Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  As a journalist I have spent some time around Marines and soldiers, both within and without war zones (my father is a former Marine and a Vietnam veteran), and I have found as much political and intellectual variance among them as one might find among the occupants of an F train into Brooklyn. Deployed soldiers do indeed tend to be good at their jobs, and since their jobs are often irreducibly technical, it is no surprise that their expertise can seem mind-boggling to outsiders. Kaplan is never quite clear whether it is the culture of the U.S. military—egalitarian, clear-eyed, unsentimental, decisive, and, sometimes, despite all that, completely nuts—that attracts such men, or that produces them, but he has some thoughts.

  Writing that he “happily admitted guilt” to the charge of having “lost [my] professional detachment and begun to identify with the troops [I was] covering,” Kaplan claims a unique understanding of American soldiers. After all, “I was a citizen of the United States and a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism.” His argument is that “the objectivity of the media was problematic” because journalists “were global cosmopolitans,” whereas the “American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.” This is delusional. For one, are there really American journalists who do not think of themselves as American? I would very much like to meet one. And does Kaplan really think it is unusual that American soldiers view themselves as American soldiers? He does. The military, he writes, “is part of another America, an America that the media establishment was increasingly blind to, and alienated from.” This Perrier-quaffing media establishment cannot hope to understand this “vast, forgotten multitude of America existing between the two coastal, cosmopolitan zones, which journalists in major markets had fewer and fewer possibilities of engaging in a sustained, meaningful way except by embedding with the military.”

  In An Empire Wildnerness, Kaplan voiced disgust with America’s “Greyhound underclass,” but in Grunts the “country-slash-southern-slash-working-class version” of that underclass is America’s very heart and soul. “The American military... was composed of people who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty,” which he later calls an “unapologetic, literal belief in God absent for the most part among the elites.” But why would a literal belief in God be anything but unapologetic? And what do the elites have to do with it? Kaplan uses some tough, pretty-sounding words to conjure up these soldiers, but one scratches at Kaplan’s prose just a little to find a nasty little drummer boy incapable of addressing any matter without going after those elites who denied him a job so long ago. He sees the world so relentlessly in terms of class, tribe, and race because he himself is unwilling to see the world in any other way.

  “I wish people in Washington would totally get Vietnam out of their system,” a soldier tells Kaplan. He translates this sentiment thus: “[I]t was the politicians who were afraid of casualties, not the American military.” Similar callousness about the lives of the men he lionizes and lauds are strewn throughout the book: “The working class’s attitude to casualties was fairly tough.... It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines.” The Marines, you see, “were an example of how government channels the testosterone of young males toward useful national ends.” Like, say, dying. “If the military were much smaller than it was, the result might be only more gang violence within the homeland,” I guess because soldiers are borderline criminals? Along these lines the book reaches its disgusting crescendo:The grunts’ unpretentious willingness to die was also a product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns. They had less of an articulated and narcissistic sense of self than the elites, and could subsume their egos more easily inside a prideful unit identity.

  Kaplan is equally coldhearted about civilians’ lives. When a Marine kills an Iraqi civilian, Kaplan writes, “I felt bad for the marine who had fired the shot—any civilian would have felt bad for him, if he or she had experienced the complexity and confusion of this urban battle space.” As for the dead Iraqi—tough luck, Ali. Next time don’t be so pretentious.

  Here we see a writer effectively lapped by his subject matter, yet still believing he is in first place. After quoting one National Guardsman as saying, “We’re like tourists with guns,” Kaplan writes, “While the media was filled with lugubrious stories about the great sacrifices being made by reservists in Iraq and Afghanistan, these guys were having the time of their lives.” Last summer I was embedded with the Marines in Iraq, and I certainly noticed some of soldiering’s satisfactions, even a few of its hard-won joys. I also saw men and women tensely grinding their dinner between molars and crying while talking to their loved ones back home; I saw equal amounts of frustration and confusion, and, in one particularly awful occasion, some wounded Marines brought into a surgical ward. A screaming, burned Marine is not having the time of his life, and neither are his friends. I am sure the U.S. military has its share of cheerful characters—the burned Marine may have been having a ball until the day our paths crossed—but Kaplan continually, and in my opinion criminally, refuses to dig beyond his baseline feeling that soldiers are super. It is both a literary and moral failure.

  Who, then, are Kaplan’s books for? The liberal elite he lectures as being too pampered and cosmopolitan to understand his Manichean world? An untraveled American reading public looking for reassurance that the nations beyond their borders are hostile, crumbling, and in need of some harshly applied American elbow grease? Right-wing think tanks in search of on-the-ground folderol? Policymakers casting about for some troublesome new chimera to chase along the crags before the next electoral cycle? One wonders if Kaplan himself knows the answer to this question. He has been so content to wander from his beloved quasi-isolationist “tragic realism” (the world is harsh; people behave abominably; war is terrible, and should only be waged when there are obvious and overwhelming strategic benefits to be reaped) to pounding a bloody-minded drum of imperialism largely because he enjoys the sound it makes, with no secondary recognition that “tragic realism” and soldiers having the time of their lives is, in fact, a profoundly self-contradictory notion.

