Jessie Pope’s ‘Love – On Leave’

Today I took at look at Love on Leave (1919), which I had seen referred to as a novel by the much-maligned Jessie Pope, and it turned out not to be a novel after all.

It is a book of short stories, and all the ones I read were love stories. (I could only manage so many at a sitting; the reading experience was rather like working through a very sickly box of chocs). Although the collection was published in 1919, I’d guess that they were in the magazines during the War. Since the publisher is Pearson, Pearson’s Magazine might be the place to find their original appearance.

The heroines are all  feisty young English girls, and the heroes are soldiers, many of them wounded. These girls fall for a man’s dark brown eyes, and they don’t care whether or not he’s got a wooden leg.

What I liked about the stories was that the heroines were so energetic. One races her crocked  lover off in a stolen wheelchair, away from her disapproving parents, so that they can get married. Another socks the hero on the jaw when she thinks he’s a spy (but he isn’t and they get paired off nicely in the end). Jessie the poetess , of course, is famous for bossing about  the wimpy men of England:

Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?
Who’ll toe the line for the signal to ‘Go!’?
Who’ll give his country a hand?
Who wants a turn to himself in the show?
And who wants a seat in the stand?
Who knows it won’t be a picnic – not much-
Yet eagerly shoulders a gun?
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
Come along, lads –
But you’ll come on all right –
For there’s only one course to pursue,
Your country is up to her neck in a fight,
And she’s looking and calling for you.

What these stories show that this was not a matter of sexual stereotyping – the men to go and play the game, while the girls stood by and watched. Jessie’s presentation of her heroines show that she expected her heroines to be as feisty as the men, and to take charge of the situation. The heroine of one story rejects a man because she believes he is socially impossible, but finds out that it is a case of mistaken identity, and he is actually marriageable.  As soon as he finds out, she is up and off to put things right and get her man.

These stories are a long way from serious literature, but I enjoyed them – in small doses.

Poor Old Jessie Pope

I sometimes feel that of all the victims of the  War, the one we should be sorriest for is Jessie Pope.

I’ve just finished marking A-Level scripts about Great War literature, and our modern judgmental teenagers have no doubt at all about what they think of Jessie. She is the villain of the War. Many candidates have harsh words for Generals (without exception condemned as unfeeling, incompetent and living in luxury while the men suffer) and Oh What a Lovely War was often adduced as incontrovertible proof that Douglas Haig was inhumanly eager to sacrifice lives wantonly, but their sins fade into insignificance besides those of Jessie.

She, according to the products of modern education, was hired by the government to write patriotic poems. These were so persuasive and potent that thousands of naive young men  enlisted entirely because of them, apparently having no idea that war might turn out to be more horrible than a game of football. (After the Battle of the Somme, all of these young men became disillusioned, and immediately stopped being patriotic, according to many candidates.)

In the minds of students, Jessie Pope was an amazingly powerful woman – ‘the most respected poet in England’, one of them told me. Another, writing of Helen Hamilton’s horrible hectoring Jingo-Woman, decided:  ‘This woman is probably Jessie Pope.’

The real Jessie, of course, was a writer of light verse and humorous articles for Punch and various newspapers, and of jolly children’s books like Tom, Dick and Harry: their Deeds and Misdeeds.

Had it not been for the war, her verse would now be utterly forgotten, but she would deserve an honoured place in literary history as the discoverer of Robert Tressell’s great socialist novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

WW1 for A-Level Literature

I have spent the last few weeks marking AS level scripts for the new AQA English Literature exam, Paper LTA1B, about literature of the First World War. So I thought I’d put a few hints and tips from a marker here, for the benefit of any teachers or students who might happen to find this blog.

