luck or bad luck. For one thing, we didn���t get much of a feeling
for Provincetown that summer. We were out of the town. We
didn���t make friends with people in town. The people we saw that
summer were people we���d known already who came up to visit.
Family would come ��� it was hard to get food that summer. When
Bea���s folks would come they���d bring certain goodies, like rye bread.
CB: Or bagels?
NM: Yes. It was the first summer after the war, and it was very
good for work. If we���d lived in town I might have had a totally
different existence. I might have lived here and had a great time,
cheated on my first wife, fucked up all over the place, never wrote
a word.
CB: You were protected from failure by your will to become a
writer.
NM: I���ve thought about it often. It was a summer of great fun,
with absolute devotion to work.
CB: Well, you were wired because you came back from the war
with the notes that would become the novel.
NM: I wanted to write, I really did. It might have worked in
town ��� maybe we wouldn���t have met that many people. Who
knows? In any event, that writing got The Naked and the Dead
started. A few months later, back in New York, I got a contract
based on those first 200 pages. I worked all year. I���m not even sure
we came back the following summer for more than a visit or two.
My cousin, Charles Rembar, a fine lawyer who has argued literary
cases, such as the obscenity trial concerning the U.S. publication
HYLAND
8
