Not forgotten

I have spent several days watching documentaries about the 1918 influenza pandemic.  They vary in quality and breadth, but all agree on two things.  The H1N1 virus took advantage of a perfect storm of circumstances -- a protracted war, displaced populations, people on the move between continents, no understanding of viruses, malnutrition in Europe especially, medical helplessness, news censorship.  And the pandemic has been largely forgotten.

No longer, of course.  Books were written to take advantage of the centenary, as publishers are wont to do, and now readers devour them for clues to our own future.  "Spanish flu" came back and back until 1920, which is not encouraging.  The advances made by science, from electron microscopes to personal protective equipment, are of limited value in the face of populist stupidity.  I think I know why there are so few monuments to the victims:  where we could claim to have "won" the war (and there is no doubt that American forces turned the tide in 1918 against the last great German offensive), in no sense did we "win" the pandemic.  It just...went away, as silently as it had appeared.  It's hard to hold a victory parade for that.  Instead of orderly cemeteries like the ones in France, poppies waving row on row, many flu victims were buried in mass graves in their own country.

Art is supposed to be our coping mechanism.  I can't tell you how many analyses of Camus's The Plague I've come across, arguing about whether it's really an allegory of fascism.  Some readers have reached back to Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, a more straightforward account of bubonic plague from a time when we hadn't figured out the whole rat-flea vector of Yersinia pestis.  Of 1918, which killed between fifty and a hundred million people depending on your source, art is skimpy.  Tin Pan Alley seems to have exhibited little or no interest.  I found two blues recordings, Blind Willie Johnson's "Jesus Is Coming Soon" and Essie Jenkins's "1919 Influenza Blues."  The essence of both is that the world is ending and you'd better repent.

There is a harrowing account of the influenza experience by Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Porter herself barely survived).  It's mentioned in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (does anyone still read Wolfe?).  I'd be happy to hear of contemporaries who had something to add.  Hemingway was busy writing about the war, Fitzgerald the Jazz Age, Stein whatever she was writing about, but if they dealt with the Spanish Lady I missed it.  Maybe someone will publish a new study showing that Eliot's Waste Land is really about the post-flu world.

With all the film expended on the Great War from J'Accuse to Paths of Glory, you'd expect someone to remember the flu.  Maybe a vast ward of young men struggling for breath or corpses piled in corridors was too awful for movie audiences.  Or awful in the wrong way, unheroic and bad for morale.  In one of his greatest poems, Wilfred Owen describes a soldier who took too long to put on his gas mask and died "guttering, choking, drowning."  He bitterly recites "the old lie" he was taught in Latin class:  "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."   Like that, but worse somehow.  No wonder we have no monuments on the National Mall to the 675,000 Americans who died from the virus.  And now another virus is teaching us history.