The Illustrious Lame God

The Shield of Achilles is an apt metaphor for a total history. Fashioned by Hephaestus, the bronze shield in Book 18 of Homer's The Iliad depicts an entire society in extraordinary detail. Soldiers "bright in arms," harvest hands "swinging whetted scythes," a "pasture in a lovely valley" full of "huts and sheds and sheepfolds," and on to still more sights, no vision too small—"a vineyard . . . weighted down with grapes," men with golden-hilted daggers swinging from silver lanyards. All in gold, all in silver. Writes Homer of Hephaestus, "The crippled god had done his work."

The three books in this review all aspire to be Achilles Shields of the years before, during, and after World War II. And each book prompts reflections on the strengths and limitations of these shields in our own moment.

Blom's book Fracture is the smoothest of the three—a point largely of praise. Starting with stories of World War I shell-shock victims, Blom establishes the leitmotif of disintegration—of faceted, broken-windowed destruction—as his book's main aim. Not a new claim, as Blom would acknowledge, the idea of a sweepingly fractured world culture nonetheless appears in a new light. Tales of U.S. Prohibition, the Scopes Monkey Trial, Ernest Hemingway and Clara Bow, and a great many others each appear as some instance of a splintered world, limber and lank, of lowered batons and shriveled beliefs. Gaining from their connection in a sweeping and fast-moving history (Blom's narrative pacing is excellent), familiar figures and obscure ones alike seem newly part of a crisis-world whose accelerations and stoppages signal mental and physical breakdown.

Poor Professor Raat—who in Fritz Lang's disturbing film The Blue Angel (1931) starts as the tyrant-commander of his classroom's small kingdom and ends as the crowing side-show performer accompanying nightclub singer Lola (Marlene Dietrich)—suffers the fate of many an old-world person whose pieties and dignities vanish in the post–World War I abyss. Even what looks like love and joy, as in Dietrich's Lola, destroys what it touches, within and without, as if a stroke from her feather cut as strongly as shrapnel.

Beautifully written, expertly researched, Blom's Fracture is yet a curious tale for this same reason. So smooth and deft in its darting tales of individual protagonists (Oswald Spengler, Josephine Baker, Andre Breton), the book is remarkably unscathed by the dislocations of which it tells. From Lance Corporal Willie Martin's shell shock to Dorothea Lange's famous Migrant Mother photograph of 1936, Blom acknowledges one wrinkle-browed disaster after another, augmented by cataclysms of the classroom and the stateroom. But the author always moves on, proud of his pace, without seeming to leave any of himself behind.

Perhaps this is an unnecessary requirement in a work of history. The vantage of Hephaestus must assure that no object—whether of garlands or warlords—should gather too much of the bronze-smith's attention. The point, after all, is the total effect; and is it not the consummate gift of the crippled artist's art that his own lameness should never appear in his work? But rhetorically, Blom's smoothness makes for a paradox: a work of history detailing a splintered world but written as though that disintegration exerted not a single effect on the form of history writing itself. Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. The boxer sees stars or, stupidly, only the bowtie of a man in the third row. The rest of the world spins around. History, by the light of...