BackBook Review | When Books Went to War
Molly Guptill Manning's When Books Went to War winds up feeling like the bibliophile's equivalent of It's a Wonderful Life
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Heartwarming war stories aren’t easy to come by, especially if they insist on being entirely realistic about the hellishness of military life. But Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War winds up feeling like the bibliophile’s equivalent of It’s a Wonderful Life. It tells of enlisted men during World War II whose one and only form of entertainment became reading, and of the enormous homefront effort to supply them with the books they desperately wanted.
Specially designed paperbacks were created, and so treasured that, as one sailor put it, “to heave one in the garbage can is tantamount to striking your grandmother". Note the sailor’s way of expressing himself. This book also whisks you back to a world in which fighting men clamoured for classics, wrote highly articulate thank-you letters and didn’t sound (at least on paper) like the unprintably bilious characters in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. And many of them had never read books for pleasure before.
“This is the story of pens that were as mighty as swords," writes Manning, who does overstate the obvious at times. She begins by explaining that the Nazis burned books and libraries and that the threat of imminent war led Congress to pass the Selective Training and Service Act in 1940. Along came a huge influx of new recruits, using 10 million square feet of wallboard, 908,000 gallons of paint and 3,500 carloads of nails to build brand-new training camps.
This doesn’t have anything to do with books. But it does pad Manning’s book. Far more interesting is the final quarter of the book, which consists only of lists. There’s a fascinating line-up of authors banned by the Nazis: Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, H.G. Wells and—no surprise here—Jews and Winston Churchill. And there’s a full list of books published for soldiers, which truly stands the test of time, making a good-faith effort to offer something for every taste. The recruits and volunteers could read classics (The Education of Henry Adams), bodice-rippers (Forever Amber, a huge, steamy hit in its time), poetry (Selected Poems of A.E. Housman), sports, culture (Virgil Thomson on music), Perry Mason mysteries and lots of humour. Manning seems to think that Is Sex Necessary? was some kind of self-help book and not a parody by James Thurber and E.B. White.
The main story here is that of how librarians rallied to get the ball rolling. A Victory Book Campaign began, aimed at alleviating the boredom of all those men building all those barracks, especially after it was discovered that existing Army libraries had been allowed to deteriorate after World War I. But civilian donations of hardcover books would do little to help soldiers headed overseas: They were hardly portable, and the public zeal for donation was short lived. So were experiments with tiny versions of magazines. And then, in 1943, after a series of incremental steps that Manning explains fascinatingly, the miraculous little Armed Services Edition paperbacks were born.
Created in a time of shortages, these books were marvels of design. They came in two sizes: one to fit in a uniform’s shirt pocket, the other to fit in the pants. They were stapled, not glued, because of the lack of rubber and the fact that tropical insects found glue edible. And they were printed horizontally, not vertically, so that each page was shaped like a postcard and contained two narrow columns of print. This layout was deemed easier to read and less likely to waste precious paper.
The special editions sparked some snobbery at first. In The New Republic, Malcolm Cowley denounced them as flimsy, which they were: These books could supposedly survive no more than six readings apiece. But he had no idea what prized objects they would become, or that they would be read by groups of men together to make them last a little longer. Those who wrote thank-you letters for the books described how they got so filthy the words were hard to see. They also told of what a huge comfort it was to race back to a foxhole in the heat of battle with a book to read, knowing the book could be the fighting man’s only barrier between sheer terror and escape to some other realm.
Manning also writes about how important these books were to the wounded, who had nothing else to get them through long, bleak hospital stays. Even if a prognosis offered no reason for optimism, a book might. Books that summoned visions of home were particular favourites; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Chicken Every Sunday were well known for raising spirits in hard times. Manning also credits the soldiers as the tastemakers who turned a certain flop, The Great Gatsby, into the indelible classic it would become. Her own book would be less superficial if she devoted some thought to how and why Gatsby spoke to these men.
Eventually, inevitably, the content of the books became politically controversial. But Senator Robert Taft grandstanding on behalf of censorship, found himself waging an uphill battle against a populace that liked allowing soldiers to read freely and an Army that thought soldiers had every right to know what they were fighting for.
“We believe that we can fight a better war and end it sooner with men who know what is happening in the world," an Army representative said.
The books had the unexpected effect of turning GIs into what the University of California called DARs—Damned Average Raisers—because their work ethic and reading habits made them such good students. The Armed Services Editions continued to be published until their titles leaned toward where the careers of the futures lay (plastics, television, recycling) and how to adjust to life at home. And then those lifesaving little books weren’t needed any more. ©2014/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Janet Maslin is a literary critic for The New York Times.
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