Inside Amazon.com

Nicholson Baker is one of those writers I’ll always pay attention to: in a modest way he seemingly reinvents writing for each new assignment, never content to use an old form to say what he wants. His first books created a new fiction subgenre–I’m not sure if it’s ever been given a name, but let’s call it the micronovel–in which he expands a tiny, ordinary moment, an office worker ascending an escalator in The Mezzanine, a father feeding his baby girl in Room Temperature, into a vastly curious commentary on an entire life. My favorite of his books, U and I, about his semi-obsession with John Updike, is a brilliantly honest and idiosyncratic examination of literary ambition and, more broadly, what it’s like to be a fan of someone you don’t know. Recently, he detoured for a few years into a new and intense career as a professional archivist–recounted in the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Double Fold–when he discovered how many rare copies of newspapers were being destroyed as libraries shifted to microfilm. And he also wrote my all-time favorite book review, a gloriously scatalogogical celebration of the first volume of the (lamentably still uncompleted!) Historical Dictionary of American Slang (unavailable on the New York Review of Books site, but available, in the August 11, 1994, issue in your local library, one hopes).

So when I saw that his newest book, Human Smoke, was a history of World War II, I perked up for yet another reinvention, of both himself and of history-writing. And I wasn’t disappointed, for it’s not like any other book I’ve read. Rather than telling the complete narrative history of the runup to the war, or even, as you might expect from his earlier books, of his own investigation of that history, he tells his story in very short, matter-of-fact anecdotes. His own presence, front and center in his other books, is muted here, but still you feel its strong effect, for he has selected his anecdotes to construct an argument of sorts: that pacifists who resisted the war were, as he puts it in a short author’s note, "right," and the war-loving Churchill was "wrong." As you can tell from recent Old Media Mondays, the reaction to the book has been very mixed: either "one of the most important books you will ever read" or "not just a stupid book, but a scary one." My own reaction, as I say below, was in between. To say we shouldn’t have fought World War II, or at least not the way we did, is a counterfactual of such strength that I’ll need more than a selection of anecdotes, without further argument, to convince me. But it’s a story worth reading. Nonviolence is a potent but exacting ideal that’s hard to sustain in the face of human cruelty–one indication being that Martin Luther King’s former right-hand man Clarence Jones is about to publish a book, What Would Martin Say?, arguing, of all things, that King would have supported the Iraq War–but is always worth testing yourself against.

There are few recent books that left me more eager to ask questions of its author, so I was very pleased that Nicholson Baker was able to take the time to reply. And for those looking for (much) further discussion of the book, I second his recommendation of the extensive roundtable discussion of the book at Edrants.

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. 
–Tom