[Reader-list] Human Smoke review II

[S. Jabbar]

Don¹t believe everything you read.
This is what I tell myself everyday and yet... A friend directed me to this
review that has quite solidly trashed the first one I posted!

John Lukacs on Nicholson Baker¹s ŒHuman Smoke¹
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20080418_john_lukacs_on_nicholson_
bakers_human_smoke/
Posted on Apr 18, 2008

By John Lukacs

This book is bad. To review a bad book is more difficult‹more precisely:
more wearisome‹than to review a good book. A bad book is bad for many more
reasons‹more precisely: in many more instances and ways‹than how and why
another book is good. There is a deeper reason for this difficulty. This is
that in our perception of every human act the why? is already implicit in
the how? Our dislike of any expression by a human being, including a book,
instantly rises out of the why. Why did this person do, or write, or say
this? Yet this normal reaction must be controlled, or tempered, by Samuel
Johnson¹s plain and wise and classic admonition: ³Intentions must be
gathered from acts.²

So, in this case of Nicholson Baker¹s ³Human Smoke,² I must try my best to
separate my discussion of the how from the why. That is: the written
evidence from an imputation of its author¹s motives.


³Human Smoke² pretends to be a history of the origins of the Second World
War. To begin with, its time frame and, consequently, its proportions are
senseless. Its first item, on its first page, relates something from August
1892. There follow three pages, Baker-lite items, about the First World War;
then 27 pages until Hitler¹s assumption of power; then another 99 pages,
1933 to September 1939, about the origins of the Second World War‹which is
Baker¹s main subject. So he declared in the subtitle of his book: ³The
Beginning of World War II, the End of Civilization.² Yet after ³the End of
Civilization² come 336 pages about the history of the war, ending with the
curious date of Dec. 31, 1941, more than three weeks after Pearl Harbor. How
(and why) was Dec. 31, 1941, the End of Civilization?

And now to the main how question. What do all of these pages contain? Most
of them are clippings from newspapers. I quote Baker from his afterword:
³The New York Times is probably the single richest resource for the history
and prehistory of the war years. ...² George Orwell once wrote that nothing
is very accurately printed in a newspaper: a reasonable maxim by a deeply
honest Englishman. What would Orwell think of Nicholson Baker? Baker¹s
villains are Hitler, and Churchill, and Roosevelt. Orwell admired Churchill.
Really, there is no arguable equivalence here.

Some of Baker¹s newspaper clippings are interspersed with clippings from
published books. They are sequential in time, but many of them make little
sense. Some of them, and Baker¹s presentations of many of them, are full of
inaccuracies and errors. To list them would fill something like a
10,000-word review. Yes, it is more difficult to review a bad book than a
good one. Besides‹or not so besides‹many of these items are badly written.
In many instances Baker presents them with his comments, and then ends them
with a repeated thumping of a muffled gong: ³It was June 17, 1940²; or ³It
was January 2, 1941.² Sometimes his very dates are wrong. Worse than that:
Perhaps one way to review this book is to write a parody of Baker¹s method
and style. Here is one‹very random‹sample:

On Page 334, Nicholson Baker writes: ³The United States sent its first
Lend-Lease boatload of food to England. Lord Woolton, minister of food, was
waiting for it on the dock. ŒCheese!¹ he said. He ate some Wisconsin cheddar
from an opened crate. ŒAnd very good cheese, too,¹ he added.

³There were four million eggs on the boat, as well, and nine thousand tons
of flour. It was May 31, 1941.²

John Lukacs writes:

³Nicholson Baker¹s book was published by Simon & Schuster. The New York
Times printed a long interview with this celebrated writer, written by
Charles McGrath, who visited him in his home. Nicholson Baker ate a grilled
cheese sandwich. It was February 29, 2008.²

On Page 35 there is a snippet of an American¹s interview with
Ernst Hanfstaengl, then Hitler¹s social secretary, on April 1, 1933:
³Hanfstaengel [his name is misspelled] sipped his wine. He was an ardent
booster for Aryanism, but he was a dark-haired man, not particularly
Nordic-looking‹except that, as he had been heard to say, his underarm hair
was blond.² Whence ³The Beginnings of World War II, and the End of
Civilization²?

