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{{DISPLAYTITLE:''The Day the Century Ended'': Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to ''The Naked and the Dead''}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/</span>''The Day the Century Ended'': Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to ''The Naked and the Dead''}}
{{MR09}}
{{MR09}}
{{byline|last=Loving|first=Jerome}}
{{byline|last=Loving|first=Jerome|abstract=An examination of the personal and literary relationship between {{NM}} and Francis Irby Gwaltney.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr15love}}


{{abstract|An examination of the personal and literary relationship between [[Norman Mailer]] and Francis Irby Gwaltney.}}
Sometime in 1961, at the elegant Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, Jean Covert interviewed Norman Mailer for a local TV station. Mailer was relatively high on the list of American celebrities, having just published his perceptive and witty “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” at the outset of the ill-fated presidency of John F. Kennedy and the era of Camelot. (The fact that Mailer had stabbed his second wife the previous year in a latenight argument fueled by alcohol never came up in the interview.) When Covert commented on the phenomenon of early fame, Mailer, whose literary reputation had yet to pick up entirely from his first best seller at age 25, wondered whether it wasn’t better to “make it” around 40. “Have you ever heard of Francis Irby Gwaltney?” he went on to ask his interviewer. “Gwaltney and I were buddies in the Philippines. We went into different companies so we didn’t see exactly the same combat. But he wrote a book about the war there called ''The Day the Century Ended''. It’s interesting to compare the perspectives of the two books.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=72}}


 
Gwaltney was actually in his mid-thirties when he published ''The Day the Century Ended'' in 1955. He met Mailer in 1944 in Texas when both were assigned to the army’s 112th Regimental Combat Team that eventually saw combat in the Philippines. If the plots of Gwaltney’s wartime novel and ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) are any reliable indication, Gwaltney saw a great deal more combat than Norman Mailer, who saw relatively little action from what we know from other sources. Both novels go against the grain of the endearing reputation of World War II as the “good war,” not only in their stark descriptions of brutality against individual Japanese soldiers (whose dead mouths are regularly mined for gold) but also in the frank way each writer depicts the average “G.I. Joe” as neither blindly patriotic nor clean-cut. Both sets of soldiers throw around the “F” word, although the censor was probably at also at work in both cases — Mailer’s grunts having to say “fug,” whereas Gwaltney’s were allowed to say “fuck” but it had to be spelled on the page without the “c” (“fuk”).{{efn|Mailer, interestingly enough, may have self-censored. He later told Edward de Grazia that “fug” was used for “fuck” because in the 1940s “you just couldn’t get near it”; see {{harvtxt|Lennon|2013|loc=793n}}.}} Like ''The Naked and the Dead'', ''The Day the Century Ended'' was made into a movie. Called ''Between Heaven and Hell'', the 1956 movie starred Robert Wagner, Buddy Ebsen, and Broderick Crawford.
Sometime in 1961, at the elegant Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, Jean Covert interviewed Norman Mailer for a local TV station. Mailer was relatively high on the list of American celebrities, having just published his perceptive and witty “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” at the outset of the ill-fated presidency of John F. Kennedy and the era of Camelot. (The fact that Mailer had stabbed his second wife the previous year in a latenight argument fueled by alcohol never came up in the interview.) When Covert commented on the phenomenon of early fame, Mailer, whose literary reputation had yet to pick up entirely from his first best seller at age 25, wondered whether it wasn’t better to “make it” around 40. “Have you ever heard of Francis Irby Gwaltney?” he went on to ask his interviewer. “Gwaltney and I were buddies in the Philippines. We went into different companies so we didn’t see exactly the same combat. But he wrote a book about the war there called ''The Day the Century Ended''. It’s interesting to compare the perspectives of the two books.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=72}}
[[File:Gwaltney-novel.jpeg|thumb]]
[[File:Gwaltney-novel.jpeg|thumb]]
Gwaltney was actually in his mid-thirties when he published ''The Day the Century Ended'' in 1955. He met Mailer in 1944 in Texas when both were assigned to the army’s 112th Regimental Combat Team that eventually saw combat in the Philippines. If the plots of Gwaltney’s wartime novel and ''The Naked and the Dead'' (1948) are any reliable indication, Gwaltney saw a great deal more combat than Norman Mailer, who saw relatively little action from what we know from other sources. Both novels go against the grain of the endearing reputation of World War II as the “good war,” not only in their stark descriptions of brutality against individual Japanese soldiers (whose dead mouths are regularly mined for gold) but also in the frank way each writer depicts the average “G.I. Joe” as neither blindly patriotic nor clean-cut. Both sets of soldiers throw around the “F” word, although the censor was probably at also at work in both cases — Mailer’s grunts having to say “fug,” whereas Gwaltney’s were allowed to say “fuck” but it had to be spelled on the page without the “c” (“fuk”).{{efn|Mailer, interestingly enough, may have self-censored. He later told Edward de Grazia that “fug” was used for “fuck” because in the 1940s “you just couldn’t get near it”; see {{harvtxt|Lennon|2013|loc=793n}}.}} Like ''The Naked and the Dead'', ''The Day the Century Ended'' was made into a movie. Called ''Between Heaven and Hell'', the 1956 movie starred Robert Wagner, Buddy Ebsen, and Broderick Crawford.
''The Day the Century Ended'' was Gwaltney’s second book. His first, ''The Yeller-Headed Summer'', was published in 1953. He wrote it with the help of Mailer, who kept in contact with Gwaltney almost until the latter’s death in 1981. In fact, it was during one of Mailer’s visits to Gwaltney in Arkansas that he met his sixth and final wife, Barbara Norris. In all, Gwaltney published eleven books, but clearly his finest was ''The Day the Century Ended''. He also wrote television screenplays for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Fugitive” and possibly “The Waltons.”
''The Day the Century Ended'' was Gwaltney’s second book. His first, ''The Yeller-Headed Summer'', was published in 1953. He wrote it with the help of Mailer, who kept in contact with Gwaltney almost until the latter’s death in 1981. In fact, it was during one of Mailer’s visits to Gwaltney in Arkansas that he met his sixth and final wife, Barbara Norris. In all, Gwaltney published eleven books, but clearly his finest was ''The Day the Century Ended''. He also wrote television screenplays for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “The Fugitive” and possibly “The Waltons.”


