In Allied occupied Naples, Norman Lewis was an Intelligence Corps NCO with a marvelously vague remit. He turned his experiences there into great literature – certainly one of the best books on war I’ve read. But what interests me here, given our running theme on Afghanistan and Iraq, are the parallels.
Some are superficial, others more profound: Criminality is rampant – military and medical provisions are lifted straight off the ship, copper wire is no sooner installed than stolen. Pervasive corruption extends to the provisional government, whose officials are deeply complicit in the huge black market. Armed groups patrol the countryside, raiding convoys and villages. Allied soldiers, in this case rapacious Moroccans, are captured by locals, tortured and decapitated. Flagellants march through the streets, beating their bloodied chests. Nascent democracy, imposed by the allies, produces great political fragmentation, extremist ideas, and politicized religion – nuns distribute bread in exchange for votes. Rumour and superstition are rife, as are hunger, disease and poverty.
The occupiers, Lewis and a few others excepted, operate in deep cultural ignorance of local dialect, history, or habit. Through it all runs an underlying theme of clashing cultures. In time, Lewis comes to sympathise with the corruption, recognising the need for complicity to smooth the regular operation of society.
The fact is that we have upset the balance of nature here. I personally have been rigid when I should have been flexible. Here the police – corrupt and tyrannical as they are – and the civil population play a game together, but the rules are complex and I do not understand them, and through this lack of understanding I lose respect. [...] My predecessor, who was more flexible than I, handed out dashes in accordance with the list he left me.This I have not done, and by failing to do so, I am probably dismissed as ill-mannered and avaricious.
But are the Italians inherently corrupt, superstitious and tribal? Apparently not. As Lewis relates, the Americans, by inadvertently importing and sponsoring leading Italian American figures from the US underworld, have done much to revive the criminal syndicates of the Camorra, and the Mafia, much diminished by the efforts of Mussolini’s Fascists. These thrive in the economic and social chaos of a society shattered by the war.
It’s a beautiful book, full of startling, sometimes brutal scenes. And it made me think again about Afghanistan and Iraq. First, where are the great works of art from these wars? In prose, I can only think of Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards or George Packer’s Assassins’ Gate – but good as they are, they don’t come close. On a more practical point, where are today’s Field Security Officers and NCOs? Lewis and his colleagues had great latitude, and allied to intelligence, flair and persistence they achieved a degree of understanding.
A more positive thought came too – Naples was greatly traumatized by its years of war and privation, and by the re-emergence of organized crime. But it has changed, slowly. The culture of ’44 was not its destiny.
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A theory: we see less of that sort of thing now because we have volunteer armies rather than conscripted ones.
An army of conscripts is going to sweep up all types of personalities into itself, including expressive artistic ones. A volunteer army is only going to include the sorts of personalities that would volunteer to go to war, which are about as far from the artistic personality as you can get.
“An army of conscripts is going to sweep up all types of personalities into itself, including expressive artistic ones.”
I think there’s an awful lot to this. In WW2 you got an awful lot of very, very clever and broadly-educated people swept up and used in precisely this fashion. It’s a trend that continued with national service. If you look as what might be classified as the Alan Bennett generation, a very large number of them were tagged for intelligence work. The JSSL alumni list is packed with future writers, actors, comedians and academics.
“An army of conscripts is going to sweep up all types of personalities into itself, including expressive artistic ones. A volunteer army is only going to include the sorts of personalities that would volunteer to go to war, which are about as far from the artistic personality as you can get.”
Interesting.
I had wondered if the lack of great art had something to do with the nature of the artistic community, itself, and with the co-opting of the serious world of art in the West by the academy – with all the attendant jokes about Turner prizes and so forth. I am, of course, reflecting my own biases about contemporary art here in the U.S. and being unfair, perhaps. The serious world of art is narrowed in who partakes, but this is not true of outsider art. I would put the more expressive single author milblogs in this category, or some of them anyway. They remind me of outsider art.
Just recently, I visited the Hemingway museum in Chicago (a suburb of, actually) and it underscores the point some of you are making. There are many artifacts from his youth displayed, because he grew up here, and hated it. As a young man he was already on his way to repudiating what he perceived as a stuffy, square and sclerotic middle-class society, interested in writing and artistic expression before he ever went abroad to see the world, let alone a war.
Two points:
1. As mentioned- conscript army means a much wider breath of thought. Added to this is that most of the truly top-notch writing in WW2 was in the Med., by men who frequently had gone to private schools and correspondingly had a classical education. Add to that the Second World War’s ludicrous number of SF and Intelligence units, with all the autonomy and civilian contact that entails. The scene in ‘Ill Met By Moonlight’ where Fermor and Kriepe quote Homer at each other on Crete sums it up for me.
2. Comparing Occupational Hazards and Naples ’44 its interesting to see how dangerous a sudden influx of goods is to a previously authoritarian and closed state. In Iraq the rush of satellite TV aerials crippled the electrical grids whilst in Naples the food, medical and clothing shortages could only be made up by criminal activity (stealing from the Allies). Not just outside goods either. The collapse of the state in both places contributed enormously to the flood of materiel, whether it be Iraqi insurgents with abandoned Iraqi Army small arms or Italian bandits with abandoned Italian small arms.
