eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers.
On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes’s essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself—the battlefield uproar of actual combat—is unimaginable for those who weren’t there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren’t, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can’t possibly know.
The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes’s experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, E. E. Cummings, and Cecil Day-Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years—men like Samuel Hynes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226468815 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 963 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
At War with Ken Burns
My hitch with Ken Burns's army began in August of 2002. That summer was a strange time in America. The papers I read at breakfast were full of war talk and ceremonial grief. In New York plans were being made for the first anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center: there would be patriotic readings — the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence — and odes to the dead, and roses, and a marathon recitation of the names of all the victims. In Washington politicians were talking about a War on Terror, using the word war loosely and metaphorically — the way they used to talk about the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs — and President Bush was being briefed on how to stage a preemptive strike on Iraq. In Afghanistan American special forces were looking for Osama bin Laden. War was an oppressive presence, but it didn't seem real, more like a B-grade war movie. It would end after a while, the house lights would go up, and everybody would go home.
In the middle of all that unreality I was glad to get a letter from Lynn Novick, Ken Burns's coproducer. She and Ken were thinking about a PBS series about the American experience of the Second World War. Their planning had only begun, but they had two good working ideas to start with: they would build the film on the lives of ordinary people — the PFCs, not the generals — and they would include both the men who did the fighting and the folks who stayed home and worried. Would I like to join the company? It would be a relief, I thought, to escape from the fog of almost-war and go back in time to a real war. So I signed on.
More letters followed, explaining the project further, and setting a possible schedule. As they came, the intentions of the film seemed to expand; now it was to show "what the War meant then and means today and a great deal more." So there'd be two meanings, then and now, and more — though the letters didn't explain what that meant. The schedule would be leisurely; the first draft of the script wouldn't be finished until the fall of 2004. Editing would begin in 2007 or 2008. I liked that kind of planning: the film existed in an ideal state somewhere; but I wouldn't have to do any work for years.
The spacious plan didn't last long. By January 2003 the Burns staffers had found and interviewed some thirty people, scattered among four American towns, who remembered their war years; scriptwriting had begun, a first draft was expected in the fall of the year, and editing was now to begin in the spring of 2004. Nobody explained the acceleration, the sudden sense of urgency, if that's what it was.
The World War Two Film Project Board of Advisors (that's the title they gave us) met for the first time in New York in late February 2003. It was a very preliminary meeting, of all kinds of people — writers, editors, military historians, old veterans like me. And the Burns people — very bright and mostly very young, none of them old enough to have seen a serious war or to have lived through one, not even Vietnam. Together two or three generations of us shared what we remembered, or had discovered, and what we felt. By the end of the third day Ken and Lynn seemed confident that they knew enough to move on to the writing phase.
While we were meeting, the newspapers were full of a different war, the one that was in everyone's mind, but hadn't happened yet. The national mood, insofar as you would gauge it from the nineteenth floor of a building on Thirty-First Street, was edgy and uncertain; the air was full of lies and half-truths, of prevarications and mendacities and equivocations. The country seemed to have two options: to attack another country that was perhaps the wrong enemy, or to wait, anxiously and passively, for something worse to happen tomorrow or next week or maybe never.
But up on the nineteenth floor, the talk about our war was relaxed and easy. We knew how our story would run and how it would end. The good guys would win. And we knew for sure who the good guys were.
A few weeks later the war was in my morning Times:
BUSH ORDERS START OF WAR ON IRAQ; MISSILES APPARENTLY MISS HUSSEIN
So the president had the war he wanted, and he had missed his first target.
The Ken Burns war went on. Researchers looked for more witnesses and more archival film and more statistics. Somebody sent me the transcript of the interview I'd done back in February, and I read it and sent it back, along with some old photographs of the young pilot I once was, back in our war. And the script grew.
In May another Times headline appeared: "BUSH DECLARES 'ONE VICTORY IN WAR ON TERROR.'" I saw the whole show on the evening news. There he came, striding across the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln; behind him a banner hung from the bridge announcing "Mission Accomplished." The president was dressed in a Navy flight suit; a leather patch sewn on his chest had Navy wings stamped on it and "George W. Bush, Commander-in-Chief." That outfit made me sore. He had no right to be wearing Navy wings; he hadn't trained as a Navy pilot; he was Air Force, if he was anything. The whole performance made me uneasy; when was the last time an American president appeared dressed up in military clothes? And what comes next? A field marshal's uniform and a white horse? But it's all right: nobody takes him seriously, everybody laughs. There'll be no man on horseback in America, not any time soon.
