Two decades ago, I was a public-affairs officer in the Marine Corps, a public-relations guy for the military, tasked with “telling the Marine Corps story” and providing accurate information about military operations to maintain the trust of the American people. We weren’t propagandists — we told the truth, and in Iraq we welcomed plenty of embedded reporters who we knew would write extremely skeptical articles on the progress of the war — but there were fairly tight borders around what the military thought the American people needed to know.
Coming back from Iraq in 2008, though, I had a set of stories that didn’t fit perfectly with the official one I had a license to tell. Some were things I’d seen, things I could report on in a journalistic way, sure of the facts, but others were things I’d heard, stories that I couldn’t vouch for personally but that, passed to me by word of mouth and preserved in my memory, that unstable medium, nevertheless seemed to express something true and unsettling.
One was told to me by a young combat correspondent, a Marine whose job in the corps was writing articles and making videos about the work we were doing. He had been in Ramadi when a suicide bomber detonated among a crowd of civilians, killing and grievously wounding dozens. The local unit took the injured to the Ramadi combat hospital, where Navy doctors, nurses and corpsmen got to work as Marines lined up to donate blood.
Horrible slaughter in a region of Iraq where violence has spiraled out of control does not make for a good news story, but there were messages the Marine Corps was happy to put out: that unlike our barbaric enemy, who brutally murdered men, women and children, we cared about Iraqi civilians and would work tirelessly to save lives. And so this young combat correspondent asked one of the Navy surgeons, who for long hours had been feverishly working among the mangled and bloody innocents, to give an interview. And because the only quiet place was the room where they had placed and bagged the dead, the cameraman set up near the bodies of all the people they had failed to save.
Undoubtedly, the doctor knew what messages he was supposed to deliver to the camera, and undoubtedly, he believed in them, too — that he had a noble mission to carry out, and that his noble colleagues were dedicated and skilled and humane. Nor was he new to death. He was a surgeon in a shock-trauma platoon in the most violent city in Iraq, all too familiar with amputating limbs, with stitching intestines back together, with treating burns that devoured faces, ears and fingers. That day could not have been the first time he bowed his head as the chaplain whispered prayers over those who died on the table. But before the interview started and the red light of the camera turned on, he took a moment, sat down among the dead and quietly wept. The young Marine cameraman stood there, silent, patient, and waited for the doctor to collect himself so he could tell his story about the good will of the American military, whose invasion had unleashed this chaos.
I cannot personally verify this story, and there are even details, like the presence of corpses all around, that have always struck me as suspect. Possibly an embellishment of the Marine who told me the story, possibly an unconscious embellishment of my own, maybe even true. And yet, even though they might be a fiction, the images remain in my mind, and those images — the weeping doctor, the Iraqi dead and the young Marine who has carefully framed the shot so that none of those dead could be seen — are sharper and more personal for me than some things that I know happened because I actually lived through them.
My job in the military was to relay the kinds of messages the doctor recited once the red light of the camera turned on. Messages I believed in. I loved the Marines around me, admired our medical units and supported the overall mission. I had been part of a surge of troops to Iraq, part of a new strategy designed to get the population on our side, and during my time in Iraq I felt we’d succeeded, with violence dropping in western Iraq and local leaders increasingly working with coalition forces instead of against them. And because I lived in Iraq for 13 months, spending time with military doctors and engineers and logisticians, with the whole complex machinery of American war, when I returned home I returned with what I felt was a license to pontificate. In bars, my 24-year-old self, with only a limited understanding of Iraq and its politics and history, would hold forth about what happened and how things were going and what America should do, not simply in Iraq but in Afghanistan too. And because I had personal experience with war, people listened.
But alongside my talking points were these other memories and stories, stories that didn’t resolve neatly into an argument about war but seemed instead to express more basic human realities. And so after I got home each day from my job of “telling the Marine Corps story,” I would sit at a desk, sometimes still in my cammies, and write fiction. “We shot dogs,” was the first sentence I wrote, riffing not on my own experience but on stories told to me by a guy I went through training with who served in the second battle of Falluja, where he shot dogs after seeing them eating human corpses. Stories that, for reasons I didn’t yet understand, struck me differently after I returned.
I wrote myself out of a state of political certainty about American war and into a state of confusion.
