Pity and war histories
But how should intellectuals write about acts of immense depravity? Faced with an outpouring of books, films, plays, television programmes and computer games based on the First and Second World Wars, it is an appropriate time to revisit this question. Peter Englund and Max Hastings might be expected to have pondered this question in the course of writing their hefty works on the First and Second World Wars (532 and 748 pages respectively). Unfortunately, despite Englund’s engrossing storytelling talents and Hastings’s dazzling display of erudition, both books provoke a vague sense of unease about the form of history that they represent: that is, history as affect.
The problem that both Englund and Hastings face in writing about war is one that troubled Auden throughout much of his life. Indeed, a couple of years before the Second World War, Auden had reflected on the poetics of cruelty. In Letters from Iceland, he evoked a scene in which he observed the slaughter of an enormous, gentle whale, “the most beautiful animal I have ever seen”. While the whale was being cut up on the slip-way, Auden heard a bell clang and, immediately, “everyone stuck their spades in the carcass and went off to lunch. The body remained alone in the sun, the flesh still steaming a little”. He reflected that the scene evoked “an extraordinary vision of the cold controlled ferocity of the human species”.
In a powerful essay, entitled “Squares and Oblongs”, Auden speculated that writing about cruelty meant paying attention precisely to the “lack of feeling” that enabled (some) humans to move easily from slaughter to sipping a mug of tea. Such a poem would have to tell how “when he read the news [of atrocity], the poet, like you and I, dear reader, went on thinking about his fame or his lunch, and how glad he was that he was not one of the victims”...
both Englund’s and Hastings’s histories seek to draw readers into the intimate lives of people who suffered through the First and Second World Wars. Englund constructs a picture of war from the perspective of twenty individuals, resolutely declaring that The Beauty and the Sorrow is not about “its causes, course, conclusion, and consequences” but about “what it was like” (his emphasis). He is vague about how he chose his twenty individuals, but undoubtedly his strategic choices profoundly dictated his overall portrayal of the war. As he acknowledges, his book is a work of “anti-history”, or the reduction of history into “its smallest, most basic component – the individual”. His book’s novelistic tone, in which small vignettes are piled up, makes for riveting reading but, as history, is this anything more than a brilliantly composed blog (he is an enthusiastic blogger) about an appalling time?
Hastings is not an enthusiastic blogger (although I may stand corrected) and, unlike Englund, his sample of first-person accounts is vast. All Hell Let Loose is a global history of the Second World War. It is a complex, even magisterial, account. Of these two books, Hastings’s is the more impressive. Part of its power lies in the fact that the author possesses a strong line on practically every issue, ironing out with authoritative confidence the numerous disputes and wrangles that mark academic debates on the Second World War. It is not reductive, patriotic history, nevertheless, and Hastings’s indictment of the British authorities’ response (or lack of) to the Bengal famine of 1943–4 is perceptive, as is his respect for the rank and file of totalitarian regimes. For someone seeking a general history of the war, including its political and diplomatic components, this is as good a place to start as any. Although the massacre at Lidice is not in his index, this is a reminder of the sheer scale of atrocity during the war of 1939–45.
For all their differences, Englund’s and Hastings’s books both excel in depicting the horrors of war. Englund judiciously observes the tedium of war, as well as its “beauty”, and Hastings has a knack for the apposite statistic, but both their narratives focus on the individual’s personal confrontation with violence. Both are concerned with the experiences of individuals, and both deliberately solicit affect. They prioritize personal stories and individual life trajectories. Readers are supposed to be mesmerized by horror – and if reviews of Hastings’s book are anything to go by, he has succeeded admirably.
The emotional impact of both studies cannot be denied. But perhaps the “history of war” as the “history of affect” should still give pause. <http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article833313.ece>