In the fall (we're still in 2003) Lynn sends me the first draft of their fundraising proposal. The project has grown, both in length — it's now a five-part film, ten hours long — and in complexity of intention — now it's to be a "bottom up" exploration of the myriad ways in which World War II transformed our country, the war seen as a social force. The title has changed, too: it's no longer "The World War Two Film Project"; now it's simply "THE WAR." That's the way my generation has always thought of it; but what about younger people, who didn't grow up with it? Will they understand?
I respond to the draft a bit professorially. I object to the presence of high-velocity words like agony and horror and gargantuan and fantastic and colossal, and I am uncomfortable with sentences like this one: "Without sentimentality or nostalgia, the film will honor and celebrate the heroism, endurance, determination, sacrifice, and bravery of the generation of Americans who lived through it." Sentimentality and nostalgia — they'll be problems all right. Nostalgia, because when people my age look back at their war years they see their own youth, when they were free and full of life, excited by new places, new adventures, new skills, and new friends, when they were discovering for the first time how spacious the world is, how full of promises. And they forget, sometimes, what the war cost: not the money (there always seems to be plenty of money for war) but the destruction — the burning cities, the starving people, the sixty million dead, including a third of a million of their own generation who died violently and young.
And sentimentality, too, the kind that men feel (and maybe women, but mostly men) who come of age after a great war, knowing they were born too late ever to march to those brave drums. When you think of the scale of our war, and the absolute moral clarity we saw in it — all the good on our side, all the evil on the other — it was inevitable that the next generation should imagine it as an epic struggle like the Trojan War, fought by a generation that was braver, more patriotic, and more enduring than the next one could ever be.
Nostalgia and sentimentality are dangerous when they're about history. The people making this film will have to look out for memory's soft distortions. And avoid the windy words — heroism, endurance, determination. Honor and celebrate, too. If I'm going to be involved in this project, I don't want it to turn into a Veterans Day parade.
Just before Christmas Ken and Lynn reported again. The script is in process; they expect to have the first three parts in a draft by February or March, and the last two in April. So we're accelerating again. A rough cut will be ready by this time next year. I don't know what a rough cut is — or anything else about making a film, for that matter.
Scripts of the first two (not three) parts arrive on schedule, and at the end of March 2004 the World War Two Film Project advisors gather again in New York for two long days of hard work. We talk a lot about the home front: women, for instance — what roles they played in the war, who enlisted (I didn't know any girls from Minneapolis who signed up), what kinds of jobs they got in munitions factories, and how much the war and the new jobs and movement of people freed them from their parents' rules. And rationing — and the black market that was the criminal side of the war. And the way the army reported to families that their sons were dead. And we probe at particulars: Did that event really happen then? Were there no black sailors in combat jobs? What were the camps for Japanese-Americans really like? We are like a painter with a huge bare canvas, covering it with color, one brushstroke at a time.
At breakfast in the hotel dining room I read in the Times about the dead in Iraq. There are 592 of them now — such a small number, compared with the Americans who died in our war. But our guys are long gone, decayed into history; these young men (and women — the roadside bombs don't discriminate) were alive when our board first met a year ago, and now they're dead, and the Times puts them in a list: a marine PFC from Houston, a master sergeant from New York. There'll be more listed tomorrow. And the next day.
Episode three comes in the mail in August. It's mostly about D-Day — a truth-telling account, as far as I can see, though I worry a little about the tone here and there. It's the war-correspondents, I think; most of them have a streak of the cheerleader in them. We'll be better off if we stick to the stories the old soldiers tell: they may lack style, but they sound like the truth. And check the numbers: the historians I consult disagree on how many Allied troops died on the Normandy beaches.
That week, while we worked on the scripts, a mob ambushed and killed four civilian workers in Falluja, dragged the bodies through the streets, and hung two of them from a bridge. A few miles away five American soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb destroyed their armored personnel carrier.
With the first three scripts done, the Burns people went back into their caves (that's the way I imagined them) to do whatever it is that filmmakers do next, and we on the board returned to our lives. I took my wife, Liz, to London for Christmas, and in February (it's 2005 now) we spent a week in Barbados.
It was restful back in our usual life; I had no reason to think about my war for a while. I could just be a retired professor again. But I couldn't, because the country's other war, the struggle to occupy Iraq, went on, declaring its disastrous course in London newspapers and on the American television broadcasts that reached us down in Holetown. Because that war was present, our country's conduct in the Second World War was present, too, as a model of how war could honorably be practiced — how to declare it, fight it, and terminate it (though there was the bomb there at the end — that was a problem). Still you could say that our part of that war was played by the rules. Set against that example, Bush's war was an unruly scrimmage.
