Life Imitates Art

Authors of fictions about the Great War often claim that their work is rooted in some actuality or memento of the conflict. A grandfather’s memories, an interview with a veteran, a bundle of letters…

In the ‘Author’s Note’ to War Horse, Michael Morpurgo wrote that he was inspired to write the book by a painting in  Iddesleigh Village Hall, placed beneath a clock pointing permanently to one minute past ten. Now it turns out that he wasn’t.

The Guardian is running an ‘Author annotates his/her text’ feature, and Morpurgo adds this note to his Note:

‘It turns out that the “Author’s Note” was rather ill-advised. Thanks largely to the National Theatre & Mr Spielberg, people began to turn up at the village hall in Iddesleigh where I live, looking for the picture of Joey. In fact, the picture was a fiction – if you see what I’m saying. So many disappointed visitors complained to the villagers that we arranged for the fiction to become fact. Now, if you visit the village hall in Iddesleigh, you will see Joey up there in his picture. And the time on the clock.’

So now I can’t help but wonder about the conversations with the three farm-boy veterans that apparently gave him the basis for Private Peaceful…

‘Bartimeus’ in war-time

Before the War, Bartimeus’s stories had mostly been pictures of everyday naval life, tinted with a nostalgia for the service from which his disability had excluded him.
They were collected in his first book, Naval Occasions, which was published in August 1914; after this, his writing would change.
He immediately set his talent to the challenge of writing about the War. What I take to be his first attempts were not very satisfactory, as he went outside his usual range to write a spy story (which includes an ingenious home-made invention for fighting submarines) and a couple stories about men inspired to enlist. One of these is a dreadfully sentimental piece about a sailor who had deserted his warship to be with the woman he loved. Come August 1914 she is dying, and she urges him from her deathbed to take advantage of the King’s Pardon for deserters and re-enlist.
Then he seems to have found his metier, in stories that, like his earlier sketches of naval life, describe a ship’s routine, but put it into a context of wartime dangers.
‘Chummy-Ships’, for example, is about the officers on a ship doing tedious blockade duty who decide to liven things up by inviting the officers of a partner vessel to dinner. There is a great deal of banter and facetious point-scoring between the two crews, but Bartimeus makes explicit the serious subtext underneath the jollity:

130 Books about the War

I like lists of books, and I’ve found an interesting one.

It was compiled in 1918, and is called  called Thirteen Ways of Looking at the War.

(Why thirteen? Homage to Wallace Stevens? His ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ had been published in 1917.)

It’s purely a list, with no commentary, except that some titles are asterisked to show ‘those of enduring quality and those making a special appeal to young people’. Which suggests that the list’s original intention was educational.

The text has been  digitised by the Hathi Trust, and you can connect to it here. Alternatively, click on this thumbnail and you’ll find its seven pages of listings, reduced in size but just about readable.

Some good texts there, and some I’d never heard of…

‘The Village’ concludes – for the time being

‘It is this obsession of futility, not any depth of sympathy or humanitarianism, which accounts for the piling up of the individual agony to so many poignant climaxes remote from the necessities or even from the incidental happenings of war [....] As for their infinite pity, nothing is easier, unfortunately, than to be bravely sympathetic about the sufferings of the past.’

Douglas Jerrold wrote that in 1930, about the numerous war books written around the time of the tenth anniversary of the Armistice, under the influence of All Quiet on the Western Front . I wonder what he’d have said about the final episode of the first series of The Village.
Previous episodes had shown us the bullying of a conscientious objector and a case of shell-shock brought on not by enemy bombardment, but by the trauma of Field Punishment Number One. Soldiers were shown as either vicious bullies or helpless victims, never as men trained to do a difficult job. The only enthusiasts for the war were either cruel or deluded; all the nice people were ‘anti-war’.
Inevitably, this last episode of the series brought in the obligatory trope of twenty-first century fiction about the War – Joe had been shot at dawn.

Leavis at War

F. R. Leavis as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit

Jessica Meyer’s talk at Leeds last week was about the Friends Ambulance Unit. She mentioned that, especially later in the War, the main work of the Unit was on the ambulance trains that took the wounded from the war zone to the channel ports.
This reminded me of a striking section in Ian MacKillop’s excellent biography of F. R. Leavis, who joined the FAU in 1915, and worked mostly on Ambulance Train 5, which went from the Somme to Boulogne.
Leavis left school in the summer of 1914 (while there he had refused to join the OTC). He became an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, but after a year, with the introduction of conscription becoming increasingly certain, he needed to make a choice. In a letter many years later, he wrote:

I couldn’t be a pacifist (that word came in then); I knew that the Germans mustn’t be allowed to win. But… I worried about the ‘ought’; the problem was insoluble. I joined the Friends Ambulance Unit. Stinking blankets and lice, and always a job to do that was too much for me.

Ambulance Train 5, apparently, was less well-equipped than others which had been specifically designed for the purpose; this one was, in MacKillop’s phrase, ‘a heterogeneous set of carriages roughly designed for medical purposes’. Because the carriages were not uniform, there was no corridor linking them, so the only way of passing along the train when it was in motion was along the roof. Leavis recalled carrying buckets of cocoa (one in each hand) from the kitchen carriage to the wounded:

I used to carry cocoa along the roofs of French trains to men who would have died without it. The trains had overhead wires, and it was very easy to get your head caught. Don’t ever try it – it’s an art.