I think the paper is a tricky one because it requires some basic historical understanding as well as literary knowledge. In answering Question One, students are given marks for relating an unseen passage not only to other texts, but also to a historical context.
Poorer candidates often fall down because they have no sense that they are writing about a very different world, and one where issues matter. It is hard for an examiner to find marks for the student who wrote: “Sassoon was not a great fan of the war and did not really agree with it.” This is a statement from the slacker politics of vague opinions about subjects you feel disconnected from – hardly seeming to belong to the same world as  Sassoon’s passion and courage.
When it comes to History, in almost every script I marked, futility rules. Teachers have given the students a historical framework (maybe based on the interpretation given in Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death ) that at the beginning of the War, men joined up in a spirit of mindless patriotism, which continued until the Battle of the Somme, after which everybody became disillusioned, and then nobody had any respect for the Generals.
Many are convinced that British participation in the War was a complete failure. Several students whose papers I marked were surprised that (in a letter to his mother set as an unseen passage for commentary) Owen  refers to successful attacks that gained their objectives. This does not tally, they say, with what they have read about the war. Some suggest that Owen was hiding the truth from his mother, and really the attack had been a disaster like all the others. There is very little recognition that this was a war that the British and their allies won. I strongly suspect that the historical knowledge of many teachers is hazy. Maybe I’ll produce a reading list for students to give their teachers, with texts like Gary Sheffield’s ‘Forgotten Victory’, Brian Bond’s The Unquiet Western Front and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory, which question the orthodox literary view that the War was entirely futile.

The Feet of the Young Men

At the excellent Stoke conference, someone mentioned the novel The Feet of the Young Men, by Herbert Tremaine. It struck me that this was a book I had never looked at, and should have done.
It was published in 1917, by C. W. Daniel, an interesting firm which printed a mixture of Tolstoyan-pacifist writings, and what might today be called ‘New Age’ material, about spirituality and vegetarianism. In 1918 it would be prosecuted for another novel, Despised and Rejected by ‘A.T.Fitzroy’ (Rose Allatini). The firm kept going, publishing tracts on alternative medicine mostly, until 2004, when it was taken over by Random House.
The Feet of the Young Men (subtitled ‘A Domestic War Novel’) is rather good. It’s about Harry, a young clerk who doesn’t want to become a soldier. He is not a burningly idealistic pacifist – he just feels no connection with the war, and is suspicious of the hysteria of 1914. He sees the marching men, and is scornful:

Well, it was a pose created by the hysteria of the press. Miserable papers overflowed, guttered with gush about ‘Tommy’; what a daredevil he was, what a brick he was, and how all the girls went mad about him, how he loved his cup of tea, how he always wore a smile. The khaki men – clerks, porters, teachers, students – were mesmerised into thinking that they must behave like those fictional Tommies.

Street Shrines

There’s an interesting article in the Telegraph about street shrines, in London and elsewhere, mostly commemorating the fallen, but sometimes simply honouring all those who went to fight.

I like this snippet of information:

This did not come without controversy. Prayers for the dead went against the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. J H Kensit of the Protestant Truth Society said that the shrines inspired idolatry, and he made a protest at the unveiling of a shrine at St Bartholomew the Great in 1917. Kensit was taken for a pacifist and nearly set upon by the crowd.

All this suggests that the process of memorialisation began before the Armistice, and that it was a grass-roots movement, later taken up officially yo produce the memorials and cenotaphs that adorn every town and village in the country.

The Leveller (in Up the Line to Death)

At the moment I’m marking A-Level papers on First World War Literature, which is an interesting job. When I’ve finished I’ll write a general piece with some hints and tips for students, and suggestions about how to avoid some common pitfalls.

The process has made me re-read carefully, for the first time in a long while, the most popular of the poetry set texts, Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death, first published in 1964, and revised in 1976 (with updates 1986 and 2007).

The anthology contains plenty of good poems, and is popular with teachers. This, I suspect, is why AQA keep it as a set text on their new syllabus. Alternatives are offerd (Scars on my Heart and the WW1 section of  Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry) but if the centres I have marked are anything to go by, Up the Line to Death rules.  This must partly be because of the tyranny of the stock cupboard. If a school has copies of this anthology to hand, why spend precious capitation on something new? (A major reason why the same old warhorses – Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men – are chosen every year for GSCE students to read, and more recent alternatives shunned.)

