Shephard and Motion

In 2002, Ben Shephard wrote A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914 -1994. This is a work of serious history, examining a wide range of sources and attempting to get beyond conventional ideas about war neuroses. He looks at these in their historical context, in a way that illuminates the behaviour both of soldiers and of doctors. He writes in his introduction:

The clinical literature of the war neuroses is so rich that it is easy for the historian to pull together a collage of horror and pathos. But to understand why, in the past, ordinary people were able to come through the horrors of war, we have to look at the overall record, not just at the gripping psychopathology. To get at the truth, case histories must be reconciled with another, less enticing body of writing: official histories, war diaries, regimental histories, Pentagon memoranda – dull, managerial, impersonal in tone and full of military euphemism, the ‘tough school’. (xxi)

It is therefore unsurprising that he was annoyed when Sir Andrew Motion filleted his book for quotations to make up exactly the kind of ‘collage of horror and pathos’ that he thought inadequate to the subject. It appeared in Saturday’s Guardian, and although it was advertised as an original work, it was actually a poem of eight sections, five of which were almost exact transcriptions of quotations from Shephard’s book, while the others were taken from Siegfried Sassoon.

Ford on ‘Folly’

Thanks to Brian Busby, who pointed me in the direction of All Else is Folly, by Peregrine Acland. Abebooks found me a reasonably-priced copy, which arrived this morning.
I probably won’t read the novel for a while, but I have already taken a look at the introduction, by Ford Madox Ford. In this he does the usual thing of saying that the novel he is introducing is a very good book (‘the convincing, mournful and unrelieved account of a simple soul’s suffering in the late war’). He also has some good words for the Canadians, claiming ‘I saw a good deal of the Canadians in France, and liked them really more than any other troops, my own battalion naturally excepted.’
But he also praises the novel for containing a hero ‘as normal in temperament and circumstances as it is possible to be’, on the grounds that a ‘normal’ hero who is ‘neither hypersensitized nor callous; neither Adonis nor Caliban; neither illiterate nor of the intelligentsia’ will be identified with by ‘normal’ readers.

For the defect of all novel-writing is that, as a rule, the novelist – Heaven help him – must needs select unusual, hypersensitized souls to endure the vicissitudes that he is pleased to make them endure, and that makes him lose half the game with the normal reader. I remember very well – for I am not pleading Not guilty! thinking to myself when about half way through a novel about the late war, “Well, my central character is such a queer, unusual fellow that I do not see how anyone is going much to sympathise with him in his misfortunes.

Well, I think most of us do manage to sympathise with Tietjens, even when he is being absurdly gentlemanly even to the vile Sylvia, but undoubtedly he is odd, and it’s good to know that Ford realised the fact.
Mind you, I wonder if this is Ford musing that he has missed the literary boat. Some Do Not was begun in the early twenties, and has much in common with best-sellers of the time like Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes (a hero who represents the best of England going off to fight, while those who represent the worst profit from the War. Then the noble hero is blamed unfairly for a scandal, but he holds his tongue.) By 1931 a new model of war book was fashionable, based on All Quiet and Journey’s End. It was now the literary fashion to write about the sufferings not of ‘hypersensitized souls’, but of ordinary soldiers. What Ford is praising Acland for writing has become the orthodox way of writing about the War – and Ford must feel that his own tetralogy now seems a little old-fashioned.

The Chickens of War

An interesting story from War Illustrated of June 24, 1916 , attested as true by a soldier stationed on a farm in France:

The men there often heard a sound as of a falling shell, not followed by the burst, and they concluded that the shell must be a ‘dud’. But one day, sitting in the farmyard, one soldier heard the sound repeated twice within a couple of minutes, close at hand, and on the second occasion found that a hen was responsible for it. Immediately afterwards a cock replicated the exact imitation of a falling shell. Comrades corroborated the observation, and the French farmer assured them that the fowls had learnt to make the noise since the war began, and sometimes kept it up for a long time.

The author of the article (who was clearly more of a Lamarckian than a Darwinist) reflects:

It would indeed be strange if the accomplishment were transmitted to these fowls’ progeny, and in future peaceful days hens perpetuated the memory of the Great War by roaring like a falling shell every time they laid an egg.

 

Sassoon Archive saved for U.K.

There’s an article in today’s Guardian about the excellent news that the National Heritage Memorial  Fund has allocated  £550,000 to ensure that Siegfried Sassoon’s archive stays in this country.

The only downside to this  is that the Guardian has appealed to the usual suspects for quotations, and some of these are a bit off-target. Andrew Motion, for example, says: “It is not only good news as a symbolic statement, but a lot of the material in the archive forms the backbone of our understanding of what it was like on the frontline during world war one.”

Really? But in the words of his biographer, Jean Moorcroft Wilson:

Remarkable though it may seem, Sassoon, who was in the army from the day War broke out to the day it ended and had the reputation of being a fire-eater, spent barely a month out of a possible fifty-one in the front line.

