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I hope a few people read this post

Adam Kirsch's review of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke is precisely the sort of response that I had both anticipated and hoped to avoid when I learned the theme of Baker's book. The review is a pure gut-level reaction from someone who writes like he ought to know better, full of logical fallacies and rhetorical flourishes. While I think that it is possible for Human Smoke to be the subject of well-reasoned critique, Kirsch's review is not that.

Now to offer some examples and make my case.

Mr. Baker's ignorance, however, is much more disgraceful than the ignorance he seeks to combat — first, because he presents it as knowledge, and second, because World War II was, in fact, if not simply a good war, then an absolutely necessary one. In arguing the contrary, Mr. Baker is trying to convince his reader that false is true, and at times even that good is evil.

This is both an appeal to belief and, more directly, an example of begging the question. Kirsch makes no effort to refute any part of Baker's book, but only repeats the claim that the book has been refuted by "history itself." This is an effective rhetorical device, but offers no substance. It is also noteworthy as an example of passive-aggressive argumentation, something I've commented on before.

If it was necessary for the survival of civilization to stop Nazi Germany from dominating Europe — which is to say, from replacing freedom with tyranny, suffocating culture and thought; inculcating racism and cruelty in future generations; depopulating Eastern Europe and turning it into German lebensraum; enslaving tens of millions of Poles and Russians, and exterminating European Jewry — then it was necessary to fight the war.

This is another example of begging the question. My understanding of Baker's argument (to the extent that a series of vignettes can be an argument) is that the very proposition contained within the "if" clause above is an assumption rather than an argument, and one that should be prodded a bit. Conventional historical wisdom, from my understanding of it, is that the Nazi movement was in large part a reaction to the repressive conditions imposed on Germany after the First World War. Is it such a stretch to imagine that German tyranny grew as the gears of the international community began to grind against Germany again? The contrapositive to that would seem to be that if Germany had not seen the machinations of conflict stirring in other powers, it could very well have been less tyrannical and aggressive. One can make arguments to counter this proposition, but Kirsch has not.

These conclusions are so plain that no one who spent even a little time reading and thinking seriously about World War II could avoid them. But Mr. Baker confessedly knew little about the subject before he began "Human Smoke." "My interest in World War II," he writes in an author's note, "began when, some years ago, I first opened bound volumes of the Herald Tribune and read headlines for the bombing of Berlin and Tokyo and wondered how we got there."

Nor does Mr. Baker have any experience with writing about large historical and moral questions. On the contrary, he is known as a writer obsessed with trivia, and his novels are stunts designed to discover how narrow a writer's compass can become before it vanishes entirely. "The Mezzanine" is an interior monologue that takes place entirely during an escalator ride, as the narrator contemplates buying shoelaces; "Vox" is a transcript of a conversation between strangers on a phone-sex line. Mr. Baker's last book, "Checkpoint," was something of a departure: It was a dialogue about whether it would be morally acceptable to assassinate President Bush.

When such a writer turns to history, it is only to be expected that he will be hopelessly at a loss.

Here is one of my favorite fallacies--the ad hominem! When logic fails, attack the person instead of the position. This portion of Kirsch's review is not even an argument and as such does not deserve any further consideration.

As he told a New York Times reporter recently, "Over and over again I would take out the five most important books on X subject, and then I'd go back to the New York Times, and by God, the story that was written the day after was by far the best source. Those reporters were writing with everything in the right perspective."

But how does Mr. Baker know what the right perspective was? Since when is a reporter more knowledgeable than a historian, or foresight more accurate than hindsight? What Mr. Baker really means, one suspects, is that old newspapers offer a sense of contingency, of different possible futures, that histories do not. But read without a historian's judgment and knowledge, old clippings simply reproduce old errors.

I think Kirsch at once hits the nail on the head and attempts to pull out the nail with the claw of the hammer. To Baker, the right perspective is one that does not accept common knowledge as fact, and does not foreclose on the possibility of "different possible futures." I question how Kirsch determined that Baker does not have "a historian's judgment and knowledge." He notes that Baker "confessedly knew little about the subject before he began 'Human Smoke,'" and quotes Baker's author's note: "My interest in World War II began when, some years ago, I first opened bound volumes of the Herald Tribune and read headlines for the bombing of Berlin and Tokyo and wondered how we got there." It does not seem to me that one can extrapolate from that quote that Baker lacks "a historian's judgment and knowledge." Likewise, it does not seem to me that one whose goal is to question conventional wisdom should be argued against using only conventional wisdom and not the reasoned presentation of contrary evidence and argument.

It does not take much thought to puncture Rankin's slogan; but thought is just what Mr. Baker's montage-method discourages. He gives us disconnected factoids, portentous with implications, but does not give us the means to decide whether the implications are correct.

