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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Dawn of Everything. Picking up Tom Brown's School Days.
I'm still on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead recounting a fictional WWII battle on a fictional pacific atoll, based on Mailer's own experiences in the Philippines during the war. I will say that after reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro has me questioning a lot of WWII stories from prominent men, so I question whether Mailer, who was definitely a clerk and a cook at other times in the army, was really volunteering for behind-the-lines Recon patrols as is claimed.
It's a funny parallel to listening to Darryl Cooper's podcast series on Israel-Palestine, because the more I listen to Darryl Cooper the more I realize that even where I disagree with him he is My Guy, we listen to the same music and married similar women and read similar books. Where the more I read Norman Mailer the more I know he would hate me, his petty villains in the book are literally called out as alumni of my school and being from my hometown.
Overall Mailer is a great writer, I decided to try his big classic after reading The Fight about the Rumble in the Jungle, but the Naked and the Dead feels a little all over the place for me. The emphasis of the book is on the internal struggles of the men on the island, the Japs are barely around. I'm halfway through the book, and the Japs have shown up for one night attack across a river, and one has been caught out behind American lines and war-crimed. Parts of the book deal with issues of strategy from the commanding officer's perspective, others with the actual labor involved for the GIs trying to win the war on the island, the drudgery of building supply roads, men being assigned to platoons or reserves being switched between companies, lots of walking and riding around and taking watch, very little action. Which is of course a view of war, but the particular way it is shown in this book is miserable.
The vast majority of the book is about the internal lives of the men, their fears and insecurities and personal sins and petty gossip and hatreds. Nobody seems to like each other in Mailer's army, they're either playing oblique status games within the military hierarchy or they despise each other for racial reasons and they all despise themselves for various insecurities related to courage or luck or wealth or success with women. For a bunch of men on an island, they are constantly thinking about pussy, getting it or not getting it or losing it. Mailer, who was Jewish, writes in two Jewish characters who specifically are outcasts from the rest of the group for their Jewishness, and estranged from each other by their own different degrees of Jewishness, one more modern and assimilationist and one more yiddish. And forget the Japanese American translator, who is a few paragraphs of a stereotype I've seen a lot by now but was probably revolutionary then. Officers scheme as to how to degrade their subordinates and force them to submit totally, subalterns cheat and steal to escape notice from their commanders when they aren't bowing and scraping to show what good dogs they are. HQ never seems to work very hard at anything useful, much time is spent talking about stuff that seems deeply out of place in the book, building a clubhouse for the officers, obtaining liquor for the officers, who put out a cigarette in the General's tent, stealing supplies from a ship offshore, etc. It's not clear where they find time to fight a war, what with all the backbiting and infighting and struggles of will and general dicking around going on. It seems like the Japs could have won the battle with a few well placed letters telling men their wives were cheating on them back home, and informing the general his aides didn't like him.
Mailer, of course, was there, he saw the elephant. So as part of my course of war memoirs this year, I have to fit it in. How does this fit in with American Sniper and Storm of Steel and Band of Brothers, or even Sevastopol Stories or The Things They Carried? Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys. The Naked and the Dead paints a whole army of similar outcasts. Where someone like Chris Kyle or Ernst Junger feels himself among friends in the war Mailer never did. In Band of Brothers, the first thing Easy Company does is get rid of the Jew Sobel in favor of Dick Winters, and after that they're a happy family. Antisemitism in the US Army in WWII might really be the underlying story here. Where in Band of Brothers the hijacking of army supplies and the redirection of stuff for fun and profit is a gay romp, in The Naked and the Dead it's a psychologically fraught crime ending in misery.
Overall, still half to go so maybe it justifies itself, and it's a Great Book by a Great Author on a Great Topic so it's never a total waste, but not one I'd really recommend.
I recently read, in a slightly weird context, two long-forgotten WWII memoirs published during the war (so generally as positive as is possible to be while remaining truthful - e.g. one of them devotes a paragraph to mentioning that there were some HQ officers he deeply disliked and thought did a terrible job, gives the unflattering nickname for one, then drops the topic as far as he can), and the sense I got from them was that when you're really at the frontline, you develop intense camaraderie or you die, but the moment you go behind the lines all the petty antagonisms come out. The real grunts stuck together in small groups even when behind the lines, but for the most part the military had a lot of every-man-for-himself balanced by small favours and horse-tradings. And of course every group dislikes and envies the guys behind them without much thought for the guys in front of them. Mailer, as suited to him, makes it much more alienated and emotional than these contemporary books (the other book, written from a frontliner's perspective, was mostly "you don't have room for emotions, except when talking about women, you either make ironclad friends with your squad or you go crazy/get killed, and humour is a critical survival mechanism"), but these accounts resonate together to me. Mailer was apparently mostly doing the miserable wait-around-build-stuff-steal-what-you-can work, whereas Junger was literally in the trenches for most of his war, and under artillery fire when not, so it makes sense the human relationships involved would be very different.
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A gay friend once described his alienation in high school in a way that made me think (but not say) "Yeah, that sounds exactly like being an insecure fat kid." I think the internal experience of alienation is pretty source independent. Maybe Mailer was just a weird asshole that no one else liked, doing a big old Typical Mind Fallacy.
Portnoy's Complaint, a book I read in November that I loved, did this well, using the particulars of the Jewish experience to really dig into the universal experience of male puberty. Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever did a good job with it as well.
It's striking seeing a book about soldiers where nobody is friends and nobody likes each other and everybody is brooding and alienated, compared to stories about war where comrades come together. And something you notice is that Band of Brothers starts out by kicking the Jew out of the company and then everyone gets along, where The Naked and Dead is full of Jews stewing about how everyone hates them and southie guys from Boston complaining about all the Yids.
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