By Jonathan Yardley

Wednesday, December 11, 2002; Page C01

Unquestionably the war on terrorism is the strangest the nation has ever fought, mostly in the shadows rather than on the open field of battle. It has more in common with the Cold War than with any of the conventional wars in which the United States previously was engaged. In another respect, though, it is almost certain to be wholly conventional: It will produce reams of prose, most of it journalism and some of it of a very high order, but it will produce little, perhaps nothing, of literary distinction.

The conventional wisdom holds that great literature is written when societies come under great stress, and in substantial measure that is true: Europe and England during the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the American South defeated in the Civil War and burdened with the curse of slavery, Latin America struggling under the legacy of colonialism and the rule of dictatorship -- here the groundwork was laid for many of the masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century literature, among them the novels of Charles Dickens, William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Inasmuch as there can be few more stressful conditions than wartime, the conventional wisdom also insists that war produces great literature. Closer examination reveals precisely the opposite to be the case. The library of war writing is so vast as to be beyond the comprehension of any single reader, critic or scholar, but the amount of it that can be called literature is astonishingly small. Yes, there are a few classics -- Tolstoy's monumental "War and Peace," of course, Stephen Crane's masterly miniature, "The Red Badge of Courage," Joseph Heller's wildly uneven but indisputably influential "Catch-22," perhaps Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird," perhaps John le Carre's "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold."

These five books have little in common with each other except that they are set in wartime, and in the case of the le Carre, Cold Wartime. There's no formula for a "great" war novel, just as there's no formula for a "great" novel, period. But each of these novels tries in its own way to re-create the world of the battlefield and to describe how individuals cope with it, are changed by it, rise above it or succumb to its horrors. Their prose is original, distinctive and powerful, and they deal with large themes in original, searching ways. But these are the exceptions; most of what aspires to be war literature falls well short of its authors' ambitions and its subject's possibilities.

An opportunity to inquire into this is now provided by "The Vintage Book of War Fiction" (Vintage paperback, $14), edited by Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen. The latter is a native of Germany who works as an editor in London; the former is a British writer of highly literate historical fiction, much of it set in the First and Second World Wars, notably "Birdsong" and "Charlotte Gray." The anthology they have edited contains 40 pieces, a few of them short stories but most of them passages from novels.

"This is a book of extracts from works of fiction set in the wars of the 20th century," Faulks writes, "and, when you come to think about it, the strangest thing about such books is that there are not more of them." This certainly is true, but what may be even stranger is that so few were written by people who were in combat or who had direct personal experience of the wars about which they have written. Faulks himself, to underscore the point, was born in 1953, eight years after the end of World War II and 35 years after the end of World War I, but this distance has not prevented him from writing about those wars with passion and what gives every appearance of authority.

Thus in this collection we have Faulks's near-exact contemporary, the immensely gifted William Boyd, writing about the trenches of World War I, a subject to which he has returned over and over again, in this case in his novel "The New Confessions"; Louis de Bernieres, born in 1954, writing (brilliantly, in his novel "Corelli's Mandolin") about the Italian invasion of a Greek island in World War II; Pat Barker, born in 1943, one of relatively few women to have written about war-related matters, describing in fiction about the actual detention of Siegfried Sassoon (whose own writing is included in the anthology) for ostensible psychiatric debility during World War I; and Michael Ondaatje, also born in 1943, describing "the last medieval war . . . fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944." We do not have Ian McEwan's splendid account of the British retreat to Dunkirk in 1941 because "Atonement," in which it appears, was published after this anthology was assembled; McEwan was born in 1948.

Had the editors cared to extend the reach of the anthology into the 19th century, they might have included C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, depicting naval engagements of the Napoleonic Wars in novels written during the 20th century, or extracts from Shelby Foote's "Shiloh" and Thomas Keneally's "Confederates," fine historical novels about the Civil War. The list could go on and on, but what it suggests is that war as a subject for serious literature is somehow more accessible to those who can only imagine it than to those who have experienced it. There are in this anthology a few pieces of vivid prose by men who had firsthand knowledge of what they wrote -- excerpts from Louis-Ferdinand Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night," Heinrich Boll's "The Silent Angel," James Jones's "The Thin Red Line" and James Salter's "The Hunters," as well as Tim O'Brien's short story "How to Tell a True War Story" -- but these are the exceptions.

A possible explanation is suggested by O'Brien, who served as an infantryman in Vietnam. "A true war story is never moral," he says. "It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue."

For those who have undergone it, war is so immediate, so ghastly and so implacably contradictory -- "It can be argued . . . that war is grotesque," O'Brien writes. "But in truth war is also beauty" -- that frequently the instinct of those who have fought is to suppress their memories rather than to rework them into fiction or anything else. Many veterans prefer not to discuss their experiences, indeed vehemently refuse to do so, a point borne home with considerable force in former senator Bob Kerrey's autobiography, published earlier this year.