If my barstool punditry consisted of the kinds of messages that doctor recited once the camera light was on, my fiction dealt with everything that happened before. Art of any worth explores what happens before political ideologies take hold. Your perspective on the Iraq war can offer a road map to comfortably interpreting that doctor’s inarticulate grief, whether you do so with contempt or cynicism or patriotic pride. Ideology is a butcher of reality, severing the muscle from bone, discarding the unsightly and inedible and delivering neatly wrapped, digestible steaks to its consumers. The fiction writer is a child playing in the alley behind the butcher’s shop, rummaging through the trash, pulling out bits of teeth, offal, hair and hide, holding them up to the light and beaming, so pleased to display a piece of the once-breathing animal.
As I wrote war fiction, all that I thought I knew felt thin on the page, insubstantial, in need of greater complexity and pressure. I wrote myself out of a state of political certainty about American war and into a state of confusion. This changed my politics, certainly, but at a deeper level it changed my sense of myself and the world I inhabit. I’ve staked much of my life on the notion that when it comes to something as morally fraught and politically charged as war, my responsibility as both a writer and a citizen was to continue that process, to keep my eyes open and to tell the truth about what I see.
But people in war zones need more direct action. That’s what we have seen with Israel’s war in Gaza, which has provoked activism within the American literary community like no other conflict of the past decade. Not art but slogans, attempts to make American support for the war a live political issue. It began with a deluge of open letters, the first coming a week after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, demanding an end to the war. More letters followed, signed by Pulitzer Prize winners and MacArthur “geniuses” and best-selling authors. Letters from literary translators, academics, Jewish writers. They argued their case seriously and soberly, wildly and stupidly; they were disturbingly blithe about the murder of Jews, or so carefully evenhanded that they said nothing.
Writers overwhelmingly spoke up for Palestinians, even as literary institutions adopted a more censorious approach. A prominent overseas book fair canceled an event celebrating a Palestinian novelist. A Jewish community center and literary venue called off a talk by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who criticized Israel. An arts magazine fired an editor who published an open letter criticizing Israel. PEN/America, a writers’ group committed to free expression (and of which I’m a member), opposed these actions, only to find itself targeted by a pressure campaign.
Some of the critics wanted PEN to more thoroughly uphold its principles of free speech when it came to Israel (PEN tended to offer only muted criticism of Israel and hadn’t expended resources for Gazan writers comparable to what it had done during other conflicts). Others, like the radical group Writers Against the War on Gaza, which has declared that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was not “terrorism” but “a defense of a mosque, a land, a people,” don’t seem to care about free speech at all unless they agree with the speaker. The tumult ended with an awards show and festival canceled, PEN reviewing its stance on Israel while offering funds to help Gazan writers and a lot of online rage.
It was a microcosm of the larger tumult in the book world, with resignations, social media mobbing, disruptive protests, crackdowns on disruptive protests, denunciations, books withdrawn, awards declined, speaking engagements and festivals canceled and even an online, color-coded list of authors an X user created to expose those who had ever showed “Zionist” sympathies.
For American authors, it was a time for declaring where you stood and for getting shouted down if you stood in the wrong place. And so as writers rushed to their social media barricades, we seemed to be torn between two approaches to the role of the arts in American life — whether we need a narrowly political approach at times of crisis, or whether we have faith in the chaotic, democratic possibilities of unrestrained speech and art.
Not long before Victory Day in Europe, Nazi forces attacked a U.S. Army company moving south near Bad Urach, in southern Germany. George Oppen, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, befriended in the 1930s by Ezra Pound, dove for cover into a crater formed by a recent shell blast. Two more soldiers joined him, one jumping on top of Oppen. But another shell exploded, killing one soldier immediately and sending shrapnel through the other man and into the poet’s body. The three men lay there, one dead, one dying and one, Oppen, grievously wounded. Oppen would lie there for 10 hours, reciting poetry to distract his mind from the pain, from the fear, from the sheer boredom of waiting and waiting and waiting to die, to be saved or to be found by the enemy. At one point he buried his dog tags, with their “H” for “Hebrew,” which would identify him as Jewish if he were captured.
Oppen was there because he was doing what he felt a writer like him should do at a time of utmost urgency — leaving his pen aside and taking direct action. “There are situations which cannot honorably be met by art,” he would later write, “and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning.” Having seen fascism rising in 1930s Europe and the desperation of America during the Great Depression, Oppen gave up writing, joined the Communist Party, fought for workers’ rights, helped organize the Utica milk workers’ strike and gave up his draft exemption to fight fascism when the war broke out. The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth. As Oppen later pointed out in an essay for The Nation in 1962, however strident the artist’s ideological convictions, “a great many things one believes or would like to believe or thinks he believes will not substantiate themselves in the concrete materials of the poem.” Besides, didactic art, “as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely excruciating.” And so rather than try to force his writing to serve a political use, he set it aside.
