Taki Theodoracopulos has written a nostalgic, characteristically name-dropping meditation in The American Conservative on a literary type that may be gone for good: the great novelist forged in the crucible of combat. His thesis is simple and melancholy. The great postwar writers — Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones — all saw combat, and all produced major novels that captured the American fighting man. That combination of lived experience and literary ambition produced something we’re unlikely to see again.
Mailer looms largest in Taki’s telling, and the anecdote at the piece’s center is a small gem. Taki recalls Mailer telling Shaw directly: “Irwin — you, physical courage. Me — moral courage.” It’s a wonderfully Mailerian line — competitive, self-mythologizing, and not entirely wrong. The Naked and the Dead isn’t a book about bravery under fire so much as a book about power, bureaucracy, and the soul’s corruption by institutional violence. Mailer understood that the real drama of World War II wasn’t just on the beaches; it was in the ugly machinery of command that ground individual men down. Calling that “moral courage” rather than “physical courage” was Mailer’s way of staking out his territory — and, frankly, elevating it.
Taki knew both Mailer and Shaw personally, and there’s real warmth in his portrait of them. He describes both as “terrific womanizers, chasing the fairer sex non-stop,” and admits that the writers’ outsized appetites — for drink, for women, for public argument — were part of their appeal to him. “No wonder I wanted to become a writer,” he says. It’s a confessional moment that gets at something true: these men were charismatic, and their charisma was inseparable from their authority as writers. They had lived, and it showed on the page.
The argument underneath Taki’s reminiscing is worth taking seriously. Modern warfare — drones, remote pilots, algorithmic targeting — doesn’t generate the kind of intimate human material that great war literature requires. You can’t write The Naked and the Dead about a Reaper drone and its operator in a trailer in Nevada. The horror, the camaraderie, the physical and moral degradation that made those novels possible came from men being placed in extremis, face to face with each other and with death. Strip that out, and you strip out the literature.
There’s something elegiac but also bracingly honest about Taki’s conclusion: if you have literary ambitions and are eyeing the conflict in the Middle East, don’t bother — only machines are fighting, and drones are rather hard to endear to readers. Give it up, he says, and become an influencer instead. It’s a bitter joke, but it lands. Mailer’s world — where a novelist could be a star, where literary combat mattered — feels as remote now as the beaches of the Pacific. Whether that’s a loss for literature, or just for a certain kind of masculine literary self-mythology, is a question worth sitting with.