War & No Peace

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (721 pp.)--Norman Mailer--Rinehart ($4).

A 25-year-old Harvard graduate who fought at Leyte has written perhaps the best novel yet about World War II.

It is distinguished primarily for simple realism, a forthright, almost childlike honesty, a command of ordinary speech, a cool and effortless narrative style, quickened here & there with a mild, understated humor. The battle scenes are so vivid as to suggest Tolstoy's War and Peace, the common soldiers as clearly visualized as Tolstoy's peasants. Unlike Tolstoy's masterpiece, it is all war, not only in the sense that there are no scenes of peaceful life poised against the scenes of war, but in the sense that a knowledge of the meaning of peace is absent from the psychology of the characters. They seem never to have known anything else.

War Without Dignity. It is all war, war on the Pacific island of Anopopei, which a force of 6,000 Americans is attempting to take, war in headquarters bivouac and on the trails through the jungle, war between Private Red Valsen and Sergeant Sam Croft--war without dignity and without purpose, war for position or prestige, war to save face, or to satisfy an inward sense of superiority, or war that is merely the psychological ricochet of the greater conflict off stage.

Even when the characters think back upon their own lives, or when the author condenses their experience in brief little biographies, the content of their doing is still war--war on the streets and at the parties, the wisecracks whining like rifle shots, the love affairs like ambushes.

The characters of The Naked and the Dead are the members of a platoon, six of them survivors of a rubber-boat disaster at Motome, wearied, embittered, haunted by a premonition of death, snarling about the newcomers and (occasionally) feeling a grudging responsibility for them, nervous, profane, lecherous. Their conversation is recorded with the fidelity of a recording machine. Indeed, it is almost too exact and too tough to be quite accurate.

The men have a faint sense of pride in the platoon, not so much in the sense of liking the members of it, as of respect for what it has gone through. They have a mild pride in (partly fear of) a good officer, and a hesitant, partly exasperated approval of the democratic process that has placed them, Jews and anti-Semites, intellectuals and illiterates, in the same unearthly, uncomfortable place. They fight shy of any speechmaking about any of these things. Democracy is not a faith they fight for; it is a sort of punishment they take for not having believed in it before.

The little group sets out on a mission as weird in its way as the quest of Ahab for the white whale. Hennessey is killed in the landing. The others take part in checking a Japanese assault across a narrow stream, get drunk, shoot prisoners, and prowl among the Japanese corpses for souvenirs. They are certain that their wives back home are unfaithful to them, from their own success in seducing other men's wives, and from the number of letters from the States which arrive, telling them that all is over.

Nightmare in a Wonderland. In an atmosphere of uncomprehending misery, the platoon is ordered on a reconnaissance patrol on the far side of the island, over the vast peaks of the Watamai Mountains. It is in itself an incident in the war superior to most war fiction, the patrol through a wonderland of grass growing higher than the heads of the men, spiders, and endless spider webs, gnats, buzzing silence, rain and sunlight, golden sand and indigo trees--a nightmare in which one after another is killed. What deepens the irony is that the campaign is successful without the benefit of either General Cummings' strategy or the heroism of the platoon.

Author Mailer has borrowed his method from Dos Passes, modifying and adapting it, alternating his narrative with flashbacks which he calls The Time Machine, and with choruses of the men's tediously cloacal comments. By some alchemy, his book moves and lives despite the similarity of the biographies (quarreling parents, first sexual experience, unhappy marriage, pretty good job, the draft), its too great length, and the narrow political bias of the views set forth in it.

The Author. Norman Mailer attended public schools in Brooklyn, at Harvard studied engineering, shortly after graduation married Beatrice Silverman (later a lieutenant in the WAVES). During the war he served in Leyte, Luzon and Japan, as a clerk, an aerial photograph expert, a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon, a cook, a baker. Discharged in 1946, he wrote The Naked and the Dead in a year and a half.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.