Walpole, New Hampshire, a little town (or maybe it's a village, or even a hamlet), is a sort of Burns enclave. We meet there at the end of June 2005. The place doesn't seem to be organized to be a town; the houses stand around randomly among the hills and pastures, as though they'd been tossed from a great shovel; there don't seem to be any street corners, not proper right-angled ones. There's a restaurant on what would be Main Street (if there were a main street), and a church hall, and out beyond what would be the edge of town is an inn where the board will stay. It seems a funny place to go to put a war together. I'm ill at ease in New England; it seems small and untidy, and the hills are too close together. But that's just Minnesota talking.
Every morning and afternoon we all sit in a room in the church hall while an episode is shown. There seem to be more members of the Burns army here than there were at our New York meetings — young men and women in jeans, mostly. I wonder if they just stay up here all the time, waiting for Ken and Lynn to need them.
Our job is different this time. Before, when we were working on written texts, it was just another editing job. But now the visual and aural form exists, and we're tuning it — questioning the accuracy of details, noting repetitions, trying to hear the soundtrack as a version of war, tightening the whole thing up. I sit at a table with a yellow legal pad and watch for problems and write them down, noting the date and time of each.
June 27:
10:37: what the film calls marine fighter-planes are actually TBDs.
11:08: we claim more dead Japanese pilots than planes shot down. Not every dead airman is a pilot.
2:50: the "British bombers" are American B-17s.
3:10: the image of a little boy in a soldier's helmet appears for the second time.
June 28:
9:45: shot of a swastika flag repeated.
3:20: "It was the heavies." But they're medium bombers.
June 29:
10:02: we call kamikaze pilots "volunteers." Not all of them were.
2:30: "the momentum problem." I'm referring to the Battle of the Bulge, but I'm no longer sure what I meant.
June 30:
9:10: that's a Marine pilot. (I'm surprised how jealous I am of the Marine Corps's reputation.)
11:45: The music at the end is the longest continuous stretch of slow sad music in the film. Is this the tone we want here? After all we won.
Across the top of the last page of my notes I have written: "A Great Act Five."
This has been the first screening. As the images moved on the screen, and the soundtrack thundered and whispered and sang, the thing we've been doing has come alive. Here are the men and women whose words I've been reading, the ordinary people who are witnesses to our war. These are the places they fought in — the fighting is still going on as I watch — and here are the machines they fought with — the bombers, the carriers, the tanks, the guns. It isn't history that I'm watching, exactly, not what happened in the past, but what it felt like to be there while it was happening.
Watching the rough cut, I learn a lot about the war I was in. That may seem paradoxical, after all I was there. But old soldiers will understand what I mean. You don't really see a war when you're in it; you're too busy doing your job or just keeping your head down to look around much, and anyway the view from a foxhole or the turret of a tank or a battleship is restricted. It isn't much better in the air, where I fought my war: there's always a lot of smoke around, and ground fire, and the other planes to watch out for, and your plane to fly. And besides, where you are in a war is only a small piece of the whole vast action. What I saw in the Second World War was mainly the southern end of a small island south of Kyushu. As I watched the rough cut, I begin to learn — no, to experience — what the rest of the war had been like. Looked like. Sounded like. Felt like. The real texture of it all. And not only the men who fought. Wives and mothers and children are in the film, too, and tell their stories, and I learn something about what it was like to wait, to work, to suffer, to grieve.
I needn't have worried about the big words in the prospectus; there are no celebrations here, and no heroes. Brave men, yes, and brave women, too, and one very brave ten-year-old girl. But not the glorified kind of brave — no Sergeant York charging the German machine-guns; no Audie Murphy on the roof of his burning tank, driving the enemy back; no Pappy Boyington over Rabaul daring the Japanese to come up and fight him. Almost no generals — though I was pleased to see General MacArthur make a brief inglorious appearance escaping from Corregidor. No politicians making speeches. No official spokesman saying what he wished were true. No vanity, no boasting of brave deeds. Just men and women remembering their war.
Members of my generation will recognize themselves here, I think, and relive what they did sixty-odd years ago; and those old veterans we all know, who were there but never talked about it, will find their voices. And all those generations who are too young to remember will learn some of the real truths of war, the truths you don't learn from the newspapers and the evening news, and by the end of the film they'll understand a little what happens in the lives of human beings like themselves when they are caught up in the great machine of war.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "On War and Writing"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Samuel Hynes.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface Introduction: Two VocationsAt War with Ken Burns
In the Whirl and Muddle of War
War Stories: Myths of World War II
A Critic Looks at War
Hardy and the Battle God
Yeats’s Wars
Ignorantly into War: Vera Brittain
Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier
An Introduction to Graeme West
The Odds on Edward Thomas
E. E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room
Cecil Lewis’s Sagittarius Rising
The Death of Landscape
Verdun and Back: A Pilot’s Log Index of Names and Titles