Book Review: ‘Human Smoke’…

HUMAN SMOKE

HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker is underwritten as a book that cites the beginning of World War II and the end of civilisation.

This review was pledged for a few weeks now but, due to the violent and aggressive conflict escalating in the Gaza strip, at this time, consideration had been held back.

 

BAKER’S writings appear as a truculent pacifist’s interpretation of the events that led to World War II. Without historical understanding, readers would likely feel swamped with some misinformed facts.

According to Mr. Baker, the United States should never have entered the war; the French made a civilised decision not to fight on; and, Roosevelt and Churchill rank alongside Hitler as equal grand architects of history’s brutality.

Human Smoke is presented as a very tightly condensed chronology, with events – large and small – provided in brief snippets and within a sentence or two.

Baker sets the scene from 1892, with Alfred Noble predicting that his explosives might very well put an end to all war. The book ends in December 1941, shortly after the entry of the U.S. into the war. In between, Mr. Baker develops, in contrapuntal and brief fashion, several grand themes: British and American racism, blood lust, Jewish suffering under the Nazi regime, and the ‘brave’ but futile protests of pacifists and other dissenters.

Events and incidents throughout the book are presented out of context, with no authorial commentary. The pages of Human Smoke have as much white space as it does black print. Frequently, entries will end with a date, pretentiously intoned: “For the sake of children everywhere, I appeal to men to stop this war. It was September 1939.” Those words appeared on a banner being held by Mary Taylor, a woman from Liverpool who walked to London. That entry is rather characteristic of how the book is written, generally.

Muddled and often irritating, Baker sounds its singular note incessantly, like a mallet thumping a tent peg over and over: war is bad; Churchill was bad; Roosevelt was bad; Hitler was bad too, but maybe, in the end, no worse than Roosevelt and Churchill. Jean Rankin, a Republican congresswoman from Montana, was good, because she cast the lone vote opposing the declaration of war against Japan. It was December 8, 1941.

Quoting a critical citation of Baker’s Human Smoke:

… In Britain, we have become used to books debunking Winston Churchill and questioning whether it was such a good idea to fight a war with Nazi Germany that cost our empire. But evidence of Churchill’s belligerence, capricious behaviour and penchant for late-night sessions over brandy and cigars seems to have come as a surprise to the American novelist Nicholson Baker. Until now, Baker has been best known for slim novels extrapolating a life from a brief incident, and entertaining pieces of erotica. His writing has been distinguished by wit and erudition. So his self-confessed ignorance of history is something of a surprise. [David Cesarani: "A novel view of history"]

Human Smoke, a grim reference to the death camps and crematoriums at Auschwitz, effectively razes the edifice he attempts to construct. In a melancholic afterword and lament, Nicholson Baker asks: “Did the war help anyone who needed help?” At no point does Mr. Baker ever suggest that the liberation of many prisoners – those entrapped in Belsen, Dachau or Buchwald, or those untold millions of Russians, Danes, Belgians, Czechs and Poles – might have been effected other than by the force of arms.

Is Baker’s commentary history? Undoubtedly, his selection of material is driven by a personal expedition, shaped by his own assumptions and prejudices. Self-examination and navel-gazing, which his novels are well known for, this is not the same as the critical thinking which historians execute when handling sources. Human Smoke is a book you would expect from an autodidact, self-taught and anecdotes that lack substance of clarity. Rigorous and objective, some of the attestations qualify the writer as a researcher quoting a skewed angle from diaries, letters and memoirs but fails to encompass a broader insight.

The writer implies that the outcome of the First World War inexorably led to the Second. As a pacifist he believes, emphatically, that wars cause more wars. By standing firm on this stance allows him to introduce such hateful features of modern warfare such as aerial bombardment and blockades. Missions of mercy, he implies, might have worked better than threats and bombs. Yet, he dutifully records Hitler’s remark to a Croatian leader that “Europe must be purged of every last Jew”.

