In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali

By Banning Eyre (Temple University Press, 2000)

Journalist Banning Eyre is one of Connecticut's great unsung musical treasures; he and Sean Barlow are the driving forces behind Afropop.org, one of the best sources I've come across to learn more about Africa's various styles of music, as diverse as they are infectious. But Eyre is also a stellar guitarist in his own right. He has recorded with Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, perhaps the biggest band to ever come out of Zimbabwe and certainly one of its coolest (and Zimbabwe has a lot of cool bands). And he has performed with the Super Rail Band, one of Mali's greatest acts. The latter, however, is for a more direct reason: Several years ago, Eyre effectively apprenticed himself to Djelimady Tounkara, the lead guitarist in the Super Rail Band. He spent the better part of a year in Bamako, learning as much as he could from Djelimady about Mali's musical traditions, and venturing out to meet—and hopefully play with—as many other musicians as he could find.

The written result of his exploits is In Griot Time, a book that's part travelogue, part character study (of Djelimady and the many other musicians Eyre meets), and part love letter to the music that Eyre went to Mali to learn how to play. In the course of the book, Eyre freely acknowledges his debt to John Miller Chernoff's African Rhythms and African Sensibilities, perhaps one of the best books ever written about African music for a Western audience. The parallels between Eyre's experiences and Chernoff's are many. Both went to Africa—Eyre to Mali and Chernoff to Ghana—to learn to play music. Both knew that playing the music well required them to understand something about the culture and history that created the style in the first place, and both strove hard to immerse themselves as much as they could. Chernoff's immersion was perhaps more successful: He emerged from his experience with a book that reads in parts like a Rosetta Stone to understanding Ghanian drumming in particular and African music generally. As a musician myself, I am still learning from Chernoff's book, and it's been ten years since I read it.

Eyre's book, by design, doesn't have that kind of insight. Unlike Chernoff, he doesn't dwell on how the music is put together so much as what it was like for him to learn how to play it. While it seems clear that he played music for at least a couple hours a day, most of the book is about what happens to him when he's not playing music—the conversations he has with people, the things he sees and does, the other musicians he hears—all written with a clear eye, an astonishing sensitivity, and a willingness to wrestle with some difficult questions about cultural frictions and the legacy of colonialism. The result, I believe, is a much more accessible book than Chernoff's. Where Chernoff's book is perfect for people who already love African music—particularly other musicians who are trying to figure out how to play it—Eyre's book is just the thing to make people who don't know much about African music want to learn more about it. Its own effect on me has already been profound. Chernoff's book in some ways scared me away from trying to play African music even as it made me want to all the more. But it was Eyre's book (and Eyre himself, who I finally took a lesson from) that finally made me pick up a guitar and try to play. I know that I'll never play like either Chernoff or Eyre—let alone the African musicians they have played with—but In Griot Time gave me the courage to play with the required humility, and evident joy.

The Book is Dead, Long Live Books

I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival yesterday; as that festival invited the organizers of Comic-Con to join then, I was lucky enough to be on a panel—along with fellow authors Peter V. Brett, Anton Strout, S.C. Butler, and Dave Roman—about New York, science fiction, and fantasy. As any good panel should, the session quickly became more of a casual conversation about how we write our books, balance day job and writing, and other related topics, guided eventually by questions from the audience. It was easygoing; it was fun. And after the panel, I had a short but really interesting conversation about the future of books. As it turned out, YA author Ned Vizzini had seen our panel and another one before it about the future of literary fiction, and he was struck by the severe difference in tone between our panel and the previous one. Apparently, for the people on the previous panel, the future of fiction was full of gloom and doom, declining book sales, declining readership. As a YA author, he said, this seemed at odds with his own experience. Young people are reading more books than ever, he said. About our own panel, he then said—and I'm paraphrasing here, so, Ned, if you come across this post, feel free to correct me (about this or anything else I've ascribed to you)—that it was just nice to see people talking about books in an optimistic way. Ned's comment particularly struck me because, walking around the festival before and after my panel, I saw that the optimism he felt, and that we had at our panel, was true of the festival at large. The festival was cheerful. The conversations I eavesdropped on weren't about how everyone should just close up shop and go home; they were about the latest books people were excited about, wanted other readers to buy. It was hard to square the energy and enthusiasm I saw there with the reports in the newspapers of the imminent demise of print. There were lots of vendors, selling lots of interesting books. More important, the festival itself was crowded. By writers, editors, publishers, sure—but also fans coming to see their favorite authors, avid readers, and enthusiasts for their particular flavor of literature. It was lively and engaging. It made me buy books, and it made me want to read even more than I already do.

