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Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Description

Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.

Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, recognized as one of the most dexterous and talented writers in America today, has created a compelling work of nonfiction bound to provoke discussion and controversy -- a wide-ranging, astonishingly fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II.

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources -- including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries -- the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and examine the gradual, horrifying advance toward overt global war and Holocaust.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his exquisitely observant eye and deft, inimitable prose, Baker has assembled a narrative within Human Smoke that unfolds gracefully, tragically, and persuasively. This is an unforgettable book that makes a profound impact on our perceptions of historical events and mourns the unthinkable loss humanity has borne at its own hand.

Questions for Nicholson Baker

Amazon.com: This is obviously a big departure for you, in both style and subject. How did the project come about, and how did it find this form?

Baker: I was writing a different book, on a smaller historical subject, when I stopped and asked: Do I understand World War Two? And of course I didn't. Also I'd been reading newspapers from the thirties and forties, and I knew that there were startling things in them.

In earlier books, I've looked closely at moments to see why they matter, and I've tried to rescue things, people, ideas from overfamiliarity. So in a way a book like this--which moves a loupe over some incidents along the way to a much-chronicled war--was a natural topic.

But yes, the style is a departure: it's very simple here out of respect for the hellishness of the story that I'm trying to assemble, piece by piece.

Amazon.com: Why World War Two in particular?

Baker: Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end of civilization.

But then we also say that because it turned out so badly, it was the one just, necessary war. We acknowledge that it was the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity--and yet it was "the good war." The Greatest Generation fought it, and a generation of people was wiped out.

If we don't try to understand this one war better--understand it not in the sense of coming up with elaborate mechanistic theories of causation, but understand it in the humbler sense of feeling our way through its enormity--then cartoon versions of what happened will continue to distort debates about the merits of all future wars.

Amazon.com: You largely kept your own opinions out of the text, except for the choices you made in what to include and a few editorial comments here and there, as well as your short Afterword at the end. It makes for a real tension between the neutral tone and the sense, at least on the part of this reader, that there are some passionate opinions behind it. What authorial role did you want to establish?

Baker: I found that my own cries of grief, amazement, or outrage--or of admiration at some quiet heroism--took away from the chaos of individual decisions that move events forward.

It helps sometimes to look at an action--compassionate, murderous, confessional, obfuscatory--out of context: as something that somebody did one day. The one-day-ness of history is often lost in traditional histories, because paragraphs and sections are organized by theme: attack, counterattack, argument, counterargument. That's a reasonable way to proceed, but I rejected it here for several reasons. First, because it fails to convey the hugeness and confusion of the time as it was experienced by people who lived through it. And, second, because I wanted the reader to have to form, and then jettison, and then re-form, explanations and mini-narratives along the way--as I did, and as did a newspaper reader in, say, New York City in September, 1941.

I think the pared-down, episodic style allowed me to offer some moments of truth that I wouldn't have been able to offer had I had uppermost in my mind the necessity of making transitions and smoothing out inconsistencies and sounding like me. I offer no organized argument: I want above all to fill the readers mind with an anguished sense of what happened.

Amazon.com: I was telling someone about your book and how it failed to convince me of what I took to be its thesis, and his response was, "Wow, you really made me want to read it." And that's my response too: if your point was to convince me that we shouldn't have fought World War II, then the book didn't work, but I'm still very glad I read it. But maybe that wasn't your point at all.

Baker: I'm really pleased that you responded that way. I didn't want to convince, but only to add enriching complication. Long ago I wrote an essay called "Changes of Mind" in which I tried to talk about how gradual and complicated a shift of conviction can be. I left overt opinionizing out of this book so that a reader can draw his or her own conclusions, folding in other knowledge.

There are many books about the war that I value highly even though I don't agree with the world-outlook of the people who wrote them. To take a major example: Churchill's own memoir-history is completely fascinating and revealing--and a great pleasure to read--although I happen to think that Churchill was himself a bad war leader.

There's no point in trying to use a book to replace one simple set of beliefs about World War Two with another simple set of beliefs. The war years are alive with contradictions and puzzles and shake-your-head-in-wonder moments. You're going to look at it in different ways on different days because you're going to have different moments uppermost in your mind.

On the other hand, I don't want to hide what I think. Here's what I am, more or less: I'm a non-religious pacifist who is sympathetic to Quaker notions of nonviolent resistance and of refuge and aid for those who need help. I find appealing what Christopher Isherwood called "the plain moral stand against killing." I don't expect people to look at things this way, necessarily--after all, it took me a while to get there myself. But I do hope that my book will offer some thought-provocations that anyone, of any ideological persuasion, will want to mull over.

