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.

Most of that front-line experience was during the highly untypical first weeks of the Somme battle, and Sassoon was a most untypical soldier. For an understanding of what typical front-line experience meant, I’d suggest Max Plowman, maybe, or A.M.Burrage.

Then in the G2 section there is a piece by Michael Morpurgo, who has sentimentalised the War in Private Peaceful and other works. He begins his piece on Sassoon with an attention-grabbing paragraph about men shot at dawn for cowardice, and then adds:

As far as I know, Siegfried Sassoon didn’t write about these soldiers.

He goes on to suggest that Sassoon would have written indignantly about them if he’d thought of it, which seems dubious to me.  He didn’t after all,  show much sympathy for the ‘cold-footed useless swine’ in ‘The Hero’, though he offered compassion to the man’s mother, and shows plenty of fellow-feeling for the rather conventional officer who has tried to offer consolation:

‘Jack fell as he’d have wished,’ the Mother said,
And folded up the letter that she’d read.
‘The Colonel writes so nicely.’ Something broke
In the tired voice that quavered to a choke.
She half looked up. ‘We mothers are so proud
Of our dead soldiers.’ Then her face was bowed.

Quietly the Brother Officer went out.
He’d told the poor old dear some gallant lies
That she would nourish all her days, no doubt.
For while he coughed and mumbled, her weak eyes
Had shone with gentle triumph, brimmed with joy,
Because he’d been so brave, her glorious boy.

He thought how ‘Jack’, cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he’d tried
To get sent home, and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits. And no one seemed to care
Except that lonely woman with white hair.

There’s another ‘cold-footed’ character in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’. An officer who ‘had now lost control of himself’, he was stumbling back to Headquarters when he should have been going in the other direction. Sassoon ‘pulled out my automatic pistol, and told him that if he didn’t go straight back [...] I’d shoot him.’ It was for the man’s own good, Sassoon argues, since he saved him from being court-martialled for cowardice. But all the same, the attitude seems pretty different from the one implied by Morpurgo.

Morpurgo puts the icing on his rhetorical cake by claiming:

Sassoon had the courage to say what, at the time, you absolutely couldn’t say, and to some extent, still can’t: that there was no point in just going on fighting and fighting.

But this Remembrancetide, that is exactly what almost everyone will be saying about the Great War. Sassoon’s attitude, once brave and extraordinary, has become the conventional wisdom about the conflict. It’s rather ridiculous for Morpugo to be trying to present his utterly conventional views as in some way brave or subversive. By the 1940s, Sassoon himself was casting doubt on the political sense of his campaign for a negotiated peace.

Still, it’s very good news that the archive has been saved – it will be kept at Cambridge, apparently.  But dont expect to find in it some ultimate simple truth about the War. Sassoon was a complicated man, and study of the archive is more likely to reveal new complexities, of character and attitude, than the grand simplicities beloved of Morpurgo.

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)

A few days later, a news article in The Times reported:

Dealing with young women of known disorderly character for importuning soldiers in the streets, Mr. Paul Taylor, at Westminster yesterday, said he was very glad to see Sir Conan Doyle’s letter in the Press characterising persons like the prisoners as enemies to their country, putting temptation in the way of young men, with horrible consequences. No fines would meet this class of case, and he sentenced the prisoners to a month’s hard servitude. (The Times, Feb 11, 1917)

The Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Venereal Diseases Act of 1917 were responses to the problem, and the parliamentary debates about these contained language very like Doyle’s crude misogynist stereotyping, as when 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.’ (House of Commons Debates, 23 April 1917)

