How great literature can change your life

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Friday

The recent New Yorker has a wide-ranging (sometimes too wide-ranging) article on “the fate—and the power—of books in wartime.” Claudia Roth Pierpont shares fascinating anecdotes about literature attempting to come to our aid when things are at their grimmest. It also has given me insight into my father, who was a soldier in World War II.

Pierpont recounts how “Armed Services Editions” were printed and sent to soldiers during the war.  In 1942 President Roosevelt declared, “In this war, we know books are weapons.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of War Information “issued a poster that framed a photograph of a book burning with the words “THE NAZIS BURNED THESE BOOKS…but free Americans CAN STILL READ THEM.” THEN IT SENT MILLIONS OF BOOKS.” Then, in 1943, millions of books were sent overseas:

These editions were small in format and printed on lightweight paper, designed so that they could fit in a serviceman’s pocket and withstand some half a dozen readings, as soldiers passed them on. (There is an entire book about this series, Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War.) Thirty titles were sent out to start, fifty thousand copies of each. Hundreds of works were eventually added, and the number of copies tripled: fiction, classics, biographies, humor, history, mystery, science, plays, poetry. Bundles of books were flown to the Anzio beachhead, in Italy, dropped by parachute on remote Pacific islands, and stockpiled in warehouses in the spring of 1944, so that they could be shipped to the staging grounds for D Day.

It may have been one of these books—For Whom the Bell Tolls –that made it to my father. It was June of 1944 and he was on night duty in, I believe, Coventry. To pass the time, he was reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel, which Pierpont says became a British bestseller as the war progressed. At first, all was quiet—a night like any other—only suddenly my father heard a loud noise and, looking up, saw that the entire sky will filled with planes. It was the day before D-Day and they were off to bomb German positions in France in preparation for the Normandy landing.

My father would be in France less than a month later, posted as translator for an American unit in charge of the city of Avranches in Normandy. He would then spend time on to the outskirts of Paris before finally ending up in Munich. During that trek across Europe, he carried with him Untermeyer’s famous anthology, Modern American and British Poetry.

I can imagine him reading the World War I poets (whom he would one day introduce to me) like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. He was also drawn to the poetry of Robert Graves, who like these others spent time in the World War I trenches but who wrote a very different kind of poetry. As I wrote in a past post,

I went back and looked at the Grave poems my father read and can see what he would have found in them. Unlike, say, Owen, who unleashes his fury at the absurdity of war, Graves looks for ways to protect his inner imagination. For instance, in “A Pinch of Salt” he advises his reader to “mask your hunger,” which sounds as though he’s recommending the outward fatalism that my father adopted throughout the war to protect his inner sensitivity. If one doesn’t mask, one risks emotional devastation.

Back to Pierpont’s article. Apparently the Nazis, in their plans to invade England, had a “Special Wanted List” of British subject and foreign residents they planned to arrest. On this list were a number of authors, including writers E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Noël Coward, and Virginia Woolf. For their part, the Americans sent over (among other works) a novel by Woolf (The Years), Oliver Twist, Grapes of Wrath, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (one of the most popular), Zane Grey westerns, and Ogden Nash poetry.

Pierpont doesn’t limit herself to World War II. Looking back at the Civil War, she mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although she underestimates the role that it played. While she’s probably correct that it didn’t turn everyone into abolitionists—more people fought to preserve the union than to end slavery—historiaan David S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that the novel made civil war more likely and that it influenced the war’s subsequent progress.

In Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Reynolds says that the novel rejuvenated and united the abolitionist movement, which until its publication had been scattered and on the defense. He also believes it enhanced the chances of an anti-slavery candidate winning the presidency, even while at the same time it hardened southern attitudes. Both developments were key factors in the outbreak of hostilities. Furthermore, he believes Uncle Tom’s Cabin undermined British sympathy for the southern cause so that, despite Britain’s reliance on southern cotton, it did not intervene on the South’s behalf. The power of the work was such, Reynolds adds, that it probably strengthened Lincoln’s resolve when it came to signing the Emancipation Proclamation, which earlier he had avoided so as not to offend slave states that remained within the union (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri).

Tracking back to earlier wars, Pierpont talks about the importance of The Iliad in ancient times. Apparently people would choose to be buried with passages from Homer’s poem, “as though it were a sacred text.” Warriors would have responded to Homer’s lesson that even those favored by the gods will not be saved and that “man is born to die, long destined for it”:

The story runs thick with the blood of heroes, with the pain and defilement of their wounded bodies, which is presumably why the Iliad, unlike the Odyssey, was not among the books sent to American servicemen. Still, the Iliad has inspired soldiers from antiquity onward. Alexander the Great is said to have always kept it near him, and to have seen himself as a new Achilles, as he conquered lands from Egypt to India.

I note in passing that, whereas Alexander could have made a compelling case for himself as a new Achilles, Mussolini was less convincing when he declared himself to be a new Aeneas, destined to conquer Ethiopia and Slovenia.

Pierpont offers another couple of interesting anecdotes, even at the risk of making her article disjointed. Apparently the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in one of Stalin’s corrective labor camps, used to tell his wife Nadezhda not to complain about their tribulations under the dictator: “Poetry is respected only in this country—people are killed for it.”

Pierpont notes that Nadezhda too had a great faith (perhaps too great faith) in the power of literature:

Immediately after Osip’s death, she tells us, she spent several weeks with a friend who had just been released from a camp, and the friend’s mother, whose husband had been shot. Reading Shakespeare together, the three women paused over young Arthur in King John, whose death is ordered by his scheming uncle but whose innocence softens the heart of his executioner, who can’t bear to carry out the crime. What Nadezhda cannot understand, she tells her friend, is how the English, who must have read about young Arthur, had not stopped killing their fellow-men forever. The friend replies, with clear intent to comfort, that for a long time Shakespeare had not been read or staged, and that people kept slaughtering one another because they had not seen the play. The notion of literature’s power is left intact. The explanation allows for the possibility, at least, that the play will have an effect someday. But Nadezhda is not comforted. “At nights I wept at the thought that executioners never read what might soften their hearts,” she writes. “It still makes me weep.”

Nadezhda’s belief that literature can soften the hearts of evildoers is similar to an idea put forth in Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie. Because tragedy “openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue,” Sidney reasoned it would deter kings from becoming tyrants. This is one of the more dubious of Sidney’s contentions, unfortunately. Piermont notes that Stalin, “in his youth, published romantic poems in a Georgian journal and never stopped caring about poetry.” He also was quite the reader and owned some 25,000 books. Hitler, Pierpont adds, owned about 16,000 books, including a hand-tooled leather set of Shakespeare, translated into German.

Although literature can do much good, we can’t expect it to accomplish miracles. Sidney himself said that poetry, in the hands of a bad man, can be corrupted, just as physic can be used both to cure and to poison and swords to aid to heroes and traitors. But acknowledging literature’s limitations, however, should not blind us to its positive effects.