Amazon.com: It's hard to believe there's something new to say about what may be the most written-about event in human history. What did you feel about approaching such a well-chronicled subject? What were you most surprised to find? What responses have you gotten from historians and other readers?

Baker: There were many surprises. For instance, I didn't expect Herbert Hoover, who argued for the lifting of the British blockade in order to get food to Jews in Polish ghettoes and French concentration camps, to be a voice of reason and compassion. I didn't know that German propagandists used the phrase "iron curtain" before Churchill did. I didn't know that in 1940 the Royal Air Force tried to set fire to the forests of Germany. I didn't know how interested the United States government was in arming China. I didn't know how public was Japan's unhappiness with the American oil embargo. I didn't know that many of the people who worked hardest to help Jews escape Hitler were pacifists, not interventionists.

I've had interesting reactions from historians, who seem to understand (for the most part) that I'm not trying to write a comprehensive history of the beginnings of the war. I've had some very good reviews and some very bad ones. The bad ones seem to follow the teeter-totter school: that if a dictator and the nation he controls is evil, then the leader of the nation who opposes the evil dictator must be good. Life isn't that way, of course. There is in fact no "moral equivalence" created by examining coterminous violent and repulsive acts. The notion of moral equivalence is a mistake, because it undermines our notions of personal responsibility and law. Each act of killing is its own act, not something to be heaped like produce on a balancing scale. One person, as Roosevelt said, must not be punished for the deed of another--though he didn't follow his own precept.

Gandhi comes up sometimes. It was said in a review that I "adore" Gandhi. That's not quite right. Gandhi is in many ways an admirable and perceptive man. He spoke gently even while thousands of his supporters were in jail and his country was being bombed by an occupying power. But the years told on him, and he sometimes came to sound, as Nehru once observed in a memoir, cold--indifferent to suffering. He is one voice, and a voice worth listening to.

My real heroes, though, are people like Victor Klemperer, who responded to Hitlerian terror not with counterviolence, but with beautiful nonresistance: by writing a masterpiece of a diary. He and Romanian diarist Mihael Sebastian have the last word for that reason. And I've dedicated the book to British and American pacifists--I want this book to rescue the memory of their loving, troubled efforts to help.

The most interesting and helpful set of responses to the book so far has been at www.edrants.com, where a group of participants discussed Human Smoke for a week, adding all kinds of thoughts, analogies, comparisons, and criticisms. I've never been through anything like it before, and I'm the better for it.

Amazon.com: Your recent celebration of Wikipedia in the New York Review of Books has gotten a lot of attention (deservedly so). Did the style and philosophy of Wikipedia influence the way you wrote Human Smoke? Have you made any Wikipedia updates based on what you found in your research.

Baker: I used Wikipedia during the writing of the book, especially to check facts about subtypes of airplanes and ships--e.g., the Bristol Beaufighter I cited in the first paragraph of the review. Wikipedia is amazingly strong and precise on military hardware. (And on when a British Lord became a Viscount, and on a million other things.) But I've been writing movies, and the model I often had in my mind while working on Human Smoke was the movie documentary--in which short scenes and clips follow each other with a minimum of narration.

Reviews

Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2010-08-31
Summary: "Succeeds in revealing hypocrisy of UK/US while at the same time squandering all credibility"

When "Human Smoke" first came out I vigorously defended the intent of the author and the content of the book. The author, Nicholson Baker, used simple quotes and news stories to show how FDR and Churchill sacrificed their moral credibility with their multitude of hypocritical actions.

Except, there is a fly in the ointment. No, it's not just a fly. It's a tarantula. Baker's overall argument goes far beyond western hypocrisy. He's arguing against the very concept of fighting a war against someone as clearly evil as Hitler. When I first started the book I thought the critics were exaggerating this part of Baker's argument. Surely this was just a side issue and his primary focus was on UK/US hypocrisy? But no, I was absolutely wrong.

On page 122 Baker quotes Gandhi as saying that he could "conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators . . . Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime." It was at this point that I was reminded of Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" in which the protagonist realizes he's been duped by the government to fight in a war and that he sacrificed his sight and limbs for nothing other than propaganda. That's exactly what Baker is advocating in this book - that people should have blindly marched to their deaths as pacifists just as the government would conversely have soldiers blindly march into battle. Baker is no better than those he criticizes.

Baker ends the book with a dedication to the pacifists of WWII who "failed, but they were right."

If Baker had just stuck to highlighting UK/US hypocrisy he would have have had a potential literary non-fiction masterpiece. Instead, we are left with propaganda that mimics the propaganda it opposes.

