines are drawn. Class conflict—O’Hara is a Catholic and a marine—dominates his life, and the choice becomes one between love and duty, while the Uris themes of loyalty, honor, and comradeship, evident since his first work, persist. Uris maintained a steadfast attachment to the marines and tried to attend one of their events every year.
Age and illness made the writing difficult, and his health prevented him from pursuing research with the gusto that marked his earlier books. The first draft of O’Hara’s Choice read like a Harlequin romance, and Mark Uris repeatedly urged him to add more battle scenes.31 But unable to travel to the sites he described, and relying on secondhand observations, he was reluctant. Uris was also uncertain about the ending and changed it numerous times.
His researcher corrected his text, both spelling and facts, and supplied him with details such as the scheduled stops of a boat traveling on the St. Lawrence river, the details of the major tennis clubs in Newport, and, of course, the manner of dress in the late nineteenth century. But he still objected to corrections, and Marilynn Pysher had to negotiate each change with tact.32
O’Hara’s Choice appeared in October 2003, some three months after Uris died. Reception of the work was predictably low key, many critics acknowledging that the book lacked the typical Uris energy and relied too extensively on history. It sold poorly for a Uris title: 68,000 hardcover copies in 2003 and 273,000 paperback copies when it appeared in April 2005.
Leon Uris died on 21 June 2003, his death the result of continuing heart problems complicated by diabetes (he refused to give up drinking, for example). Severe arthritis caused by various knee operations prevented him from walking. The eventual cause of death was kidney failure, worsened by a weakened heart. At one point while in intensive care in a Stony Brook, Long Island, hospital, he became delusional and insisted on calling various marine generals and Hillary Clinton. After suffering a partial stroke, he refused to pursue rehabilitation or to spend time at a convalescent home. The severe arthritis in his legs increased. Throughout this period, his relations with his children remained difficult. He could never understand the foibles or shortcomings of others, repeating his earlier, intolerant behavior. According to his eldest son, he was a good father to begin with, but as his publicity and fame increased, so, too, did the pressure to behave like a celebrity. This meant he was around less and had little time for his family. “He wasn’t much of a father,” Mark Uris once remarked.33
Until the end, Uris loved the physical act of writing, and for most of his career he undertook research with enthusiasm. He loved to learn and to let his knowledge inform his fiction. But when he was working on a book, he isolated himself, though his demands on others did not diminish.
The Uris paradox was that although he found people difficult, especially when they disagreed with his opinionated ideas, he couldn’t do without them. He remained passionate, argumentative, and belligerent if he had to be. He used language effectively but at times in a devastating, harmful manner. He was hard on his family, and it was only in the last few years of his life that he reconnected with his older sons. He found greater difficulty with his younger children. And his patronizing attitude toward women did not change. The inscription in Marilynn Pysher’s copy of A God in Ruins reads “To a Great Broad.”
From the first, Uris felt he had to establish his authority as a writer. He needed to make his credentials clear, but all he had were his experiences, beginning with the marines. Consequently, he wrote only from them. He also used the experiences of others, such as those of his uncle who fought in Greece in the Second World War. Then he hit upon a method that would provide authenticity for his writing: foreign travel, which would be the foundation of his research. Trips to Israel, Poland, Germany, Ireland, and New Zealand became essential for establishing credibility for his work, which readers valued. His confident tone and storytelling skill originated in his physical encounter with the past, whether he found it in the Irish countryside, the Negev, or the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto. And he loved to draw parallels between classical texts and his own: the first five books of the Hebrew Bible parallel the five books of Exodus.
The reading public loved Uris, making him one of the wealthiest and most popular American novelists of his time. This occurred when such writers such as James Michener, Herman Wouk, Irwin Shaw, and Norman Mailer—who would be superseded by Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace and Jacqueline Susann—were beginning to climb the best-seller charts.34 Uris made many promotional appearances on television and at book signings, conventions, and shopping malls; he also made frequent demands for high advances. He was as marketable as his titles, and his career coincided with the explosion of the mass-market paperback. Sizeable print runs of paperback books and new steps in their promotion, including the author tour, became standard. Tie-ins began to define the new links between books and other media, marked by the early connections between his first novel, Battle Cry, and the 1955 film of the novel produced by Warner Bros.
