After the Lost Generation by John Watson Aldridge

Author:John Watson Aldridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789123937
Publisher: Arcole Publishing
Published: 2019-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX—Mailer, Burns, and Shaw

The Naked Zero

PEOPLE FIRST BECAME conscious of the new war novelists with the publication, in 1946, of Alfred Hayes’s All Thy Conquests, the first important novel of World War II and a disturbing one to older readers whose picture of the war had been formed on the hygienic productions of Marion Hargrove and Ernie Pyle. At about the same time Gore Vidal and Robert Lowry appeared with their terse little books, Williwaw and Casualty, which, along with Hayes’s novel, helped to carry the tradition of Hemingway into our own decade. Then, in 1947, John Home Burns published The Gallery, a fine book which almost everybody read, and Vance Bourjaily made his all-too-brief appearance with The End of My Life, which was an equally fine book in its way but which, for some reason, almost nobody read. It was not until 1948, however, when Norman Mailer’s encyclopedic The Naked and the Dead appeared that the general public fully accepted the new war literature.

To account for the remarkable success of a book as full of bitterness and horror as this one is, it is necessary to remember that up to the time of its appearance there had been no book like it and that when it appeared the public was ready for it. All Thy Conquests, Casualty, Williwaw, and the others had all told the truth of war as their authors had seen it, but the vision that had gone into them had been limited and, for the most part, confined to one or two special areas of the war experience. None of them had been truly conclusive or able to crystallize the evil of war within a philosophical framework. There was, furthermore, for the first year or two after the war, a period of general reaction and apathy when the public was emotionally incapable of responding fully to the issues raised by any serious war novel. But by 1948, the war was far enough away for people to remember it with some detachment and to begin to speculate on its larger meanings. They had long been vaguely aware of the existence of a complex moral and philosophical design that lay behind the surface reality of campaigns fought and men killed and wounded; and Mailer was the first writer to attempt to make its implications clear to them.

This design arising out of a narrative of intense dramatic action makes The Naked and the Dead something more than simply a journalistic catalogue of war; while the dramatic element playing constantly beneath the design keeps it from becoming simply a philosophical discourse on war. No novel since The Red Badge of Courage and War and Peace has contained a more vivid or terrifyingly accurate picture of the conditions of actual warfare, and certainly no novel of our time since U.S.A. has projected its theme on a more variegated background of human experience. On page after page and in episode after episode, it is Mailers magnificent reportorial sense, his gift for

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