The War Books Lull

R.H.Mottram thought it necessary to preface Sixty Four! Ninety Four! (1925) with an apology for writing a war novel at a time when such books were not wanted. Ian Hay does something similar in the preface to The Willing Horse (also 1925).

Mottram’s sense of the publishing climate might have come from his experience with The Spanish Farm, which (despite the endorsement of Galsworthy) had been rejected by several publishers before being taken up by Chatto and Windus. Despite the spectacular success of some war novels (such as Tell England) there was a definite prejudice against them in parts of the publishing industry.

Of course, serious War fiction was published in the twenties, including some of the very best (Mottram, Manning, Montague, Ford, etc.) but there was definitely a lull. Why? Was it because of publishers, or readers, or the writers themselves?

One frequently offered explanation is the psychological one. Herbert Read wrote in 1930:

All who had been engaged in the war, all who had lived through the war years, had for more than a decade refused to consider their experience. The mind has a faculty for dismissing the débris of its emotional conflicts until it feels strong enough to deal with them. The war, for most people, was such a conflict, and they never got “straight” on it. Now they feel ready for the emotional reckoning and All Quiet was the touch that released this particular mental spring.

This ties in with Freudian-influenced thinking about the repression of war experience. Elaine Showalter used Freudian language to describe the twenties as a “latency period” when the war was forgotten.

Which is pretty much nonsense. The twenties was a decade devoted to the process of remembering. Every town and village built its war memorial. Millions made solemn pilgrimages to the Cenotaph in London, and tens of thousands visited the battlefields and graves of France and Belgium. Films reconstructing episodes from the war (like Walter Summers’s Ypres) were extremely popular, and generals’ memoirs sold well.

Despite this, publishers were wary of war novels. Here are some possible reasons. It’s not an exhaustive list, and I’d welcome suggestions for additions.

The shift to fact
Non-fiction books about the war appeared in large quantities throughout the twenties. In “the war of the memoirs” politicians and soldiers tried to claim credit for themselves while shifting blame onto others. Accounts of the war by journalists such as Philip Gibbs also sold well.
During the War years fiction had offered to perform a truth-telling role – giving an account of war experience at a time when factual information was censored. Now the facts of war could be stated more directly, so fiction was less necessary.

A change in fantasies
War inevitably played a smaller part in the fantasy life of the homebound reader. The early twenties show a boom in books about travel to exotic locations.

Women readers
The majority of the novel-reading public (and especially of the library-using public) was female. These were perceived by publishers as being less interested in the war. Publishers such as Hodder deliberately employed women readers, who would be in tune with the taste of the female reading public.

An unsold glut
During the war there had been a plenitude of war-related books. After the war did numbers of these still sit on booksellers’ shelves, looking dated, so that publishers’ reps would be told “We’ve got quite enough war books, thank you”?

The desire for novelty
What kind of war books sold really well? Those presenting a new angle, such as the books by Lowell Thomas and Robert Graves that created the Lawrence of Arabia myth. Novels set in unusual locations (such as Philip Macdonald’s Patrol) could do well.

Disillusion
The War hadn’t ended War, and twenties Britain didn’t look much like a land fit for heroes. Many ways of writing about the war endorsed a myth of national unity that must have looked rather unconvincing at the time of the General Strike.

The desire for context
War didn’t drop out of twenties fiction, though there are fewer books that are specifically “war books.” There are many where the war is shown as one episode (often a culminating one) in a longer narrative. This can be seen as an effort to put the war into context; frequently war is shown not as an exception to the pattern of life, but as an episode revealing that pattern. Novels as different as Tell England and Montague’s Rough Justice show a process of education, and the results of that education tested in war. Family sagas like Sadleir’s Privilege show war as a catalyst that speeds up the historical processes at work on the family.
Key texts of the “war books boom” of the late twenties (All Quiet, Journey’s End ) would reverse this trend, once again presenting the War as exception to history, rather than as a part of it.