‘Rope’ and War Poets

Sometimes you think you know a text and then discover that you don’t.

On the basis of Hitchcock’s 1948 film, I assumed that I knew Rope. Based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 play, the movie shows a pair of young men who commit  murder as an acte gratuite, and invite their victim’s relatives round to a party to their flat, serving canapes from the trunk in which the body is locked. James Stewart plays the university lecturer whose shallow Nietschean philosophy inspired their crime, and who becomes shocked into a firmer morality by discovering what they have done. It’s interesting, but not one of Hitchcock’s very best. A bit slow, because of his ‘ten-minute take’ experiment, and James Stewart doesn’t fit the part he is supposed to play.

Reading Michael Billington’s review of the new production of Hamilton’s play at the Almeida, I realised that I didn’t know it at all. Instead of James Stewart’s university lecturer, there is a disenchanted war poet:

Rupert, a war-damaged Wildean poet filled with ennui, is the play’s most original creation. Bertie Carvel suavely demonstrates that Rupert is a man who minces everything but his words, but also reminds us that the play is really about the character’s moral awakening: Carvel offers a riveting portrait of an affected nihilist who discovers the hollowness of his credo, that the slaughter of 1914-18 has devalued individual murder.

Intrigued by this, I picked up a copy of the script while I was in London.

Ernie Lotinga Sculpted

I’ve just had a busy couple of days in London, with not much time for rambling, but one thing I had to do was check the sculpted frieze on the Odeon Cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue (formerly the Saville Theatre). This was designed by Gilbert Bayes for the opening of the theatre ion 1931, and represents ‘Theatre Through the Ages’. This includes everything from Greek tragedy to Punch and Judy, and has been ably analysed by Chris Partridge on his Ornamental Passions blog.

The reason that I had to see it was that the twentieth century is represented by two figures, who bookend the rest. The first, fairly predictably for 1931, is Sybil Thorndike as Saint Joan. Shaw’s play doesn’t have quite the reputation today that it had eighty years ago, but the recent production at the National showed that it is still effective and thought-provoking  when performed well.

The other bookend is less predictable. Ernie Lotinga was a favourite of T.S. Eliot, but is almost forgotten today. A huge star at the time when Music Hall was evolving into Variety, but never quite a Music Hall performer, Lotinga starred first in comic sketches, and then in full-length farces that toured the variety circuit, with enormous success. A while back I was reading twenties copies of the show business newspaper, The Era, and there’s no doubt that at that time, Lotinga was the king of comedy.

We Will Not Fight

Oxford bookshops are closing at an alarming rate. Waterfield’s last month, Borders this week. The upside of Borders going broke was that they had a spectacular sale to get rid of stock. This meant not only that I solved a whole load of Christmas present problems extremely economically; I also bought a bundle of books for myself.
One of these was We Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of World War One’s Conscientious Objectors by Will Ellsworth-Jones. The author of this very readable history has done some good research, especially at the Liddle Collection of the University of Leeds, which has enabled him to trace the careers of several ‘conchies’ during and after the War. A central narrative is that of the Brocklesby brothers – Phil an officer and Bert an ‘absolutist’ who refused to do any work even remotely connected with the War effort, and who ended up in jail.

Submitted!

Today was the day.
I took two copies of my thesis into Brookes, had them spiral bound by the rather impressive ladies in the Print Room, and then went to the Graduate Office to hand the thing in.
In the Print Room I was at the head of a small queue, and felt rather good when a young undergraduate with a PDF to print off saw the vast bulk of my research; she said, ‘Wow! What’s that? A Ph.D. thesis?’
I admitted that it was.
‘It’s enormous. How long did that take to write? A year?’
Four and a half years actually, and now it’s been submitted into the system, and is at the mercy of the examiners. They will take a couple of months to find fault with it, and then there will be the viva…
So what shall I do now?
I’ve got plenty to keep me occupied – two book reviews to write, and a chapter for a conference book to revise. I’ve also got to decide whether I’ll submit an abstract for a paper at the forthcoming John Buchan conference. I fancy writing about his historical novels of the twenties, but I haven’t quite decided on my angle yet.
So that’s the short term busy enough – but what about the long term? I’m hooked on research, and I’m going to want another big project soon. Should I stick to the War period or branch out?
And what about this blog? Great War fiction has been the subject of my thesis, and I’m sure I’ll still find things to say on that subject – but maybe I’ll rename it ‘Great War Fiction Plus’ and allow myself even more scope to stray from the narrow subject. I’ll have to think about it.

Harberton

After C.W. Daniel had been convicted under DORA for publishing Despised and Rejected, the novel about homosexuals and pacifists, he received this letter:

20.X.18

Dear Mr Daniel,
As I say, I can only hope that the enormous fine inflicted on you, for no offence at all, may serve as an advert, at all events, to that book. In self-defence, you are now bound to push the book for all its worth – as soon as you can – to get back as much as possible.
The fact of the book possessing salacious tendencies is to this extent an advantage; for curiosity draws countless readers to read it, apart from the actual Bulgarians.
Personally, I see no harm in ‘rogering’ whatever you want to. It’s quite natural, and dogs are not in the least particular. Nor are the Turks. The outcry on that subject is vulgar and middle-class.