Bennett’s Christine is not a harpy preying on innocent soldiers, but a canny businesswoman, doing the best she can with the opportunities life has given her. Her main relationship is with G.J.Hoape, a wealthy man above the military age;  when they meet on the Empire promenade their communication is a matter of subtle hints between sophisticates. Is she exploiting him? Is he exploiting her? Bennett leaves it to the reader to decide.
Throughout the novel, Bennett questions the simple moral dualisms found in Doyle’s letter. The prostitute may be ‘the professed enemy of society’, but society’s official protectors, the police, demand a bribe to let her continue her business. As for those who set up as society’s moral guardians, Bennett shows them as using the war to advertise the nobility of their own characters. There is Lady Queenie Paulle, for example, who ‘had few rivals as a war-worker’, because she attended so many societies and sat on so many committees, and had, Bennett sardonically notes, ‘done practically everything  that a patriotic girl could do for the war, except, perhaps, join a Voluntary Aid Detachment and wash dishes and scrub floors for fifteen hours a day and thirteen and a half days a fortnight.’ One of her committees, in charge of a French hospital, assumes the right to moralistically discuss the private lives of doctors and nurses, with an interest clearly shown as lubricious.
John Shapcott’s introduction shows how Bennett in this novel presented a disturbing image of wartime society, fragmented, uneasy and divided. There are references to industrial unrest and to social injustices, and hints that the British press is less than frank about the war. (Hints that are the more remarkable when one considers that at the time of the book’s publication, Bennett held an important post in the Ministry of Information). Those in authority are mostly  either self-deceiving or corrupt, while there is immense sympathy for those doing the essential work of war, the female munition-makers and the soldiers.
The soldiers in this book, however, are neither the innocents of Doyle’s fantasy, nor the calm and responsible action-men of wartime cliché. The first soldiers that we hear of, at a funeral service, and as the subject of an official telegram, are dead; living ones are enigmatic. When Hoape meets some old friends on leave, they avoid speaking about the War, and channel the conversation into trivialities, making both him and the reader aware of the urgency of their need for distraction before they leave again for the front.
The most important military character is the anonymous officer first seen fighting with another soldier on the Empire promenade, and later found lying in a drunken stupor, snoring on Christine’s bed. Above all, he is needy, and Christine supplies what he wants – not sexually, but as someone to talk to, so that he can unburden himself in confession. Significantly, he is irrational and superstitious. Christine asks him about his experiences:

‘Have you been in the retreat?’
‘I was.’
‘And the angels? Have you seen them?’
He paused, and then said with solemnity:
‘Was it an angel I saw?… I was lying doggo by myself in a hole, and bullets whizzing over me all the time. It was nearly dark, and a figure in white came and stood by the hole; he stood quite still and the German bullets went on just the same. Suddenly I saw he was wounded in the hand; it was bleeding. I said to him: “You’re hit in the hand.”  “No,” he said — he had a most beautiful voice — “ that is an old wound. It has reopened lately. I have another wound in the other hand.” And he showed me the other hand, and that was bleeding too. Then the firing ceased, and he pointed, and although I’d eaten nothing at all that day and was dead-beat, I got up and ran the way he pointed, and in five minutes I ran into what remained of my unit.’
The officer’s sonorous tones ceased; he shut his lips tightly, as though clinching the testimony, and the life of the bedroom was suspended in absolute silence.

The text’s realistic narrative is disturbed by this irruption of the supernatural; the silence that follows it is also an authorial silence. Bennett does not tell us whether he gives any credence to the story of the figure with the stigmata, or whether readers should.
This association of this soldier with the supernatural (which could signify his contact with experience beyond the reach of prosaic civilians, or could merely reflect the extremity of his need) recurs months later at a tedious night club, when the recitation of a poem by Poe precedes Christine’s hallucination of a voice calling her name. Running randomly through the streets, she finds her officer, now reduced to the ranks because of his drunkenness, and puts herself at his service again. Bennett implies that people like her, nearer to the harsh realities of life, can do more for a soldier than any of the  proliferating committees and charities can. The soldier and the prostitute are both outsiders, and Bennett links them by this narrative of the uncanny that is outside the conceptual range of an otherwise naturalistic story. To research this part of the book, Bennett consulted George Whale, a folklorist. He wrote in his journal: ‘Dined with George Whale at the N.L.C. And in his great ugly sitting room took what I wanted from his large collection of notes on war superstitions for my novel. His notes were extremely interesting.’)
At the end of the novel, there is a crucial scene where Hoape, who thinks he has exclusive rights to Christine, sees her in the streets, talking to one soldier after another. He does not realise that she is searching for news of the soldier who needs her, and whom she is helping back to the War. He assumes she is soliciting, and decides to have nothing more to do with her, thus condemning her once again to the difficult life of a common prostitute. Like Doyle and the parliamentary moralists, Hoape, himself far from innocent, presumes to make a judgment about the relationship of the soldier and the prostitute on the basis of appearances, assuming the worst and without knowing all the facts.
As A. S. Wallace wrote in his review for the Manchester Guardian, Christine has, ‘despite an analysis of the stratagems and devices of her professional career that is Maupassant-like in its ruthlessness… a humanity that shines in contrast with this world of humbug and hysteria.’  The prostitute and the soldier together become a judgment on the wartime society that passes judgment on them.  The committees of the rich and powerful who populate the book pride themselves on doing good for the victims of war, while benefiting themselves from the power and status that do-gooding confers on them.  She, meanwhile, is a refugee who does not claim charity or victim status, but copes efficiently for herself. This was not a message that commended itself to some of the book’s first readers. The Star reasserted Doyle’s moralistic contrast between soldiers and courtesans:

