Herman Wouk: Youngblood Hawke

[pwilson]

A young man from backwoods Kentucky walks into the office of a New York publishing house and plops down several frayed and bulging boxes which contain the manuscript of his first novel, Alms For Oblivion. After some wrangling, the book is accepted and thus begins the meteoric rise and tumultuous career of Arthur "Youngblood" Hawke.

This a true country boy/city boy story, complete with greedy agents, financial pitfalls and complicated love affairs. Largely due to the novelty of his Southern no-nonsense demeanor, and of course his overnight success, Hawke instantly becomes the darling of upper-crust New York, where he quickly gets in over his head. From the beginning, his plan is to make a substantial amount of money from his first few "lesser" novels and thus put himself into the financial position to focus on The American Comedy, a Proust-esque masterwork. So, whether cramped into his boyhood bedroom in Hovey, Kentucky or nestled in the penthouse suite of a New York highrise, Hawke maintains a manic nocturnal writing routine that eventually takes its toll both mentally and physically. It is this ambition, along with his naivete, that leads to the many ups and downs that make up much of the novel.

Said to be loosely based on Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Hawke provides a wonderful glimpse into the psyche of an artist. We sweat and toil alongside the author as he pours himself onto the page and watch as his books evolve from vague ideas to clumsy fledglings and eventually become critically acclaimed (or panned) bestsellers. This is by far the most realistic portrayal of the writing process that I have ever read.

In 1951, Herman Wouk won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Caine Mutiny and in reading Youngblood Hawke, it quickly becomes obvious why. He is a master storyteller in every sense of the word. His style is straight forward, no frills and impossible to put down. Weighing in at well over 700 pages, there is nothing small about this book. Youngblood, like New York itself, is larger than life, and yet he is so completely human that the reader experiences every one of his successes and failures on a very personal level. Combining a cast of the most detailed and believable characters that I've read and a stunningly detailed setting, this is easily the best book I've read this year.

 

[Sitaram]

Forty-four years ago, at the age of 13, cooped up with an illness and bored, I read the Reader's Digest condensed Youngblood Hawke. The most exciting passage for me was a sex scene which would be considered quite tame by today's standards.

My late mother's name was Marjorie. Growing up, I would often look at the bookshelves and see Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar. I never asked her if she had read it. I wonder whether she had the book became of her name, Marjorie, or whether it was from a period where she belonged to Book of the Month.

Read this post just now made me curious to google on Marjorie Morningstar

What follows is an interesting read:

http://www.slate.com/id/2126022/

Only as I read this do I realize that her name was Morgenstern though she dreamed of being Morningstar. She becomes a suburban matron, Mrs. Schwartz. People complained bitterly about the disappointing ending of the story, but Wouk, who patterned it after his own sister's life, said that it is just reality.

Wouk was an orthodox Jew considered reactionary in his values.

Now that I am in my fifty's, I am probably better prepared that I was as a teenager to enjoy an author like Wouk.

During those early teenage years of frequent internment in convalescence, I was deeply touched by a Reader's Digest version of Joy in the Morning by Ms. Smith, who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Those were innocent and sentimental times when I knew nothing of semiotics and deconstruction, and could enjoy a good story without the slightest trace of intellectual guilt that I should be reading something more profound and analyzable.

I hope no one minds my nostalgic rambling. I recently heard Salman Rushdie speak of a novel having "a life of its own." He said this with regard to Satanic Verses, stating his hope, all the threats and controversy having subsided, that now the novel might be free to have a life of it's own. Rusdie added, parenthetically, “Novels do, by the way, have a life of their own.” I certainly feel that our collective lifetime memories and experiences and nostalgia become part of a novel’s life.

A novel becomes part of our life, and we become part of the novel's life.

 

[Sitaram]

Here is an interesting page on Wouk's biography

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/cainemutiny/context.html

Excerpts:

Wouk's education began at Townsend Harris High School, an elite program for students with high IQs.

The two most influential men that Wouk encountered in his schoolings were his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Mendel Leib Levine, who taught Wouk the Torah, and his Columbia philosophy professor, Irwin Edman. The radical theories that Edman introduced to Wouk caused Wouk to largely ignore his orthodox beliefs before returning to them in 1940.

Wouk moved on to write scripts for Fred Allen. After thirteen years in the radio business, a pursuit that had been earning Wouk $500 per week, Pearl Harbor inspired him to enroll in midshipman school at Columbia.

Wouk did not write very much while at sea, but he did read a lot. At the age of twenty-nine, Wouk discovered Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quijote, a writer who Wouk called "the key" to understanding his career.

 

[Shade]

I'm grateful to pwilson for recommending this big book, which I ploughed through over the last few days. I say ploughed but that's not to imply any element of forced slog; for the most part I enjoyed the journey. And when I say big I mean BIG: Youngblood Hawke is 783 pages long and has very small type (font fans will be fascinated to know that it fits 45 lines of text on each page: 35 or fewer would be common for most novels). By my reckoning that makes the book longer, in words if not in pages, than Bleak House or Anna Karenina.

And although size isn't everything, it's a big part of the success of Youngblood Hawke. The sheer volume of words, events and characters is dauntingly impressive. The story covers the years 1946 to 1953 (plus an epilogue ten years later), which permits Wouk an enormous amount of detail, and for the first hundred or more pages, he tells a minutely rendered account of just a few days in the life of the eponymous Art Hawke. And I can't pretend that the pleasure I got from the book would have been diminished if he'd knocked a third of the pages off: there were times, mostly before the summit of halfway, when the great length of the book was as maddening as it was admirable.

What Wouk tells is the story expertly detailed by pwilson above, of a young writer from Kentucky who is about to hit the big time with his first novel Alms for Oblivion (at time the plausibility of the prose was such that I went looking on Amazon to see if there really was a novel of that title. And just to tease, you will have to do it yourself if you want to know). And hit the big time he does. What I admired most about the book was the stuff, doubtless drawn from experience (Wouk had won the Pulitzer by the time he wrote Hawke), of the ups and downs of the publishing process. Oddly, Hawke never struggles in the writing itself, turning out 4,000 words a day, which given the mass of Wouk's output (this is a mere tiddler next to the 1,000+ pages of The Winds of War), may also be autobiographical. I got the feeling, too, that Hawke and Wouk write mostly the same sort of thing: long epics, plainly told and not always critically acclaimed, but popular with the reading public, and no doubt this was a chance to get his own back, or at least put his side of the story. Indeed, immediately before Hawke, Wouk had published Marjorie Morningstar, a short (by his standards - 500 pages) account of a woman's life. And sure enough, after his first few epics, Hawke the fictional author decides to branch out and writes a short novel of a woman's life, Evelyn Biggers, which is critically mauled and financially disastrous. Undeterred, he expands into theatre. (The Caine Musical?)

Having said all this, Youngblood Hawke, impressive as long books almost always are, was not as impressive as other very long narratively-driven books I've enjoyed, such as John Irving's best and even Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. This is probably a question of style: Wouk is a plain writer, and although there are some nice things in it (like a page-long paean to New York City), the writing never really flies. Compare with Tom Wolfe, who can be madly irritating at times but who has a real vim and vigour to his prose. And also the characters, while literally believable (and impressively drawn when it comes to the women in particular: Art's mother, the two women he never manages to sort out, Frieda and Jeanne), lack the liveliness, eccentricity, or variation from the norm that Irving's best characters have. Even though Wouk's are more plausible, they are also - because of this - less interesting.

So Youngblood Hawke is a both inspiring (if he can do it...) and cautionary tale (don't be greedy, young man!), whose extraordinary length is both its strength and weakness. It's never less than impressive for all that.