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Wouk and remembrance |
Novelist Herman Wouk is best known for his linked monumental “War Books” – “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance,” an epic two-part narrative of World War II. But “Marjorie Morningstar” remains one of his most beloved works. Wouk took some time recently to answer questions about the novel from Samantha Goldstein, who teaches at UCSD where she completed a Ph.D. in Literature with a focus on Jewish Cultural Studies.
SG: The setting for a significant part of the novel, South Wind, represents the Jewish resort culture that was so popular in the early 20th century. That haimishe community now only exists as a nostalgic memory. In recent years, several films and novels that feature a young Jewish girl’s coming of age story have been set in Jewish resorts of this period. Why do you think these locations resonate for this kind of story?
HW: The mise-en-scène of the South Wind sequence is the adult camp called Copake in the Berkshires. In 1935 I worked there as a writer of show material with the late Arnold Auerbach. We were a radio comedy writing team in those years, mainly for Fred Allen. Auerbach and I met a Columbia, where we both wrote Varsity Shows. He went on to a career in Broadway musicals.
I guess you could call Copake haimishe, but only in that it was all-Jewish, down to the waiters, the busboys, and the caddies. The Jewish cultural context as such was zero – no religion, no Zionism, not even a socialist tinge. Strictly free-winging New York Jewish living it up, i.e. hedonism, though that’s too fancy a word for those goings-on. The shows were the glory of the camps, original material echoing Broadway and yearning toward it, now and then with eventual great fulfillment. That’s how we fledging writers ate during the summer, while older writers and directors earned money.
SG: Was there a real-life inspiration for the novel?
HW: My sister Irene, who just passed away at 93, worked at Copake, much as Marjorie does in the book. In her own circle Irene was well-known as the model for Marjorie, not unjustly. As her kid brother I observed her romances, I visited her at Copake, and I witnessed her life as it unfolded to middle age, where we leave Marjorie a contented prematurely white-haired mother. I’ve read an occasional objection to the end as “disastrous, wrong, too sad, too religious,” and what you will. It’s just the truth.
SG: Most of your novels have been adapted for stage, television and/or film. Do you feel that the 1958 film “Marjorie Morningstar” captured what you were trying to convey about Marjorie’s life and choices?
HW: The film is a thin rinse of the novel, hardly more. The
tacked-on ending hinting that Marjorie will end up with poor Wally is
outright Hollywood, quite at variance with what the book tells. I presumably
had “script approval.” That scene was not in the script I
approved. It all happened long ago, and it doesn’t matter.
SG: In 1980 you said you find that “Marjorie Morningstar”
is especially appreciated by young girls. Another half-century later,
what do you think Marjorie’s story has to offer girls (Jewish or
otherwise) today? Also, did you intend to reach a non-Jewish audience
and/or educate readers about Jewish life and practices?
HW: I didn’t really “decide” anything about
the novel. I started to do a short book about a growing girl, as a departure
from my large-scale war story “The Caine Mutiny.” I tried
to put myself into her mind and emotions as much as I could, and to set
her in the milieu that formed her. I ended up with a long novel of social
portraiture, but in the writing every touch seemed important to make the
girl live.
Young girls yield up their virginity in due course, then as
now. I guess it happens earlier nowadays, because the girls who write
or approach me to say that the book spoke to them personally, changed
their lives, and so on are younger than Marjorie was in her first experience.
The Time cover story about “Marjorie Morningstar,” 50 years
ago, jocundly called the story “the biggest to-do about a girl’s
virginity since ‘Clarissa Harlowe.’” It’s easy
to be smart and civilized about the event in a girl’s life, and
of course it’s often trivialized. Anyway, that’s one reason
that the book speaks to girls today. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t
be in the 10th printing of the latest (1999) paperback edition, one of
many down the years.
San Diego Jewish Book Fair: Herman Wouk
When: Thursday, Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m.
Where: LFJCC, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla
$22. (858) 362-1348 or www.lfjcc.org.
For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.