The limitations of Gardner’s anthology are well-known. He presents the war as a journey from unthinking jingoism to disillusionment; soldiers begin in Georgian innocence and end confronting horrors. There is an implication that all soldiers went through the same process of reaction and rejection as Siegfried Sassoon, whereas he was, of course, very atypical. Poets whose work does not fit this schematic pattern are left out – most notably Ivor Gurney. In many cases, the chronology is falsified to fit the pattern – so that a Richard Aldington war poem is included in the 1914 section, even though he did not enlist till conscripted in 1916. To have included Field Manoevres (rather a good poem) in the 1916 section of the anthology would have spoilt Gardner’s thesis that only dark and grim verse was written after the Somme.

A Forthcoming Anthology

Tim Kendall, whose War Poets Blog is always worth reading, will be editing an anthology of WW1 poetry for the Oxford World Classics series. He has asked for suggestions of poems to include, so do send him some.
For my own part, I don’t really think much of any anthology that doesn’t include this poem by A.P. Herbert of Hawke  Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. It’s about a visit to the trenches by the much-disliked General Shute, who discovered something nasty there:

The General inspecting the trenches
Exclaimed with a horrified shout,
‘I refuse to command a Division
Which leaves its excreta about.

But nobody took any notice
No one was prepared to refute,
That the presence of shit was congenial
Compared with the presence of Shute.

And certain responsible critics
Made haste to reply to his words
Observing that his Staff advisers
Consisted entirely of turds.

For shit may be shot at odd corners
And paper supplied there to suit,
But a shit would be shot without mourners
If somebody shot that shit Shute.

Valerie’s version

While I was off at the excellent Stoke conference the week before last, the BBC broadcast the climax of its poetry season, a long Arena programme about T.S.Eliot.

This was quite a good introduction for newcomers to the twentieth century’s most interesting poet, but there wasn’t much new, apart from a glimpse of the scrapbooks compiled and treasured by the second Mrs Eliot. Until now she has been rather miserly about allowing scholars access to Eliot’s archive, but recently she has changed her mind. There will be new editions of the poems, the letters and the uncollected prose – and to be going on with there is this TV programme.

The story of Eliot’s second marriage is well-known. In 1957, Eliot, in his late sixties, announced his marriage to Valerie, his adoring secretary, aged 30. Speaking as a bloke in his sixties, I can well understand why he did this, and the result seems to have been much happier than might have been expected. By all accounts they had a very good marriage, which lasted for eight years, until his death in 1965.

The Good Companions

Visiting London, I took the opportunity to book a research viewing at the British Film Institute, of a film I have wanted to see for years, Victor Savile’s 1933 version of The Good Companions.

It was as good as I’d hoped, and like so many other British movies of the period, left me wondering why nobody has bothered to issue it on DVD. Any American film of this quality, and with such stars, would surely be available.

The film sticks fairly closely to Priestley’s 1929 novel, and projects the same happy myth of a band of misfits coming together to run a Pierrot troupe.  It is a feast for nostalgics, but then the book and film had nostalgia built in from the start. Pierrot shows were disappearing from the beaches in the thirties, and variety itself was wilting against competition from the cinema.  One thing that struck me about the book (still there in the film, but less obviously) is that in creating his myth of England, Priestley had to write the War out of history. In the first chapters of the book, much is made of old Jess Oakroyd’s bravery in travelling South, out of familiar Yorkshire. None of his fellow workers, we are told, had ever gone so far.  Which is nonsense, of course, since even if working in the mill was a reserved occupation, some of the men there would surely have gone to France, or Mesopotamia, or Palestine, or farther afield.  But Priestley (who had had a pretty traumatic war himself) preferred to forget this temporarily, to create the effect of an ever-static Bruddersford society, which Oakroyd could bravely shun.

London, 1903

My visit to Stoke has got me thinking (even more than usual) about the way things were. Here is some film of London street scenes in 1903.

The film was posted on YouTube by the ever-excellent BFI, and I found it thanks to one of my very  favourite blogs, the West End Whingers.