Herman Wouk: You fight the war

Wonder if Batman ever played the Exec?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114670358831943314.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

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Dissent in Wartime
By HERMAN WOUK

May 4, 2006; Page A14
In the way of nature, plays do not live long. Early in my literary life I wrote several plays, convinced myself that the theater was not my métier, and thereafter have stayed with books. Yet one effort from those days, "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial," has been holding the stage here and there around the world ever since I wrote it, and opens once again next week on Broadway, in the same theater where it played half a century ago. A word or two about the origin of this anomaly, for an anomaly it is.

Shaw's "Man and Superman" contains a quirky interlude, "Don Juan in Hell," longer in itself than most plays, and usually omitted when the play is revived. In the early 1950s Charles Laughton, at a nadir in his film career, produced "Don Juan in Hell" as an entire evening in the theater. It cost nothing to mount. He and three other film stars (also at liberty) simply read the script at lecterns, Laughton playing the Devil, of course. The novelty toured the country to big business and wowed New York for months. When I saw the piece, it occurred to me that the court-martial chapters in my novel, "The Caine Mutiny," could provide just such a coup de théâtre.

Nothing to it. Those chapters were mostly dialogue, actors at lecterns would simply read them from copies of the book! No work, and a nice stream of royalties; an author's fantasy par excellence.

So I sought out Laughton in his New York hotel. He received me amiably, for "The Caine Mutiny" was a current best seller, and he liked my idea, but said it wouldn't work, I would have to fashion a play from those chapters. I was then writing "Marjorie Morningstar," and hated to break off and rehash the tale of Captain Queeg in a theater piece. However, I had asked the Devil into my life, he tempted me with visions of how easy it would be, easy as pie, and I fell. It proved half a year of what I call cold-iron work, when the heat of creation is past, and one adapts, revises and rewrites a tale already told, as I obsessively do with my novels.

Yet the play was not a rehash, exactly, as it turned out. The novel tells the same story twice, although I did not plan it that way, once as a straight-on narrative, and the reader tends to cheer when the exec relieves the whey-faced captain, clinging in panic to the engine room telegraph of a ship reeling in a typhoon. With a very sharp break in narrative tone, the tale is then reconstructed step by step, backwards as it were, from the viewpoint of Barney Greenwald, a peacetime Jewish lawyer and reserve fighter pilot, who defends the exec and gets him off. It is a rare theatergoer who is not taken abruptly aback, when a drunken Greenwald at the end excoriates the officers for making the mutiny. That denouement in the novel, and then in the play, has engendered much controversy down the years.

More and more nowadays my "greatest generation" is departing, and World War II is fading off into the history books, the novels and the films. What then keeps this play going? Courtroom drama is a staple of entertainment to be sure, a plethora is on television. I confess to pride in the true ring of my wartime navy trial, yet that cannot account for its longevity. Dissent in wartime, the theme of this two-hours traffic on the stage, evidently strikes an abiding nerve.

Recently I left my desert hermitage and flew to New York to observe the rehearsals. I found the actors, a wonderful company, debating the play's outcome as hotly as critics and essayists did when it first appeared. They pounced on me with questions. It was no use to suggest that they regard me as gone to a better world, and to figure it all out for themselves. There I was, and I had to speak up.

I did my best to extemporize. What I told them was true enough, so far as it went. The denouement turns on the character of Greenwald, very drunk and spilling his rage at having had to destroy Queeg on the stand. But he is speaking one side, and a very personal side -- he calls it "warped" -- of the theme. As he says, he speaks as a Jew. I have to take some responsibility for that; he comes close to speaking for the author. Close, but not quite. He is putting, as forcibly as he can, the other side of an enduring question which the exec throws at him at the end of Act One. "What do you do when you really get a Queeg?" Greenwald barks back, "You fight the war."

That was not always my point of view. At Columbia College in the '30s I was an organizer of an anti-war conference. My outlook underwent a sea change when after Pearl Harbor I became a reserve deck officer, and was shipped halfway around the world, to serve in the South Pacific on a decrepit old destroyer-minesweeper, the USS Zane. I had been a quite happy New York Jewish gagman, writing for the nonpareil radio comedian Fred Allen, with no thought for the future but maybe one day writing funny farces. My wartime years changed all that. I wrote most of my first novel at sea, and returned to civilian life with a passion for the fiction art, and a bone-deep awareness of the 20th century's central reality, War, which is central too in my works.

Greenwald in 1944 can hardly know what is actually happening in the Holocaust. He doesn't dream of the coming rise of a Jewish state that can fight and win wars. He speaks from the gut his instinct about the mutiny, and the play is not an answer, it poses a question, an old dilemma of war. How will a New York audience in 2006, with a war going badly in Iraq, respond to the question? One sure thing about an opening on Broadway is that nobody can say how the play will go until the curtain rises. Makes for a bit of nervous excitement for all hands, including the ancient author.

Mr. Wouk is the author of "The Caine Mutiny" and, most recently, "A Hole in Texas" (Little Brown, 2004).

 

what about Mary McCarthy?