The Pretty Lady

The Pretty Lady (Churnet Valley Books, £14.95. ISBN 1904546689)
John Shapcott’s excellent new edition of The Pretty Lady raises the question why this extraordinary book has not been generally recognised as one of the most original and penetrating twentieth-century novels. Even Bennett enthusiasts like John Carey and John Lucas have been a bit sniffy about it. Recently, though, Margaret Drabble has written in the TLS about the novel as ‘a “feverish” engagement with the violence and sexuality of modernity’, and Shapcott’s introduction to the new edition  (whose text is a facsimile of Cassell’s nicely printed 1918 first edition) provides an excellent analysis of the book’s visual symbolism, in a way that shows how closely worked and considered the book is beneath its easy readable surface.
It’s the readability that has told against the book among twentieth-century academics, of course.  Bennett the best-seller (The Pretty Lady sold 30,000 copies within six months) offers little to those who make their living by explication, unlike his arch-critic Woolf; untangling her gossamer complexities has made many a career.
The subject-matter of The Pretty Lady was what caused problems for the book at first. It is the story of a French prostitute, Christine, who has escaped from wartime Ostend, and set herself up in business in London. Though a refugee, she demands no pity; she is self-sufficient, practical and realistic.
Bennett began writing the novel in May 1917, when the nation was in the throes of a moral panic on the subject, helped on its way by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote this letter to The Times:

Sir – Is it not possible in any way to hold in check the vile women who at present prey upon and poison our soldiers in London? A friend of mine who is a Special Constable in a harlot-haunted district has described to me how these harpies carry off the lonely soldiers to their rooms, make them drunk with the vile liquor which they keep there, and finally inoculate them, as likely as not, with one or other of those diseases which, thanks to the agitation of well-meaning fools, have had free trade granted to them amongst us? (The Times, Feb 6, 1917)

East London Theatre Archive

If you’re interested in theatre history, there’s a promising new website showing some of the holdings of the East London Theatre Archive.
It aims to give a picture of the flourishing theatrical culture of the East End, from 1820 to the present day, though it seems a bit patchy at the moment – I couldn’t find any material relating to Joan Littlewood, for example. In addition, the web coding keeps throwing up error messages. But there are already treasures online.
I was especially pleased to find a 1928 programme for Khaki at the Stratford Empire. This was the play that got its star, Ernie Lotinga, into such trouble with the censor in 1924. Lotinga’s policy was usually to produce a new play each year, tour it round the Moss circuit and then do a different one. I read an article in the show business magazine, The Era, in which he (half seriously, half boastfully) bemoans the fact that unlike the usual variety comic who can keep on relying on the same material, he, because he presents farces, has to constantly come up with complete new shows. The fact that Khaki was revived must be a sign of its popularity.
Here’s the 1928 programme:

Click on the image for a full-size version.

You Read it Here First

There’s a nice little piece by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian about that 1929 competition to predict the living novelists who would still be remembered and read in 2029.
I blogged about the competition a couple of weeks ago, having come upon it in the Manchester Guardian archive by chance. (I was looking for references to a man called Brett-Smith, and the search engine took me to this piece because it mentions Francis Brett-Young and Sheila Kaye-Smith. It’s the kind of serendipitous discovery that makes research so much fun – and so slow, if you’re as easily sidetracked as I am.) A couple of days later it got picked up by someone on Twitter who spread the word, and yesterday a link in a website called Rockpapershotgun brought the post more readers than any other in my blog’s normally uneventful history.
So is it just coincidence that Prof Sutherland (I critic whom I always enjoy reading, by the way) picked up the story at the same time? Or did he get it, directly or indirectly, from my blog? If so, an acknowledgement would have been nice.

Update (Nov 2):

I asked the Guardian reader’s editor about this, and received a prompt reply.
John Sutherland had picked the story up from Twitter, and had referenced this blog in his article, but the mention was edited out when the story was edited down to 300 words.
The Guardian have now restored the mention in the online version of the story, and  a brief statement of the facts has appeared in their Corrections and Clarifications column, which I think is a pretty handsome response on their part.

Social Death

I’ve been looking at the 1925 House of Commons debate about military executions, which gives some good insights into how the war was seen at the time.  The Labour M.P. Ernest Thurtle moved the amendment, making some very strong arguments, and citing some persuasive cases in evidence:

Case No. 1 is that of a private soldier and the charge against him, was that the accused, when proceeding with a party for work in the trenches, ran away owing to the bursting of a shell and did not afterwards rejoin his party. He was executed. Another private soldier, after going over the parapet with his company in an attack, absented himself while the attack was in progress, and remained absent until the following day. In a third case the accused, from motives of cowardice, left the trenches during a gas attack. The fourth case is that of a lad of 18½ years of age, who ran away from a trench which had been subjected to bombardment for six days. The battalion holding the trench had suffered heavy casualties. This boy, I am informed by one of his comrades, was known to the whole company as a bundle of nerves. He was executed. He enlisted in August, 1914, when he was only 17 years of age. I want to say, in fairness to the War Office, that they probably did not know his exact age. The lad, in his enthusiasm and his desire to serve his country, had deliberately over-stated his age, so probably they were not aware that he was only 17 when he enlisted.

Montague’s ‘Right Off the Map’

At the recent Utopian Spaces conference in Oxford, it cheered my heart to note that there were two papers on that most unjustly neglected writer, C.E.Montague. In particular, there was a paper on Montague’s 1927 novel, Right Off the Map, by Amy Cutler, who has posted it in full on her very promising new blog. This sparked my interest greatly, so I’ve been reading the book.
I’d heard of Right Off the Map before, but had read a disparaging comment somewhere that led me to think it wouldn’t be very good, or very relevant to my research. Moral: Don’t listen to disparaging comments.
Right Off the Map is set in Ria, an imaginary republic ruled by an elite of British stock. Next door is Porta, and a conflict is stirred up between the two by Bute, a profiteer who wants to sell war supplies to both sides. The novel tells the inglorious story of the war.

TLS: ‘England My England’

I’ve  a letter printed in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, adding to Bernard Bergonzi’s article last week about the D.H.Lawrence’s use of the Meynell family in England, My England (a subject that I have written about in this blog).
My letter (which you can read by clicking here) is about the way readers might have read the story when it first appeared in The English Review in 1915.