#JLF Retrospective Pt 3: Antony Beevor, History, and Nonfiction

I enjoyed hearing Antony Beevor speak on three different occasions at JLF. This allowed me a reprieve of sorts because, despite his acclaim as a historian, I hadn't read any of his books. Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 had stared at me for ages from the shelves of Prairie Lights, but for one reason or another, neither had made it into my bag. Here in Trivandrum, The Second World War is available, but its so big and fat that I thought it would crowd out other pre-JLF reading.








Now, post-JLF, I've embarked on his D-Day: The Battle for

Normandy, and I'm finding out why he's received such acclaim. At page 152, I'm just beginning the chapter "Securing the Beachheads", but I have a good sense of how the book works. Beevor moves up and down the chain of command from Roosevelt and Churchill dealing with the prickly Charles DeGaulle, to  Ike's decision to proceed in 6 June despite the uncertainty of the weather, to the reactions and actions of the men in battle. War brings out extremes in humans from the base and cruel to the brave, gallant, and the kind. Even only 152 pages in, one can see how operations fail to go according to plan and how some plans prove very poorly considered. Donald Rumsfield infamously said that "you go to war with the Army you have", and one must grudgingly admit some truth to that, but you'd expect more forethought and care than what too often seems to have been the case with this invasion, such as soldiers and paratroopers weighed down by excessive gear and gliders made of plywood that would splinter upon a hard landing (sometimes impaling their occupants). Beevor weaves in and out from "the pornography of war" to its heroism and to its banality while maintaining a strong sense of story.

At JLF, Beevor had a session to himself at which he gave a talk that amounted to a synopsis of his most recent book, The Second World War entitled "Global War 1937-1945". Beevor starts his narrative with the full Japanese invasion of China in 1937, which he argues marks the opening of the war, not the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Beginning with the invasion of China, events unfold in varied and often unpredicatable ways. Casualities arising from this conflict that involved so much of the globe, impossible to know with certainty, were staggering by any calculation. While certainly not equally distributed, war crimes abounded on all sides. Beevor noted distinctions between national fighting forces as well as within national forces. For instance, he identified the U.S. Army as "slow" in the South Pacific  while the U.S. Marines were "aggressive". Finally, he defended the use of the atomic bomb against Japan given the casualites that the Allies (primarily the Americans) feared from an invasion of the Japanese mainland, estimated at a half a million, with a potential of civilian casualties in the range of two to eight million.

In response to questions, Beevor knew of no evidence that the U.S. proceeded to use the atomic bomb against Japan in order to intimidate Stalin. He also noted the racial and ethnic hatred during the war, much of it the result of propaganda, which made the war that much more barbaric as one saw on the Eastern Front, the Holocaust, and in attitudes of U.S. troops toward the Japanese. Finally, he opined that history is a branch of literature, to which I say "amen".

I heard Beevor speak on a couple of panels as well. In the "Nonfiction Renaissance" panel, with Beevor, William Dalrymple, Geoff Dyer, and Reza Aslan, listeners enjoyed some interesting comments. Dalrymple argued that storytelling (narrative) had been the primary vehicle of history writing from the time of Herodotus, but that in the era following World War II, history had moved away from narrative. However, the publication of Simon Schama's Citizens, about the French Revolution, marked a return to narrative. Dalrymple also noted the continuing popularity of "historical fiction". Panel member Reza Aslan suggested that the ability to "humanize" figures (referring particularly to his recent work on Jesus) was a key, but that nonfiction must remain "tethered" to reality, as readers have an expectation of fidelity to the truth. Beevor noted that nonfiction now uses techniques of novels to describe what the world was like in a very different time.

Someone had the good sense to ask the panelists for a favorite or especailly good work of nonfiction that they would recommend. Their answers:

1. Geoff Dyer: Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
2. Antony Beevor: Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time for Gifts. (I encountered Mr. Beevor in the waiting line at the men's room and thanked him for validating my choice of a favorite read in 2013, to which he responded that he had some bias as Fermor had helped him during his career and that his wife had written Fermor's biography. I suggested that the recommendation was no less valid for the biases.)
3. William Dalrymple, noting that Beevor had selected Fermor, made recommendations in three fields: for travel, Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia; for history, Steven Runciman's The Fall of Constantinople 1453; and for journalism, Truman Capote's "Hardcarved Coffins" (which has been criticized as containing fabrications by the author). 

In the "Literature of War and Revolution", Beevor described conflict, such as war and revolution, as the basis of all drama and issues of moral choice. Indicative of this insight is the work of Vassily Grossman, the Soviet writer who chronicled the experience of the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II in his novel Life and Faith (the title an homage to War and Peace). Only by good fortune do we have this book, as the KGB arrested Grossman after he sent the manuscript to a publisher. The Communist Party's chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov stated that the book could not be published for two or three hundred years, but a forgotten copy of the manuscript was smuggled to the West after Grossman's death and his masterpiece was published. Grossman had the temerity (insight) to see that Stalin's Communist regime and Hitler's Nazi regime were mirror images of one another.

Beevor's own most successful book is Stalingrad, the tale of the epic battle on the Eastern Front. Beevor reported that his publisher thought that they might be able to sell 5,000 copies. Winner of the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (books published in English in the U.K.) and the Woofson Prize (for history published in English for a general audience by a U.K. author), it has now sold around 2 million copies. No doubt a pleasant surprise for Mr. Beevor and his publisher. The Glorious Nomad purchased a copy of this, and I'm eager to hear her report.