Aurora Dawn
Authors: Herman Wouk
Copyright 1947 by Herman Wouk
Copyright © renewed 1975 by Herman Wouk
Illustrations copyright © 1956 by Doubleday
All rights reserved.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-07702-6
Contents
Books by Herman Wouk
Novels
Aurora Dawn
City Boy
The Caine Mutiny
Marjorie Morningstar
Youngblood Hawke
Don’t Stop the Carnival
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
Inside, Outside
The Hope
The Glory
A Hole in Texas
Plays
The Traitor
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
Nature’s Way
Nonfiction
This Is My God
The Will to Live On
This story is dedicated to Irwin Edman
I
N THE DECADE
since this novel was written, radio has given way to television.
Who would have dreamed, a mere ten years ago, that the money-crammed world of radio was a bubble about to burst?
Or who would dare to suggest today that commercial television—with its mammoth floods of cash, its huge studios, its racketing
parlor games, its jigging advertisements, its solemn potentates—may someday be pricked by an electrician who will devise a
more agreeable entertainment tool?
Meantime sponsors are still sponsors; glamor girls are glamor girls; cringing executives are cringing executives; and ulcers
apparently are ulcers. In the halls of Radio City, between rounds of the unchanging hot fight for place and money, boys still
chase girls. The little box that sold us things in our homes by giving us music, yarns, and jokes, gratis, has yielded to
a larger box that does the same job with pictures added. Miracles of engineering; trifles of amusement; at the heart of it
all, the peddler.
Plus Ça change … !
Television, like radio before it, is a revival of an old form of entertainment, the free show or come-on. The purpose of the
come-on is only incidentally to please. The main idea is to catch attention, hold it, and then divert it to whatever the man
is selling. The instability inherent in this amalgam of sketchy amusement and hard-eyed selling causes most of the abuses
and follies pictured in
Aurora Dawn.
None of that has changed. Aurora Dawn is a more rampant goddess than ever.
The American people have accepted their broadcast entertainment in the ancient form of the free show. Who are novelists that
they should prescribe differently? To crusade against the come-on seems faintly ridiculous. But perhaps it may be useful to
raise a laugh against some of its abuses, which are not so much monstrous or evil as just plain silly, and unworthy of an
adult civilization.
H.W.
Fire Island,
August, 1956.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
T
HE WRITING
of this story was begun to relieve the tedium of military service at sea in wartime, which, as sailors will tell you, is even
more monotonous than in peace, despite occasional interruptions of terror.
A
URORA
D
AWN
was started aboard the
U.S.S. Zane
at Tulagi, Solomon Islands, in 1943. The first part was completed aboard the U.S.S. Southard at Okinawa in 1945; and the book
was finished at Northport, Long Island, in May,1946.
This chronology is introduced because of the recent publication of more than one novel intended to expose the inner workings
of the advertising industry, which this story may be said to resemble in setting and certain points of detail, though not,
surely, in matter or manner. The coincidence, such as it is, cannot injure the other books, and will not greatly distract
the readers of this one. Let me be forgiven, then, for publishing
A
URORA
D
AWN
unaltered in those points of similarity.
“The artist’s revenge” is a familiar flaw in satire. In so far as a grudge dictates the writing of any portion of a book,
the work is marred; humor is one thing, lampoon another. The true distinction of humor is that it raises laughter against
folly, not against individual fools. All this is self-evident. Yet, to go on in the pertinent words of LeSage, “There are
some people in the world so mischievous as not to read a word without applying the vicious or ridiculous characters it may
happen to contain to eminent or popular individuals. I protest publicly against the pretended discovery of any such likenesses.
My purpose was to represent human life historically as it exists; God forbid I should hold myself out as a portrait painter.”
THE AUTHOR
Northport, Long Island,
July, 1946.
1
The Beautiful Brahmin–
The Faithful Shepherd–
Bezalel
Introducing us to Andrew Reale
and the Beautiful Brahmin.
O
NCE THERE
was a bright and spirited young man named Andrew Reale, who came into the world in the second decade of the twentieth century
and grew up in the third and fourth, and was thus convinced that the road to happiness lay in becoming very rich very quickly.
To call this a conviction is not quite clear, because in the same way he was convinced that it was a good idea to breathe–that
is, he did not expect either conviction to be challenged and could hardly have argued very successfully in their support.
It was, rather, an axiom on which his life rested. This is enough of his background to explain most of his actions, at least
in the early stages of his history, and we may proceed forthwith to the first moment in his life which merits the attention
of the reader. He is on a train speeding south from New York, and is staring very hard at a strange young lady.
