In the matter of The Naked and the Dead our duty as liberal and educated people is clear. If it comes to a showdown we stand by Norman Mailer. His book is tremendously good, and perhaps better than that. There has been some conjuring up of the ghost of what Henry James called "that Rhadamanthus of English literature - the Young Person." Presumably British grown-ups have enough moral fibre to read without becoming demoralised, a book about soldiers fighting, frightened, swearing (which everybody knows most soldiers do all the time - and in any case almost everybody has been a soldier; even the women have been in uniform by the hundred thousand), and about soldiers and their women and soldiers getting wounded and killed. As for the Young Persons, those belonging to what used to be known as the working classes are commonly enlightened very early about elemental things, and the other boys and girls are not nowadays brought up prudish. But in fact "The Naked and the Dead" will only be scavenged for obscene passages by those whose taste or fancy is already for such nourishment. It is a powerful, well-planned and excitingly intelligent book: a far more remarkable achievement than there is space to describe here.
An American brigade is fighting the Japanese on a Pacific island. We are made intimate with individuals of all ranks from the G.I.s to the General. (Some of them are perfectly respect-able, kindly, and restrained.) From time to time there is a flashback to the private home life of one or another of our heroes, and these passages, though brilliant in their analysis, are in some cases the weakest links in the sequence: in their compression they are a little too magazine-slick. When one considers that Mr. Mailer is still only 26 years old, the range and the grasp he shows seems extraordinary. His assessment of something nearly as universal as fear inspired by danger comes out in the superb dialogues between the General and his aide. Most people who reach three times 26 never tumble to a fraction of what Mr. Mailer has already found out about the psychology of the men who want power. In the long future which may be ahead of mankind the misfortunes of the masses will seldom any more come to them from a lone dictator - much from countless bosses and managers like Mr. Mailer's not altogether detestable General. And what a lot this story tells us about that subject of such prime interest in the twentieth century: the Americans! One feels, of course, that Americans get too much to eat in war as in peace. How can one not become rather more animal than befits a human being with so much rich food to eat? "The Naked and the Dead" is a little too long - not much; and one must insist that the construction is masterly.