Our boys are being martyred by the millions. Hearts are being lacerated by incalculable sorrows. This is no time to regale our hurt minds with glimpses of the nether world. We are not in the mood for idylls of the promenade and pastorals of the pavement.

Bennett’s point is that the ‘nether world’ with its acknowledgment of human frailty, may be more use to a damaged soldier than the sermonizing of those above him.
The book aroused protests which belatedly caused it to be banned by the libraries. Among the strongest complaints  were those from Catholics offended by the portrayal of Christine as a sincere member of their religion.  The Catholic Federation wrote threatening prosecution; nothing seems to have come of this, but as Kinley Roby writes: ‘It was the kind of letter that made publishers very nervous, and Bennett was sufficiently disturbed by the letter to send a copy of The Pretty Lady to Attorney General F.E.Smith to forestall any police action against the book.’   Bennett’s establishment connections helped him to outface criticism in ways that a less well-situated writer would have found difficult. As he wrote to Geoffrey Madan: ‘Various attempts have been made to suppress it. Smiths, after doing exceedingly well out of it, have decided to ban it. Boots of course won’t touch it. […] However, I have influences in high places which ought to be able to counteract such moves. The book sells like hot cakes.’
After the War, the book doubtless suffered from the general reaction against wartime fiction; the early twenties mostly wanted to look forward. When they read novels about the War, they were less interested in books analyzing wartime society than in books like Hutchinson’s phenomenal best-seller If Winter Comes, which explained the War in a way that explored its meaning for the post-war world. Even apart from the assault on Bennett’s reputation by modernists such as Woolf, the subject of The Pretty Lady was not one to endear it to the moralistically Leavisite generation of critics of English fiction. As Margaret Drabble wrote in her Bennett biography, ‘the extreme calm with which Christine, G.J. and the author accept her profession is unusual in English fiction, to say the least.’ On the other hand, Bennett’s treatment of the question is too sane to have attracted the Foucauldians.
With luck, John Shapcott’s new edition, with its clear and attractive reproduction of the original typography, and its keenly analytical introduction, will do something to alert new readers to this remarkable novel.

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.

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.

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.

One of Thurtle’s arguments is that different standards were applied to officers and to enlisted men:

I think I can best establish that point by citing one given case. Section 6 of the Army Act provides that if a soldier sleeps on his post, or is drunk, he is liable, on conviction, to suffer death. I have been at pains to go through the general routine orders in connection with the various campaigns during the late War, and I will give the Committee the case of an officer charged with an offence of this kind. A temporary captain who was serving in the Salonika campaign was tried for drunkenness when in command of a post in the front line. He was an educated man, or he would not have been a temporary captain, and he was in a position of great responsibility, because he was in charge of this post in the front line. He was charged with the offence of drunkenness, which is not an offence which could arise from any weakness of his, but is something which would be contributed to wilfully and deliberately. He was found guilty and he was sentenced. The penalty for a private soldier drunk on his post—not being in charge of the post, but being drunk on his post—is death. The sentence on this officer was that he should be dismissed from His Majesty’s Service. There was a certain amount of ignominy attached to it, I admit, but he was sent home safely out of the danger zone for having committed this very serious offence of being drunk in charge of a post in the front line.

