We'll start with Chapter 3, The Army, pp 56 - 97, because this is the two-year period that resulted in The Naked And The Dead.
While in college, Harvard, Norman Mailer and Bea become serious but do not get married.
Following college graduation in 1943, Norman and Bea "vacation" in Provincetown.
Norman works on a novel, waiting for his draft notice, hoping he can get a deferral while working on his novel.
January 7, 1944, they get (secretly) married, p. 58, but I get the feeling that his heart wasn't really "in it." p. 58.
She graduated from Boston University.
March 18, 1944, married again, full Jewish service. Mailer despised the ritual. Barbara not Jewish.
Reported for army duty, Camp Upton. IQ test, 145. Then to Fort Bragg, NC, arriving in early April.
Barbara joins the WAVES; Norfolk, VA; officer training, commissioned an ensign.
Mailer in the US Army, enlisted by his choice.
His platoon sergeant: Donald Mann, a southerner, later a physical model for Sergeant Croft in Naked.
Most of his friends in basic training were New York Jews.
Served 25 months; kept quiet, observed.
Phrase: "lee of a truck" -- can't meaning of this on the internet -- is this cargo back of a deuce and a half? The flatbed of a truck: the lee? p. 61.
Joyce James reference, p. 61.
William James' rerference, p. 62.
On leave, up the coast by train to Brooklyn (his family's home) and Norfolk (Barbara's WAVES location), p. 62.
Then Fort Ord, CA.
Wow, wow, wow, I've been to all these places. Can visualize them in my mind.
When traveling and reading about traveling as I do when reading Norman Mailer, my memories return to Linda Fisher.
Environmentalist; reference, p. 63.
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, p. 63.
West Coast embarkation center, Camp Stoneman, shipped out on the USS Sea Barb. Camp Stoneman was located in Pittsburg City, California, just south of Fairfield / Vacaville, CA.
As much as I would have loved exploring England with Pat, I would have loved exploring California with Linda even more.
Headed for the Leyte Gulf. Planning for invastion of Luzon under way. Battle of the Bulge was being fought. Luzon: the ain island of hte Philippine archipelago; capital of Manila located there.
Started populating the novel with characters, but only one, Sergeant Mann, was used. In fact, the unit, yet unknown to him, would be from where he drew his characters: the 112th Cavalry Regiment, a National Guard unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas. The 112th and 124th Cavalry were brigaded into the 56th Cavalry Brigade in 1940.
First island: Leyte Island, December 29, 1944, p. 65.
Invasion of Luzon began January 9, 1945 -- 112th arrived at Langayen Gulf, Luzon, on the USS Monrovia (APA 31) [APA: attack transport] See wiki. APA: amphibious but could spend long periods at sea, and cross oceans.
The mythic eight-day patrol undertaken by a 112th platoon across the upper Angat River in Leyte .. p 70.
Tolstoy, War and Peace, "... every army moves on waves of ignorance and misinformation."
Norman Mailer remembered having read that when writing The Naked and the Dead.
Then, epitomized in the Coen Bros Burn After Reading.
If one gets into a discussion of the wisdom of ending the war with two atomic bombs, ask if anyone knows how many divisions landed on Normandy and then how many divisions were planned to invade Japan. See p. 71.
********************
Chapter 2: Harvard
Theodore H. White, Harvard, 1938
Came up with a system of classifying prewar Harvard students:
- white men
- gray men (the grays)
- meatballs
Citizen Rauh: An American Liberal's Life in Law and Politics, Michael E. Parrish, 2010.
Cincinnati, 1921.
The journey that took Joe Rauh to the Union of Hebrew Congregations meeting in Los Angeles in 1985 and to the NAACP board meeting in 1979 began decades earlier, in his hometown of Cincinnati.
New York Post columnist Jimmy Wechsler, his longtime friend, used to quip that Rauh gained his sympathy for the underdog when he played center for the Harvard University basketball team in the late 1920s. In truth, Rauh learned his first lesson about underdogs and race at the age of ten from his family’s black chauffeur and handyman, Eugene Smith. As part of the bargain for a third child, Sarah Rauh had secured from her husband Joseph Sr. the promise of a new automobile and a chauffeur to drive it. In the spacious yard of their comfortable home on Marion Avenue in the predominantly Jewish section of Cincinnati known as Avondale, young Joe frequently lured Eugene into a game of catch and plagued the older man with endless questions about baseball. “Who’s the best pitcher in baseball?” young Joe asked Smith one afternoon. “Satchel Paige,” Smith replied, not missing a beat. And then he added, “all the great players are colored.” “That can’t be,” Joe said. “I’ve never seen a colored player on the Reds.”