  Kaplan is worse than a bad writer or thinker. He is a dangerous writer made ever more dangerous by the fact that he is taken seriously. Even his most hostile reviews have treated him as though his arguments are still within the pale. His worldview is, in many ways, that of the current administration, and shared by many Americans. These are people for whom the wider world means only acrimony to be dismissed and obstacles to be knocked over. People who care not for “exquisite subtleties” when it comes to matters of force and occupation. People who do not think in human terms, except insofar as those terms reflect their own beliefs, which are supremely correct. People, in short, who have no use for people, except as cannon fodder—lives whose passing they dutifully mourn on their side and gleefully celebrate on the other. “Kaplan is America’s Kipling,” reads one of Imperial Grunts’s blurbs. This is to slander Kipling, who nevertheless did write one Kaplanesque sentence: “All the people like us are We / And every one else is They.”

  “Lying awake,” Kaplan writes in Imperial Grunts, “as Indian Ocean breezes raced through my mosquito netting... I thought that if you were a male of a certain age during World War II and had not served in some capacity, you were denied the American Experience.” Not some part of the American Experience, mind you, but the American Experience. Let us, please, reflect on this. If you have not killed a fucking kraut or zipperhead with your own two hands, you are not a real American. “Now I realized that many of my own generation had been denied it as well.... Perhaps it was a safer, more enriching global experience that we were having, but whatever it was I knew now that it was not fully American.” So what is this American Experience? It was “exotic, romantic, exciting, bloody, and emotionally painful, some
times all at once. It was a privilege, as well as great fun, to be with those who were still living it.” I do not doubt that it was great fun for Kaplan to play soldier, but he is apparently unaware that he is celebrating the taking and loss of life in this leprous book—though, given the current state of our nation, perhaps he is the writer we deserve.

  Travel, Kaplan has written, “is where we truly meet ourselves.” Unfortunately, this has proved to be his one most accurate articulation.

  —2006

  STILL RISING

  The possibility that becoming the most distinctive American prose writer of the twentieth century would have its considerable drawbacks probably did not occur to the twenty-seven-year-old author of The Sun Also Rises when it was published in 1926. Despite some powerful literary advocates, Hemingway’s first two books had flopped; copies were not even available in Hemingway’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois. His third book—a cocky, strutting, elliptical novel about British and American expatriates behaving as badly as their times (and Hemingway’s censors) allowed them—changed all that. As Lionel Trilling wrote only thirteen years after Sun’s publication, Hemingway, “more than any writer of our time... has been under glass, watched, checked up on, predicted, suspected, warned.” The book’s much-heralded style, as liberating as a magic spell for its author, eventually became a kind of aesthetic stockade. By 1961, serial shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic had left the arch mage depressed, unable to write, needlessly lecturing his wife about her “expenses,” and convinced that the FBI was reading his mail and wiretapping his phone. Hemingway’s suicide of that year was not only an act of escape from the various furies, real and imagined, in steady pursuit of him; it was the explosive period to the only sentence he could bring himself to compose. For this reason any writer who has been compared to Hemingway feels a certain clammy shudder. As it turned out, not even Hemingway could survive the comparison.

  The bright student who picks up The Sun Also Rises today cannot be wholly blamed for finding its opening pages somewhat cinched and joyless, in the manner of a man playing badminton in a tuxedo. We should be glad that Hemingway, on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s suggestion, dumped Sun’s original and singularly leaden opening: “This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring.” An assumed conservatism is the fate of nearly all books that become classics, though few are less deserving of that fate than The Sun Also Rises. The opening Hemingway ultimately went with (“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton”) ranks among literature’s great misdirects. The Sun Also Rises really is a novel about a lady. Cohn is merely one of her four suitors, though he suffers the most because of it.

  Lady Brett Ashley, recently divorced, presently engaged, frequently drunk (or “tight,” in Hemingway’s parlance), and doggedly promiscuous, is one of American fiction’s more striking heroines. Like Hamlet, she controls the action even by her absence. The novel’s narrator, Jake Barnes, loves her, but cannot consummate their relationship due to an undisclosed war wound. (“Of all the ways to be wounded,” Barnes thinks before falling asleep. “I suppose it was funny.”) Brett’s bankrupt fiance, Mike, loves her, but is sickeningly aware of her infidelities. Rounding out the cast are Bill Gorton, Barnes’s viciously funny writer friend from New York, who alone among the novel’s men pulls back before succumbing to Brett, and the Spaniard Romero, a teenage bullfighter whose relatively late introduction results in the multilateral ruination of Hemingway’s characters.

