What They Wrote About the War
Dear friends,
This is a short, mid-month dispatch to tell you about an essay of mine, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
"What They Wrote About the War" contrasts the World War I experiences of two famous writers — George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Mann. Each stirred up a hornet's nest with their journalistic responses to the outbreak of the war, and each went on to put together a self-justifying book. As far as I know, their tales have never been told together, though there's a whole scholarly literature about each incident separately. I braided them into something that feels — to me — more like a short story than an essay, and it expresses (albeit very indirectly) a lot of what I think about the political responsibilities of writers.
The origin of this piece is my lockdown obsession. Last summer, stuck inside in Pittsburgh where I'd just arrived for the first time when Covid sledgehammered the U.S., I became randomly fascinated by George Bernard Shaw. First I stumbled across Michael Holroyd's magnificent biography, and before I knew it I was reading multiple biographies, as well as Shaw's diaries, letters, and plays, and every scholarly monograph I could find (there are many) — all in tandem. For about a month I would turn immediately after the day's work was done to my pile of Shaw books, where I would essentially relive about a month of his life in my imagination per day, turning from biography to biography to collected letters to collected works to diaries to monographs, until I had read every scrap relating to a specific date, then moving on to the next date.
I don't think I've ever had so intense an involvement in a historical personage. And I can't fully explain the reasons for my obsession. Certain features of Shaw's life, ambitions, and self-conception strongly remind me of myself, but the truth is I always read biographies egotistically, looking for self-resemblances and personal lessons (yes, that's embarrassing, but I'm keeping it real with you), so that's hardly unusual. I suppose it was probably a psychological symptom of lockdown and election season, a desire to live elsewhere for a while.
Anyway, as a result I've accidentally become a kind of Shaw expert. A number of writing projects have grown out of my desire to use this accidental expertise in my own writing. "What They Wrote About the War" is the first. I think it's one of the better things I've ever written, and I hope it doesn't sink like a stone. (You never can tell with internet writing.)
I'll be back in a few weeks to talk about my month in reading — it's been a Turkish literature extravaganza and I am overflowing with excitement about it!
Until then you have my warm regards, Robert Minto