Violence Is the First Refuge
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In his poem “MCMXIV,” Philip Larkin meditates on the England of 1914, a pastoral idyll of “mustached archaic faces” and “dust behind limousines” on the verge of extinction: “Never such innocence,” he writes pityingly, “Never before or since / As changed itself to past / Without a word.” In the decades since Larkin wrote, the chasm represented by 1914 has only grown more unfathomable; it now seems to mark one of the great transitions in human history, like the fall of Rome.
In his new book, “The Bullet’s Song” (Simon and Schuster, 368 pages, $27.95), historian and foreign-policy analyst William Pfaff tries to gauge the magnitude of that rupture by its effects on a group of European writers and intellectuals. Mr. Pfaff’s subjects range from the renowned – T.E. Lawrence, Gabriele d’Annunzio – to the obscure – Vladimir Peniakoff, alias “Popski,” who commanded a sort of freelance army in North Africa during World War II. What unites them is their fascination with violence, which after the Great War could not but appear as the central fact and problem of human existence. As Mr. Pfaff writes, his subjects – who also include Ernst Junger, Andre Malraux, F.T. Marinetti, Arthur Koestler, Willi Munzenberg, and a handful of others – “were not only implicated in violence … but exploited it for themselves, in fulfilling themselves, looking into it for the extremity of themselves.” They all heard the “song” of the title – an image Mr. Pfaff borrows from a poem by Bret Harte, which hymns the “joy” and “rapture” of battle.
This is a rich and fascinating subject. Each of Mr. Pfaff’s featured players has inspired a huge literature, and together their stories embrace most of the political and cultural history of Europe between the wars. Indeed, it is the vast potential scope of Mr. Pfaff’s theme – “Romantic Violence and Utopia,” as his subtitle puts it – that makes the book he has actually produced disappointing. Rather than marshal his insights into a single, coherent argument, Mr. Pfaff writes haphazardly about each of his subjects in turn. Much of the book is taken up with rehearsing, or even just quoting, the biographies and secondary sources on which Mr. Pfaff heavily relies. The result is a dispersion of attention and interest, compounded by the division of the book into very short sections, most just a couple of paragraphs long.
The book functions best as an invitation to further study of its subjects. Mr. Pfaff divides them into two groups: Those whose experience of violence led them to adopt a severe warrior stoicism, which Mr. Pfaff rather loosely calls “chivalry,” and those who tried to turn violence into an instrument of purification and redemption, in the service of utopian ideology. The chivalric types, who occupy the first half of the book, are the closest thing to heroes Mr. Pfaff’s story has to offer.
Mr. Pfaff, a veteran of the Korean War, holds a deeply idealized view of the military profession, seeing it as a vocation akin to monasticism: “both are ancient and inwardly directed commitments, of ideal and sacrificial character.” He mourns the passing of this vocation in our hedonistic times, perhaps needlessly; the samurai or knightly code has surely had nothing to do with the motives of most soldiers throughout history. For Mr. Pfaff, the soldier is always Hotspur or Prince Hal, never the kind described by Falstaff: “food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.”
Mr. Pfaff finds the chivalric ideal brought to life in the career of T.E. Lawrence, and especially in his postwar renunciation of celebrity – after becoming internationally known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” he re-enlisted as a common soldier under the name of Shaw. A similar, but much more problematic, nobility can be seen in the life and work of Ernst Junger, who won the German Army’s highest decoration in World War I and went on to celebrate the Front generation as “an entirely new race … energy become flesh, charged with unequaled power.” He slid easily from this patriotic vitalism to an extreme right-wing chauvinism and was a supporter of Nazism until Hitler aroused his aristocratic disdain.
Even Junger’s “romanticism about the chivalric tradition,” however, appeals to Mr. Pfaff more than the ideological worship of violence that took hold of European intellectuals in the 1930s. He has nothing but contempt for Andre Malraux, who fabricated his own legend and then put it at the service of Stalinism: “I am a Communist,” he once told the novelist Bernanos, “and I shall never write a word that might cause the slightest injury to the Party.” Mr. Pfaff is equally disdainful of Willi Munzenberg, the propaganda mastermind of German Communism, who cynically helped the Comintern to exploit the idealism of what he called “innocents” in the West.
What Mr. Pfaff finally distills from his case studies is a kind of stoic pessimism. “Not only does no evidence exist of man’s moral progress,” he writes, “but … none is to be expected.” Given our permanent, instinctive fascination with violence, the best we can hope to do is to channel that violence into the restricted, honorable forms of chivalric warfare, rather than let it metastasize into Fascist or Communist ideology. (Or Straussian ideology: One of the oddest and most objectionable elements of the book is Mr. Pfaff’s sporadic effort to paint the foreign policy of the Bush administration as incipiently totalitarian.) This is an arguable conclusion, and a very large one; to make it adequately would tale a book much larger, in every sense, than “The Bullet’s Song.”