[Marxism] NYT review of Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke"

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

("the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used 
to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious
contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an
eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate
targeting of civilians can ever be justified.")
==================================================================

March 23, 2008
Their Vilest Hour
By COLM TOIBIN

HUMAN SMOKE
The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.
By Nicholson Baker.
565 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Toibin-t.html 

In 1960, after his essay on the Democratic National Convention had
appeared - written in his customary flamboyant style - Norman Mailer
received a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy, who wondered if the
"impressionistic" way in which he had treated the convention could be
applied to the writing of history.

The novelist Nicholson Baker's customary style in books like "The
Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature" is to observe the world in slow,
painstaking detail, relishing the tiny moment, enjoying the aside for
the sake of accuracy, insisting on charting the precise state of
things. He has now applied this system to history, to the few years
before the United States declared war on Japan and entered into World
War II as a full participant. It is clear Baker has not done this as
a literary exercise, nor as a new way of amusing himself and his
readers, but because of a passionate view of how the war against
Germany was conducted by Britain under Winston Churchill.

There is, it seems at first, a sort of madness in his method. He does
not offer a straightforward narrative as a historian or a polemicist
might do, but instead his book is made up of a set of vignettes, each
containing a fact or a quotation from one of the main participants,
or from someone who kept a diary. Most vignettes carry a date.
Sometimes these entries come three to a page, sometimes they are
slightly longer. Slowly, as you read, because of the variety in the
tone and the shocking or tragic nature of the quotation, and because
of how well chosen they are, "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World
War II, the End of Civilization" becomes riveting and fascinating. It
is as though a brilliant film editor, with an urgent argument to
make, began to work with gripping newsreels.

The main figures in the book are Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt;
members of the pacifist movement including Gandhi; Hitler and his
entourage; and diarists like Victor Klemperer in Dresden and Mihail
Sebastian in Bucharest. But sometimes it is the simple stark fact
that makes you sit up straight for a moment, like this one from early
in the book: "The Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs
on India. It was 1925." This, coming soon after an account of the
proposed bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1920 (with Churchill
writing: "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against
uncivilized tribes"), sets a theme for the book, which Baker will
skillfully weave into the fabric of events mainly between 1920 and
1942 - that the bombing of villages and cities from the air
represents "the end of civilization."

Baker is adept at managing the reader's emotion. His vignettes about
the treatment of the Jewish population, the deportations and the
planned mass murders, are just as carefully chosen, with the same
amount of barely contained anger in them as his pieces about what was
done to the civilians of Germany and to the civilians of Britain by
bombers. It seems that he wishes to stir up an argument as much as
settle one. In his afterword he says of the pacifists: "They failed,
but they were right." It is an aspect of the subtlety of his book
that the reader is entitled to wonder if it's true.

Churchill emerges here as a most fascinating figure - impetuous,
childish, bloodthirsty, fearless, insomniac, bookish, bullying,
determined, to name just some of his characteristics. Baker writes:
"He wasn't an alcoholic, someone said later - no alcoholic could
drink that much." The prime minister of Australia noted of Churchill:
"In every conversation he ultimately reaches a point where he
positively enjoys the war." After the bombing of British cities Baker
quotes him: "This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even
exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain."

"One of our great aims," Churchill wrote in July 1941, "is the
delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs
per night." Soon afterward, he said publicly: "It is time that the
Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities
something of the torments they have let loose upon their neighbors
and upon the world." Baker quotes large numbers of people who seemed
to feel in these years that the entire German population, including
women and children, were to blame for the Nazis and should be
punished accordingly. For example, the writer Gerald Brenan: "Every
German woman and child killed is a contribution to the future safety
and happiness of Europe." Or David Garnett (the author of the novel
"Aspects of Love," on which the musical is based), who wrote in 1941:
"By butchering the German population indiscriminately it might be
possible to goad them into a desperate rising in which every member
of the Nazi Party would have his throat cut."

The problem, as Baker makes clear, was that the bombing served to
kill and maim the civilian population, yet the survivors did not
blame the Nazi leaders, who used the bombing as a further excuse to
inflict suffering on the Jewish population, claiming, for example,
that evictions of Jews were "justified on the grounds that Aryans
whose houses were destroyed by bombing needed a place to live." As
early as 1941 a member of Churchill's cabinet could write: "Bombing
does NOT affect German morale: let's get that into our heads and not
waste our bombers on these raids." Churchill's rationale for the
bombing, Baker writes, arose from his belief that it was "a form of
pedagogy - a way of enlightening city dwellers as to the hellishness
of remote battlefields by killing them."

In April 1941 certain German cities were identified as good 
targets because they were "congested industrial towns, where the
psychological effect will be greatest"; the same report recommended
the use of delayed-action bombs "so as to prevent or seriously
interfere with fire fighting, repair and general traffic
organization." The following month Lord Trenchard, who had been
instrumental in establishing the Royal Air Force, admitted that "the
percentage of bombs which hit the military target at which they are
aimed is not more than 1 percent." And when Baker turns his attention
to Washington, which he does regularly, he offers vignettes to
suggest that Roosevelt was busy goading the Japanese to bomb Pearl
Harbor so that America could enter the war.

Baker knows he is preaching to readers who already believe that the
Nazis were evil, and that the German war machine, including the
blitz, was, to say the least, conducted with ruthless carelessness
for human life, and that many ordinary Germans were implicated in the
Holocaust. It is possible that "Human Smoke" will infuriate those who
believe that Churchill was a hero and that war, in all its
viciousness, is often the only way to defeat those who declare or
threaten war. "Human Smoke" will not be admired by those who argue
that methods used to win a war may seem, especially to novelists
writing more than 60 years later, impossible to justify. Nonetheless,
the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to
dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious
contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an
eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate
targeting of civilians can ever be justified.

Colm Toibin's most recent book is a collection of stories, "Mothers
and Sons."


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