Book blog success (so they say)

I’ve had an email from a setup called Feedspot which says that Great War Fiction is ranked second among military book blogs. Which is very flattering, though a bit bothering. I’ve neglected the blog horribly over the past year, and it’s not what it was.

Does that mean that other military book blogs are in an even worse state? If so, that’s a pity.

Over the years, my attention has been diverted away from the Great War. I was getting too used to the material, and it wasn’t surprising me as often as it used to back in the day. It’s eighteen years since this blog began. You can’t blame me fro wanting to move on.

Not that I’ve totally neglected the War. Recently I’ve re-read two war novels – Philip MacDonald’s excellent Patrol and William J. Locke’s not-so excellent The Rough Road, and have written about them for the Sheffield Hallam Popular Fiction gatherings and website. Maybe I’ll blog about The Rough Road and its depiction of Tommies here too, when I’ve time.

I’m occasionally asked whether the blog is still in business, and the answer is yes – but don’t be surprised if it goes dormant for a while. Having focused very much on war literature for a long time, I need to broaden my horizons. At the moment my two obsessions are the poetry of Catullus and the terrific new novel James by Percival Everett (about the brightest novelist around these days). Neither of these have a lot to do with the Great War, so I won’t be writing about them here. But I haven’t gone totally away. Watch this space.

A Miserable Kipling

Here, from the Lyttelton Times, a New Zealand newspaper of 1911, is yet another proof of the strange side-effects of Rudyard Kipling’s immense celebrity:

Humanities

After I retired as a teacher, I applied to Oxford Brookes to research a Ph.D. on the prose of the Great War. They were welcoming, and I had a good and productive time there. (I was very fortunate in having Jane Potter, who had written brilliantly on Great War fiction, as one of my supervisors.)

It is gloomy reading, therefore, to learn that there are going to be major cuts in the English Department there, as well as History, Film, Anthropology, Publishing and Architecture. The Music and Mathematics departments will be closed completely.

There are good people in the English Department at Brookes, and it is very sad to think of their jobs being at risk (and of the opportunities for students being reduced). The same is true of other departments, I’m sure – I knew a postgraduate researching Music, and got the impression that the department was very lively indeed.

Byron

Even more off-topic than usual, but I thought I’d share here the fact that I’ve co-authored an article that is printed in the new edition of the Byron Journal.

Here’s how it happened:

Here’s a challenge…

I’m puzzled. Vintage Uk have apparently prefaced their edition of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse with this warning:

‘This book was published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not intended as an endorsement of cultural representations or language contained herein.’

I’m racking my brains to think of what in Woolf’s novel could possibly offend even the most sensitive of offence-hungry modern readers. Any ideas?

It’s a while since I read To the Lighthouse, but I can’t recall anything in the way of prejudiced or nasty language. Not that Woolf wasn’t capable of a bit of anti-Semitism elsewhere in her work, despite being married to Leonard.

Maybe they are worried about the suppressed violence under the family relationships, as in:

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father’s breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children’s breasts by his mere presence;

But would that be enough to send a modern reader, even the tenderest little generation zedder into hysterics? I doubt it.

A Kipling anecdote

From the Tewkesbury Register, and Agricultural Gazette, 14 Sep 1918

A true story, or a bit of folklore?

Did T.S. Eliot read Edna Ferber’s ‘Showboat’?

Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat (1926) has a memorable description of the detritus after a storm on the Mississippi:

Outside, the redundant rain added its unwelcome measure to the swollen and angry stream. In the ghostly gray dawn the grotesque wreckage of flood-time floated and whirled and jiggled by, seeming to bob a mad obeisance as it passed the show boat which, in its turn, made stately bows from its moorings. There drifted past, in fantastic parade, great trees, uprooted and clutching at the water with stiff dead arms; logs, catapulted with terrific force; animal carcasses dreadful in their passivity; chicken coops; rafts; a piano, its ivory mouth fixed in a death grin; a two-room cabin, upright, and moving in a minuet of stately and ponderous swoops and advances and chassés; fence rails; an armchair whose white crocheted antimacassar stared in prim disapproval at the wild antics of its fellow voyagers; a live sheep, bleating as it came, but soon still; a bed with its covers, by some freak of suction, still snugly tucked in as when its erstwhile occupant had fled from it in fright— all these, and more, contributed to the weird terror of the morning.

It was those those chicken-coops that snagged in my memory as I read – I recalled Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) :

Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,

Rose Allatini and D.H. Lawrence?

When I wrote my monograph on Rose Allatini, I tried hard to find information about what Rose did between the publication and the prosecution of Despised and Rejected. Now I’ve found an intriguing clue. It’s in the Weekly Dispatch of June 2, 1918.

The Kipling Boom, 1890

Researching (i.e. idly Googling) Kipling, I came across this rather good bit of verse printed in the San Francisco Examiner of 1890. It’s a reaction to the sudden and seemingly unstoppable vogue for the works of Kipling. The Examiner credits it to the Saturday Review, but since the references are mostly American, I don’t think this would be the London Saturday.

The War and the Novelists: a talk in Sheffield

I shall be giving a talk in Sheffield on January 30th, on The War and the Novelists, looking at how writers of fiction responded to the Great War, both during theactual war years, and in the 1920s.

I’ll be suggesting that patriotic stories published during the war were not always mindless patriotism, but often were ways of dealing with current anxieties, and frequently outlined the difference between sensible and excessive ways of supporting the war effort.

I shall also be talking about the very various kinds of thoughtful war fiction that appeared in the twenties, long before the ‘war-books boom’ at the end of the decade.

The talk is one of a series of talks given by members and supporters of Reading Sheffield during January and February. Details are below. Some of the talks, including mine, are selling out fast, so do book early.