“The Bomb Shop”

A book I’m investigating at the moment is ‘D’ Company and Black ‘Ell: Two Plays by Miles Malleson, published in 1916 by the radical publisher Henderson. The police raided Henderson’s shop in the Charing Cross Road, and all copies in stock were confiscated under the Defence of the Realm Act.
Black ‘Ell is a strong little one-act play about a returning soldier. It begins with his family anxious for his return; then they receive news that he has been awarded a medal for killing six Germans and are overjoyed. But when he does arrive, he is a nervous wreck full of self-disgust, horrified by the thought that he has taken human life. A difficult theme for 1916 – though it is hard to see why the plays were seized, while Malleson’s pamphlets, making the same argument about the sanctity of human life, were not.
Malleson, of course, became an actor, and a very well-known presence in films of the forties and fifties. He is Canon Chasuble in Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and – my favourite – the furtive vicar buying porn in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It’s hard to connect that tubby embarrassed presence with impassioned anti-war propaganda, but then, life is full of surprises.
I had seen references to Henderson’s shop as “The Bomb Shop”, but thought that this was just a nickname applied by the sceptical, making fun of its radicalism. I was rather surprised therefore to see the term actually used on the back of the book.

The Cavalry Went Through

If you want a really good read, you can’t do better than Bernard Newman’s The Cavalry Went Through (1930). I’ve whizzed through it in a day; it’s definitely one of the unputdownables.

The novel is one of the first (actually the first?) in the genre of virtual history. It is the supposed memoirs of an officer (called Newman) who took a crucial role in the Great War of 1914-1917, and explains how the British, led by an unconventional and individualistic general, developed new tactics that broke the trench stalemate and scored an overwhelming military victory that left the German armies decimated. It comes complete with mock-scholarly footnotes referring to the more detailed and scholarly works that chronicle this triumph.

Newman imagines a colonial administrator, Duncan, who fights the Germans in West Africa, and discovers a genius for military thinking. C.E.Montague, in Disenchantment (1922) describes the naive trust that the soldiers of 1914 had in their generals:

One of the heavenly things on which the New Army had almost counted, in its green faith, was that our higher commands would have genius… We had indulged that insane expectation, just as we had taken it for granted that this time the nation would be as one man, and nobody “out to do a bit for himself on the quiet.

The generals by and large did not have genius, though many had ability, and the dreadful impasse of trench warfare dragged on into a war of attrition. As Montague could not help feeling, though:

Yes, there is always an impasse until genius shows a way through.

Bernard Newman must have felt the same, and in this book shows how genius could have managed it.

J.R.Ackerley and the censor

I was in London (Boris’s London!) again on Wednesday and before going to Major Barbara had time for a short session with the some of the Lord Chamberlain’s papers at the British Library. One of the best plays of the twenties is J.R. Ackerley’s Prisoners of War - I wish some enterprising producer would revive it.
It is about a group of British officers in Switzerland, prisoners of war, but paroled on their honour not to go back to Britain or to take any further part in the war. They hang around a dull resort feeling useless and frustrated, and getting on one another’s nerves. The play is based on Ackerley’s own experience, and was at least partly written while he was a prisoner. The play is a tautly-written study of the tensions between the men, and is striking for its picture of the intense and rocky relationship between the main character, Captain Conrad, and a flashy and unstable young man with whom he is clearly in love. The edition that I own is in a Methuen collection of Gay Plays, and the homosexual implications are definitely evident to a modern reader. They were less evident in 1925. The play was originally put on - as often happened with serious plays at the time - for a single Sunday performance by the “Three Hundred Club”. This was run by a lady called Mrs Whitworth, who wanted to give a chance to plays that might not otherwise receive a performance. She had read and liked the play, but when it was in rehearsal she became alarmed. There were rumours that this was a “homosexual play” and she received requests for club membership from people she did not know and did not like the sound of. She re-read the play, and was horrified when she saw it in the new, sinister light. In particular she wanted to cut an episode where Conrad strokes his friend’s hair. She was worried that the play would disgust the lady subscribers to the “Three Hundred Club.”

Major Barbara at the National

Major Barbara is among my least favourite Shaw plays. A few years back I taught it to an A-level class; I felt that it had flashes of brilliance, and some very good characterisation (The class enjoyed Lady Britomart hugely, I remember.) But many of the paradoxes seemed willed and often mechanical, and the treatment of the arms trade seemed irresponsible (Beatrice Webb described the play as “gambling with people’s emotions”).