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Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-08-30
Summary: "Strange selection of disjointed quotes"

It is possible to obtain an impression of the points the author is trying to make, but the first third of the book is a disjointed selection of quotes. It is not possible, without repeated reference back to earlier quotes, to obtain any coherent view of any one person's agenda during this pre-war period. It is as though the author reviewed his research notes and just cut and paste a few quotes together. The result is not so much a coherent whole as a print of his research. Undoubtedly he worked hard, but this is not "writing".

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-23
Summary: "Clearing the Smoke from Our Heroes"

I've just read Nicholson Baker's take on the first years of World War II, Human Smoke, and it is certainly unsettling. But I have come across a couple of reactions to the book of late that complain that Baker is trying to convince the reader that WWII was a bad war that should never have been fought, and that Churchill and Roosevelt were as bad as Hitler. This leads to a pretty much categorical dismissal of the entire work. Here's a bit from the New York Times review:



As "the reader" in this instance, I at no time felt "forced" to draw any such conclusion, nor any other proffered by this and other similar criticisms. If I felt that the book's central message was so naively simplistic, I would likewise dismiss it.

What the book does do is to remind us that the events of World War II were not black and white, that Churchill and Roosevelt were not utterly pure and heroic in their motives or executions, and that there was a legitimate anti-war sentiment that pulsated at the time-one that was as well-intended and as based in honest principle as any opponent of, say, the Iraq invasion in 2003 (putting aside whether the opponents of battling Hitler were in that sentiment correct, which I think history bares out that they were not). The principled pacifists of that era deserve to have their story told, stories seldom told-how many World War II histories can you think of that feature Gandhi as a central figure and moral voice?

The book also reminds us, very often through primary sources such as diaries and direct quotes, how removed those waging war can be from those suffering unspeakably from its horrors. The prime ministers, presidents, ambassadors and generals often seem heartless and utterly out of touch in regards to the real world consequences of the war's mass butchery of human beings.

Yes, Baker shows us the often-bloodthirsty and callous sides of Churchill and Roosevelt, but this aspect of such a giant figures needs to be aired, needs to be remembered. It is important that we are reminded that throughout history the good guys are not always good-a lesson which, to this reader, only made the bad guys seem even worse. As jaw-dropping as some of the Allies' actions and sentiments were, the acts of the Nazi regime as recounted by Baker were so horrific, so awful, so monstrous, that Churchill at his worst never approaches the evil of Hitler.

Baker makes that very distinction clear without having to say it explicitly. Baker gives us the real human beings as they were in this chapter of the human story, and does not need to explain that, yes, of course, Hitler was far worse than any Allied leader. Perhaps some folks, still oversensitive and over-reverent of certain persons and eras, just need it spelled out more plainly, and have the same versions of history fed to them on slightly different spoons each time.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-20
Summary: "A fascinating exercise in truthtelling"

To put it mildly, in Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker has produced an amazing book. It was one of the most absorbing 400+ page books I have ever read.

The book is made up of hundreds, probably close to 1,000, short vignettes that trace the events leading up to World War II and its prosecution until the end of 1941 (which, for the U.S., marked our country's entry into the War).

These vignettes are mostly simple, descriptive statements; only rarely is Baker's voice apparent. An example of an editorial comment, though, may be found on page 452: A December 10, 1941, Gallup poll had shown that two-thirds of the American population would support the U.S. firebombing Japanese cities in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. "Ten percent--representing twelve million citizens--were wholly opposed. Twelve million people still held to Franklin Roosevelt's basic principle of civilization: that no man should be punished for the deeds of another. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one of them."

As should be obvious (and reviewers have all taken pains to note), the reader should not mistake the objective tone of Baker's reportage for a merely descriptive intent on his part. Baker clearly has an agenda--though precisely what that agenda is remains for us to discern from the book's contents. It has no introduction or commentary beyond a very brief "Afterword." However, by what he includes and excludes, Baker tells a story filtered through his own lenses and reflecting his own concerns.

The final paragraph of the afterword is telling: "I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right." (474)

These two quotes I have cited do, I think, give us a sense of what Baker is up to. Though he is far from a Nazi apologist (some of his vignettes about Nazi actions evoke visceral outrage), Baker makes clear that opposition to Nazism in itself did not settle the question of what the best response to their actions would be.

The response of British and American leaders horrify Baker. He makes it clear that neither country did even come close to what could have been done to save Jewish and other refugees nor to provide aid to starving children and others in Europe (he has a number of telling quotes from former President Herbert Hoover who was deeply frustrated in his efforts to take aid to needy people in Europe). That is, to allude to Baker's subtitle, he presents this war as anything but a war to save civilization and support humane values.

