Reading behind the lines: Postmemory in contemporary British war fiction 9781526102607

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Reading behind the lines Postmemory in contemporary British war fiction

Natasha Alden

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Reading behind the lines Postmemory in contemporary British war fiction

Natasha Alden

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Natasha Alden 2014 The right of Natasha Alden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 8893 3 hardback

First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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1 Introduction

1

2 Regenerating the past: fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy

52

3 ‘In the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run’: Briony Tallis and Atonement

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4 Lesbian postmemory: haunted ‘history’ in The Night Watch

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5 Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

207 225

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Acknowledgements

My primary thanks must go to the English Faculty at Oxford, St Hilda’s College, Oxford and the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, for their generous support during the writing of this book. My thanks must also go to the staff of the English Faculty Library at Oxford; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; St John’s College, Cambridge; the Imperial War Museum; the Harry Ransom Centre; the Wellcome Trust Library; University College London Special Collections; the British Library; the National Library of Wales and the Hugh Owen Library, Aberystwyth. Particular thanks must go to Pat Barker, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters, Ann Radloff and the late Lucilla Andrews for being so generous with their time in answering my queries about their work. The book has benefited greatly from the guidance and insight of many colleagues and friends at Oxford and Aberystwyth. I would like to thank Hermione Lee, Laura Marcus, Michael Whitworth, Sue Jones, Margaret Kean, Sally Mapstone, Diane Watt, Chris Butler, and Sarah Prescott in particular, and also the students on my ‘Rewriting the World Wars’ and ‘Contemporary Queer Fiction’ modules at Aberystwyth, whose insight, energy and enthusiasm adds much to my professional and intellectual life. I am deeply grateful to my family and friends for their immense love and support. Finally, I wish to thank my wife, Claire Pickard, for her unfailing love, support and faith in me, as well as for a not inconsiderable amount of patience. This book is for her. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬vii ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions or parts of this book have previously appeared in the publications below. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint this material. ‘War of Words: Atonement, Metafiction and Plagiarism’, in Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum Critical Perspectives), ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 57–70. ‘Rewriting Rivers: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Regeneration trilogy’, in English 61:233, pp. 178–96. ‘“Possibility, Pleasure and Peril”: The Night Watch as a Very Literary History’, in Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), ed. Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 70–83.

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Introduction

‘Flickering at the edge of my childhood’: postmemory, history, story1 Andrew Greig’s 2000 novel, That Summer, set between June and October 1940, begins thus: To the vanishing generation FIRSTWORD Above my bed, when I was young, the Airfix kits, the Hurricane, Spitfire, Messerschmitt, spun on their threads in the draught. One by one they will return, throttling down over perimeter wires of forgotten airfields, then taxi up to abandoned huts. Down the bramble-choked lane come the women and men on bicycles, others on foot, the sound of their voices light and drifting as a summer swarm as they pass through the rusting gates, waving to the CO gliding by in his Lagonda. The pilots jump down from their planes, knees bending as they hit the ground . . . Some wave, some call, but their voices are so light they are borne away on the summer breeze. A faint rain is starting to fall and clings, shimmering, to their grey-blue uniforms. The two groups meet and mingle. Handshakes and pats on the back. A hug and a light kiss on the cheek, postponed for sixty years . . . Others look around in the rain at the rutted grass, the cracked concrete where the youth of the town race motorbikes and go-karts at weekends, the husks of Nissen huts. The control tower still stands though its windows are blank, the aerials bent and rusting . . . ‫ ﱢﱡ‬1 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines Nearly all smoke. They pass cigarettes between them like benedictions, like tokens of belonging. After all, they need take no heed of health warnings, even if there were any on the packets they slip from breast pockets . . . They talk in small groups. The pilots gesture with their hands, showing how it happened. They argue still over numbers and formations. One shows with the side of his hand dropping earthwards how he had peeled away, then steadied and came up behind his other hand, flying level. Then both start to shake. The others nod and laugh, quiet but persistent as memory . . . There are some radio telephone signals from that summer – pilots taking directions from the women who controlled them from the ground, or screaming at each other to get in formation – that have become trapped between the ground and the Heaviside layer. They bounce back and forward like tennis balls in some endless rally, for they don’t decay. Once in a while a radio ham, idly skimming the airwaves late at night, will suddenly be listening to men and women controlling, flying, singing, cursing, dying. All present in the headphones though they are long gone. And among the few trees that are left beyond the rusting perimeter fence, there is a trunk with large distorted letters bearing a name and a date. It was carved by the other one, the lanky tired one who stands half in, half out the bedroom window of a house in the post-war estate, his tan boots sunk a foot below the floor. The one with his long back turned, whose right arm hangs slightly crooked, who is always starting to turn round, who never fully turns round, whose face would be so familiar. Who speaks in the dark . . .2