Now, I'm not saying that the newspapers are full of crap. I can easily believe that the days when a single publisher could make tons of money selling books may be ending. If I were a large publishing conglomerate, I would probably be as depressed as they seem to be. But I think we should be careful not to confuse this with the demise of books themselves. Books, after all, aren't that expensive to make. They're not chump change, but they're also not remotely as expensive as even a low-budget movie. You can do a pretty nice small book run for the same price as buying a used car. And I don't think I'm being too naive in saying that there will always be people who write books, and there will always be people who want to read them. Books survived the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition; as venerable publishing veteran Jason Epstein has pointed out, they survived the Soviet era. They are the cockroaches of global popular culture. Look at your own bookshelf, right now: Someday, when you are rotting in your grave, some of those very books will almost certainly be sitting on someone else's bookshelf. And that's a wonderful thing.

In a Where We Live episode on Connecticut Public Broadcasting a few months back—which featured NHR editor Mark Oppenheimer, Lev Grossman, and Jason Epstein—Mr. Epstein envisioned a publishing industry that was less a collection of large conglomerates and more a swarm of squabbling small presses, perhaps more like what it had been a few centuries ago, when publishers hawked their books on street corners and had local wars with each other for the attention of a voracious yet fickle readership. Looking at the Brooklyn Book Festival, it was easy to imagine that Epstein might be right, and even easier to be excited about the prospect. There might not be as much money in books as there was. But it might be a lot more fun.

New New Haven Lit Journal!

I am excited to report the existence of The Dirty Pond, a new literary journal based in New Haven. In their own words: The Dirty Pond is an independent online literary journal based in New Haven, Connecticut. The journal's primary objective is to provide a home for work by New Haven-affiliated writers, with an eye towards curated gatherings in the near future. We will be updating biweekly.

We seek work that is anchored to our fair city without being provincial. We want work that is fierce, compelling, and wonderfully weird. And we're particularly partial to work that is cross-disciplinary and/or collaborative in nature.

We want your short stories and your essays. We want your flash fiction and your poems. We want your photography and your artwork. We want your liner notes. We want sections from your script.

We generally do not want genre fiction, but will grant some leniency, particularly to fanfic.

Most of all, we do not want to be bored.

When you submit, please submit a bio, CV, cover letter, and (if relevant) a myspace/facebook url and a list of upcoming related local events in which you may be participating. Please make sure images are in a standardized .jpeg format, videos and music accessible, and if you're sending us a novel, just give us a heads up.

Please send all submissions along to thedirtypond @ gmail.com (remove the spaces).

Deadline for submissions is September 15, 2009.

First edition goes live October 15, 2009.

Submit, artists, musicians, and writers of New Haven! Submit!

Beach Town

People don't necessarily think of the greater New Haven are as a beach town—I imagine the label university town is much more widely used—but in the summer, it is. And I don't mean beach town in a snooty, country-club way. New Haven is a beach town the way that many of the towns on the Jersey Shore and Long Island are beach towns: In the summer, the place cranes its neck toward the Long Island Sound, and the skinny stretch of sand in front of the water becomes wonderfully overpopulated. I should admit right here that I am a huge beach person, a trait I inherited from my mother. I am one of those people who could—and does—sit on the beach all day, alternating between reading, napping, taking walks, and watching the water. I've told my parents that staring at and swimming in the ocean is one of the closest things I have to a religion, and I'm only half joking. So after living in New York for years (too far from Brighton Beach and Coney Island to go as often as I wanted to), learning that New Haven had beaches was a revelation. In the seven years that we've lived here, my family and I have split our allegiance between two beaches: the shore of West Haven and Lighthouse Point, in New Haven proper. They are right across the harbor from each other; you can see one very clearly from the other.

Parts of the shore of West Haven are surprisingly untouched for a town beach. A lot of smart things happened in the course of its development, the biggest one being that they kept large areas of the dune intact. (Oceanography 101: If you keep your dune, the beach can replenish itself. Take away the dune and, even worse, build a seawall, and the ocean starts to take away the beach. Which is why so many beach towns end up building a line of jetties along the coast and still have to get the Army Corps of Engineers to dump tons of sand on the shore at the beginning of every summer. Also, the dunes protect the inland from all but the big storms. Build your house behind the dune, and you're reasonably secure. Build your house on it or in front of it, and hey, you take your chances.)

