Reviewed by De Sales Harrison, Professor of English, Oberlin College
Dawn breaks; war breaks out. Wars end, and days do too, even the longest days: September 1, 1939, December 7, 1941, June 6, 1944, August 6, 1945. The past consolidates its disasters, impassive as a croupier with his hook, while we keep wagering on happier outcomes, birthdays, anniversaries, hope for another trentes glorieuses or the Age of Aquarius. When dark falls again, we tell ourselves the points of light surrounding us are kindly constellations, not the watchfires of our foes. As for dawn, we can rely on the astronomers and astrologists alike can tell us with precision when it will, and when it did, occur. (On September 1, 1939, dawn in Warsaw broke at 4:45am, just as the Deutchland-class battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on on Polish ammunition depot at Westerplatte.) Of course we we could always just put the question to the naked eye: once we were blind, but now we see. Surely there are some varieties of hindsight we can't give back, no matter how much we might want to? Surely we know now what we didn't know then.
But when did World War II break? With the Hitler's invasion of Poland? Or was it earlier, the fall of 1938, with the occupation of the Sudetenand in Czechoslovakia, or even earlier, with the Munich negotiations, where France and England granted Hitler the permission to cut out that portion of Czechoslovakia for itself? Or was it later, only when the war became a World War, if say when Russia invaded the moiety of Poland set aside for it by Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact? Or when Russia invaded Finland? Perhaps, as far as the allies were concerned, it began only months later, when the Germans swept through Luxembourg, Holland, and Belgium, and drove down into France, or was it when the first bombs fell on English soil? Or if "we" are Americans and speak as ringmasters of a unremittingly bloody pax americana, maybe it didn't begin until dawn of December 7, 1941, when the first air-raid sirens at Pearl Harbor woke the nation from its isolationist slumbers? One way or another, whenever that dawn broke, it illuminated a world changed forever, and made one thing at least blindingly clear: no one would sleep soundly again.
James Heffernan's superb volume, Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II inquires into the origins of that famous conflict, not with the eye of the historian, jealous to command both cause and effect, not with the eye of the jurist, apportioning innocence and guilt, not even (chiefly) with the eye of the critic, though the book reaffirms what readers of Heffernan have long known, that as a critic, his peers are few, and of the very best. What animates the book is something different, more like an appetite than an agenda, and his readings crackle with ozony urgency. As he declares his intent, he concerns himself not with historical narrative nor with the broader, retrospectatorial category of the Literature of World War II, but with what he calls punctual literature, works by writers who live during (and only sometimes through) the events evoked in their pages, and what is more, write those pages in ignorance of how things will end.
Heffernan explains this project with brisk lucidity, acknowledging how the long shadows of Homer and Thucydides and the shorter shadows of modern critics and historians overlap all around him, but he claims a clear space for this particular, and particularly arresting undertaking. What does it mean (he asks) to write from a place of unignorable experience, experience both hopelessly private and ensared in global conditions of crisis, all while knowing nothing of how it will all turn out? There is a kind of inherent suspense in such works, a suspense that no novel or poem or play can ever resolve, whatever conclusions they arrive at or propose. Preserving this unresolvable suspense is a delicate undertaking. Whether we are speaking of literary criticism or of history, the certainties claimed by most current strategies of argumentation depend on the a knowing mastery over everything declared (often by fiat) to be evidence. History goes on, breeding opinion and feeding it with carefully selected facts, but lives and artworks alike are defined by closure and limit, and in the cases of the works Heffernan discusses, they all enclose that fundamental, dominant not-knowing. While various in tone, ethos, and genre, they all have in common that certain uncertainty. Heffernan's greatest triumph here is the grace and finesse with which he handles that delicate undertaking, always adjusting his instrumentation to keep that paradoxical condition in view. He never fumbles his commitment to keeping unmastered and unmasterable what Charles Maier called The Unmasterable Past.
Some chapters center on works of single authors, such as Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gellhorn's A Stricken Field, Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children or his Svendborg Poems. Others are compounded of multiple perspectives, such as those convoked in the influential Partisan Review, or those represented by the more theoretical alignment of Jan Karski, Patrick Hamilton, and W.H. Auden. Either way, each chapter shows how a point of view, or a convergence of multiple views, frames through the aperture of art a part of the onrushing cataclysm, a cataclysm so immense that no one could see around it. Such moments resonate with their historical contexts, the Spanish Civil War, say, or the treacherous and fleeting equilibrium of the Munich accords, and overflow with often unbearable knowledge of what was to come later, as is the case with Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, her unrealized quintet of novels. (Némirovsky, murdered in Auschwitz, would only draft two of the five books) Most chilling in all instances, however, is the palpable sense of something provisional or desperate, an effort to distill if not hope then resolve or resignation from the gathering dread.
In Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Gellhorn's A Stricken Field, the narrative takes form in the force field between journalism and counter-factual fantasy. For all the admiration Heffernan feels for each writer, the effect in each case is troubling. Hemingway the novelist, his narrator, and his protagonist Robert Jordan agree on the possibility that a soldier's single-minded pragmatic know-how might be elevated to the height of a moral ideal. But Heffernan prevents us from falling in line, emphasizing the novel's insistence that heroic or even stoical death is death nonetheless, that all striving for glory, or fame, or honor may do no more than connive with atrocity and collude with what Wilfred Owen called the "old Lie", that Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"
Relatedly The Stricken Field asks whether the protagonists saving the written testimonies of doomed Czech refugees is admirably similar to the saving of lives, or whether it literally papers over the hideous betrayal of those lives, not only by Munich, Chamberlain, and Daladier, but by Czechoslovakia itself. For Heffernan this open question refers not only to the plight of Czechoslovaks, but recalls the engineered fate of the Poles, and implies a critique of the subsequent sacralization of World War II, "the good war" fought by "the greatest generation."
Orwell and Auden knew, and Waugh did too, that if truth is the first casualty of war, then comedy might be the second, as the shadow of seriousness flattens the landscape into a patchwork of piety, patriotism, sterile outrage, and despair. Against this, Heffernan sees in Waugh's Put Out More Flags a triumph of irony in the face of sombre disaster, and a means of taking on those most slippery and stateless enemies: willful stupidity, cant, and vanity. Irony takes a different form in Green's undersung Caught, the most searching investigation here of the internecine warfare fought between what Auden calls our dual natures "of Eros and of dust." Green illuminates the inner by means of external conflict, specifically, the fires of the Blitz. Neglected as a brittle and yellowed experiment in Modernist narrative dislocation, Green's novel reveals itself under Heffernan's scrutiny to be an unforgettable rendering of extreme circumstance, where the Blitz shows an aspect of war all the more violent for being frontless, an arbitrary rain of high-explosives and incendiaries falling indiscriminately on a city already fractured by class divisions, resentment, jealously, perfidy, sexualized panic, and sheer overmastering terror.
Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War Two rightly gives Brecht pride of place, crediting him with the greatest of the many great accomplishments under consideration, Mother Courage and her Children. Heffernan's elaborates with great care Mother Courage's endless war, which is at once her livelihood and undoing, a creditor to whom she pays debt on mounting debt, as if not paid before, even as it claims the lives of each of her children. He argues that Mother Courage requires its viewers to interrogate their divided interests, their own collaborative tendencies, their own inhuman compulsion to barter lives for security.
That Heffernan, in a book predominantly concerned with novels, reserves the palm for this towering, harrowing play, raises a question about genre, and the broader inclination to restrict the definition of literature to narrative forms, fiction, history, epic, memoir, and historical drama. The readings of Brecht's Svendborg Poems, and Auden's September 1, 1939, indispensable for Heffernan's argument, nevertheless get his reader (or at least this reader) wondering what may have been possible, world enough and time permitting, if more poetry (to say nothing of cinema, photography, or graphic arts) had found a place in this chock-full but over-all-too-soon volume.
Nevertheless Heffernan's book overflows with vigor. The sweep and loft of his readings creates a powerful backdraft, one capable of lifting and rifling through Benjamin's Illuminations, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, as well as a splendid sequence of lesser known but no less gripping texts, most notably Marc Bloch's Etrange Defaite, the above-mentioned Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State, and Hanna Diamond's Fleeing Hitler. The effect is thrilling; even a brief foray into the footnotes informs the reader that a wondrous garden of forking paths, of secondary and tertiary tributary sources all awaiting exploration.
Early on Heffernan describes the evolution from epic to history, from Homer to Thucydides, as the progression from poetry to "good sturdy prose." Heffernan's prose is sturdy in the best sense, utterly without vanity, sound as a solid table on which stacks of books and documents have been neatly arranged. There is no end to the relief and satisfaction of reading such sure, well-joined arguments, each one a blessed reprieve from the stridor and shrilling of most academical prose. But the pleasures on offer here are not merely the nourishments of an honest style, or even the gratification of observing a master once again at work with his materials. There is also the delight of his patient wit and playfulness, guiding readers to moments of wonder and surprise. Look! The well-crafted table is in fact the deck of a ship, wind already in the shoulder of its sail, prepared to cast off on the next voyage.
The most poignant of these moments appears only in the last paragraphs, when Heffernan recounts a boyhood memory of seeing a newspaper headline in 1945, announcing at once the End of the War and the Obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as though part of the same single triumph. Instructed as you have been by the preceding pages, you feel for the boy, only six years old, for all he will have to learn, to read, to struggle with, for having to learn that disentangling victory from defeat, and both from atrocity, is the work of generations, not of a single lifetime. Only then you realize with a gentle shock that Heffernan, six in 1945, was born in 1939.
To reach and touch one's parents, to know them as they were when young, younger than we are now, to know them as though they were our own children whose futures are a no-man's land between our responsibilities and failures and whatever the Fates hold in store, that too is a colossal undertaking, a part of what it means to own a past. Whatever we may think about it, we are all children or grandchildren of les grandes guerres. Heffernan's account of the punctual literature of Word War II, is as rich and enriching an acknowledgement of this fact as one could hope to encounter. The project brings home the recognition that the tragic story that broke in 1939 unfolds around us still, whether in Gaza or Bakhmut or Kunduz, and none of us, even now, knows how it will end.