“That’s because they aren’t allowed to play in the major leagues,” Smith told him. His father’s flourishing business manufacturing men’s sports shirts meant that Joe Jr. enjoyed a world of security and comfort unknown to most Americans in the years before World War I. The senior Rauh and other Jews owned and operated three-quarters of the Queen City’s thriving ready-made clothing industry, and they played major roles in the dry goods business, the liquor trade, real estate developments, banking, and insurance. By the time of young Joe’s fifteenth birthday, Jews in Cincinnati had been elected as mayors and district attorneys, in addition to holding positions on the court of common pleas, the police commission, the city council, and the school board. No less an authority on power in his city than President Taft had remarked that “none of the great charities, none of the theatres, none of the societies of art . . . or music, could live [in Cincinnati] if it were not for the support of the Jews.”
While not ranking financially among Cincinnati’s Jewish elite—the Fleischmanns, Freibergs, and Krohns—the senior Rauh’s success permitted vacations on lakes in upstate Michigan, summer camp in Maine for young Joe and his brother Carl, and a Wellesley College education for their precocious older sister, Louise, who soon went on to medical school. Sarah Rauh and her husband could afford a nurse to tend Joe Jr., and saw to it that all the children entered the University School, an institution funded in large part by German Jews who had experienced discrimination at the city’s elite private schools. For the Rauh family, Cincinnati, despite its lingering antiSemitism, remained, as one earlier historian observed, “a sort of paradise for the Hebrews.”15 But Eugene Smith had given young Joe his first significant hint that another world, riddled with discrimination and injustice, existed side by side with his own sheltered one. Joe absorbed a second lesson when he followed his older brother to Harvard College in 1928.
Cambridge, 1930.
In 1930, the Harvard basketball team sent on the court one Jew, center Joe Rauh, and one African-American, William (Bill) Baskerville, a short, wiry guard who could dribble circles around opponents and possessed a devastating outside shot as well. When the team traveled, the Jew and the African-American roomed together, an arrangement as significant as the storied columns at Widener Library.
These were the twilight years at the Harvard of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, whose family had played an active role in the school’s destiny since the American Revolution. A sometime defender of academic freedom for his professors, Lowell’s tolerance did not extend to matters of race, religion, and ethnicity. As national vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, he expressed alarm at the increase in Jewish enrollment at Harvard, which had risen from 7 percent in 1900 to slightly over 21 percent by 1922. President Lowell believed that many German Jews, who behaved like Yankees, could be, like the Irish, absorbed by Harvard, but he reserved a special animus for Jews from eastern Europe and Russia, whom he blamed for the increase in general campus rowdiness and disciplinary problems. His was not the only voice of bigotry at Harvard. English professor Barrett Wendell made it clear that his annual dinner for scholars in the college would have to be dropped “if a Jew ever turn[ed] up among them.”
The Harvard faculty rejected Lowell’s suggestion in 1922 that freshmen applicants who “belong to the Hebrew race . . . be rejected except in unusual and special cases.” By 1927, despite objections from the Board of Overseers, the president had achieved his objective through piecemeal revisions of admissions criteria that capped total freshmen numbers, denied automatic entrance to high school graduates in the top seventh of their class, and favored applicants from the South, Midwest, and Far West. This last provision helped open Harvard’s doors to two young Jews from Cincinnati, Carl Rauh, a math whiz, and his younger brother, Joe. Money, political influence, academic achievement, and athletic prowess could soften the edges of hard ethnic and religious boundaries at Lowell’s Harvard, but not for African-Americans. Small in numbers, they suffered the worst discrimination. When it opened new halls for freshmen in 1914, Harvard told its black students to find lodgings elsewhere. Roscoe Conkling Bruce, a black Phi Beta Kappa graduate in the class of 1902, attempted to break this racial barrier for his son in 1922, but Lowell personally vetoed the idea: “We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we do not owe to him to force him and the white man into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial.”
Harvard’s color line followed its basketball players to New York City when the team arrived at the Vanderbilt Hotel for scheduled games against Columbia and the City College of New York. As Joe Rauh entered the lobby, he watched his roommate turn, grim-faced, from the reservations desk, pick up his suitcase, and head for the door. “Hey, Bill,” he asked, “where are you going in such a hurry?” “They won’t let me stay here, Joe. They don’t accept Negroes.” Baskerville quickly explained to his stunned roommate and the other Harvard players that white Southerners owned the Vanderbilt and did not want their patrons forced to mingle with African-Americans. The Harvard team huddled for a moment, then marched as a group to the front desk, canceled their reservations, and left the Vanderbilt.18 They were ahead of their time. The Harvard Corporation would not take a stand against racial discrimination in sports until 1941, when another group of athletes protested a decision by the school’s athletic director, who had bowed to pressure from the United States Naval Academy and benched a black lacrosse player scheduled to play against Annapolis.