I have just finished writing a small book about one of Churchill¹s speeches
(on May 13, 1940, his ³Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat² speech) and about its
then reception. There are six and a half lines about that speech in Baker¹s
book, with three major mistakes about its reception.

In his afterword, on Page 474: ³The title [of this book] comes from
Franz Halder, one of Hitler¹s restive but compliant generals. General Halder
told an interrogator that when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz late in the
war, he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell. Human smoke, he called it.²
Halder was never in Auschwitz, imprisoned or not.

But, now, about the why. Why did Baker write this badly jumbled, half-baked
book? Now I must say something in his favor. He is a pacifist. But pacifist,
too, is an often inaccurate word. He writes, and thinks, that the Second
World War was not A Good War, that it was a disaster, that indeed it was the
End of Civilization.

I have often quoted the old Irish biddy whom her neighbors had asked if the
gossip about the young widow at the end of the street was true. And she
said: ³It is not true; but it is true enough.² I have also said that
historians ought to face the opposite problem: that this or that may be
true; but also not true enough.

That war is awful is true. It is also true that Churchill and Roosevelt
wanted‹more: they chose‹war to destroy Hitler. Especially Churchill thought
that Hitler¹s winning the war‹more precisely: his ruling all of Europe‹would
mean something like the end of Western civilization. He was not very wrong.

It is true that Hitler did not want to conquer the British Empire. It is
true that he did not want‹he couldn¹t‹to invade the United States and the
Western Hemisphere. What he wanted (and he said this often) was for Britain
and the United States to accept his domination of Europe, including his
conquest of most of Central and Eastern Europe. But what did that mean?
After conquering Poland, he would have gone into Soviet Russia, defeated it,
establishing German, and National Socialist, rule over most of Eurasia. And
what would have happened then? Not only to the strategic interests but to
the British and American peoples¹ state of mind?

It is true that in 1940 Churchill chose to fight Hitler¹s Germany with every
possible means at his disposal (and those few and ineffective bombing raids
were the only means at his disposal then). It is also true that Roosevelt
wanted to get into the war against Hitler‹if necessary, through the back
door of inducing Japan to attack America. But, beneath and beyond all of
this: Hitler had to be resisted. Resistance, truly, is a conservative word.
It also means: if necessary, fighting.

A fair amount of Baker¹s snippets deal with the Germans¹ humiliation and
persecution and eventual murdering of Jews. I do not for a moment think‹this
belongs to the why question‹that Baker did this to cover himself. His
concern with what happened to the Jews of Europe seems authentic and honest.
Now: It is true that Jews hoped for Churchill and Roosevelt to go to war
against Hitler. But in 1939 and 1940, Churchill and Roosevelt decided to
fight Hitler not because of the Jews. It is true that until about
August-September 1941, the policy of the Germans was to force the Jews to
emigrate: It was expulsion, not yet mass extermination. But thereafter this
was no longer possible. It is also true that this final decision to proceed
to extermination occurred only after‹and, in some ways, perhaps even because
of‹the full coming of the war between the United States and Germany. But
Baker never asks the questions: How much have Jews contributed to the
British and American decision to war against Germany? And: Had Churchill and
Roosevelt not gone to war, what would have happened to the millions of
European and Russian Jews? The Jews did not cause the war; and the war did
not go on because of the Jews. True, millions of Jews perished because of
the war; but it was a war Hitler started, wishing that he would not have to
fight Britain and the United States.

He did and he lost. And Western civilization survived‹even with a portion of
Europe falling under Soviet domination for a while. Millions died in the
war; other millions survived. What now matters, in the long run, is what we
know of that war. We live forward; but we can only think backward,
Kierkegaard once said. Knowledge, all knowledge, depends on memory; and
history is the memory of mankind. All kinds of comfortable, and
uncomfortable, truths‹and half-truths‹are latent within history, potential
arguments for all kind of purposes; but they are seldom enough. What
happened and what could have happened are not separable in our memories, in
our minds. And why and how are not separable either.

John Lukacs is the author of more than 20 books on topics in European
history, including ³Five Days in London: May 1940,² ³The Hitler of History,²
and ³The Last European War.² Currently professor of history emeritus at
Chestnut Hill College, he has also taught at Columbia University, the
University of Pennsylvania and the University of Budapest. His new book,
³Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning‹Churchill¹s First Speech as
Prime Minister,² will be published by Basic Books in May.