 

CHURCHILL is portrayed as a Hun-bashing, Jew-hating, pro-fascist, drink-sodden imperialist spoiling for a fight with Germany. Ostensibly, he is also credited with starting the Great Depression which helped bring Hitler to power. According to Baker, Sir Winston Churchill was in the pay of British industrialists, notably ICI, who always wanted a good war as a reason for flogging arms and poison gas. Baker focuses lavishly on the production of chemical weapons in Britain; he fails to inform the reader that they were never used.

It is correct, though, that Britain did use airpower as a “cut-price method” of maintaining its rule over restive colonies and mandates between the wars. However, Baker implies some kind of mutual connection between this policy and the air war against Germany from 1939. The opposite was the case. It was precisely because the RAF was heavily geared to colonial policing that it was woefully ill-equipped for a real war.

Baker’s portrayal of the RAF’s offensive during the first two years of the war is so wide off the mark, it is grimly comical. If only the RAF had been as fearsome as he suggests, it might have succeeded not only in irritating Hitler into launching revenge attacks, but ending the war a lot sooner. Baker transforms the RAF’s ineffectual raids into a devastating assault because he believes the Nazi’s, who said the bombing justified not only a Blitz on London, but the “punishment of Germany’s Jewish population”. So, you see, according to Nicholson Baker, it was all Churchill’s fault. Spurning Hitler’s “peace overtures” in 1939 and 1940, and insisting on bombing the Reich to show that the RAF would not give in, prolonged the war and doomed the Jews. Risible to say the least.

President Roosevelt does not emerge much better, either. The short descriptive writings and vignettes prevalent throughout Human Smoke indicate him as cynical and anti-Semitic, and interested mainly in promoting wars and conflicts that will supply markets for arms manufacturers. Baker hangs on to previous US conspiracy theories who maintain that Roosevelt directly provoked the Japanese to war which left the way open for their attack on Pearl Harbour in order to stampede a peace-loving American public into war against Germany.

Baker’s picture of Winston Churchill as a warmonger rejecting Hitler’s “sincere peace offers” can only work by expunging and obliterating large chunks of preceding history. Why, for instance, is there no mention of the Hossbach Memorandum that recorded Hitler’s plans for war as early as November 1937? Nor is there any sense of what peace on Hitler’s terms would have meant in 1940, especially for those under Nazi occupation.

For Baker, Churchill and Roosevelt were just as bad then as President George W Bush is now: foolish, small-minded cowards who ordered the bombing of innocent civilians from the air and so participated in a process of reciprocated killing. The Allies military victory was thus, in Baker’s view, a moral defeat that comprised the civilisations these leaders claimed to be upholding.

 

THE WRITING of history requires context in which to assess the information provided. Treating history in the form of a novel, which Nicholson Baker clearly does, dispenses with context and allows him to select solely whatever material he can find to substantiate his one predetermined conclusion: that the Allies were as bad as the Axis, and civilisation was the loser. By using such an approach, self-defence can be made to appear the same as attack.

Although Baker’s extracts do not deny that Hitler and the Japanese were aggressors, with ambitions to re-order as much of the globe as possible, they are marshaled so as to suggest that Hitler’s aggression should have been met with kindness and thus turned aside. Baker digs out of obscurity a crew of egoists, often rather innocent churchmen, who preached pacifism. Among them were Reverend Harry Fosdick, Professor Rufus Jones and the Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee.

Individuals who went to prison rather than be conscripted into the armed services of the democracies are especially highlighted. In England, for example, they included members of the Peace Pledge Union. But none carried wartime pacifism to a higher extreme than Mohandas Gandhi in India, who is quoted frequently throughout Human Smoke. Gandhi’s advice to the British was to fight Nazism “without arms”, even if the results were to prove suicidal.

World War II was a deeply unfortunate and troubling conflict in which many lives were lost. Mr. Baker is certainly right about that, but not about much else in this hand-wringing, moral mess of a book.

 

© Mark Dowe 2009: all rights protected

mark.dowe@googlemail.com

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