Aside from being smart, the dunes in West Haven give the beach there a real sense of wildness, making the houses huddling along the beach road and the stacks of the water treatment facility rising in the middle distance almost surreal. But in front of Chick's, my favorite fish fry place—because of their lobster rolls, vats of mustard for the french fries, and also their free beach parking—West Haven's beach is a town beach, complete with dozing lifeguards, rioting children, casual swearing, loud reggaeton coming out of tinny speakers, and guys trying to catch blues off the pier and coming up mostly with sea robins. It's great.

Lighthouse Point is in some ways a more civilized place than West Haven's beach. It's a well-maintained park, complete with playground, water park, concession stand, ranger station, multiple bathrooms, a gorgeous old pavilion with an even more gorgeous old carousel inside (people looking to get married in the summer, take note: That pavilion would be a truly awesome place for a party), and, of course, the lighthouse itself. But in other ways, Lighthouse Point is crazier. No matter how crowded West Haven's beach gets—and on Saturday afternoon, it's pretty crowded—it never manages to kick off that sleepy vibe that all great town beaches have. Lighthouse Point isn't a town beach; it's a city beach, bursting with summer camps and the children of multiple extended families running amok, on the sand, in the water, on the swings, across the lawns, all over the rocks. A dozen big barbecues scent the air while multiple large sound systems compete with each other for dominance of the park's groove—hip hop, merengue, reggaeton (again), bachata—and combine in the air. Charles Ives (who studied composition at Yale) would be proud.

Both West Haven and Lighthouse Point have their quiet times. People who like their beaches cold, on the off season, will find what they want at either place. And I'm lucky enough to be able to go on weekdays. But even on the busiest weekend, both parks have their secluded coves and stretches of shore with only a few people, or none at all. The days when I get both are when the religion hits me hardest. One minute there's just the sand and rocks, sea and sky. The next, it's people at their best, playing, relaxing, having fun, just being with each other. It's bliss.

On Editing, Part 2

After staring at The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer's epic about the Pacific theater of World War II, on my to-read shelf for over ten years, this summer I've finally gotten around to reading it. Interestingly, it appears to be a first-edition hardcover of the book, though it's in bad enough shape that its value as a collectible is shot (hooray!). Before reading it, I had to reinforce the spine with Scotch tape. Also, it has the name "Glass" written on the inside cover—it was my grandfather-in-law's book, and I say "grandfather-in-law" instead of "grandmother-in-law" because it's hard to imagine too many self-respecting women sitting through a book this long that tells them, over and over again, how horrible they are. I'm only half joking. Except for "The White Negro," The Naked and the Dead is the only thing I've read by Norman Mailer. And, unlike my grandfather-in-law, who—assuming he didn't wait ten or twenty years to read the book after buying it—read Mailer as a hip young writer, the Next Big Thing, I came to Mailer with the outline of his life story firmly lodged in my head. The politics. The pugilism. The woman-hating. I was given to understand that the woman-hating thing came later, in effect—that with The Naked and the Dead, Mailer was crowned one of America's best novelists; both the uneven output and the misogyny that made him an enemy of feminists came afterward. The Naked and the Dead was given a pass, as if it's too bad that a guy who turned out to be such a jerk had written such a great book, and the book's general reputation—and the fact that, as a child, I read over and over again an excerpt from it that appeared in a Time-Life photography book about the 1940s—is the reason I decided to start with The Naked and the Dead, with an eye to perhaps proceeding from there.

I'm now on the closing chapters of the novel, and it's easy to see why it has its stellar reputation. It is a great book for all the reasons that people say it is. It's got a bit of everything. There's action, extremely well-developed characters, some really amazing feats of psychological realism, and, of course, beautiful writing. For me, there's also what feels like a very accurate glimpse into the Army as an organization: the scheming, the petty infighting, the tension between officers and enlisted men, that comes as icing on the cake; Mailer may at his best in this book when he delves deep into the minds of two men who are plotting to humiliate or destroy each other. That Mailer wrote it when he was in his 20s is a bit astounding; that he pulled it off as well as he did, even more so.