So I went to see Nicholas Hytner’s production at the National Theatre with more curiosity than expectation. Last year St Joan had been a triumph in the Olivier Theatre. Could Major Barbara in all its wordiness work there?

Tunnels under Arras

For a BBC news clip about British Army WW1 tunnels under Arras, now opened to the public, click here.

There’s a good full article about the tunnels on the Daily Mail website, from which I gathered this photo.

The tunnels are part of La Carrière Wellington memorial museum at Arras.

The Myth of the War

Whenever a writer needs an image that suggests doomed struggle, incompetent leadership and meaningless slaughter, he reaches for a historical parallel - and the one he always finds is the Great War. Andrew Gimson, in a rather well-written article in today’s Telegraph, pretends to have sympathy with the poor bloody infantry of Labour back-benchers after the recent local elections:

And it is true that there are few predicaments less enviable than crouching at the bottom of a trench with Mr Brown, waiting for him to launch one of his botched attacks.

Even Mr Brown’s courage becomes, in these circumstances, a liability: he leads his troops over the top at the very time when the only sensible thing is to sit tight and devise a new plan of attack.

Any Labour MP who watched Mr Brown’s performance on the Andrew Marr show yesterday morning will have been driven to the conclusion that the only sensible thing to do with this Prime Minister is to shoot him in the back. For if Labour’s situation looked bad before Mr Brown mounted this operation, it looked a lot worse afterwards.

There was a pitiful absence of any element of surprise: Mr Brown launched his offensive long after dawn and everyone could see him stumbling, revolver in hand, towards the enemy lines. He was a sitting duck.

This is vivid and enjoyable writing, but the historical parallel has just a couple of flaws:

Le Chagrin et la Pitié

Anyone who wants to think about the politics of memory in the twentieth century can’t do better than watch the DVD of Le Chagrin et la pitié, Marcel Ophuls’ documentary about France during the Vichy years. Made twenty-five years after the events it describes, it is mostly made up of interviews - with French, Germans and English, with collaborators and resisters, with those who remember and those who prefer to forget.

As I watched the film this afternoon, I couldn’t help noticing how the memory of the First World War was crucial to people’s understanding of what happened. Most importantly, it was Petain’s reputation as the hero of Verdun that allowed the majority of the French to believe that their separate peace was honourable. There is a snatch of interview near the start of the film that suggests that ex-poilus’ organisations were used to buttress the Vichy regime.

The film includes archive footage of Hitler touring the sights of Paris, after the French had surrendered, and memory of Versailles is clearly adding to his satisfaction. For the French, on the other hand, the memory of Versailles was a bitter one. they had fought in the trenches for four years, for a peace that had not solved the Europen problem, but had brought them to their current position. No wonder Petain’s rhetoric of peace and collaboration found receptive ears.

Pipers and a Dancer

Sometimes you open a book by a writer you don’t know, you read a paragraph, and you think: “Where has this writer been all my life?”

Stella Benson’s Pipers and a Dancer (1924) begins:

Ipsie suddenly stopped speaking and heard with horror the echo of her own voice saying, “You see, I lost my three brothers in the War.” “How damn pathetic,” she thought, and she reminded herself for the thousandth time that she had determined to be reserved.

Ipsie is Benson’s heroine and struggles continuously (and unsuccessfully) with the urge to present herself to the others as someone interesting, or dramatic, or pathetic; she calls this desire her inner Showman:

Blogging - with extra serendipity

This blog runs on the excellent WordPress system, which has given me reliable service for the past two years. And I’ve just realised - it’s exactly two years today that I started putting my thoughts online.
Why do I do it? Some reasons:

• sending my thoughts through my fingers and onto the keyboard helps me to get them straight in my head - and because there’s a potential audience I have to express myself a bit more clearly than when just scribbling notes to myself.
• mine is a bit of a niche subject - so the Internet is a good way to make contact with others interested in it.
• feedback can come from the most interesting places. Most subjects that i write about bring in some intelligent feedback, as blog comments or as emails. I’m particularly pleased to have heard from descendants of some of the novelists I write about, and a descendant of a family that D.H.Lawrence libelled.
• when I write something really daft, someone usually corrects me, which is good for my soul.

The Green Hat

“But, then, one goes to a nightclub to think, to be alone, to be comfortable, to eat a haddock.”

I like that sentence immensely, but really I just can’t get along with the rest of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. (1924). It gives a very florid picture of post-war rootlessness, and so I ought to be interested by it - but the style is so… lubricious, that’s the word - constantly licking its lips and hinting at scandalous revelations, but never going beyond a hint. I have quite an appetite for popular fiction of the twenties, but this is one I may leave unfinished.