We have been having some heated discussions in our household lately over the question of whether an evil means can ever be justified for a good end.
Specifically whether dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations was justified because it put a quick end to the war with Japan and saved, not just American lives, but also Japanese because the Japanese military were gearing up for the kind of guerilla defense involving women and children that we’ve seen in Iraq.
We did not, of course, resolve this discussion. Both sides merely conceded that it is a difficult question, and the men who made the decisions were neither demons nor saints.
I bring this up because today is the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo (Wikipedia says tomorrow. My source is the Encyclopedia Britannica), when U.S. B29s dropped napalm that burned a quarter of the city and killed something between 80,000 and 100,000 people. I was blissfully ignorant of this event until I picked up Buckdancer’s Choice in the 1980s and read “The Firebombing,” easily the most horrifying poem I have ever encountered.
Gun down
The engines, the eight blades sighing
For the moment when the roofs will connect
Their flames, and make a town burning with all
American fire.
Reflections of houses catch;
Fire shuttles from pond to pond
In every direction, till hundreds flash with one death.
With this in the dark of the mind,
Death will not be what it should;
Will not, even now, even when
My exhaled face in the mirror
Of bars, dilates in a cloud like Japan.
The death of children is ponds
Shutter-flashing; responding mirrors; it climbs
The terraces of hills
Smaller and smaller, a mote of red dust
At a hundred feet; at a hundred and one it goes out.
That is what should have got in
To my eyeAnd shown the insides of houses, the low tables
Catch fire from the floor mats,
Blaze up in gas around their heads
Like a dream of suddenly growing
Too intense for war. Ah, under one’s dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land: O death in the middle
Of acres of inch-deep water!
I should point out that Dickey himself doesn’t seem to have been involved in bombing big cities like Tokyo.
Buckdancer’s Choice and “The Firebombing” and Robert Bly pretty much ruined Dickey as a poet.There’s a nice description of that conflict here at Edward Byrne’s One Poet’s Notes. Dickey didn’t help himself.
But folk are reconsidering the poem. Byrne refers to this statement by Joyce Carol Oates:
In her book about the visionary in literature, Joyce Carol Oates devotes a chapter to James Dickey and regards “The Firebombing” as a crucial poem: “It is unforgettable, and seems to me an important achievement in our contemporary literature, a masterpiece that could only have been written by an American, and only by Dickey. Having shown us so convincingly in his poetry how natural, how inevitable, is man’s love for all things, Dickey now shows us what happens when man is forced to destroy, forced to step down into history and be an American (‘and proud of it’). In so doing he enters a tragic dimension in which few poets indeed have operated.”
Had I read this poem when it was published (1964), I would probably have been thoroughly convinced by Bly. There is much in Dickey’s poetry, especially an espousal of violence, that distresses me. Reading the poem in my middle age, as a mother of sons, I was appalled and frightened but also impressed by the power and honesty. Now, nearly 50 years later, I tend to agree with Oates.
“The Firebombing” does not glorify war.
More from Byrne, whose whole post you ought to read:
Dickey once commented: “To have guilt you’ve got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don’t feel the guilt you ought to have. And that’s what ‘The Firebombing’ is about.”
. . .
In a 1990 Contemporary Literature interview as reported in Henry Hart’s excellent biography of the poet, Dickey explains “the guilt at the inability to feel guilty.” He continues: “You’ve been given medals for doing this. Your country has honored you—but there are those doubts that stay with you. You feel as a family man what all those unseen, forever unseen, people felt that you dropped those bombs on. You did it. The detachment one senses when dropping the bombs is the worst evil of all—yet it doesn’t seem so at the time.” In “The Firebombing” his persona lives in an average American suburb two decades after the war and still seems haunted by the Japanese living in the homes of neighborhoods beneath his plane during those bombing runs so long ago.
And the poem itself ends this way:
Come in, my house is yours, come in
If you can, if you
Can pass this unfired door. It is that I can imagine
At the threshold nothing
with its ears crackling off
Like powdery leaves,
Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not
Amiable, gentle, well-meaning,
A little nervous for no
Reason a little worried a little too loud
Or too easygoing nothing I haven’t lived with
For twenty years, still nothing not as
American as I am, and proud of it.Absolution? Sentence? No matter;
The thing itself is in that.
I am American, and sometimes, though not always, proud of it, and I stand firm in my conviction that you don’t make war to bring peace or set fire to cities to save lives. Though once a nation is in a war, it has to fight to win. But is winning by evil means — torture, for example — ever a real victory? We have not left off firebombing in the last 60 years and the legacy of the atomic bomb drop has been dark. Not that the men who made that decision in 1945 could see that dark future.
All my reservations, however, do not diminish the power of Dickey’s poem.
What always irritates me is that whenever August rolls around and the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are observed in all solemnity, someone on the Internet starts yelling about treason and not supporting the armed forces and don’t you know the atom bomb was necessary.
I cannot second-guess Harry Truman, and I should not try. What’s done is done. But to ignore and dismiss the suffering and death of those days, and to pretend the United States holds no responsibility for the world we unleashed, is not within my power. I have seen artifacts from the blast sites; coins fused into one inseparable lump, statues burnt to blackened pits on one side only, photographs of the devastation. And I say, Never again. Twice is enough.
On a related note, do you think that the way we ended that war — drop two atom bombs, silence the world, and scare the Japanese leadership into suing for peace — has colored our strategy ever since? Shock and awe were our strategies in the Iraq War. They certainly seemed to help us overwhelm the Iraqi army, but the population didn’t seem too impressed to cease resisting us. If the only way to defeat a guerilla war before it begins is to go atomic, then perhaps our aversion to going atomic may eventually wean us off of starting guerrilla wars.
I have spent much of my adult life as a war correspondent. My father is the poet. My son is a lieutenant colonel. So I guess you could say these are issues of considerable concern to me — and they are very well considered here, thanks.
Back in 2003 I wrote a long essay about “The Firebombing” because it struck me that the poem tried very hard to come to terms with the weird detachment that has come to characterize much of modern warfare. Anyone interested can Google “Firebombings: From My Father’s Wars to Mine.” The direct link to the pdf is http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/calhoun/guests/dickey.pdf
Best regards, Chris
Hello, Christopher Dickey. Thank you for stopping here and for finding my musings acceptable. Most of the real work in this post was done by Edward Byrne.
I read your article about your father and Deliverance with interest and look forward to reading this article about the firebombings. I can’t say that I enjoy your father’s work but I do find that I keep circling back to it. I doubt it is meant to be enjoyed the way one might enjoy a Billy Collins poem.
I write my opinions in the full knowledge that I’ve never been tested –never earned this particular kind of guilt—and at my age I live in hope I never will be. But I’ve long been appalled by bombings and now drones and other ways of killing at a distance without having to face up to what it is we’re doing.
And as a mother, I am appalled at the unconsidered enthusiasm with which we ask our children to become killers.
Sherry,
Who needs an MFA? Two visits to your blog and already I’m feeling as if I’m sitting in on a master’s class*. (Meant as a compliment regardless of your take on academia.) Another outstanding post.
Dickey’s line, “Death will not be what it should,” is jaw-dropping.
My husband and I wanted to got o Hiroshima the last time we were in Japan but we couldn’t afford the extra train tickets. I’m not sure how i would have handled it anyway, just thinking about what was done. Thanks for sharing the poem and your thoughts on this.