The Perilous Pathway To Morality

Herman Wouk's current best-seller, as shown by a number of reviews, is a novel to praise indiscriminately or to ignore fully. Those who praise it do so because it is an affirmation of mid-twentieth century American morals and values. Those who despite it seem to think that American morals and values are not worth affirming. Between these two critical poles lies poor Marjorie Morning-star, a mediocre-to-good contemporary novel, whose one distinction is its affirmative tone. This seems like a fairly shoddy critical standard. It we are "anti-affirmative" we cross off conventioal morals as having no positive value whatsoever to the author or to the characters he creates. If we are "affirmatives", we cross of seventy percent of the literature written in the last three hundred years.

It is true that the American reading public has been kicked, beaten, ridiculed, and generally pummelled for the last three decades. Throughout this time the "affirmatives" have been brooding and grumbling about the contrast between America's spectacular rise to Number One Nation, and its authors castigation of directionless, valueless, hypocritical America. In the same period the "anti-affirmatives" have been gaily dancing and clicking their heels, gurgling something very much like "Oh boy, oh boy." So now, with the appearance of Marjorie Morning-star, the tables are turned, and everybody is making himself just as ridiculous, if not more so.

Simply, Marjorie Morning-star is about a middle class New York Jewish girl, Marjorie Morgenstern, who wants to be an actress. She falls, and after losing her chastity, becomes a respectable and loving mother and wife. Marjorie's final position in society is to Wouk a triumph, and not a failure. Throughout the novel, Wouk points out the gap between the average American woman's ("Shirley's") conception of herself, and the reality of her possibilities. Every "Shirley", Wouk believes, wants to be Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley, and is incapable of being such. Since Wouk sides with the "Shirleys" it is plain that he thinks 1.) the average American woman is more admirable, in her beliefs and prejudices than her opposites or her critics; and 2.) that these critics of conventional morality cause only confusion and suffering in minds that are satisfied by religion and social mores.

I personally have no quarrel with Wouk's conception of the average American woman. Greater thinkers than he Shaw, for one, believed that women were dedicated biologically and cosmically to only two purposes--catching a mate and bearing children. Shaw envisaged women as infinitely superior to the meandering, excitable man; and the conflict between male and female, in his works, is the basis for comedy on a high plane. Not so with Wouk, for his women seem to flounce and grovel around in a prolonged adolescence before they finally settle down, scarred but happy, to a respectable life of breeding. Despite her courageous accumulation of savoirfaire, Marjorie is not a very intelligent young lady. We are asked to have sympathy with her as she plods along the road to conventionality; we are asked to have sympathy for her failures; we are asked to be in sympathy with the morals from which she reparts, and finally, with her triumph--a respectable marriage. All this sympathy we would gladly give if Marjorie were not so remarkably like Richardson's Pamela--if she ever showed any sign of not becoming what she ultimately does. If it seemed that Marjorie had any choice in the matter of whether she would be Lady Brett Ashley or "Shirley," in short, if she were not so awfully dumb, then we would be more likely to share her heart throbs and such. Marjorie's final conventional resting place may very well be morally admirable, but her literary progress there is not.

Another rather disturbing trait of Wouk's is his tendency to lump the pastimes of his average people together with their morals. He is not content to show that people are admirable when they adhere to conventional morality, but must also show that everything they do--listening to soap operas, watching abominable movies--is just as admirable. Fortunately such passages are few, but their overall effect is to liquidize and sentimentalize the viewpoint that Wouk takes.

Marjorie Morning-star is characterized by its author's love for life as it is--people who live by religion, petty prejudices, and conventional morality, people who are a thousand adjectives good and bad. When Wouk does not drift off into sentimentality, he creates finely and vividly constructed scenes, and often the characters are so familiar that one finds if difficult to view them critically. The prose has a polished unpolish; it is eminently readable and perfectly suited to the novel form. Wouk might easily be remembered as a leading American novelist of the 1950's.