The response to this from Lieut-Colonel Dalrymple-White, M.P.,says much about the world-view of the pre-1914 army, and the puzzlement of traditionalists at the social changes accelerated by the War:

I think there is no doubt that the penalty of cashiering, perhaps, does not for every-one carry quite the same amount of terrible disgrace and stigma as it did many years ago when the penalties were first imposed. Many years ago officers came chiefly from what you may call the rank of the county families, and if any officer was cashiered it was equivalent to a death sentence. He could hardly live in the county at all and it was a most terrible stain. Nowadays I have heard of one or two cases where officers were cashiered in the late War and those who met them afterwards could only say that they did not seem to show much signs of having undergone a stigma.

So the social death of cashiering is actually presented as equivalent to actual death in front of a firing squad. This brings home (to me at least) how much the Army of 1914 was still governed by a military code (written and unwritten) developed in the eighteenth century for disciplining an army composed on the one hand of the aristocracy and on the other, according to  Wellington, of: ‘men escaping justice, with bastard children, or seeking cheap wine — the scum of the earth.’   For the traditional officer cashiering was indeed the end of social life, and ‘a most terrible stain’.  At a loss about how to cope with a world in which this was no longer true, Lieut-Colonel Dalrymple-White can only suggest a levelling-up, ensuring that  the officers were as liable to execution as the men.

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.

C. E. Montague

The novel is based on a play that Montague had written back in 1902 (presumably intending it for Miss Horniman’s repertory company, but it was never performed). The 1902 origin is evident in the type of war described, which is rather like the Boer War, but with mountains. One of the most crucial military events is the siege of Ria’s capital, whose inhabitants are reduced to near-starvation, clearly inspired by such Boer War sieges those of Kimberley and Mafeking.
The theatrical origins are fairly obvious in the chapters set in Ria. There are long conversational scenes, all in one location, punctuated by dramatic exits and entrances. The chapters set in the mountains during the war are another matter. These are written in a far more physical style (I’d suspect the influence of John Buchan, but Montague was a keen mountaineer, well able to imagine his own detailed descriptions of screes, overhangs and such mountainous features.)  These chapters are stylistically different from the Ria chapters, but this doesn’t make the book disjointed, because the contrast is dramatically effective. In Ria, people talk; in the war zone, they have to act.
The novel has two central figures; there is Burnage, editor of the most distinguished Rian newspaper, The Voice, and there is Willan, once his fag at school and now a soldier brought in to help in the battle against the Portans. The book mercilessly exposes Burnage, a man utterly without firm principles, who constantly makes disastrous decisions for bad reasons, often motivated by nothing more than a scornful look from his dissatisfied wife. He betrays his official principles, his country and his friend. The satire in these scenes is very like that in A Hind Let Loose, Montague’s 1904 novel, which is also set largely in newspaper offices. Montague, who had worked for the Manchester Guardian since 1890, had a sharp eye for the hypocrisies and pomposities of journalism, and enjoyed exposing them.
Willan, by contrast, is the man of action, with immense integrity, but few political or social skills. He has a huge and quite unjustified respect for Burnage, the man of words. Willan’s skills lead the Rian army from total disaster; he regroups it and leads it on to rescue the besieged city. Only Burnage’s weakness ruins his plans.
It’s a good read, and possibly the best of Montague, since it combines the satire of A Hind Let Loose with the profound thinking about war that is found in Disenchantment and Rough Justice. The latter novel is a very earnest affair, which has interesting things to say about the war, but says them in rather a dogged way.
Taking up his old play again clearly reunited Montague with his less preachy side, and allowed him to reinvigorate his writing. There is a ruthlessness about it that is only occasionally found in his post-war work (though it’s there in the short stories ‘Honours Easy’ and ‘The First Blood Sweep’).
The Rian scenes are Shavian, but the best of the dialogue in the war scenes has an almost Kiplingesque feel for the allusive way that men speak to one another when they are involved in a job. And I enjoyed his digression on the way soldiers ‘chaff’ each other before a battle:

During the luncheon rest that day, the Staff and a few regimental officers who were invited to join them were laughing and chaffing harder than ever. One man chaffed because his spirits had risen in the presence of things queer, perhaps boding, possibly the raw material of great adventure; another because he enjoyed human converse, and chaff was the only mode of converse he knew; another because he felt a little lonely, with these eerie things going on, and liked to have the jolly din of voices kept up; another to prove to himself that he was nonchalant in the face of the creepy symptoms – as athletes of small experience plume themselves upon their many yawns before a big race, fancying this nervousness to be a sign of robust unconcern. The Colonel chaffed because he felt that a leader of men must lead all the time, sometimes sobering, sometimes enlivening, always keeping up a flow of right guidance and stimulation, if only by means so humble as chaff.

When the fighting has become difficult, one soldier is ashamed because he had previously displayed fear. The instinctive soldier Willan chaffs him, and:

Seaton glowed with pleasure under Willan’s chaff. It seemed, more than anything else, to certify the ex-coward a man among men. One does not chaff those whom one would black-ball.

The war scenes of the novel reflect Montague’s Great War experience, but the attitudes expressed show how far he had come from the enthusiasm with which he had enlisted in 1914. One character describes the battle against Porto as ‘a battle that you simply must fight.’

‘Every war’s that when it starts,’ said Merrick. ‘It’s only after it’s over that they find out it was silly or caddish.’
‘It is, nine times out of ten. Even the Good old Great War they don’t seem so sure about now. But […] we’ve got the right thing this time. It’s a war in a hundred.’

Which is exactly what they say about all wars at the start. I can imagine Bush and Blair saying, ‘All the other wars in Afghanistan have led to humiliation of the invading powers, but this time…’

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.

A week or so back I wrote about the 1929 Manchester Guardian competition in which readers were asked to predict which living novelists would still be read in 2029. (Galsworthy came top with 1180 votes.)
The top six on readers’ lists were all men, and the highest-scoring woman writer was Sheila Kaye-Smith, with 198 votes. As a comparison, only 21 rated Virginia Woolf’s chances of being read a century hence.
These days, Kaye-Smith does not often feature on lists of significant twentieth-century novelists. A literary society in St.Leonards keeps her local memory alive, but her fame does not seem to go far beyond the region. According to Amazon a couple of her books are available on a print-on-demand basis; otherwise, she seems to have disappeared from the literary map.
Curious about this, I have taken a look at her 1918 novel, Little England, and I am tremendously impressed by it. (I warn you that the following account will contain plot spoilers.)
The novel is about the effect of the war on the ordinary people of a small community in East Sussex; it conveys very well the atmosphere of a dispiriting time when in the local shop:

the bottles of sweets had vanished long ago, and the empty spaces were filled with large cardboard posters, displaying Thyrza’s licence to sell margarine, and the Government list of prices.

The main characters are the Beatups, a family of small-scale farmers, Thyrza,a shopkeeper, and Mr Sumption, a hellfire preacher at the local Bethel.
The book begins with two men going off to War. Tom Beatup is a conscript, unwilling to go because he fears that his drunken father and scapegrace brother will not be able to manage the farm without him. Jerry Sumption is the son of the minister and a gypsy woman who died after his birth; in contrast to Tom, Jerry is a wild and restless character who volunteered for the Army on a restless whim.
In the Army, these two have contrasting careers. The unwilling Tom tackles the job positively, and from being a soldier gains the confidence and courage to propose marriage to Thyrza the shopkeeper; Jerry, on the other hand, is a bad soldier, slovenly and ill-disciplined. In a central incident, he comes close to murdering a girl who has spurned him. In Kaye-Smith’s book the War does not change soldiers fundamentally, but brings out the qualities that were latent within them.
It is the civilians who are most changed by the War, especially Tom’s brother Harry, who stops larking off to the woods and takes on the responsibility of the farm, and makes a success of it. His life changes when he looks at a local newspaper and reads ‘a very solid article on wheat-production and the present needs’:

In many ways it was a revelation to Harry. Though he had been a farm-boy all his life it had never struck him till then that grain-growing was of any importance to the nation, or imagined that the Worge harvests mattered outside Worge. The fields, the stock had been to him all so many means of livelihood, and the only motive of himself and his fellow-workers the negative one of keeping Worge from the auctioneer’s. If he ever realised his part in the great adventure, it was only when he saw his duty to keep the place together for Tom to fight for. This was his newest and highest motive, and when he refused the call of distant woods, broke with the Brownbread rat-and-sparrow club, and paid no more than a business visit to Senlac Fair, it was so that Tom’s sacrifice should not be in vain. But here was a chap making out that a farmer was very nearly as important as a soldier, and that it was on the wheat-fields of England as well as on the battlefields of France that the war would be won. . . .

The biggest transformation, however, happens to Mr Sumption, the Particular Baptist minister who had been born in a smithy, and whose young imagination had been inspired by fire and drama of the forge:

He became ” queer.” He spoke his thoughts, and in time preached them to the men who brought their horses to be shod. His father jeered at him, his mother was afraid, but the minister of a neighbouring chapel took him up. He thought he had found a rustic saint. He invited young Sumption to his house, taught him, and encouraged him to enter the ministry. The parents were flattered by the pastor’s notice, and he found little difficulty in persuading them to let their boy leave the forge and train as a minister of the Particular Baptists.

In Mr Sumption, Kaye-Smith creates a character full of a passion that he can only inadequately express. When a young man he fell in love with a gypsy girl, and married her despite widespread disapproval. After her death he brought up their child Harry alone, with a mixture of indulgence and severity, and has watched the boy go wild. Meanwhile, Sumption serves as a minister at Little Bethel, delivering a strict and cruel faith to a small group who see themselves as the elect worthy of salvation. The contrast with the Beatups is made clear. They are a family rooted in the land, and the land is their salvation, despite the failings of individual members of the family.

Sumption’s great test comes at the end of the book. Telegrams arrive at the village, announcing the death of various soldiers. The one that comes to Sumption is oddly worded, and is followed by a letter from Jerry, written from the condemned cell. He will be shot for desertion, but it is made very clear that this was not a matter of cowardice, but of waywardness; he went away with a French woman while his comrades went off to the trenches.

This revelation has a great effect on Sumption. He had planned to hold a church service in memory of some of the local men who had died, and he turns it into an occasion where he speaks about his son, and justifies him. If the other soldiers died to save England, then Jerry, shot as an example, died to save others from following his path. It is an odd confused theology, and causes indignation among his narrow flock. Sumption walks away from his church, and enlists in the Army Veterinary Corps, where his skills as a smith and horse-doctor will be useful.

This is a book that looks backward to the old rural England. Its concerns – the relation between the farmer and his land, the sympathetic examination of lives limited by rural ignorance, nonconformist religion, seem to belong more to the nineteenth-century novel than to the twentieth. Is that why we have written Kaye-Smith out of our literary history? On the basis of this book, she is a very good novelist.

It’s good to see a hefty selection of Sexton Blake stories back in print. I don’t know whether the new collection has any of the wartime stories – as soon as hostilities began, Blake was on the case, dealing with secret German arms dumps in Epping Forest. When his usual enemies, such as Ezra Q. Maitland, Broadway Kate and their servant Yang committed vile crimes such as robbing the Belgian Relief Fund, Blake was there to frustrate their plans.

The new selection is prefaced by a nervous note warning those of a sensitive disposition that the stories reflect the values of their time. The editor reassures us, however, that he has purged them of “words that readers may find particularly offensive”. I can see the point, but it seems a pity. Whose sensibilities are being protected? Those of ethnic minorities, or those of the British who prefer to forget the more unsettling parts of their history?

A new recording of Elgar’s Kipling settings, The Fringes of the Fleet, will soon be generally available, but can be pre-ordered from the Elgar Foundation, who are also offering a hefty discount if you also buy the book Oh My Poor Horses: Elgar and the Great War , an excellent compilation of essays that investigate Elgar’s wartime work, and also the general musical culture of the period. Recommended.