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It would be nice to conclude this essay by saying that Francis Irby Gwaltney, until his death in 1981 at the age of fifty-nine, remained friends with Norman Mailer. Unfortunately, the two old friends quarreled again in 1979, following the publication of Fig’s review of ''The Executioner’s Song'' in the ''Arkansas Gazette''. It was over a slighting remark Gwaltney made in the review about Barbara Norris, Mailer’s sixth wife, whom he had met in 1975 at a party in Russellville, Arkansas, where the Gwaltneys were teaching English at Arkansas Tech. Fig, whose monogamous idea of marriage was diametrically opposed to his friend’s, evidently regretted the fact that he had allowed Barbara to attend his party in order to meet Mailer, with whom she subsequently left Arkansas to live and ultimately marry Mailer. Norris Church, as she came to be known after her marriage, resented Fig’s reference to her as Mailer’s “present live-in wife,” as well as the fact that she was never mentioned by name in the article. When Mailer himself addressed the issue with Fig, he replied with the feistiness he had shown during their first quarrel. In response to Mailer’s letter of November 27, 1979, he wrote a month later: “It has never been my understanding that acting as Barbara Norris’s publicity agent was a condition of our friendship.” He concluded that now that their friendship had been “lastingly breached,” the thing he most deeply regretted was having allowed her to crash his party in 1975. Shortly before her official marriage to Mailer in 1980, Norris Church made an effort to patch up the quarrel, saying “Norman and I are getting married now, and it’s all your doing, et cetera,” but apparently Fig either never received the letter or simply ignored it, not even mentioning it to his wife.{{sfn|Manso|1985|pp=618–619}}
It would be nice to conclude this essay by saying that Francis Irby Gwaltney, until his death in 1981 at the age of fifty-nine, remained friends with Norman Mailer. Unfortunately, the two old friends quarreled again in 1979, following the publication of Fig’s review of ''The Executioner’s Song'' in the ''Arkansas Gazette''. It was over a slighting remark Gwaltney made in the review about Barbara Norris, Mailer’s sixth wife, whom he had met in 1975 at a party in Russellville, Arkansas, where the Gwaltneys were teaching English at Arkansas Tech. Fig, whose monogamous idea of marriage was diametrically opposed to his friend’s, evidently regretted the fact that he had allowed Barbara to attend his party in order to meet Mailer, with whom she subsequently left Arkansas to live and ultimately marry Mailer. Norris Church, as she came to be known after her marriage, resented Fig’s reference to her as Mailer’s “present live-in wife,” as well as the fact that she was never mentioned by name in the article. When Mailer himself addressed the issue with Fig, he replied with the feistiness he had shown during their first quarrel. In response to Mailer’s letter of November 27, 1979, he wrote a month later: “It has never been my understanding that acting as Barbara Norris’s publicity agent was a condition of our friendship.” He concluded that now that their friendship had been “lastingly breached,” the thing he most deeply regretted was having allowed her to crash his party in 1975. Shortly before her official marriage to Mailer in 1980, Norris Church made an effort to patch up the quarrel, saying “Norman and I are getting married now, and it’s all your doing, et cetera,” but apparently Fig either never received the letter or simply ignored it, not even mentioning it to his wife.{{sfn|Manso|1985|pp=618–619}}