What is harder to fathom is how this book got a pass on the misogyny charge that is leveled against Mailer's later work and, of course, Mailer himself. The misogyny in The Naked and the Dead is rampant. Yes, being a book about the Pacific theater of World War II, this is a book about men, and men at their most brutal, conniving, and horny. There is not a woman in sight in the main action of the book, so the long passages in which character after character longs explicitly for a good lay, or reminisces about particularly hot episodes with wives or girlfriends, don't bother me—it's high-school locker-roon talk of a sort that's easy to imagine happening in an army camp. What does bother me is the near constant refrain about "no woman is worth a damn" and the seemingly infinite variations on same, that come out of most characters' mouths; the one or two men who seem to have decent relationships with their wives or girlfriends back home are portrayed as weak, indecisive, or deficient in some way. The misogyny is so thick that it actually makes the book dumber; it feels like a huge blind spot in the author's intellect, and renders suspicious even the most intelligent things that the book says.

You may be wondering why this post is actually called "On Editing." Here's why: While the editors of The Naked and the Dead seemed to be totally okay with Mailer's hateful misogyny, they balked at the use of the word fuck, forcing Mailer to use fug instead. (In the edition I have, they also hypehanated ass-hole, which is neither here or there—just an interesting stylistic choice.) Today, the fug reads as really unnecessarily chaste, though one gets used to it. But it's interesting to me that the editors intervened severely on behalf of a four-letter word (which From Here to Eternity, by the way, got away with, so it's not just a question of falling afoul of obscenity law) but let the misogyny go, because today, those emphases would almost certainly be reversed. It's hard to imagine an editor today giving a damn about the profligacy of expletives in The Naked and the Dead—aesthetically and thematically, they're completely justified. It's also easy to imagine Mailer getting a long editorial note about the book's apparent attitude toward women, something along the lines of, "you know, we'd really like to publish this, but could you turn down the woman-hating a couple notches?" Perhaps that happened then as well, though if so, it's sad to think that's as far as it went. In any case, the final manuscript stands as a fine exhibit of how editorial standards regarding obscenity and moral values have changed in the last sixty-odd years—in response, presumably, to the perceived difference between challenging and offending their readers, a line many editors are always trying to straddle.

P.S. Yes, yes, I'm a giant hypocrite for using Mailer's biography in a discussion of his book when I just said recently that I don't see the point of same. I await your subpoena.

Occasional Paper #1: Rudolph Delson Reviews the Official GED Practice Test

This post marks the release of the New Haven Review's first occasional paper; as the title suggests, we expect to put out more such papers, well, occasionally (though we have more in the works right now). Why an occasional paper, you may ask? I answer: why not? In this occasional paper, novelist and essayist Rudolph Delson, a lawyer by training, reviews the Official GED Practice Tests (Steck-Vaughn Co., $21.95). No, it's not mean. And no, it's not smarmy. What is it, then? Download Occasional Paper #1 and find out. And let us know what you think—both of Delson's piece and the idea of occasional papers generally.

Midnight Picnic

By Nick Antosca (Word Riot Press, 2009)

Bram pulls into the parking lot half asleep and the crunch of gravel under his tires becomes the crunch of bone. Something screams.

The old deerhound that lives at the bar—it’s pouring tonight and he didn’t even see her.

That crunch.

He gets out of his dented Pontiac, hunches against the downpour. He doesn't want to look. It's 3:30 A.M. and the bar is dark. No light to see by except the Pontiac's headlights, ghostly cones of white slashed by rain.

He kneels to look under the car.

Nothing.

"Baby!" he yells, getting up. "Where are you?"

Movement off in the darkness, on the other side of the car. The deerhound, dragging herself away. She looks less like a dog than a man in a dog suit, huge, crawling across the gravel. He goes to her side.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,"—his voice splintering—"Hold on, let me look."

The damage is catastrophic; the dog will die.

Not quickly, though.

These are the opening paragraphs to Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, a short and terrifying book that I read a few months ago now and just can't get out of my head. The plot follows Bram, an aimless young man living in West Virginia who finds the bones of a murdered child. Hours later, the dead child finds Bram and asks him to help avenge his death. What follows would be, in the outline of the plot, part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.

