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,
, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational
discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth.
Millions of people were sed, , 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
ert 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
ses 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 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.