Rauh’s Harvard contemporary, the journalist Theodore White, divided the undergraduates of the time into three sociological groups—white men, gray men, and meatballs. The white men arrived in Cambridge with grand names, great wealth, or both—Saltonstalls, Morgans, Roosevelts, Harrimans. They drove fancy automobiles, belonged to social clubs, wore fine clothes, escorted debutantes to lavish parties, and could afford out-of-town football games in New Haven or New York. White proudly placed himself among the meatballs. They often arrived as day students on scholarships. Children of immigrants—Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians—they ate their lunches from paper bags, owned one suit of clothes, and endlessly debated the virtues of socialism or communism on Dudley Hall’s ground floor, set aside for them. In contrast, White’s gray men came from public schools or second-tier private schools. “Neither aristocracy nor of the deserving poor,” resolutely middle class, they staffed the Crimson and the Harvard Advocate, dominated the athletic teams, earned good grades, and ran the school’s student government.20 With his Buick automobile, sporty clothes, spending money, and supply of bathtub gin, undergraduate Rauh could have been mistaken for a white, but he remained a gray, someone capable of navigating up and down Harvard’s social ladder, cultivating friendships across the class divide. Barred from prominent social clubs such as Porcelain, Rauh and other grays studied harder than whites and earned better grades, while their enthusiasm for sports and politics brought them into alliance often with meatballs. Driven by competition with his two bright roommates, Joe Keller, a wizard at engineering, and Bernard Meyer, destined for a distinguished career in psychiatry, Rauh completed his major in economics, earned a Phi Beta Page 16 →Kappa key, and graduated magna cum laude. He might have garnered honors as Harvard’s best athlete, too, had it not been for Barry Wood, a future physician, who earned straight A’s, lettered in four sports, and quarterbacked the Crimson football team.21 He also experienced little overt anti-Semitism as a Harvard undergraduate, despite the Lowells, the Wendells, and others on the faculty and among the student body who probably shared their prejudice. The episode at the Vanderbilt stirred his growing sense of kinship with the Bill Baskervilles of America; so, too, did his visit to Berlin in 1932.
Berlin, 1932
On the eve of the stock market crash in 1929, Rauh and two friends from Cincinnati went to western Europe. Typical college-age tourists, they ate, drank, and visited the great sites, but did not engage a single European in discussions about the swirling economic and political forces about to plunge the continent and the world into disaster. By 1932, unemployment spawned by the Great Depression rocked democratic regimes across Europe, especially in Germany, where Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party had become the single largest voting bloc in the Reichstag on a platform that stressed military rearmament, revision of the Versailles Treaty, full employment, and anti-Semitism.
Rauh arrived in Berlin that year under false pretenses as part of a jazz band organized by his Harvard classmate, Jim Plaut, a gifted piano player and the future director of the Boston Museum of Contemporary Arts. Although Rauh could not read music or keep time, Plaut described him as a backup drummer for the group, a ruse that apparently fooled officials who approved the trip. All illusions vanished, however, when the band went to Berlin’s vast Wannsee Stadium on the night of a huge rally hosted by Hitler’s Nazi Party. Perhaps 100,000 Germans marched into the stadium in military fashion, many wearing the uniforms of their particular occupation, trade, or profession, and they carried aloft the party’s red-and-black swastika banners. When the last marcher had settled into a seat, doors opened only twenty feet from where Rauh stood, and a car slowly emerged bearing Hitler and other party leaders, who waved to the crowd as the vehicle made several passages around the stadium. On each pass of the car, Hitler came so close that Rauh could have knocked off his hat with a long stick. Minutes later, the Nazi leader launched into one of his hate-filled diatribes against Versailles, the craven leaders of the Weimar Republic, and Jews. “Niedrig mit den Juden,” he shouted. “Down with the Jews. Down with the Jews.” The crowd, now worked into a fury, picked up his chant and hurled it back: “Niedrig mit den Juden! Niedrig mit den Juden!” Joe Rauh had never heard anything like it.22 Several weeks later, as the jazz band prepared to sail home to America, Hitler’s party suffered a temporary setback in Reichstag elections. On the eve of entering Harvard Law School, Rauh told curious friends in Cincinnati that the Nazi Party’s influence in Germany had probably dissipated. But in January 1933, President Hindenberg proved that prediction utterly wrong. He elevated Hitler to the chancellorship.
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