Nicholson Baker, _Human Smoke_

I've been a fan of Nicholson Baker since The Mezzanine, have read each of his books soon after publication, and have admired and enjoyed them all (in the spirit of full disclosure pioneered by Baker's U & I, however, I should confess to not finishing Double Fold).  The title of this very blog, in fact, was inspired by the final essay in Baker's The Size of Thoughts. I admired and enjoyed Human Smoke, too, departure though it is.

 

There is the heft of the volume, for one thing.  Balancing the tome in my hand after locating in the book store -- which took a few minutes, as I had begun by vainly searching in "fiction" before being directed to "history" -- I wondered, how does a miniaturist write a 500-page book?  The answer turned out to be, by writing about a thousand miniatures.  

Human Smoke is a gathering of about that many news items, diary excerpts, and quick anecdotes from about 1917 to the end of 1941, focusing most intently on the approach of World War II and that war's first two years.  It ends with Pearl Harbor and the Wannsee Conference, with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and the holocaust plainly foreshadowed -- and fittingly, because the book's main subjects are the destruction of the European Jews and the aerial bombardment of cities.  Human smoke is what is produced by the burning of human bodies.

There is no consecutive narrative in the book, no consecutive argument.  The effect, though, is of some narrative of the approach, outbreak, and early stages of the war, with all the connecting transitions between the vivid stories and striking quotations removed, or of some argument about the sheer inhumanity of the war, with all abstract discussion and generalization removed...an effect emphasized by the book's design, with an inch of white space around each brief item, creating the impression that the dull filler of conventional history has been omitted.

 

There is a narrative, though, and an argument, as every reviewer has noted.  The narrative is about the Allies' at first tentative, then eager embrace of the strategy of bombing cities, with the inevitable civilian casualties.  As for the argument, Baker comes clean in the last paragraph of the acknowledgements at the book's close, dedicating his work to the "British and American pacifists" who tried to "stop the war from happening": "They failed, but they were right."

 

Hmm.  I don't think so.  But Baker has nonetheless done something amazing.  Through selection and juxtaposition of small details from a staggering number of sources (all published, though -- no secret hitherto-unknown archives, just things available to anyone who could get to a good library), in a prose style so scrupulously neutral he seems to be making no judgements at all, he had me equating the aerial bombardment of cities with Auschwitz.  Not because he insisted I equate them -- I'm not sure even he equates them -- but that conclusion loomed up with every turned page, without his ever drawing it.

 

I don't think the two are equivalent any more than I think the pacifists were ultimately right.  But the idea I lazily had, probably from a boyhood of reading about the bomber and  fighter pilots of WW II, and even after an adolescent reading of Catch-22, that the Allied bombing of cities was a grim necessity forced on the reluctant Roosevelt and Churchill by the desperate exigencies of a just war -- well -- that's gone.  The strategy had been contemplated and prepared for even before the war started, and was deliberately chosen even though no one had any illusions that more than a few of the bombs dropped would hit their intended "military" targets.  Meanwhile, the whole grim-necessity-forced-on-reluctant-leaders-by-desperate-exigencies-of-a-just-war rhetoric was also being used by the Nazis as they started on the Final Solution.

 

Baker even quotes some Nazi propaganda to the effect that what they were doing to the Jews was necessary because of the bombing.  I had to balk here.  Surely Baker is not so naïve as to think the Nazis would have left the Jews alone had German cities not been bombed.  But did the bombing hasten the creation of the death camps?  Provide a pretext that otherwise would have been longer in coming, the delay perhaps allowing more to survive?

 

So -- Nicholson Baker has always been smart, funny, observant, and honest, and I would guess a really fun dad, and I'm now going to add "a serious writer of conscience," some folks' huffiness about Checkpoint notwithstanding.