Such principles are out of step with the times. In a Times opinion piece in December 2020, the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen — whose event at the 92nd Street Y was called off after he criticized Israel last year — cheered the way Donald Trump’s presidency pushed formerly apolitical writers into a political role and demanded that after Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency they not “retreat to their pre-Trump,” apolitical selves, but rather follow the lead of “marginalized” writers who do not shy away from “explicit politics.” I don’t necessarily have an objection to this — how can you talk about modern life without discussing the political passions that drive us? But the question is whether political ideas appear in a novel as settled truths or as things people encounter in the world. George Eliot once described “the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh,” and too many novelists with explicit politics write their ideas as if they had revealed themselves in a shopping list.
In an essay for the journal Liberties on a recent slate of novels, from those by Sally Rooney and Emma Cline to Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the critic Becca Rothfeld labels this sort of fiction “sanctimony literature,” a genre she defines by “its efforts to demonstrate its Unimpeachably Good Politics in the manner of a child waving an impressive report card at her parents in hopes of a pat on the head.”
Too many novelists with explicit politics write their ideas as if they had revealed themselves in a shopping list.
One of the most celebrated books of 2023, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” tells the story of American prisoners who compete in modern gladiatorial combat to win their freedom. It’s a thriller in the mode of “The Hunger Games,” with three lethal matches in the first 50 pages, as well as a blood-smeared embrace between the lesbian-lover badass gladiators who drive the novel and descriptions of hand-to-hand fighting suggesting an author with greater exposure to Marvel movies than real violence. What elevates the book is its politics, with activist speeches about the carceral state, gladiators condemning their job and a slew of footnotes throughout about the profits of the prison-industrial complex, the dangers of tasers and the militarization of the police, sledgehammering the message into readers’ brains.
In our relentlessly utilitarian culture, where even the book world’s greatest controversies revolve around political transgressions rather than aesthetic ones, such a book appeals because it seems to fulfill a clear purpose. What is art for? Underwriting our political commitments. The writer steps into the role I used to play, back from Iraq, pontificating at the bar with a few compelling stories and a lot of confident opinions. It’s a voice I distrust, because I learned to distrust it in myself.
“Why writers should be canvassed for their opinions on controversial political issues I cannot imagine,” W. H. Auden once noted. “Literary talent and political common sense are rarely found together.” And indeed, to study writers’ political stances is often to come away wishing you’d remained in ignorance. Pound, Yeats, Celine, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein and Knut Hamsen had their love affairs with fascism. George Bernard Shaw, Dalton Trumbo, W.E.B. Du Bois and Pablo Neruda were Stalinists, with Neruda even losing his position in the Chilean diplomatic service for aiding an attempted assassination of Trotsky. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Roland Barthes all signed a petition protesting the arrest of three men for committing sex crimes against children ages 12 and 13 — it was the ’70s, it was France, c’est la vie.
Moreover, great artists make poor propagandists. Picasso’s “Guernica,” one of the most celebrated antiwar paintings of all time, was created in response to the fascist bombing of the Basque town Gernika during the Spanish Civil War and was displayed at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris World Fair in 1937. “Painting is not done to decorate apartments,” Picasso once claimed. “It’s an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.” And here was his 25-and-a-half-foot-wide, 11-and-a-half-foot-high instrument of war, an astonishing display in black and white, with techniques from cubism accentuating the rending of reality caused by heavy aerial bombardment, offering up a fractured world of distorted buildings and body parts, religious iconography and animal pain. An artistic triumph, it was a propagandistic failure. The architect Le Corbusier wrote that of all the artworks at the World’s Fair, “Guernica” alone “saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.” The German fair guide mocked it as a “hodgepodge of body parts that any 4-year-old could have painted,” while Sartre pointedly asked, “Does anyone think it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause?” “Guernica” did not achieve public acclaim until a showing in America in 1939, after the war it was created to protest had been lost.
