Cats may or may not have nine lives, but historical events definitely have at least two: first when they take place, and then again when they’re re-created by the arts — in books, films, songs and plays. It’s almost as if reality isn’t real enough, all by itself. Reality needs narrative — a methodical recapitulation of exactly what happened — in order to leave a more visible footprint.
Pearl Harbor — the shorthand designation by which the Japanese attack on an American military base in Hawaii is commonly known, an event that propelled the United States into World War II — is one of those endlessly retold, endlessly unfolding moments. Like 9/11 — another shorthand that nobody needs to have explained — the reverberations from Dec. 7, 1941, are ongoing. Scholars still argue about the details, about the significance, about who knew what when. Literature, though, has its own way of getting to the bottom of history.
These ruminations are prompted by a recent glance at the calendar and by this realization: Dec. 7 falls on a Sunday, just as it did in 1941. So many Sunday mornings have come along since that cataclysmic one 67 years ago, in an attack that left more than 2,400 Americans dead or missing. So many people have lived and died since then; so many events have crowded their way into our historical chronicles. More wars, more financial crises. Rain falls. Snow arrives, then departs. The Sundays pile up. Everything changes. Nothing really changes at all.
And still we keep reaching back, scrambling to get some purchase on a momentous event such as Pearl Harbor. We press older friends and relatives who were alive when it happened to share their recollections. We watch movies such as “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970) or — if we’re in a self-punishing mood — “Pearl Harbor” (2001). We read the popular histories, the ones that put Pearl Harbor into rich context, such as Robert Leckie’s “Delivered From Evil: The Saga of World War II” (1987), and so many others. We read novels such as James Jones’ “From Here to Eternity” (1951), a work that’s just as loud and lively and sexy, just as gloriously profane, just as involving and heroic as it was when Jones first wrote it.
Fiction and history have a prickly, uneasy relationship with each other. And that’s exactly how it ought to be. We wouldn’t want history to be entirely comfortable when fiction comes along and blunders into its territory. History doubtless regards fiction as altogether too careless, reckless and fancy-free. Nor do we like it when fiction relies inordinately on reality, because imagination shouldn’t be tethered too tightly to the real word. They have to work together, history and fiction, but they also must keep tabs on each other; there’s a mutual — and mutually beneficial — mistrust.
In British author William Boyd’s 2006 novel “Restless,” you can glimpse one of the spot-welds where fiction and history are joined. “Restless” tells the dual story of Eva, recruited to be a British spy during World War II, and her daughter, who lives in the present day and is startled to find out about Eva’s adventures. Those adventures are interesting and perilous, and the reader rides along with the saga, lulled by Boyd’s supple prose. The events being described, the European place names, all sound vaguely familiar. And then, some two-thirds of the way through the novel, there comes a startling sentence:
“It was a Sunday morning, she realized, listening to the noise of her feet crunch on the gravel of the roadway,” Boyd writes, “and the first birds beginning to sing — Sunday, 7 December 1941.”
Sunday, 7 December 1941. The date tolls in the consciousness of every American, just as 9/11 now does, just as other dates toll for those of other nationalities. What had previously been a peppy little story about a brave, resourceful young woman in a challenging time becomes an instant history lesson, a grave part of a larger and more ominous story that engulfs both fact and fiction.
It’s a head-snapping moment for the reader, as a fictional character is subsumed by the awesome implications of the same real-life event that changed things forever for the United States — and for the many millions of people in Europe and elsewhere whose lives were saved by America’s entrance into the war.
We like to think that fact and fiction are completely distinct, that they move in different universes and obey different laws. Indeed, they do — usually. But then a real-life historical event shows up in an imagined story, and we realize just how much we need fiction to link us emotionally and viscerally to actual events, to help us get a fix on how it might have felt to live through those events.
And so on a Sunday morning when we wake up, start the coffee, let out the dog and unfold the newspaper at the kitchen table, it is worth a glance back over our pajama-clad shoulder at another Sunday, a Sunday in December of 1941, a Sunday re-created in stories and legends. “History can’t be undone,” writes William T. Vollmann in his great World War II novel, “Europe Central” (2005). “The clock winds down and you wind it up, but when the spring, you see, gives way … “
Fiction fixes that broken clock. Stories heal the world.
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‘Man your stations!’
From “Delivered From Evil: The Saga of World War II” (1987) by Robert Leckie:
“Aboard the mineslayer Oglala, Rear Adm. William Furlong, who commanded a fleet of service vehicles, was strolling along the quarterdeck awaiting a call to breakfast. He heard the roar of aircraft engines but thought nothing of it until he saw a bomb fall from a diving plane. What a stupid, careless pilot, he thought, not to have secured his releasing gear. But then he heard an explosion, saw a shower of earth rise above Ford Island, and glimpsed the red ball on the fuselage of a fleeing plane.
“Japanese!” Furlong cried. “Man your stations!” At his command, Oglala flashed the alarm: “All ships in harbor sortie!”
But the order had come too late. Battleship Row had begun to thunder and blaze. A pall of smoke drifted over the harbor, through which the red-balled enemy planes darted in and out like huge buzzing hornets. Aboard the fighting ships sailors and Marines began battering the padlocks off the ready chests with ringing blows of sledgehammers and mauls. Ammunition was passed out, and at last American antiaircraft guns began to stutter, spitting out shells at the Japanese … Meanwhile, other men on shore leave came racing back up to the docks, on foot, in taxis, on bicycles, jumping into small boats to come bouncing over the waves to their stricken ships. Some of them swam out …”
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jikeller@tribune.com