I don't use the word terrifying lightly. As anyone who's been to a bad horror movie knows, scaring people is not easy. Do it wrong and it's boring, or maybe just kind of disgusting, or worse, unintentionally funny. (That the line between horror and comedy is so thin and blurry is one of the reasons, I think, that the comedic horror movie has blossomed into such a delightful genre.) Do it right, though, and you tap into the fear that early humans must have felt when the sun went down and it began to rain, and they were huddled in a group under a tree that did not provide shelter, and they knew that predators were coming for them. For me, the first two-thirds of The Shining do that (though not the final third, which becomes boring); perhaps all of 28 Days Later and much of Clive Barker's stuff does, too.

But Midnight Picnic's particular brand of scare reminds me most of David Lynch, who, at his best, pulls horror from simple elements—lighting, sound, costume, a good line, clever camera work—capturing with eerie effectiveness the experience of having a very bad and extremely compelling dream. Antosca's own use of such dream logic is the best I've come across in a long time. There are a few missteps—at one point, about halfway through the book, Bram interrogates the dead child in a way that very nearly breaks the spell—but here I'm just quibbling. I could give you passage after passage of the images and conversations that engrossed and frightened me, but I don't want to ruin them.

Also, and most impressively, Antosca manages to give his story what many horror tales never even reach for: heart. Yes, Midnight Picnic is scary. But it's also, keenly and unexpectedly, touching and tragic; for underneath the ghosts and revenge is another story about a boy looking for his father, but not being quite ready for what he finds.

On Editing, Part 1

A couple of days ago, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the New York Times website ran a fascinating piece about the iconic photograph of the so-called tank man—the man in the white shirt, holding what look like shopping bags, standing defiantly in front of a column of approaching tanks. The Times, quite justifiably, calls it "one of the most famous photographs in recent history." Thing is, unlike many other famous photographs—Robert Capa's "Death of a Loyalist Soldier" comes immediately to mind—there isn't just one of them. There were a lot of photojournalists covering the event that day, and as a video of the confrontation between the tank man and the tanks shows, the incident lasted long enough for several photographers to capture essentially the same image. The Times piece has the recollections of four of them: Charlie Cole (who was working for Newsweek), Stuart Franklin (Time), Jeff Widener (Associated Press), and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah (Reuters). Each photographer is given several paragraphs to explain how they took their pictures, what was happening around them at the time, and what happened afterward. David Nickerson, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me a link to the New York Times piece; we are friends from college and are always emailing each other newspaper items with snarky comments attached (this piece is written with Prof. Nickerson's generous consent). As we talked more about the piece, two themes emerged, about both the event itself and the apparent personalities of the photographers. But really, we were talking about editing: how our perceptions of a thing are shaped by every word we read about it and every word that is left out.

The tank man is a compelling figure partly because he's anonymous. His back is always to the photographer, and to this day, as the Times piece pointed out, his identity and whereabouts are unclear. This may seem almost impossible to believe: His showdown with the tanks was the middle of a wide street in broad daylight, witnessed apparently by hundreds of people, many of whom, even at the time, knew they were witnessing something extraordinary. But look at the recollections of the four photojournalists of what happened to the tank man immediately after he stopped the tanks:

[Cole:] Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. [Franklin:] He then disappeared into the crowd after being led away from the tank by two bystanders. [Wah:] Four or five people came out from the sidewalk and pulled him away. He disappeared forever.

Was it two bystanders or four or five? And what led Cole to think to think that they were security officers? (Were they?) Right from the start, the stories of eyewitnesses to the scene don't square—and these are journalists at the top of their game, people who are much better than most of us at getting the facts right. At this point, my editor brain kicked in. Surely the editor of the Times piece noticed the discrepancies. Did they ask the photographers any follow-up questions? Wouldn't you just love to get the three of them in a room right now to sort this all out? (Presumably this documentary does something like that and more.)

Meanwhile, Widener's piece doesn't mention what happened to the tank man after he took his picture at all, which brings us to a more delicate matter. As Prof. Nickerson pointed out, Widener's account of the actual taking of the picture is very different from the accounts of the other three photographers. Cole, Franklin, and Wah recall mostly what was happening around them—who was there, what they were doing. In their accounts, they're photojournalists doing their jobs, but their concern for the tank man's safety, not to mention the safety of themselves and everyone around them, is evident. Cole even finds time to take a wider view:

As the tanks neared the Beijing Hotel, the lone young man walked toward the middle of the avenue waving his jacket and shopping bag to stop the tanks. I kept shooting in anticipation of what I felt was his certain doom. But to my amazement, the lead tank stopped, then tried to move around him. But the young man cut it off again. Finally, the PSB (Public Security Bureau) grabbed him and ran away with him. Stuart [Franklin; apparently they were standing next to each other, which accounts for the similarities in their photographs —ed.] and I looked at each other somewhat in disbelief at what we had just seen and photographed.

