Underside of the War
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
New York, Rinehart, 1948. 721 pp. $4.00.

Norman Mailer’s novel about the war in the South Pacific can be regarded as the inevitable reaction to the pallid, neatly trimmed literary commodities turned out by the graduates of Yank, Stars and Stripes, and the OWL It is the explosion of the army’s underside, the sewer of hostility and fear and petty annoyance and boredom that until now has been either covered up by banalities or avoided altogether. For the first time we have a record of the dirty, hard business that the Second World War was for the combat soldier. And what a record! Mailer is hardly the great war novelist, indeed in the final accounting his limitations bulk larger than his accomplishments, yet his detonating outburst, huge, acrid, and raspingly uncouth, comes as a relief—a whiff of the actual—after the pussyfooting of his contemporaries.

It is a curious sociological fact that, until Mailer wrote his book, the conduct of the recent war as described by the run of war novels seemed no more productive of unpleasantness than the outings of a normally ill-behaved boys’ club. And although Mailer sees little else but war’s melodramatic miseries, his perspective brings him closer to the combat reality than that of such novels as Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun and John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano. An opaque screen stood between these other writers and the reality of the war experience; and it was the screen itself, constructed chiefly out of the myth that they themselves were busy creating on their various journalistic and propagandistic jobs, that got transcribed into their books. One encounters in this book not another version of the same experience, but a wholly new order of actuality.

What explains such a persistent and penetrating social myopia? Is it merely that Mailer is a skillful craftsman and that Brown and Hersey and many others are inept ones? I think not. The explanation is far simpler and more concrete: all these writers ducked the reality because they are deeply conventional, responding to the dominant view with a sensitivity that real artists reserve for their own feelings. They are equipped with receptivity to the current mores as other writers have a flair for dialogue or a talent for scenic description; in fact, it is their sole asset and accounts entirely for their popularity.

Of course, the barely hidden armature of their books was the convention of war fixed by a previous generation’s experience of it. But what had been a revolt and a fresh vision in the First World War became a glib and slick formula to the journalist-novelists of the second. Everyone who knows Hemingway knows the British-derived stereotype: war is hell; all soldiers are forced to be cowardly heroes or hero-like cowards; big words like duty and honor and sacrifice are phony, and only silent, efficient action counts; combat is a vile affair but it does establish, unlike civilian life, an intimate and bitter camaraderie—and so on.

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Norman Mailer has broken that mold. What he tells us is scarcely news, but it has the value of the authentic inflection, the undeniably accurate feel and shape of what happened, and not the echo of other books about other wars. Compare the obscene talk of Mailer’s soldiers with the polished wisecracks dished up by the others, compare his vision of the army’s set-up—that “ladder of fear,” as he calls it—with the compliant picture of an unthinking, unfeeling, automaton-like “chain of command” that Harry Brown describes—and one is struck by the extent of the falsification that Mailer has rejected.

But Mailer has his own borrowings and his own conventions—Dos Passos and Farrell seem to be his chief literary influences—and by and large these stand in the way of his native ability to tell a story and depict a character. His main error was to cast his novel in the mass-novel form, and I think that this was due to his copying of the Dos Passos of U.S.A. Actually, however, his novel deals with as close a group of characters as Wuthering Heights, and suffers from the added machinery of choruses and flashbacks.

The only excuse Mailer has for his mass-novel structure is his shuttlings between the fortunes of his platoon, at the bottom, and the “big brass” of division headquarters, at the summit. The latter milieu is portrayed in the main through the pathological relationship that exists between a shrewd, inverted, brilliant, fascist-minded general and his weak, neurotic, intellectual, half-liberal-minded aide (the adjectives are Mailer’s). The novel hits its lowest points in these episodes. · Completely unbelievable as a character, such a general might well have existed in the American army, yet he is but a pale montage of second-hand opinions (“The role of 20th century man is anxiety,” he learnedly quotes) in Mailer’s conception of him. In contrast, when Mailer writes of a soldier bellyaching he is not content to leave the work to the reader’s imagination; instead, he functions as a real novelist, selecting that piling series of indignities and frustrations—those cruel straps of a full pack, those undefined and subterranean tensions among men who know each other too long and too well, those capricious movements of hostility and aggression that stream like electrical currents through a platoon on a tough assignment—that wrings out the real, distinguished gripe.

