Herman Wouk
Bestselling author of The Caine Mutiny and the epic The Winds of War and War and Remembrance
HERMAN WOUK, the American novelist, who has died aged 103, became instantly famous with the publication in 1951 of The Caine Mutiny, a story set on a US Navy destroyer in the Second World War.
Wouk created an unforgettable character in the neurotic and eccentric skipper Lt-commander Queeg, who is relieved of command by his number two in the midst of a Pacific typhoon. The novel spent almost a year at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and brought Wouk the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
A number of books and plays followed before Wouk’s two staggeringly long novels The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978). These dealt on the epic scale, the result of vast research, with the war’s main events and campaigns threaded through the story of a fictional naval officer, Captain Victor “Pug” Henry, and his family.
Somehow Pug Henry seemed to meet every allied leader and military commander, to be at every conference and in every campaign, with sons serving in Europe and the Pacific, a wife playing silly games in Washington and a lady friend popping up when the plot could stand it.
In the 1980s Wouk’s war seemed never to be off the television screen after he adapted the books as two lengthy miniseries, with Robert Mitchum as Pug and almost every actor of distinction in the western world in cameo roles.
One of the many themes Wouk touched on was the horror of the Jewish deportations, and readers found him extremely moving in his portrayal of Pug Henry’s son trying to get his Jewish wife out of France. Later he tackled the Jewish experience more fully, once again at epic length, in The Hope (1993) and The Glory (1994), two novels tracing the story of Israel from its foundation to the Yom Kippur War.
Throughout these and other books he drew on folk memories of his family’s background as Jewish immigrants to the US, and on his own upbringing, to make a tapestry against which to create his stories.
Herman Wouk (whose surname is pronounced “Woke”) was born on May 27 1915 in the South Bronx, the son of Abraham Isaac Wouk and his wife Esther (née Levine), immigrants from Minsk; his father began his life in New
York as a laundryman and came to own a successful laundry business.
His maternal grandfather, a rabbi, joined the family from Minsk when Herman was 13, and profoundly influenced his grandson. Herman read Literature and Philosophy at Columbia University, where he edited a humorous magazine, and during the depression years toiled in a “joke factory” writing gags for radio comics such as Fred Allen.
Later he produced radio shows for US government war bond campaigns before being commissioned in the US Navy. He spent the war in destroyerminesweepers in the Pacific and won several battle stars, but found the time to write plays and begin his first novel, Aurora Dawn (1947), a satire on the advertising industry written in a pastiche of the 18th-century mockheroic of Henry Fielding.
Neither this nor the coming-of-age story City Boy (1948) won him much attention, but The Caine Mutiny, his third novel, catapulted him to fame. Despite Wouk’s authentic presentation of life aboard ship, the main characters and events had no basis in reality and the US Navy brass opposed the making of a film version on the grounds that it would disseminate the idea that mutiny was possible in the service.
A number of film companies with options on the script pulled out in frustration, but after a year or so the navy finally gave in and reluctantly blessed the project, converting a couple of latter-day destroyers to look something like Wouk’s Caine. Humphrey Bogart’s memorable deterioration from martinet to hysteric as Queeg was Oscar-nominated.
Meanwhile, Wouk had adapted the novel’s climactic scenes into a play, The Caine Mutiny Court-martial,
which was directed on Broadway by Charles Laughton in 1954 and has been frequently revived.
His next novel, Marjorie Morningstar
(1955), a long, richly detailed story of New York Jewish life, was also wildly popular and was filmed in 1958 with Natalie Wood in the title role. Then came Youngblood Hawke (1961), which described a successful young writer – perhaps with overtones of Wouk – who is harassed by his agent and the taxman and by the pressures of early fame. Critics were quick to call
Youngblood Hawke the story of Thomas Wolfe, but Wouk denied it. Again perhaps reflecting his own wish for quiet, rather than the jazzy big city life, Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965) chronicled a Broadway publicity man’s disastrous attempt to reinvent himself as a hotelier on a Caribbean island.
Inside, Outside (1985) was set in a Jewish family milieu in the Bronx. Here was the immigrant culture of this rundown New York borough, and the third-generation character who makes it from the slums to a post as special assistant in the White House.
There is a nicely turned scene in which the narrator, Israel David Goodkind, is at his White House desk, in his skullcap, taking a few moments to peruse his Talmud. A startled president (unnamed but clearly Nixon) happens in, “a goy walking in on a Jew studying the Talmud in the White House, and asking, ‘Ah, and just what is that large book, Mr Goodkind?’ I explain what it is and give him my standard quick tour for outsiders.”
Wouk himself had offered a “tour for outsiders” in the non-fiction This is My God (1959, revised 1975), a kind of plain man’s guide to Judaism. In 2010 he published The Language God Talks, a disquisition on science and religion based on conversations he had had with the physicist, Richard Feynman. These had also inspired his novel A
Hole in Texas (2004), which imagined, some years before the event, what might happen if the existence of the Higgs boson particle were proved.
In 2011 Stephen King published the short story “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive”, in which two elderly poets are reinvigorated by the example of Wouk’s intellectual curiosity, undimmed in his tenth decade. Still the books came: The Lawgiver (2012), a satire about the making of a Hollywood film of the life of Moses, was his final novel, published when he was 97. In acknowledgement of the failure of one of his longestcherished literary ambitions, it features a “mulish ancient” called Herman Wouk struggling to complete his own novel about Moses. Wouk’s last book was the charming memoir Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-old Author (2015.)
Critical opinion about Wouk was divided. Some regarded him as an American Tolstoy; others deplored his “journalese” and his tendency to lapse into cliché. Gore Vidal, quoting a sentence from The Winds of War, declared “This is not at all bad, except as prose”, but he admitted Wouk’s narrative skill.
Wouk’s books were translated into 30 or so languages, and when Winds of War and War and Remembrance were rendered into Chinese he was proclaimed the most popular living foreign novelist. Among innumerable prizes and honours, he received the inaugural Library of Congress Lifetime Achievement Award for the Writing of Fiction in 2008. He sloughed off in later years a reputation for reclusiveness to reveal the genial and modest personality well-known to his family and close friends.
Herman Wouk married, in 1945, Betty Sarah Brown, who worked for many decades as his literary agent; she, and his faith, sustained him when his oldest son died in an accident aged four. His wife died in 2011 and two children survive him.
Herman Wouk, born May 27 1915, died May 17 2019