Baker uncovers a voice, a perspective, a record of action that is completely ignored in most discussions of World War II. He makes a strong case for acknowledging two crucial points. (1) There were pacifists, such as Quaker leaders Clarence Pickett and Rufus Jones, who faced head on the unspeakable evils and sought to bring healing to the brokenness. Theirs was far from an ethic of withdrawal, passivity, or parasitism. (2) And, the responses of the leaders of the "Free World" only compounded the evils set loose by the Nazis and Japanese militarists.

This is what I especially drew from the book: When faced with extraordinary crimes against humanity, the defenders of Western civilization with little resistance succumbed to the same criminal spirit. We learn just how bloodthirsty Winston Churchill and other British war leaders were--insisting on horrific violence against German civilians in face of clear evidence that such violence was ineffective, even counter-productive. Churchill had the asinine belief that if the British starved and traumatized the German people enough, they would rebel. Of course, the opposite happened--the Allied actions only strengthened the Nazis hold on the people's loyalty (which, of course is precisely what happened in Britain in face of German air strikes). This reality is clear already by the end of 1941--Baker's book stops long before Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

By taking Pickett and similar pacifists seriously, Baker shows that there were alternative approaches. This is not to say that he is even hinting that "Hitler could have been stopped" by the pacifists (he makes this clear with a number of somewhat jarring quotes from Gandhi that convey a pretty strong sense of naiveté). I think his point would be rather that simply responding to evil with evil not only is profoundly immoral and destructive of the core values that the Nazis' opponents sought to defend, it also does not work very well. Surely a more humane and moral approach by the Allies to resisting the Nazis would have saved untold lives on all sides and greatly heightened possibilities of internal resistance to Nazi governance.

The enormous challenge humanity faces if it is to have a future is how we might, to quote Walter Wink, "oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves" (the opening words to his wonderful book Engaging the Powers).

The issue that arises from the book for me is its challenge to the easy (and extraordinarily corrupting) assumptions that World War II in some sense was a "good war" that in some sense successfully defended the core values of western humanism. In fact, it seems clear that the true winner of the War was the spirit of violence. A good book for confirming this point for the United States is James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-06
Summary: "A powerful and disturbing book"

I'm a boomer and the son of a European immigrant, a woman who spent part of her teen years in a Nazi slave labor camp and who then became a displaced person after WWII. So, WWII history has always been more personal to me than for many of my peers. I majored in history in college and was jolted awake when I was introduced to the discipline of historiography, the study of history itself. You've heard it said that "history is written by the victors" and this is quite true. Reading "Human Smoke" brought this lesson home once again.

One of the enduring myths of WWII is that the Nazis had some monopoly on cruelty and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. Hitler and Co. were a nasty bunch and they did perpetrate horrible atrocities. I know. My mother endured many of them. But as my mother pointed out to me when I was a youngster, no army was perfect and all soldiers have the potential to be cruel. What is so startling in Baker's book is to read how the prejudices of many of our own leaders (e.g. Roosevelt) as well as our allies' leaders (e.g. Churchill) grew to embrace the wanton slaughter of civilians as an acceptable and moral manner of the conduct of war. In the same manner that many Americans took exception to the Bush administration's policies regarding the treatment of detainees, so did many Germans take exception to Hitler's treatment of the Jews. And yet both Churchill and Roosevelt regarded the actions of Hitler as being the express and uniform will of the German people and this, in their minds, justified the use of terror in the conduct of war.

But though Americans now tend to look back at our involvement in WWII as in some ways a set of actions to save the world from the Nazis and Japanese, in fact, as Baker reports, the Roosevelt administration was not anxious or even sympathetic to the plight of European Jewry. It blocked the attempts of Jews to enter this country and turned away boatloads of refugees. Why? As Baker illustrates, a pernicious anti-Semitism pervaded Roosevelt's administration (and no, I'm not Jewish).

Worse, Baker reports on how our participation in a blockade of food to Europe accelerated a famine that swept the continent, years before the horrors of 1946 when people such as my mother ate bark to survive. And, Baker tells of our country's rush to develop chemical and biological weapons to use against both the Germans and Japanese . . . long before we entered the war. And to read how the British and American bomber commands reveled at the destruction they could wreak on civilians with incendiary weapons is sickening. And all of this was rationalized as being a legitimate tool to shape the behavior of dictatorial regimes. To wit: "if we (the Allies) wreak enough destruction of your civilian population and cities, you (the Axis leaders) will change course." Utter nonsense.

Baker has produced a powerful work. Did he selectively report some facts while omitting others? Like any historian, he had to pick and choose. But what he has done is recover and report some facts that have long been hidden in the shadows of powerful myths and in so doing, has given us reason to pause and think: is this how we should fight our wars?