Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition, With a New Introduction by the Author

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Contents

I would like to thank William Raney, Theodore S. Amussen, and Charles Devlin for the aid and encouragement given me at various times in the writing of this novel.

All characters and incidents in this novel are fictional, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

To My Mother and Bea

Introduction

Now that fifty years have gone by since The Naked and the Dead was published in May 1948, I think it might be interesting to talk about it as a best-seller that was the work of an amateur. Of course, as bestsellers go, it was a good book, and the author who began it at the age of twenty-three and completed it fifteen months later had already written more than a quarter of a million words in college and so could be considered a hard-working amateur who loved writing and was prepared in the way of a twenty-four-year-old to fall on his sword in the cause of literature.

Still, he was nave, he was passionate about writing, he knew very little about the subtler demands of a good style, he did not have a great deal of restraint, and he burned with excitement as he wrote. He hardly knew whether he should stand in the shadow of Tolstoy or was essentially without talent. He was an amateur.

He was also a writer of what soon became a big best-seller. Indeed, The Naked and the Dead was his only prodigious best-seller. It had a good story that got better and better, it had immediacy, it came out at exactly the right time when, near to three years after the Second World War ended, everyone was ready for a big war novel that gave some idea of what it had all been likeit thrived on its scenes of combatand it had a best-seller style. The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing.

The book also had vigor. That is the felicity of good books by amateurs. They venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether. The Naked and the Dead took chances all over the place and more of them succeeded than not: It was rightly a best-seller; it fulfilled one of two profiles of such a categoryfor invariably these books are written by bold amateurs or by niche professionals who know more about a given subject than they ought to.

All this said, one may now ask the artisan who is setting down these words what virtue he might ascribe to this work he did as an amateur. The answer is that he had the good luck to be influenced profoundly by Tolstoy in the fifteen months he was writing this opus back in 1946 and 1947he read from Anna Karenina most mornings before he commenced his own work. Thereby, his pages, through the limited perceptions of a twenty-four-year-old, reflect what he learned about compassion from Tolstoy. For that is the genius of the old manTolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful. In any case, good or bad, it reminds us that life is like a gladiators arena for the soul and so we can feel strengthened by those who endure, and feel awe and pity for those who do not.

That fine edge in Tolstoy, the knowledge that compassion is valueless without severity (for otherwise it cannot defend itself against sentimentality), gave The Naked and the Dead whatever enduring virtue it may possess and catapulted the amateur who wrote it into the grim ranks of those successful literary men and women who are obliged to become professional in order to surviveno easy demand, for it would insist that one must be able to do a good days work on a bad day, and indeed that is a badge of honor decent professionals are entitled to wear.

So, I am still fond of The Naked and the Dead. It has virtues, it has faults, but it also has a redeeming, even stimulating touch of Tolstoyan compassion, and thereby enables me to feel hope for all of us when very occasionally I go back and read a few pages. Allow me then to suppose that there is a good deal of hope to be found if one reads all of its pages.

Norman Mailer

PART ONE

Wave

N OBODY COULD sleep. When morning came, assault craft would be lowered and a first wave of troops would ride through the surf and charge ashore on the beach at Anopopei. All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead.

* * *

A soldier lies flat on his bunk, closes his eyes, and remains wide-awake. All about him, like the soughing of surf, he hears the murmurs of men dozing fitfully. I wont do it, I wont do it, someone cries out of a dream, and the soldier opens his eyes and gazes slowly about the hold, his vision becoming lost in the intricate tangle of hammocks and naked bodies and dangling equipment. He decides he wants to go to the head, and cursing a little, he wriggles up to a sitting position, his legs hanging over the bunk, the steel pipe of the hammock above cutting across his hunched back. He sighs, reaches for his shoes, which he has tied to a stanchion, and slowly puts them on. His bunk is the fourth in a tier of five, and he climbs down uncertainly in the half-darkness, afraid of stepping on one of the men in the hammocks below him. On the floor he picks his way through a tangle of bags and packs, stumbles once over a rifle, and makes his way to the bulkhead door. He passes through another hold whose aisle is just as cluttered, and finally reaches the head.

Inside the air is steaming. Even now a man is using the sole fresh-water shower, which has been occupied ever since the troops have come on board. The soldier walks past the crap games in the unused salt-water shower stalls, and squats down on the wet split boards of the latrine. He has forgotten his cigarettes and he bums one from a man sitting a few feet away. As he smokes he looks at the black wet floor littered with butts, and listens to the water sloshing through the latrine box. There has been really no excuse for coming, but he continues to sit on the box because it is cooler here, and the odor of the latrine, the brine, the chlorine, the clammy bland smell of wet metal is less oppressive than the heavy sweating fetor of the troop holds. The soldier remains for a long time, and then slowly he stands up, hoists his green fatigue pants, and thinks of the struggle to get back to his bunk. He knows he will lie there waiting for the dawn and he says to himself, I wish it was time already, I dont give a damn, I wish it was time already. And as he returns, he is thinking of an early morning in his childhood when he had lain awake because it was to be his birthday and his mother had promised him a party.

* * *

Early that evening Wilson and Gallagher and Staff Sergeant Croft had started a game of seven card stud with a couple of orderlies from headquarters platoon. They had grabbed the only empty place on the hold deck where it was possible to see the cards once the lights were turned off. Even then they were forced to squint, for the only bulb still lit was a blue one near the ladder, and it was difficult to tell the red suits from the black. They had been playing for hours, and by now they were in a partial stupor. If the hands were unimportant, the betting was automatic, almost unconscious.