I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.

Now look at Widener:

I loaded the single roll of film in a Nikon FE2 camera body. It was small and had an auto-exposure meter. As I tried to sleep off the massive headache that pounded my head, I could hear the familiar sound of tanks in the distance. I jumped up. Kurt/Kirk [a college kid who's helping them and whose name Widener never quite caught —ed.] followed me to the window. In the distance was a huge column of tanks. It was a very impressive sight. Being the perfectionist that I am, I waited for the exact moment for the shot.

Suddenly, some guy in a white shirt runs out in front and I said to Kurt/Kirk “Damn it—that guy’s going to screw up my composition.” Kurt/Kirk shouted, “They are going to kill him!” I focused my Nikon 400mm 5.6 ED IF lens and waited for the instant he would be shot. But he was not.

The image was way too far away. I looked back at the bed and could see my TC-301 teleconverter. That little lens adapter could double my picture. With it, I could have a stronger image but then I might lose it all together if he was gone when I returned.

I dashed for the bed, ran back to the balcony and slapped the doubler on. I focused carefully and shot one … two … three frames until I noticed with a sinking feeling that my shutter speed was at a very low 30th-60th of a second. Any camera buff knows that a shutter speed that slow is impossible hand-held with an 800mm focal length. I was leaning out over a balcony and peeking around a corner. I faced the reality that the moment was lost.

In comparing the four entries (in their entirety as they appear in the piece, not only in what I've excerpted here) it was easy for me to think a few uncharitable thoughts about Widener. He seems more concerned with his camera equipment than with what's happening to the people around him. Most tellingly—or so it would seem at first read—at the point in his narrative where he might tell us what happened to the tank man, it seems that Widener was actually looking at his camera, noticing that the shutter speed was too low. In the Cole, Franklin, and Wah accounts, the man appears as a man; in Widener's, he is an element of composition.

But then my editor brain kicked in again. Was I really being fair to Widener? After all, my opinion of his account was formed, first, from comparing it with the other three accounts. Without the other three accounts right next to his, the idea that Widener was more preoccupied with his photograph than the subject of the photograph might never have occurred to me. Widener's piece might even have struck me as funny and refreshingly candid—the story of a man trying to do his job in trying circumstances.

Then the real doubt started to creep in. As a editor, I should know better than to think I'd even read all of what the photojournalists wrote (let alone what they would say if I were to be fortunate enough to have dinner with them). Perhaps Widener's piece had a lot about the tank man himself, but it was redacted due to concerns about the length of the piece overall. Perhaps the other three had a lot more talk about the gear they had, but Widener's gear talk was better, so they left Widener's in and cut the rest out. All these pieces had been through the editing mill (one editor? Two? Three?), and they were edited (presumably, and no matter how invasively) to make the piece as a whole as tight and coherent as possible, while sacrificing as little of the authors' voice and intent as possible. But no edit is made without giving up something; the question is whether what you're giving up is worth what you get in return. And there's no predicting how people will read the final product: Maddeningly, wonderfully, some readers respond to even the most straightforward text in ways that surprise even the most careful writers and editors.

In every published text, in the passage from thought or experience to writer to editors to reader, perception piles onto perception, subjectivity piles onto subjectivity, and the original thing—the truth, or the closest thing we have to it—is buried under layers of reconsiderations, rewordings, and manipulated grammar. It sounds like a bunch of postmodern claptrap, I know; but it's the nature of the job. And twenty years later, we have these stories of what happened in Beijing that June 4—or May 35, as some call it to avoid censorship from China's government—but we still don't know who the tank man was, or where he is today.

