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2008-04-19, 12:11:14
Nicholson Baker's new book, Human Smoke, has gotten positive reviews, and his varied and unusual books seem intriguing, although I've never gotten around to reading one. So I was lucky to happen to be a in a Cambridge, MA, bookshop just before he was going to read from his new book, about the build-up before WWII.
His approach to writing his book was intriguing. He said he wanted to consider ideas about the war that might seem naive—such as what pacifists said about avoiding conflict and helping displaced and oppressed people. Above all, he wanted to understand what it felt like for people to go through that time. Also, he said that all of his books, until now, have been arguments, in one way or another, that life is fundamentally worth living. This new book, however, is about how people descended into collective insanity (to paraphrase what he said).
Much of Baker's research for the book involved reading front pages of old newspapers, since he and his wife wound up in possession of a huge archive of old newspapers. He would flip through them and look for odd stories, or facts that seemed to make sense at the time but sound crazy now. He gave as one example a straightforward story about how the Allies were planning to drop incendiary bombs on German forests to burn them down. (So when journalists like me are putting down the "first draft of history," we better watch what we write, huh?)
As Baker read from the book, I thought it sounds like a collection of disparate facts and stories that had jumped out at him as he was reading through all this stuff. He put the things in the book that, he said, "I couldn't forget."
But I'm not sure that all these snippets would add up to an understanding of the war unless you already know a fair amount about it. I'm sure the people who reviewed the book for places like the New Yorker and the NY Times alright knew a lot about the war, and that's why they were asked—or asked themselves—to write a review of the book.
Also, it was disappointing that, it turns out, Baker didn't want to use what he'd learned to gain any kind of broader understanding. Since his book was about the build-up to WWII, I asked him if he gained ingith into what it takes to motivate people. A lot of people say it will take a mass mobilization of resources, and also individual sacrifices by people in developed countries, to deal with global warming and avoid a climate catastrophe, I pointed out, and people say that the world acheived this in WWII, so we can do it again now. But then they were motivated by fear of imminent death and by nationalism. Is there any hope of people being motivated to tackle longer-term, more abstract, and global problems like climate change, I asked him.
Baker's answer was indirect, and I didn't understand what he was saying at first. He said that when you're researching a history like the one he wrote, it's so hard to wrap the lobes of your brain (he used that phrase) around all the material, that you can't start to think about parallels today or how to take lessons from that history and apply them to today. But once you're done with the history, you can begin to do that—but (if I understood correctly) he's not ready to do that yet. He wrote the book because he think people have a moral obligation to learn about what happened in WWII and to understand it, just for itself and not because we are going to apply what we learned to today.
I know my question was kind of off-topic, but I thought his answer was lame. What about that old saying, "Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." He wants to learn about the past, but not from it, apparently. If we're not trying to learn from the past, why focus on WWII? Why don't we have an equal moral obligation to learn about the Peloponnesian war? I'm glad I heard his reading, though, because now I can strike his book off the list of things I want to read. *Note: The "area man" in the title is me; if you read The Onion, you'll get it.
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