In one of his last letters (extant in the HRC), however, Fig read ''The Fight'' (1975), a book that led Mailer almost directly to his magnum opus in ''The Executioner’s Song'', and told his wartime buddy and lifelong friend: “You’ll discover, deep in your dotage, that people will be studying [''The Fight''] as a social document.”{{sfn|Gwaltney|1975|}} Francis Irby Gwaltney was Norman Mailer’s best and oldest friend, and the New Yorker who could do a pretty good Southern accent paid tribute to him in 1983, when he gave the keynote lecture at the Annual Creative Writing Workshop at Arkansas Tech that Fig had co-founded. Mailer had come for $3,000, half his usual lecturer’s fee, and at the close of the workshop he returned the check to establish a scholarship fund for creative writing at the college in Fig’s name.{{sfn|Dempsey|1987|pp=42–45}}{{efn|Mailer returned to Arkansas Tech twelve years later, again donating his speaker’s fee to the college (“Scholarship”).}} Today, advertised as the only Bachelor of Fine Arts, or BA level creative writing program in the Southwest, the BFA website still features a photograph of Gwaltney, the writer who hated the South enough to write in the Southern tradition of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Along the way, he befriended another great writer, a New Yorker and a “Southerner” — that is, a “natural mimic” who could talk “to us in a language that only a sharp ear could differentiate from the good, Southern English.”
In one of his last letters (extant in the HRC), however, Fig read ''The Fight'' (1975), a book that led Mailer almost directly to his magnum opus in ''The Executioner’s Song'', and told his wartime buddy and lifelong friend: “You’ll discover, deep in your dotage, that people will be studying [''The Fight''] as a social document.”{{sfn|Gwaltney|1975|}} Francis Irby Gwaltney was Norman Mailer’s best and oldest friend, and the New Yorker who could do a pretty good Southern accent paid tribute to him in 1983, when he gave the keynote lecture at the Annual Creative Writing Workshop at Arkansas Tech that Fig had co-founded. Mailer had come for $3,000, half his usual lecturer’s fee, and at the close of the workshop he returned the check to establish a scholarship fund for creative writing at the college in Fig’s name.{{sfn|Dempsey|1987|pp=42–45}}{{efn|Mailer returned to Arkansas Tech twelve years later, again donating his speaker’s fee to the college.{{sfn|Scholarship|1995|p=1}} }} Today, advertised as the only Bachelor of Fine Arts, or BA level creative writing program in the Southwest, the BFA website still features a photograph of Gwaltney, the writer who hated the South enough to write in the Southern tradition of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Along the way, he befriended another great writer, a New Yorker and a “Southerner” — that is, a “natural mimic” who could talk “to us in a language that only a sharp ear could differentiate from the good, Southern English.”


==Notes==
==Notes==
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* {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |recipient=Francis Irby Gwaltney |subject=- |language= |date=October 28, 1959 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |location=MS. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas, Austin. |ref=harv }}
* {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |recipient=Francis Irby Gwaltney |subject=- |language= |date=October 28, 1959 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |location=MS. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas, Austin. |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=1985 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781416562863 |location=New York |publisher=Washington Square Press |author-link= }}
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=1985 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781416562863 |location=New York |publisher=Washington Square Press |author-link= }}
* {{cite news |author=<!--staff--> |date=December 6, 1995 |title=Scholarship Gets Boost from Mailer’s Speech |page=1 |work=Atkins Chronicle |ref={{harvid|Scholarship|1995}} }}
{{refend}}
{{refend}}


{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{Review|state=expanded}}
 
{{DEFAULTSORT:Day the Century Ended: Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to The Naked and the Dead, The}}
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