I am yours,

Harberton

Despised and Rejected

I’ve been off to Amsterdam for a few days, during which time I managed to take a look at the archive of the publisher C.W. Daniel (at the International Institute of Social History there.) He was a Tolstoyan pacifist, and a brave and principled man. He went to prison in 1916 rather than pay a fine for publishing the pamphlet ‘A Knock-out Blow’, which was an appalled response to Lloyd George’s determination that the British should fight to a complete victory, and never consider a negotiated settlement.
He was also tried and convicted under D.O.R.A for publishing Despised and Rejected by ‘A.T.Fitzroy’ (Rose Allatini), a novel about a group of bohemian homosexuals who are also pacifists. It was prosecuted for its pacifist sentiments, but the sexual unorthodoxy played a large part in the press campaign against it, which provoked the authorities into a prosecution several months after the book’s publication. (By and large they preferred not to prosecute works of fiction, if only because this allowed them to claim a moral superiority over Germany, where censorship was far stricter.)
The piece in the archive that most surprised me was a leaflet circulated by Daniel after the trial, in which he wrote protesting his innocence of the book’s sexual import:

I was assured by the author that the love between the hero and his friend was analogous to that between David and Jonathan. I did not see what has since been pointed out – that certain passages are open to an immoral interpretation.
Personally, I would rather that any book were burnt than that I should be party to lending support to depravity of either the homo-sexual or the contra-sexual types. And I think that I am entitled to say that the invariable influence of my publications has been considerably above, not below, the conventional moral standards.
[…]
I was drawn to publish ‘Despised and Rejected’ because of its pacifist sentiment; but I would not have published it had I believed that there was a risk of prosecution under D.O.R.A.

William Golding on War Poets and Georgians

In 1975 William Golding wrote a review of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory for The Guardian. It’s a very perceptive review (noting something I’ve noticed, that in Fussell’s treatment of his authors ‘a note that can only be called patronising creeps in’; Fussell doesn’t trust his authors to tell the whole truth about the War, which is why he brings in those jarring sections about American absurdists).
This paragraph of the review, about the war poets, is striking, though I don’t agree with it:

On the Western Front, these by no means major poets experienced so violent, indded so literally explosive, a dissociation of all the elements of normal living that they passed their time, emotionally speaking, in a kind of white-hot plasma. There, the satiny irrelevance of the Georgian poetasters was burned away and the forked creatures screamed the unspeakable. The age of irony had begun.

I’m currently reading Merryn Williams’s new anthology The Georgians 1901-1930. I’m writing a review of it that will appear elsewhere, so won’t say much about it here, except that one of the things the anthology does brilliantly is show how the best war poetry grew out of the Georgian method (intelligibility, avoidance of archaism, traditional form). Hardy’s example inspired the Georgians, and it was Hardy that Sassoon read voraciously while in the trenches.
Merryn Williams’s selection goes beyond the poets included in Marsh’s anthologies to claim other good poets for the Georgian tradition – notably Charlotte Mew, Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney. The latter two dominate the last third of the anthology, and show that far from being irrelevant, it was Georgian poetry that gave them the language and techniques through which the War could be described.

Mr Sterling Sticks It Out

During the Great War, a work of fiction had to be pretty extreme to attract the attention of the authorities, who had their work cut out regulating the Press (and were sometimes criticised for only dealing with the London papers, and letting the provincial press go more or less unchecked). A pacifist novel like Theodora Wilson-Wilson’s The Last Weapon of 1916 could be published by C.W.Daniel, the Tolstoyan publisher, without being prosecuted. (This is a work of religious pacifism, and gets very allegorical, but contains a very strong chapter depicting a soldier who has returned from the front, where he has done terrible things. He angrily confronts the minister who had persuaded him to enlist because it would be doing Christ’s work.)
Even Despised and Rejected by ‘A.T.Fitzroy’ (Rose Allatini) was on sale for several months before a press campaign forced the authorities into prosecuting it. (This was a novel that compounded its offence by being about young men who were not only pacifist but homosexual, a provoking combination in the year of Pemberton-Billing’s campaign against treason and depravity in high places.)
The government prided itself on allowing more freedom of expression in Britain than there was in Germany, and on the whole seem to have been happiest when difficult cases were not thrust upon their attention.
That was what happened, however, with Harold Begbie’s Mr Stirling Sticks It Out. Begbie was a popular novelist who had written rousing recruiting poems at the start of the War:

Shooting Prisoners

When Charles Yale Harrison’s Generals Die in Bed was published in 1930 it aroused much criticism in Canada, partly because of the hero’s relationship with a prostitute, which I mentioned yesterday. One critic deplored the representation of the Canadian soldier as

a coarse-minded, profane creature, seeking only the solace of loose women or the courage of strong liquor [....] On the whole, such literature, offered to our avid youth, is an irrevocable insult to those gallant men who lie in French and Belgian graves.

Even more sensitive was the issue of Canadian soldiers commiting a war crime by shooting prisoners.
In Harrison’s novel, the men get a pep-talk before battle:

Our Colonel speaks to us. We like him. He has risen from the ranks.
‘I’m not saying for you not to take prisoners. That’s against international rules. All that I’m saying is that if you take any, we’ll have to feed ‘em out of our rations…’
Some of us laugh at this. Most of us are silent, however.

Canadians and Prostitutes

(Book covers courtesy of Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site)

In a recent post on Arnold Bennett’s The Pretty Lady, I quoted the 1917 parliamentary debate on prostitution and its effect of the soldiers. During this, Col Sir Hamar Greenwood reflected on the scandal of seven thousand ‘clean Canadian boys’ needing venereal treatment after a stay in England:

During a recent visit to the Dominion I met many fathers and mothers whose boys had been sent back to Canada debilitated and ruined for life because they had been enmeshed by some of the harpies who are still allowed to go very near the camps, and especially in this great Metropolis, and again and again these parents have said to me, ‘We do not mind our boys dying on the field of battle for old England, but to think that we sent our sons to England to come back to us ruined in health, and a disgrace to us, to them, and to the country, is something that the Home Country should never ask us to bear.

Brian Busby has kindly sent me in the direction of a 1929 novel by Peregrine Acland All Else is Folly, which presents the relations between a Canadian soldier and the ladies he meets in London in a more nuanced light.