But are the Italians inherently corrupt, superstitious and tribal?
Don’t think so but you should go more often to see how Naples and the south of Italia is working… Not Afghanistan but corruption, drugs trafic and criminality are still present and we are in 2009 !!!
” volunteer army is only going to include the sorts of personalities that would volunteer to go to war, which are about as far from the artistic personality as you can get.”
Whitman volunteered to tend the wounded in the U.S. Civil War. Orwell’s depiction of Catalonia came from his voluntary service in Spain, just as his terse and tough disseration on imperialism came from his voluntary service with the constabulary in Burma. See also Andre Malraux.
Hemingway volunteered for WWI. So did Waldo Peirce, Cole Porter, John Dos Passos, Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald (even if the war ended before the latter two could see combat).
For the Brits, Isaac Rosenberg enlisted, as did Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, John McCrae and pretty much every other “Lost Generation,” “Trench Poet,” “Generation du Feu” or “Class of 1914″ intellectual on the Continent and in North America.
What changed between these years and ours isn’t the fact that we have a military built by volunteers (WWI was mostly volunteers, too), but rather the reality that few self-consciously would choose to risk death today for state causes great or small.
One doesn’t need to mention Fussell to realize that.
“What changed between these years and ours isn’t the fact that we have a military built by volunteers (WWI was mostly volunteers, too), but rather the reality that few self-consciously would choose to risk death today for state causes great or small.”
Yes and no, surely? The examples you give are excellent, but isn’t there a case to be made that they are somewhat unrepresentative? The contention is that the key difference is that Back In The Day people were more broadly prepared to go off and get shot at and now they aren’t. There’s clearly something (a lot) to this. But are the conflicts that you cite representative? WW1, ACW, Spanish Civil, WW2. I dunno, seems to me that these conflicts were unusual in their ability to mobilise civilian opinion and to inspire people to put themselves forward.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. But I think it’s maybe more an interplay of the volunteer/conscript dynamic AND the perceptions of certain key wars relative to the ones we’re in today (a regular topic of discussion on this website) rather than an either/or situation.
“But are the Italians inherently corrupt, superstitious and tribal?”
I’ve got relatives from the Veneto and they’ll spend whole weekends cataloguing the ways in which the population of Naples is inherently corrupt, superstitious and tribal.
The point Fussell would make is one I would wager, too: The European and North American culture that would send volunteers to wage war in the trenches of WWI was so shocked by the losses that it couldn’t voluntarily do so a generation later. This is especially true of the intellectual elites in the two continents, with a few rare examples.
Blame the eloquence of the Trench Poets and Lost Generation scribes such as Hemingway, I guess, for proving Whitman’s aphorism — ”the real war will never get in the books” — wrong.
Or, wrong enough. Because certainly one particularly bright chap disillusioned enough by the Trench Poets or Orwell’s recollections of Spain certainly could still abhor Hitler’s racialistic warmaking enough to go trade rounds with Fritzy, right?
Certainly, Jason’s declarative summation that soldiers are from Mars and poets from Venus could be challenged on any number of commonsensical accounts (how many artists are so well defined by the ripe age of conscription to pen their profession on their induction forms anyway?).
One might point out, for example, that Solzhenitsyn was a happy Marxist until he volunteered as an artillery spotter in the Great Patriotic War. He never wrote a novel until he was in uniform, and the unfinished work would continue to inform his jaundiced perspective on Soviet life for the remainder of his years.
Now, just because elites won’t buy into romanticized notions of slaughter doesn’t mean that we don’t still traffic in the vices to sell combat to all sorts of peoples, those with an artistic bent and those without it. Or, as Fussell considered the way popular culture had molded our understanding of another “good war,” WWII — “sanitized and romanticized beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty.”
Those who are doing the sanitizing, romanticizing, sentimentalizing, et al, for the patriotic, loony, ignorant and bloodthirsty are those very same artistic elites who have absented themselves from the sausage-making process.
If you don’t believe me, visit Hollywood.
Heh – good payoff line, SNLII. Maybe, though, fewer citizens would choose to risk death today because they don’t see the cause as great, compared to WWII. Also, I agree with your point about artistic volunteers – there have been many. Perhaps there’s a question of scale involved: in smaller volunteer armies of today, the law of averages might diminish the number of great artists in uniform. Final thought, Lewis didn’t publish Naples ’44 until 1978, so it’s early days yet.
“Hemingway volunteered for WWI. So did Waldo Peirce, Cole Porter, John Dos Passos, Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald (even if the war ended before the latter two could see combat).”
Of course, thank you for the correction to my comment above.
So, my initial instinct about the nature of the artists being different was correct? I still think there is very little art that resonates (or we would be talking about it more) because of the nature of art, and the art community, itself, but that is a different discussion. Also, I wonder if social media, and the ability for anyone to create anything and have an immediate audience is having an effect? The ‘great’ experiential art out of war may be distributed in this way, initially. I don’t know. An area to study, perhaps.