Interestingly, and revealingly, the 20th-century wars that produced the most writing from the actual battlefield were World War I and Vietnam. World War I "made no sense at all," as Celine put it, and most of those who fought on the American side in Vietnam apparently felt much the same. The most famous novels to come out of World War I probably are Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" and Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," both of which are antiwar and, in the case of the former, pacifist; Remarque's views brought him under attack in Germany as militant Nazism came to power, and he fled his native country in 1938, moving to the United States the following year. Hemingway continued the antiwar theme in his famous novel about the Spanish Civil War, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which like much of the fiction inspired by that conflict is embarrassingly sentimental and romantic in its embrace of the Loyalist, anti-fascist cause.

As to other writing of World War I, it is a pity that Faulks and Hensgen restricted themselves to fiction, for had they included poetry their selection of the literature of World War I would have expanded exponentially. Nearly four decades ago a superb compilation of British poetry from that conflict was published under the title "Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War." Edited by I.M. Parsons, it includes poems by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Julian Grenfell and many others, all too many of whom lost their lives in the trenches, many of whom depict the insanity of those trenches in ways that achieve genuine, if horrifying, beauty. The book, unfortunately out of print, underscores the essential point that senseless and/or unjust wars seem more conducive to literature than necessary and/or just ones.

To put it another way, war literature tends to be antiwar literature. People who have seen combat, whether as participants or as observers, rarely seem inclined to get romantic about it. That's strictly for armchair warriors. Many readers bliss out on Tom Clancy's puerile, strutting Jack Ryan fantasies, cartoons that bear absolutely no resemblance to the brutal, bloody, morally ambiguous reality described in the work of Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Larry Heinemann and others who tried to make literary art out of the horror that was Vietnam.

This isn't to say that war fiction has to be antiwar in order to be literature, it's just that it tends to work out that way. A literary or artistic sensibility is inherently incompatible with the mindless brutality of the battlefield, as all those British poems from World War I make so poignantly plain. The ferociously ambitious Harvard graduate Norman Mailer enlisted in the Army in the summer of 1943 as a private, his biographer Hilary Mills writes, because "he was determined to write the great war novel and didn't want the responsibility of rank." The result, "The Naked and the Dead," fell a long way short of his ambition and is now, as the excerpt in this anthology reminds us, almost unreadable, but for all the tough-guy swagger of Mailer's literary persona it is, at its core, an antiwar novel, just as is James Jones's far more accomplished "The Thin Red Line."

Even if you accept the premise that World War II was a "good" war, that doesn't make war itself good in the eyes of those who write about it. World War II was probably both unavoidable and necessary, but it still killed or wounded more than a million Americans, as well as uncountable millions more from other countries. Small wonder that ambiguity creeps into the fiction written about it, not merely the fiction with literary ambitions but also the best of the popular fiction, such as Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny," Thomas Heggen's "Mister Roberts" and Irwin Shaw's "The Young Lions."

Ambiguity can't be avoided by anyone who writes seriously about war. The recent history of what may well be the greatest literary "war story," Shakespeare's "Henry V," is instructive in that regard. During World War II, Laurence Olivier "was summoned to the Ministry of Information," as he recalled in "Confessions of an Actor," to make a film of the play "to enhance the British cause." The result was a superb piece of wartime propaganda, a heroic interpretation of the play and a celebration of the warrior king. It opened shortly after D-Day in 1944 and immediately became a huge hit, stirring the flames of patriotism in England and support for the war throughout the Allied nations, eventually earning Olivier a special Academy Award "for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director."

Four and a half decades later Kenneth Branagh turned his hand to the same play. Determined to be the Olivier of the next generation of British actors, Branagh acted in and directed a "Henry V" that was shaped not by the exigencies of wartime but by the antiwar legacy of Vietnam. Whereas Olivier's battlefield at Agincourt is sunlit and beautiful, Branagh's is dark, spattered with mud and blood. My own preference is for the Olivier version, but Branagh's film is excellent and his ambiguous interpretation of the play's statement about war has its own validity.

Speaking of ambiguity, there is a curious omission in "The Vintage Book of War Fiction." Not a single novel or story about the Cold War is excerpted or even mentioned, yet a case can be made that some of the best 20th-century war fiction is set in that conflict and draws its deep moral seriousness from its pervasive ambiguity. Too often the literati dismiss the novels of le Carre as spy thrillers, but the best of them -- "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," "The Honorable Schoolboy," "Smiley's People" -- are by any reasonable standard works of literature. The same can be said of the best work of le Carre's American counterparts, W.T. Tyler, Robert Littell (whose "Defection of A.J. Lewinter" has just been reprinted in hardcover by Overlook Press), Alan Furst and Charles McCarry, whose "Shelley's Heart" ranks with le Carre's finest work.

The dark, shadowed world of the Cold War was perfect for serious writers, because it raised many of the great themes -- most particularly loyalty and betrayal -- with which novelists, poets and dramatists had wrestled for centuries in work about those more placid aspects of the human condition, domestic and social life. Perhaps the war on terrorism will provide similarly fruitful raw material for other writers, though history -- literary history, that is -- leaves no doubt that the odds are against it.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com