[Marxism] Their vilest hour

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, 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.

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."

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


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