Yet it is in struggles, ideological and personal, between the general and his aide that the novel’s central theme is given its most explicit expression. War, Mailer appears to think, is made by evil, sadistic men, who might happen to be sergeants like Croft or generals like Cummings. Men like these provide the motor power that drives the war-making machine; the others—the fools, the sentimentalists, the good, the honest, and the brave—are lashed ahead by these demoniac taskmasters. Thus Mailer’s novel soon parts company with modern literature, taking its place, along with the novels of his contemporaries, on the academic shelf. Only this is the shelf of naturalism, now stamped in its up-to-date form by heavy lacings of sex and free-and-easy psychoanalytical readings into every motive and response. Indeed, the novel’s very virtue—its method of straightforwardness and carefully observed detail—proves to be a contribution to its ultimate failure, since even the flaccid ideas of naturalistic fiction force its practitioners to adopt a certain logic. Naturalism, it has often been observed, is the perfect medium for the portrayal of victims and misfortune, and Mailer’s often brilliant revelation of the goaded, brutalized soldier’s existence is testimony to this. But when he attempts to encompass the war in its emotional and moral complexity he wanders off into the vague wilderness of politics and gets lost.

Contrary to Mailer’s view, the experience of the recent war does not divide neatly into two camps: the duality of victim and victimizer lies within each one of us—and this is what must be explored before the meaning of the war will come clearly before us. For this reason even so schematic a novel as Albert Camus’ The Stranger—a “war” novel, too—evokes a stronger response from us than the graphic catalogue of hardship and despair that Mailer recounts at great length. Intent on an easy and embracing political explanation for the disorder, Mailer shirks his duty as a novelist, which is to turn his back on all such “explanations.”

Kenneth Burke once brilliantly argued that a depiction of war’s brutalities might give rise to more militarism than was bargained for; Burke could see the recruit of a future war pointing to the photographs of a past war’s mutilation and terror, and saying with quiet courage to his girl friend: “Look at those! That’s what war is like. Dearie, today I enlisted!” In short, an “aesthetic barrage” composed of the wildest images of military disorder has often prepared the way for an enhancement of notions of heroism. It is doubtful that Mailer’s book, which is full of terrors and mutilations but is weak in conception, will rouse anyone against militarism. The reverse effect is just as likely: the thousands of bored veterans might find in the bombardments, the skirmishes, and the patrol behind enemy lines the final fillip to their jaded, civilian urge toward a renewal of the romance of the simple issue and the unmitigated experience. On the other hand, the novel that concerns itself with the bare and obsessive problem of war’s tangled morality will, I am afraid, continue to be unimpressive to the mass of humanity.

A word more should be said about Mailer’s style: it is terrible, and, outside of the creative reporting of soldiers’ speech, he achieves all his triumphs of narration and characterization in spite of it. The English critic V. S. Pritchett recently said that writers did not learn how to write badly all at once, they had to work hard at it. There’s no doubt that Mailer has worked hard. Here, for example, is the general musing in his tent: “All the deep dark urges of men, the sacrifices on the hill top, and the churning lusts of the night and sleep, weren’t all of them contained in the shattering screaming burst of a shell, the manmade thunder and light? . . . All of it, all the violence, the dark coordination had sprung from his mind.”

This ornately awkward, muscle-bound prose, so unsuited for any human modulation, be it a whisper or a shout, is not hard to trace: Mailer is writing out of the accumulated officialese of his generation, it is the prose of the NRA, the WPA, the agit-prop theatre, the sociological tracts, the bad novels, the corny articles, the editorials in PM, the army’s manuals and reports. Along with all the other blights visited on our war-and-depression generation, this, too, has been in some way imposed on all of us by our very history—but Mailer has swallowed more than his share of the collective alphabet soup.

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