Walk through any express train on the Atlantic coast and you will probably chance upon a girl much like this one. Usually
one, occasionally two, and sometimes a group of them, can be seen lounging in the parlor car. They are as easy to pick out
as highcaste Brahmins, and can be recognized by the same tokens: their distinctive clothing, their pallid, abstracted air
of human beings devoted to a difficult ideal, their unique and uniform way of wearing their hair, and the paint marks on their
faces. They are known in journalists’ jargon as “glamour debs,” a sect of young females which adheres to its symbols with
a fanaticism rare in these lax times. The girl who sat in the parlor chair opposite our hero, intent on a copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
, was to the other members of her cult as the Dalai Lama is said to be to the monks of Tibet. Other girls painted their mouths
into a vicious pout, according to the fashion; she had achieved a glaring red masterpiece of a pout. Something in the arrangement
of her hair made the current mode, a rather disheveled, unsightly one to the detached view, suddenly seem as inevitable as
the outcome of a tragedy. Her sweater was a triumph. There was a mathematically exact carelessness in the way the sleeves
were pushed up above her elbows. There was an ineffable machine-tooled precision in the slovenly way it hung about her hips.
Girls with a less happy touch labored for hours, all in vain, to achieve this uncannily correct, cut-crystal sloppiness.
This charmer was as responsive to Andrew Reale’s presence as a compass needle is to the North Pole, but, unlike it (to the
confusion of behaviorists, who say that human beings are soulless bundles of responses to external stimuli), she would not
make the slightest movement in his direction. In fact, the magazine seemed increasingly to claim her attention until in her
absorption she resembled a nun conning her breviary. Andrew’s consciousness, on the other hand, was divided among three ideas
in the following order of importance: the beautiful young stranger, the secret mission on which he was traveling, and, receding
into the background, the sweet savor of his early-morning farewell to his sweetheart, Laura Beaton. This last, a photographer’s
model of extravagant attractiveness, had been renamed “Honey” by the agency which managed her fortunes, and it was by that
name that Andrew thought of her. He loved Honey with his whole soul; she loved him no less in return, and their marriage and
everlasting bliss awaited only what they both called “a good time for it.” From this, and from the fact that she was now third
in his thoughts while a strange female was first, the casual reader may instantly surmise that Andrew was a light and wicked
philanderer, ignoring the simple truth that a young man is less likely to focus his thoughts on a girl who loves him unreservedly
than on one whom he suspects of not loving him at all or of loving somebody else as much.
–Known in journalists’ jargon as “glamour debs”–
Admirable or no, our hero was becoming more and more contemplative of schemes having no more worthy goal than the opening
of conversation with the young lady. He continued his uneasy glances, and she her impassive reading, until she was betrayed;
for, like an animal with a will of its own, her hand crept softly up to her hair and bestowed an anxious, supervisory caress
over her entire coiffure. Poor Andrew watched the hand with an eager eye that did not miss the delicacy of its form or the
sweet grace of its little movements. It seemed to him that her fingers, as they curled around a roll of her hair, were like
a half-opened white rose. Honey’s hands were more beautiful; it cost an advertising agency a standard price of one hundred
dollars to associate the charm of her hands with a brand of lotion or nail polish; but Honey’s hands were in New York, and
this hand was, at the moment, within a few inches of Andrew’s nose. As the girl stirred her hair, a faint, delicious perfume
came to his nostrils, which flared enthusiastically.
At this moment, both became aware of a sound which broke disagreeably on their pleasant silent duel. Starting as a low, vague
rasp, it had risen in a few seconds to an assertive, slabbering, unmistakable human snore. Leaning back heavily in a chair
behind the young lady, a stout, gray, sparse-haired man, to whom half-opened white roses were evidently objects of little
concern, had given up the effort of maintaining his dignity as a human being on an early-morning train, and had subsided into
the character of a large, breathing mound of flesh. The sound rose in volume. The fair one caught Andrew’s eye, and she smiled.
Andrew burst out laughing.
“He’s happy,” he observed, with a nod at the sleeper, from whose limp, fat fingers a dead cigar was just dropping to the floor.
“But I’m not,” said the girl, putting her hands to her ears.
A colored steward in a very white coat came through the corridor announcing breakfast. Andrew was only twenty-five, but in
his work he had already learned to seize the passing chance. He invited her to breakfast with the pleasantest smile he could
muster, a smile implying that he was offering her, entirely impersonally, an escape from distress. Andrew smiled often, and
most often when he was trying to gain a point. He had extremely white, perfectly even and well-shaped teeth. The girl’s glance
seemed to flutter for a fraction of a second to the teeth and away from them: it happened so quickly no one could be sure.
In any case, with a slight, modest pause, she thanked him very much and accepted.
Let us leave them for a moment on their way to this breakfast, which is to be such a turning point in Andrew’s life, leading
him into an unexpected series of adventures, upsetting his career, and giving him an all-too-intimate knowledge of a lover’s
anguish, and let us consider the familiar irony of destiny as demonstrated anew at this instant by Andrew and his unknown
young beauty. All they know is that they are about to breakfast in pleasurable company. Andrew is a-tingle with elation, and
his beloved Honey, to whom he has never been unfaithful, is temporarily out of his mind. The difficult mission on which his
train is whisking him through the winter brownness of Maryland is out of his mind, too. Such is the effect of a bud of seventeen
on an ambitious young man, and so far is he from keeping in mind what long shadows such trivial events may throw across the
green paths of the future; even as a young shoot can cast a shadow across the entire breadth of a park in the slant light
of dawn.