After demobilisation in 1919, Leavis was reticent about his war service, preferring not to talk about it.
New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) contains his judgments on several war poets. Rupert Brooke gets a squashing:

And Brooke’s ‘complexity’ amounts to little more than an inhibiting adolescent self-consciousness in an ironical disguise.

Blunden (‘significant enough to show up the crowd of Georgian pastoralists’) and Edward Thomas (‘an original poet of rare quality, who has been associated with the Georgians by mischance’) are given their due, and (as those quotations indicate) used to contrast with the bulk of their generation.
Sassoon’s verse ‘made a wholesome impact’, but ‘it hardly calls for much attention here.’
Wilfred Owen ‘was really a remarkable poet, and his verse is technically interesting. His reputation is becoming well established.’ This is praise, but I don’t think Leavis ever wrote criticism that engaged more fully with what Owen was doing. That tribute was reserved for Isaac Rosenberg, perhaps because he was less well-known. Together with another Scrutiny critic, D. W. Harding, Leavis did much to establish Rosenberg’s reputation in the 1930s.
Apparently some students and colleagues attributed Leavis’s later intransigence and prickliness to his war experience. Maybe, but I think he was more complicated than that.

Extracts

A reader sent me a request the other day. He will be taking the AQA WW1 AS exam next month, and would like some suggestions for practice extracts. (the trickiest question on the paper is a compulsory one where candidates are given an unseen extract about the War, and asked to analyse it, and to link it to their previous reading.)
I shan’t be marking the exam this year (I had a small dispute about standards with my team leader last year, and sent my papers back) but still feel well-disposed to the students who take this paper, so here are three extracts that I might have set were I still a schoolteacher and preparing students for this exam:
1. From The Red Horizon (1916) by Patrick MacGill
“To the war! to the war!” I said under my breath. “Out to France and the fighting!” The thought raised a certain expectancy in my mind. “Did I think three years ago that I should ever be a soldier?” I asked myself. “Now that I am, can I kill a man; run a bayonet through his body; right through, so that the point, blood red and cruelly keen, comes out at the back? I’ll not think of it.”

Jeeves

In a comment on my ‘Faulks’ post, Roger speculates on the interesting question of Jeeves’s war service
The only evidence we have for this is an enigmatic exchange in Ring For Jeeves (1953):

“Were you in the First World War, Jeeves?”
“I dabbled in it to a certain extent, m’lord.”

What could the dabbling have consisted of? Perhaps he helped out at GHQ, performing the very necessary task of ensuring that the cocktails were at exactly the right temperature. After the German advance of March 1918, though, I suspect he must have taken a more proactive part, whispering a few words of advice into the ear of Douglas Haig, and thereby ensuring the victories of the last hundred days.

‘Bartimeus’ before the War

Bartimeus Pre-War

The ‘Bartimeus’ Omnibus (1933) is divided into three sections – Pre-War 1909-1913, War 1914-1918 and Post-War 1919-1925. The sections refer to when the stories are set rather than when they were written, though, as one or two of the Pre-War section explicitly look forward to more testing times.
It’s not hard, though to work out which were the earlier stories; the differences between these and the ones written in wartime are quite interesting.
The best of the pre-war stories are hardly stories at all, but plotless sketches of life at sea (I think that many were originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette). There are descriptions of daily routine, of gunroom conversation, of a shipboard Sunday, and events like the arrival of the mail or a trip ashore in a foreign port.

The most resonant of the stories is ‘That Which Remained’, about a young Signal Midshipman, ‘The Periwinkle’:

‘small for his years, skinny as a weasel, with straight black hair, and grey eyes set wide apart in a brown face’

This young man loves his work, but is struck down suddenly by the brucellosis (or Malta Fever) that ruined the eyesight of ‘Bartimeus’ himself.

Faulks

From time to time I have a go at the Spectator literary competition. A couple of weeks ago the set task was based on the fact that Sebastian Faulks has been roped in by the Wodehouse estate to write a new Jeeves novel. We were asked to imagine the reaction of the characters on discovering that they were under new management. I’m rather chuffed this morning to discover my effort among the winners. Here it is:

Links

Two new blogs:

Nick Milne’s very promising new blog is called Wellington House, since his current research is on the writers recruited by that Buckingham Gate organisation to write pieces that could be used for propaganda purposes. The blog ranges wider than that, though.

The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship blog is run by Deb Fisher, who edits Siegfried’s Journal, the SSF quarterly publication. The blog contains various SS and War jottings. Today it reminded me about the big Oxford War Poetry conference in September 1914,  for which registration is now already open.

Update: That should of course, as Janesvw points out in the comments thread below, read September 2014. But I’m so used to typing 1914…

 

Two useful sites:

Centenary News is mostly about the events arranged for the big four-year birthday party that begins in 2014, but its video section lets you see   and hear some very good talks. Try Hew Strachan’s views on how and why the War ought to be commemorated, for example.

There are more videos (and audios) on the University of Oxford First World War: New Perspectives site. I warmly recommend, of course, the talk on WW1 popular fiction by Jane Potter (my Ph. D. supervisor). Take a look, too, at Edward Madigan’s talk on combatant courage.