I will only note that, to my own thinking (and perhaps not yours), a series of "disconnected factoids" is thought-provoking stuff, and even allows the reader to reach a contrary conclusion to the author's own--just as Kirsch did.

Using omission and juxtaposition in place of narrative allows him to distort the real sequence of events — as when he allows the reader to imagine that America sold weapons to China for aggressive purposes, rather than to assist China in resisting Japanese invasion; or when he implies that, if Britain had made peace with Hitler in 1941, Nazi aggression would have ceased.

This is a fascinating and internally inconsistent sentence. Kirsch first would have Baker distorting "the real sequence of events"--something hard and inarguable--but then cites as examples distortions of motivation rather than events. Motivation can be tricky to pin down, and if Baker has evidence that the historical consensus is incorrect, particularly factual and corroboratable evidence from contemporary newspapers (which I do not know if he has), then a claim of "distortion" is ill-founded. A challenge to the reader's assumptions does not entitle the reader to cry distortion. And if we take Kirsch's examples as the best he has to offer--for why would Kirsch present an argument that is weaker than his best--then it seems safe to assume that Baker has not, in fact, distorted the real sequence of events. Of course, no assumption is ever truly safe.

This technique is never more delusive than when Mr. Baker seems to take Nazi propaganda at face value. In September 1941, when the mayor of Hanover deported the city's Jews "to the East" — code for extermination — he gave as an excuse the shortage of housing caused by British bombing. "In order to relieve the distressed situation caused by the war," the mayor announced, "I see myself compelled immediately to narrow down the space available to Jews in the city." That this was a transparent and shameless lie, of a piece with all the Nazi "justifications" for their persecution of Jews — that by September 1941 the genocide of the Jews was already well advanced, and the "final solution" a matter of implicit if not yet explicit Nazi policy — cannot emerge in Mr. Baker's uncritical account. Indeed, by reproducing Nazi language uncritically, Mr. Baker effectively endorses it.

Kirsch seems not to recognize the subtlety of Baker's presentation in Human Smoke. Critique may be accomplished by means other than commentary, and while Baker may allow Goebbels's own language to pass without direct comment from Baker, he does present Goebbels critically. I offer a counter-example from Human Smoke (pp. 37-38) to demonstrate that Baker's account is not "uncritical" nor does Baker endorse Goebbels:

Goebbels stood at a swastika-bedecked rostrum on the Unter den Linden, a whide, tree-lined street in Berlin running past the University and the State Opera House. He said: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended." He threw a book into a fire.

Pause. At this point, if you will pardon a turn to the metaphorical, I can feel devoted bibliophile Baker's soul writhing in pain, even without what follows:

"It was like burning something alive," Lilian Mowrer said. "Then students followed with whole armfuls of books, while schoolboys screamed into the microphone their condemnation of this and that author, and as each name was mentioned the crowd booed and hissed." Lion Feuchtwanger's books, which had already been banned from the stores, went into the flames, as did books by Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Brecht, Lenin, Marx, Engels, Zinoviev, Heine, Emil Ludwig, Helen Keller, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. Bertha von Suttner's pacifist novel Lay down your arms was condemned as "un-German" and burned. All Quiet on the Western Front got the most booing. Stefan Zweig's books were nailed to a pillory as well as burned. Pacifism masked a "seeping poison," one speaker said. It was May 10, 1933.

Goebbels said: "Brightened by these flames our vow shall be: the reich and the Nation and our Fuhrer: Adolf Hitler. Heil! Heil!"

Baker presents no direct commentary, but can anyone imagine that presenting this vignette without commentary is an endorsement of the events of May 10, 1933, or the words of Goebbels? Kirsh seems to think so.

A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take "Human Smoke" at all seriously.

We have seen now that Baker's treatment of Goebbels falls somewhere on the line between ambiguous and downright hostile. Baker certainly does not present Goebbels as a moral authority, and therefore Kirsch's comment that Human Smoke (and, implicitly, Baker) has "lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings" has no foundation in Kirsch's review. It is therefore sad that the second sentence of this excerpt is likely true--what we really need is for people who know about World War II to take seriously challenges to long-established viewpoints. Otherwise scholarship grows stale and the conventional wisdom devolves into just that--conventional wisdom--when in fact knowledgeable adherence to the conventional wisdom might well constitute the best and most reasoned position. If scholarship is to stay alive and well than it must deal squarely with any challengers, and scholars must not resort to lazy rhetoric and the ever more common ad hominem attack. With that said, I am reading Baker's book with an open mind, and will read any well-reasoned responses with an equally open mind.