War & No Peace

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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.