As a writer, Uris capitalized on the public’s fascination with history, relying on fiction to tell the story of the past. Unlike contemporaries who came to popular writing through journalism, Uris approached it first through his direct experience as a marine and then through his research. The Middle East and Europe captivated him, and seven of his thirteen novels are set there. And what he wrote in the preface to Battle Cry still stands as a guide to all his fiction: “To do justice to a story of the Marine Corps I felt that a sound historic basis would be the only fair avenue of approach.” But, he adds, there are instances in which “events have been fictionalized for the sake of story continuity and dramatic effect” (BC, 1). This was the Uris method: researched fact restructured for narrative impact.
Literature was memory for Uris, who drew from recent history to cement past experiences in imaginative worlds that drew in readers. He made history in the sense that he refashioned its presentation so that it became vivid and understandable. And he did not disguise its uglier aspects. But he was also a victim of some of its larger narratives, notably that of Zionism and the British exploitation of Ireland. For the former, he attached the memory of the Holocaust firmly to the defense of a single country—Israel. This has increasingly come under attack from the so-called new historians in Israel, who emphasize the Palestinian displacement.35 But Uris, like his hero Ben-Gurion, remained focused, and he stated and restated his narrative. He portrayed Britain one-sidedly in Trinity and in Redemption (as he did the Arabs in The Haj) and allowed for no sympathies. Nevertheless, Uris’s writing, despite its literary shortcomings, worked to prevent the twentieth century from becoming “a moral memory palace,” a place where history could be safely enshrined and ignored.36 The past, he reminds us, is not behind us.
Uris avoided joining the emerging school of Jewish writers of the 1960s, which was shaped by Wouk, Bellow, Roth, Malamud, or Chaim Potok.37 He did, however, see himself in a larger tradition of moral writers such as Dreiser, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Hersey, blended with the adventure writing of, say, Eric Ambler or Graham Greene, with perhaps the moral concerns of Elie Wiesel. He centered most of his fiction on twentieth-century traumas: the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, Irish independence, the Battle of Gallipoli. His legacy can be seen in a new generation of novelists, including Alan Furst, Louis de Bernières, William T. Vollmann and Jonathan Littell.38
Vollmann’s sense of Europe’s tragic history most closely parallels Uris’s: at the opening of Europe Central (2005), the narrator observes that “the sleepwalker gets Lithuania, the realist Finland.”39 Europe pays the price: “We’ll whirl away Europe Central’s wine-tinted maple leaves and pale hexagonal church towers,” says the narrator. Rhetorically, he then asks, “What once impelled millions of manned and unmanned bullets into motion? You say Germany. They say Russia. It certainly couldn’t have been Europe herself.”40 Covering the years 1914 to 1975, this sweeping novel charts the unstable history of Central Europe and the warring cultures of Germany and Russia. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.
Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009), originally published in French as Les Bienveillantes (2006), is the story of the Second World War and the Eastern Front through the fictional memories of a sadistic SS oberstrumbannführer, Max Aue. Its themes range from incest to genocide, and an unrepentant Nazi SS officer is the hero. It describes massacres of Jews and Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the Battle of Stalingrad, the implementation of the Final Solution, and the last days of Berlin. It won the Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Goncourt in 2006. Like Uris, these writers treat war, history, and culture as necessary proving grounds for ideas, politics, and heroism.
Uris, however, knew his limitations as a writer, which began with the treatment of characters. He did not attempt to explore the individuality or complexity of his characters, but rather the impact of historical events upon them. He preferred to have them “carry along the plot that history has already written.” His aim was simple: “to paralyze [the average reader] with a story he cannot put down,” and in this he succeeded.41 But his purpose was always moral: to show the Jew as a Eurocentric figure who heroically challenged injustice and who shared, with the narrator of Vollmann’s Europe Central, the monumental ambition “to invade the meaning of Europe.”42