Sailor and Fiddler by Herman Wouk

Author:Herman Wouk
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

* * *

I. The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Communism.

II. Exodus 15:2 (Holy Bible, New Living Translation).

III. Paths of Glory, Patton, Bridge over the River Kwai, Little Big Man, The Graduate.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Main Task II

“DON’T TELL ME YOU bought the purple house!” Georgetown acquaintances would exclaim at first. The previous owner, an eccentric spinster, had so empurpled it throughout that it had been on the market for years, unsalable.I Sarah’s decorative demon awoke. We bought the place, and she was in the racketing upheaval of restoring it when my writing stopped dead. I moved out to seek peace in a room at the Cosmos Club. One evening I came home for dinner, and I was reading my day’s work to her afterward amid the disorder, when she burst out, “You can’t do that!” A German general, writing in prison, was explaining that Hitler’s invasion of Poland had all been England’s fault. “Who is this general? You can’t stop the story dead like that! He doesn’t even sound German. What are you thinking?”

I tried to explain that the big war book wasn’t working, that my plan to scatter characters around the world to convey the global aspect (my first Hilberg’s “structure”) was in collapse. She did not understand. I could not make her understand. I could only say in desperation, “Look, I do this or I quit.” That she under­stood, grumbling, “Oh, don’t quit.” Down the years she had seen me back out of many a narrative blind alley. Now I had to grope my way out of this one.

In point of fact, I had groped my way forward into Hilberg’s structure! The grand narrative scheme that would carry me through so many years of war writing had at last come in sight. I was a while getting the general straight. At first he was “General von Goethe” (a Princeton historian had to talk me out of that), and he was a jarring intruder, not in any way related to the story, for Victor Henry as his translator was a later idea. Yet if I had to submit to a court of angels a sample of my stuff, it might well be General Armin von Roon. Only in his retrospect on the global war, written in prison during twenty years of enforced leisure—a former insider in Hitler’s entourage, a professional soldier with strong informed judgments on all the campaigns including the Pacific sea fights—only so, I say, could the story structure come clear as the brightly lit drama of the Henrys and the Jastrows, played out against the dark cyclorama of General Armin von Roon’s military history.

Byron Henry, the hero of the central love story, is a good-looking charming loafer, a drifter, a do-nothing who slides along the low track in life, barely passing examinations or, if they don’t matter that much, flunking them. He goes not to Annapolis but to Columbia. The only subject that interests him at Columbia is a known gut course for athletes, art history. The

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