When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.
With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.
As the words of my book, 'The Bloodless Revolution,' accumulated, I envisaged a parallel growth: the stack of pages they would have to be printed on, thousands of times over; every page representing a slice of forest, a belch of fumes and a squirt of toxic ink.
The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
All the papers contained nothing but fantastic stories about the war. However, for several months we had been accustomed to war talk. We had so often packed our service trunks that the whole thing had become tedious.
At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.
I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.
There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.
When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.