Finding the War

It is common to hear that part of what contributed to victory in World War II, and the overwhelming sense that it was the right thing to do, was that nobody at home knew how awful it was for the soldiers fighting it abroad. For many years now, books, essays, and movies have been editing the popular story about the war, revealing its singular brutality and the myriad of motivations that led the powers that be to fight it as they did. This has led to a bit of a crumbling of World War II's image as America's last good war, due to both those hoping to complicate its simple popular moral equation and those hoping to give a clearer picture of just what the soldiers' sacrifice entailed. Yet the idea that, from 1939 to 1945, the people were sheltered from the war's horrors persists—an idea that I found myself questioning when I read Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, a collection of the war correspondent's dispatches from 1943 to 1944, when he covered the war in Italy and then the Allied push through France to Berlin. The 1944 edition of the book is a fascinating artifact of the time period: Along with the copyright, an eagle-emblazoned seal states that this is a Wartime Book: "books are weapons in the war of ideas," the sash fluttering from the eagle's beak proclaims. The seal goes on to state that "this complete edition is produced in full compliance with the government's regulations for conserving paper and other essential materials," and it's easy to see the result: It's printed on very thin paper (that nonetheless has held up remarkably well—even wartime cost-cutting seems to have produced a better-quality book than today's mass-market paperback printers do) and with a clear regard for cramming as much text onto the page as possible without rendering it illegible. For me, a grandchild of those who lived through World War II, the effect of the book is to recall the stories I'd heard of who in my family served in the war, what they did, and where; and also, what the lives of the women who stayed behind were like, waiting for their husbands to come home, raising small children who had no recollection of their fathers.

Pyle, like the cartoonist Bill Mauldin, is celebrated for his honest yet dignifying depictions of the soldiers that he met, and Brave Men certainly gives you a lot of that. But Pyle's vision of the war does more than that: By giving us what he saw in Europe at the height of combat, and by making the soldiers he met human—naming them, talking about the meals he shared and the combat he experienced with them—Pyle undermines the idea of World War II, or any war, as good. Consider his description of an air battle he witnessed from the ground:

Someone shouted that one of the planes was smoking. Yes, we could all see it. A long faint line of black smoke stretched straight for a mile behind one of them. And as we watched there was a gigantic sweep of flame over the plane. From nose to tail it disappeared in flame, and it slanted slowly down and banked around the sky in great wide curves, this way and that way, as rhythmically and gracefully as in a slow-motion waltz. Then suddenly it seemed to change its mind and it swept upward, steeper and steeper and ever slower until finally it seemed poised motionless on its own black pillar of smoke. And then just as slowly it turned over and dived for the earth—a golden spearhead on the straight black shaft of its own creation—and disappeared behind the treetops. But before it was down there were more cries of, "There's another one smoking—and there's a third one now." Chutes came out of some of the planes. Out of some came no chutes at all. One of white silk caught on the tail of a plane. Men with binoculars could see him fighting to get loose until flames swept over him, and then a tiny black dot fell through space, all alone.

Or his description of soldiers approaching a firefight:

The men didn't talk amongst themselves. They just went. They weren't heroic figures as they moved forward one at a time, a few seconds apart. You think of attackers as being savage and bold. These men were hesitant and cautious. They were really the hunters, but they looked like the hunted. There was a confused excitement and a grim anxiety on their faces.

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren't warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren't warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That's the point.

He goes on to describe all of them—their names, their addresses, and a epigram about them that makes them suddenly, startlingly real ("his New England accent was so broad I had to have him spell out 'Arthur' and 'Auburn' before I could catch what he said"; "Eddie was thirty, he was married, and used to work in a brewery back home; he was a bazooka man, but his bazooka was broken that day so he was just carrying a rifle."). Always giving them their dignity.

I like to think it was this dignifying impulse, and not the work of censors, that made Pyle use a kind of synecdoche when he described the beaches at Normandy just after the fighting was over. He lets the soldiers tell you what the actual assault was like themselves, the things that happened to them then, but he never pretends he was there with them. And when he takes a walk along the beach himself, he tells us that "men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn't know they were in the water, for they were dead." But he lingers much longer on the mangled machinery, "empty life rafts and soldiers' packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges," and at last, "in a jumbled row for mile on mile were soldiers' packs." He goes on:

There were socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. There were the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.

There were toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. There were pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. There were broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.

There were torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits, and jumbled heaps of life belts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier's name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it a half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don't know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down again.

There are other things he sees that day, ironic and funny and pitiful and heartbreaking. And though Pyle himself never questions why they fought—if no war is good, fighting against Nazi Germany was certainly just—the overwhelming impression you get from the soldiers is that they're just trying to do their jobs and then get back home. If they believe in the cause, it's not so much for the lofty reasons that came out of the mouths of politicians, but because what they went through damn well better have meant something.