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pages went into that, and I remembered in the early days I was annoyed at how long it was taking me to get to my patrol.
    SM : Do you keep notes, or a journal? What’s your preparatory material?
    NM : That varies. For
The Naked and the Dead
I had a file full of notes and a long dossier on each man. Many of these details never got into the novel, but the added knowledge made me feel more comfortable with each character. Indeed, I even had charts to show which characters had not yet had scenes with other characters. For a book which seems spontaneous on its surface,
The Naked and the Dead
was written mechanically. I studied engineering at Harvard, and I suppose it was the book of a young engineer. The structure is sturdy, but there’s no fine filigree to the joints. And the working plan was simple. I devised some preliminary actions for the platoon in order to give the reader an opportunity to get to know the men, but the beginning, as I said, took over two-thirds of the book. The patrol itself is also simple, but I did give more thought to working it out ahead of time.
    SM : People have commented on the pleasure you seem to take in the military detail of
The Naked and the Dead.
    NM : Compared to someone like James Jones, I’m an amateur at military detail. But at that time I did like all those details, I even used to enjoy patrols, or at least did when I wasn’t sick with jungle rot or Atabrine (which we took to avoid malaria). I was one of the few men in the platoon who could read a map and once I gave myself away. We used to have classes after a campaign was over. We’d come back to garrison—one of those tent cities out in a rice paddy—and they would teach us all over again how to read maps and compasses or they would drill us on the nomenclature of the machine gun for the eighth time. One day, very bored, I was daydreaming, and the instructor pointed to a part of the map and said, “Mailer, what are those coordinates?” If I had had a moment to think, I would never have answered. It was bad form to be bright in my outfit, but I didn’t think: He caught me in a daze, and I looked up and said, “320.017 dash 146.814” and everyone’s mouth dropped open. It was the first time anybody ever answered such a question thus briskly in the history of infantry map reading. At any rate, that was the fun for me, the part about the patrol.
    I think I suffered more, however, from the reviews of
The Naked and the Dead
than any other of my books. I wanted to sit down and write a letter to each and every critic to tell how my work had been misinterpreted. I felt this way even when they enthused over the novel. It probably takes twenty years to appreciate book reviewing for what it is—a primitive rite. By then, you are able to ingest unkind reviews, provided they are well written. Sometimes, an off-the-wall review can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner. (And, by times, as indigestible.) I’d never dream, however, of not reading reviews. It would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window. Whether ugly or lovely, she is undeniably interesting under such circumstances.
    Fifty years after its publication in 1948, and thirty-two years after the interview with Steven Marcus, I wrote the following as a foreword to a new edition of the book.

    I think it might be interesting to talk about
The Naked and the Dead
as a best-seller that was the work of an amateur. Of course, as best-sellers go, it was a good book, and the author who began it at the age of twenty-three and completed it in fifteen months had already written more than a half million words in college and so could be considered a hardworking amateur who loved writing and was prepared in the way of a twenty-four-year-old to fall on his sword in defense of literature.
    He was naïve, he was passionate about writing, he knew very little about the subtle demands of a good style, he did not have a great deal of restraint,