Sphinx

Obviously my ongoing survey of modern literary receptions can’t just stick to works I like and admire. The recent death of novelist Herman Wouk, none of whose books I’ve ever read (but I have seen most of The Caine Mutiny), has naturally prompted a burst of quotations, including the revelation that Thucydides is referenced several times in his late novels about the Second World War, Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978) – which were unironically compared by the Christian Science Monitor to Thucydides at the time (link). Wouk majored in philosophy and comparative literature at Columbia in early 1930s, and would certainly hav encountered Thucydides in the General Honors course established by John Erskine in 1920 (thanks to Liz Sawyer for confirming this), but it was in early 1960s that he turned to him and other historians in earnest, as noted in a profile in The Washington Post from 2000 (link):

He had never been much on history, so he started his research by reading Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. That taught him, he says, that history was not dull as he had thought, but a great drama of conflict. Soon he was devouring volume after volume of World War II history. But he also read “War and Peace” four or five times to see how Tolstoy unfolded Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the process of telling his tale. What he discovered, he says, was that the skeleton of “War and Peace” was provided not by Thucydides but by Thackeray. It was not all about Napoleon. It was all about who gets Natasha.

I’m not going to attempt here to discuss the whole range of possible Thucydides’s echoes in Wouk’s novels, as that would entail reading them (possible doctoral project, if anyone’s short of ideas, would be the influence of Thucydides in C20 war novels, from Jünger to Faulks via Heller, but since I don’t like war novels much…). Instead I’m going to confine myself to comments on the explicit references – with the promise that where Google Books’ snippet view limits my sense of the context, I will in due course do a bit more research…

There’s only one explicit reference to Thucydides in The Winds of War, fairly late on in the narrative (which runs to late 1941):

At the time of both attacks [Pearl Harbour and Barbarossa], of course, there were loud outcries of ‘infamy’ and ‘treachery’, as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one must use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. (p.787)

I really do need more context here, to get a sense of whose voice this is; my best guess for the moment is that this is one of the extracts Wouk inserts into the narrative from a book written in prison by former German officer Armin von Roon. In other words, this enthusiastic summary of the Melian Dialogue, with added Hegel, is intended to characterise the world-view that must be defeated, rather than the author’s own view.

This reading is, I think, supported by some of the references to Thucydides in War and Remembrance. Half of them come from Aaron Jastrow, a Jewish American Professor of Hebrew who has been living in Italy for ten years, whose diary of subsequent events, A Jew’s Journey, is interspersed with the narrative. In the first relevant scene, however, we are given the narrator’s account of a meeting between Jastrow and his former student, now a German diplomat, Werner Beck, who is pretending to be friendly and to repudiate the extreme elements of Nazi ideology. Jastrow is convinced that he will be perfectly safe in Italy, and that fleeing to the United States is no solution, given the level of anti-semitism there, and offers his view of current global politics. “Why are the Germans more wrong, in trying for world mastery, than the British were two centuries ago when they succeeded? Or than we Americans are, for making our own bid now?” He continues in this vein for some time, upsetting his niece. A little later, Beck remarks: “Professor, your discussion of the war stunned me. You spoke with the grasp of a Thucydides.”

This echoes the reference in the previous book (especially if it turns out that that was likewise presented as the thoughts of a Nazi): Thucydides as the hard-nosed prophet of power and realism, cited by aggressive imperialists to legitimise their conquests. The irony is that this ethics-free relativist view of Hitler’s foreign policy, in the mouth of a Jew, is bound to fall apart sooner rather than later, and so it has proved by Thucydides’ second appearance in an extract from Jastrow’s A Jew’s Journey:

The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.

Thucydides is now cited not as the legitimator of aggression and authoritarianism – that is revealed as the tendentious, self-serving reading of Beck and other Nazis – but as the bleakly illusionless chronicler of the human tragedy, in the vein of Auden’s “Exiled Thucydides knew… we must suffer it all again”.

The third reference offers a different spin in a different context, when another character, Leslie Slote, happens to meet a pilot called Bill Fenton in a bar.

He had a whole new vision of the war. In his fumed brain pictures reeled of aircraft crisscrossing the globe – bombers, fighters, transports, by the thousands – battling the weather and the enemy, bombing cities, railroads, and troop columns; crossing oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges; a war such as Thucydides had never imagined, filling the skies with hurtling machines manned by hordes of Bill Fentons.

This is the classic argument against Thucydides’ relevance, that the world has changed so much since his time that his observations cannot possibly offer anything useful to modern readers. It’s not obvious (at least not to someone who hasn’t read the book…) why Slote would reach for such a comparison, whereas it seems a plausible point of reference for academics like Jastrow and Beck, so I wonder if this is simply Wout’s own reaction on reading Thucydides and reflecting on his wartime experiences.

The final reference comes from Jastrow again, now in Theresienstadt awaiting his fate.

Here I have seen German barbarism and duplicity with my own eyes, and have tried to record the truth in bald hurried language… Words break down as a means of describing [the atrocities]. So, in writing what I have heard, I have put down the plainest possible words that come to mind. The Thucydides who will tell this story so the world can picture, believe, and remember may not be born for centuries. Or if he lives now, I am not he.

Thucydides as archetypal historian, preserving the truth of the past – and perhaps the implication is that a Thucydides offers an overview where someone like Jastrow can give only one perspective. But the main focus seems to be on the difficulty of writing, the inadequacy of language to describe events; the talent of a Thucydides is to find the words to convey horrors to future audiences, not as a bit of entertainment but so that they can “picture, believe, and remember”. And perhaps by this point Wouk had determined that Tolstoy was the best model for a war narrative but less so for the problem of how to represent the Holocaust and its atrocities.