The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Day the Century Ended: Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Day the Century Ended: Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to The Naked and the Dead (view source)

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 {{DISPLAYTITLE:''The Day the Century Ended'': Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to ''The Naked and the Dead''}}
 {{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]]
-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.”