  What begins as “the chaps” jaunting down to Pamplona to watch bullfighting during fiesta season quickly, and unforgettably, becomes an occasion for a more human form of blood sport: Cohn is chronically humiliated, Barnes is beaten, Mike is destroyed, countless bottles of wine (I lost count at fifty) are imbibed, and the slaughter of the bulls themselves becomes merely dramatic counterpoint. Here Hemingway has few peers. Yes, the descriptions of Paris, which Hemingway worried were too satirical, are lovely, and the several dozen pages lavished upon Barnes and Gorton fishing for trout along a lonely Spanish river are more or less unimprovable. But in depicting the toxic interaction between scarred and broken people who love and hate both one another and the lives of threadbare glamour they have found themselves trapped inside—“a wonderful nightmare,” Gorton quips—Hemingway invented a new way to write about women and men and the world Americans found themselves forced but not yet ready to confront. The Sun Also Rises has now been with us for eighty years. What one imagines seemed irrepressibly fresh to its readers then feels deathlessly relevant now, but its brokenhearted tenderness and savage skepticism know no expiration date, and need no renewal: We are all a lost generation.

  —2006

  THE SECRET MAINSTREAM

  Contemplating the Mirages of Werner Herzog

  Truth is always concrete.

  —Hegel

  Of that time, there is still much we do not know. Although answers exist to the basic questions—how they fought (viciously), how they governed (variously), how they worshipped (combatively)—there are those among us who warn that no real comprehension of twentieth- and twenty-first century civilization is attainable, much less advisable. But those who attempt to hold knowledge back can only lose ground.

  What caused this remarkable civilization’s collapse is now generally understood. There are controversies, naturally, about the precise nature of its collapse, foremost of which is the extent to which this civilization destroyed itself. Most of us believe that, given the way its constituents lived, the annihilation was inevitable, even if the overwhelmingly thorough nature of the annihilation was not. We need not delay ourselves debating these issues yet again.

  It is here where the recent discovery of the films of Werner Herzog provides us especial aid. The extraordinary circumstances of the Herzog archive’s survival have been amply celebrated and documented elsewhere, but that does not mean we can forget how objectively precious these films are. An entire civilization’s most popular form of art also proved one of its least durable. The expected deterioration of their film stock took most of the earliest films, and the fragile nature of their digital storage systems, which was apparently unanticipated, resulted in the loss of many of the rest. The relatively few films that have survived do not always provide the most culturally revealing portholes through which we can today peer. We all exalt in the survival of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), but the cultural significance of Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) has proved difficult for many of us to articulate (though it does have its champions).

  The work of Werner Herzog presents a different case, as it offers us the only instance of a single filmmaker’s entire corpus surviving until our time. His numerous films—so heterogeneous in technique, genre, and breadth—scarcely seem the work of one man. Indeed, some of us have doubted that they are the work of one man. Thankfully, we have been able to put such fanciful conjecture to rest. Unfortunately, that is where our agreement concerning Herzog’s work ends.

  “[W]hen you think about people four hundred years from now

  trying to understand civilization today, I think they will probably

  get more out of a Tarzan film than out of the State of the Union

  address by the President that same year.”

  —Werner Herzog

  What, indeed, would future historians make of our civilization if the frustrating, beautiful, always mesmerizingly strange films of Werner Herzog were their primary cinematic witnesses? Would they be seen as damage inspection of a civilization at horrifying odds with nature and itself? As documents so fiercely visionary they often come within millimeters of insanity? Would they be seen as mirrors or warnings? Symptoms or cures? Herzog himself has explored this question, using a similar science-fictional conceit to frame several of his ostensible documentaries, the genre in which he has done his most singular and protean work. Fata Morgana (1970) is nominally a film about mirages in the Sahara Desert. The film’s narration, read b
y the German film historian and Herzog mentor Lotte Eisner, offers long recitations from a Mayan creation myth: “Therefore the creatress and the creator essayed once more to build living beings, to make moving creatures.” Early in the film, a long tracking shot offers some windblown orange dunes, across which sail tiny whirlwinds of sand—a bizarre, almost Martian vision. This, in fact, is part of the point. While the film has been called “a cosmic pun on cinema verite,” Herzog has said that his “plan was to go out to the southern Sahara to shoot a kind of science-fiction story about aliens from the planet Andromeda, a star outside of our own galaxy, who arrive on a very strange planet....The idea was that after they film a report about the place, we human filmmakers discover their footage and edit it into a kind of investigative film.”1 This conceit, barely evident in Fata Morgana itself, announces itself more clearly in Herzog’s other “science fiction” films, namely Lessons of Darkness (1992), which features putatively “alien” narration over apocalyptic footage of the oil fires in Kuwait ignited by retreating Iraqi forces at the end of the first Gulf War, and Wild Blue Yonder (2005), which stars Brad Dourif as an embittered alien narrating the story of an unwelcome Earthling mission to his home planet over actual—and hilariously mundane—footage of NASA astronauts floating around their space-shuttle living quarters.