Early one morning, about a century ago, George Orwell grabbed an old rifle and sneaked out in the predawn darkness to go shoot a fascist. When the Spanish Civil War kicked off with a military coup that divided the country between Nationalists backed by fascist Italy and Germany and Republicans backed by the Soviet Union and left-wing movements across the world, it didn’t just attract the interest of formerly apolitical artists like Picasso but also drew a wide array of writers. Hemingway, Malraux, Koestler, Stephen Spender, John Dos Passos and W.H. Auden all spent time in Spain. “To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,” Auden wrote. “But to-day the struggle.”
Such idealism is not entirely dead, even in the present day. When the war in Ukraine broke out, the writers and military veterans Matt Gallagher, Adrian Bonenberger and Benjamin Busch traveled to Lviv and established a training camp in basic military tactics for Ukrainian civilians.
For Orwell, in 1936, that meant going to serve with anti-Stalinist Marxist forces. He was politically naïve, and later wrote, “If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism,’ and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’” What he found was deadly leftist infighting, left-wing movements intent on suppressing allies with unorthodox views, friends tortured or killed by those nominally on his own side and, on the morning when he went out to shoot a fascist, a disquieting revelation about the nature of the enemy.
He settled himself in a ditch about a hundred yards from the enemy trench, waiting for a target to appear. Slowly, dawn light increased, making his return to his own trench more and more dangerous. You had to time it right, striking when there was enough light to aim by but not so much that you couldn’t safely return to your own lines. That morning, he feared he’d waited too long. But then allied airplanes flew overhead, startling the enemy line. Suddenly a man appeared, perhaps holding a message for an officer, jumping up out of the enemy trench and running along the parapet, half-dressed and holding his trousers with both hands. Orwell, having traveled from northern England to Spain for this moment, held fire. The trousers, he later reflected, had something to do with it. “I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists,’” he wrote, “but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”
A noble sentiment for a human being, and a wonderful observation for a writer, but a terrible one for a soldier. Seven years later, the Army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, distributed throughout the Army, then at war with Nazi Germany, a training manual by Pvt. Frank Sargent that, in the section on psychological preparation for combat, recommended hatred. “Until John Doe learns to hate he will be no good,” Sargent wrote. The soldier who “regards his opponent as a good fellow, a man who, after all, does not really want to fight and kill him,” will not be prepared for the enemy’s ferocity, not able to counter it with his own. “Hate is like gin,” the manual explained. “It takes awhile, and then, suddenly, it hits you.” It hits you after you’ve seen your buddies killed and you’ve internalized that the moral code does not exist, or if it does, that it will not protect you. “Americans,” he wrote, “never had to drag the torn bodies of loved ones out of smashed buildings,” as the French and British had to do then, as Israelis had to do in the aftermath of Oct. 7, as Palestinians are doing now.
Orwell was a fine writer, but fascism was not defeated by fine writers. It was defeated by shooting, stabbing and burning men and women alive. When Orwell returned from combat and wrote honestly about the repression and propaganda and lies within the ranks of the Communist forces in the Spanish Civil War, two early essays of his were rejected by Kingsley Martin, editor of The New Statesman, because they would “cause trouble” for the broader, noble, antifascist struggle. Because Orwell’s writing has lasting value and no one now bothers with the stale propaganda churned out by that era’s hacks, we’re inclined to sneer at that editor, but he might have been right. “Our side has its own grotesque moral failings!” is no rallying cry.
But when the dust has settled and a final reckoning is due, we need to sift through the propaganda to get a true accounting. What evils did we commit in service of our higher goals? What grievous moral failures must we learn from, so we don’t fail again in the future? Solidarity, that necessary virtue for effecting political change, demands compromises with truth-telling, that necessary virtue for writers. The activist always runs the risk of blindness, the honest writer of uselessness.
These days our politics demand blindness. For the greater good, we must believe things that are manifestly untrue. The Israeli military has set a high standard in mitigating civilian harm in Gaza. The movement for Palestinian rights doesn’t struggle with antisemitism. We’re accustomed to thinking strategically, and thanks to social media we now have ample opportunity, at any time of day, to be that Navy doctor in front of the red camera light, delivering the right messages for the greater cause. We’re all political strategists, fighting tactical battles, acting as though we’re press secretaries for ourselves. But it’s the work of writers to be irresponsible, to stare at reality openly, unstrategically. To approach the issues of gravest political import without fidelity to what we want to believe.
Phil Klay is an author of fiction and nonfiction on the subjects of conflict and citizenship and has won a National Book Award for fiction. He is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war.
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