Greig’s novel is, in effect, an attempt to ‘speak’ this generation; to bring back the men and women of this airfield and recreate their experience of five months from the summer to the autumn of 1940. The perspective of the narrator witnessing this revisitation is made clear at the beginning of the quotation: ‘above my bed, when I was young, the Airfix kits, the Hurricane, Spitfire, Messerschmitt, spun on their threads’.3 The list of aircraft gives Greig’s opening the sound of an incantation, and it must be an effective one, as it leads straight into the ghostly return of the air crew as well as to the eerie description of the snatches of radio signals trapped in the Heaviside layer, the echoes of which will never die away. We do not know who ‫ ﱢﱡ‬2 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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our narrator is, but we know that this generation lingers for them. We will not find out their identity until the final page of the novel, either; Greig takes us from this distinctly unheimlich (‘unhomely’) moment in our present straight into the late June of 1940, introducing us to the novel’s protagonists, Len and Stella. The novel traces their romance, beginning in June and ending with Len’s death in October 1940. The final page of the novel reveals, without comment, that the narrator of the ‘firstword’ is their child, born after Len’s death, and that the preceding narrative was his imagining of his parents’ brief relationship. Looking at a box of his mother’s momentos, the narrator thinks All that’s left are the letters, his diaries, the stories she told near the end. The long-delayed stories . . . this silver framed photo [of Len], gathering dust and glances over the years. And three dusty yet gaudy bangles [which had belonged to a friend killed in a bombing raid]. They gleam on the table . . . and at last you know what they mean.4

This study asks in what ways, and using what techniques, contemporary British writers born after the Second World War, but whose parents were involved, remember and re-imagine the world wars in their fiction. It also asks what analysing the author’s use of historical source material can tell us about the nature of the contemporary historical novel: what truth-claims does it make, and how? How does it relate to its parent genres of history and fiction in a ‘post-postmodern’ context? Further to this, how does this kind of fiction fit into the ongoing collective memory of the wars, and how are these memories, as acts of vicarious witnessing, different from other types of culturally mediated memory? Through tracing and analysing how creative writers use historical research in their work it is possible to explore in what ways, and on what terms, we remember and re-imagine the world wars now, or to ‘record the historically evolving relation of individuals and communities to sites and the associated transmutations of memory and identity’, as Anne Whitehead puts it.5 This book uses this procedural, archival analysis to ask a number of questions. What factors have shaped how, and what, we remember about the wars in the last twenty ‫ ﱢﱡ‬3 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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years? What factors – such as being the child of a veteran – affect the authors who choose to write about the period? The study will investigate whether it is possible to move from these questions to devising a taxonomy of the uses of the past in contemporary historical fiction. Each chapter offers detailed analysis of how a specific author adopts, adapts, appropriates, elides, re-orders, augments, edits and transposes elements found in historical source material, asking whether there is a pattern of usage in the way they transpose, re-imagine, supplement and re-arrange events, and to what extent such writing is, necessarily, metafictional. The study of second-generation fiction is largely a result of the exponential growth of Holocaust studies since the 1970s. Eva Hoffman suggests that Helen Epstein’s influential study of secondgeneration trauma, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, marked the beginning of serious academic study of the second generation.6 Marianne Hirsch coined the now widely used term ‘postmemory’ to describe the ‘experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated’.7 In Hirsch’s reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection [which is to say, postmemory is not memory in the sense that we usually mean the term] but through an imaginative investment and creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past.8

Clearly, for the vast majority of British people born after 1945, the inherited trauma of the Second World War is of a very different order to that of the children of Holocaust survivors, the group Hoffman and Hirsch are describing. The experience of ‘coming after’ undergone by the British second generation is related to a ‫ ﱢﱡ‬4 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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sense of belatedness, of having missed the most intense experience of their era, rather than the sense of loss following atrocity dominating the experience of the children of the victims of the death camps, particularly the Jewish survivors. However, there are clear parallels between the way second-generation Holocaust survivors and the children of British servicemen react to their parents’ experience, particularly in the fiction they write about their parents’ generation. In an article in the Quaker journal The Friends Quarterly, William West, born in 1950, describes his emotions as he types up his father’s war stories, feeling they should be preserved. After finishing one story about the sailors on his father’s ship disobeying orders and feeding a ship full of refugees they come across at sea, West finds himself deeply upset: More tears as I type this. I have written five of the stories now and shed a lot of tears and I feel washed out . . . [I] wonder what the point of all this was and whose tears I was shedding and what the heck I am supposed to do with these stories. It feels as if these stories are some kind of legacy from my Dad which I am carrying maybe for him . . . I do know from my understanding of the psychodynamics in families that some children do end up wrestling with problems that don’t really belong to them.9

West himself compares this type of transgenerational memory (‘[I wonder] whose tears I was shedding’) with the transmission of memory between generations in Jewish families. Whilst being careful not to claim the same kind or degree of trauma for his family, he does suggest that a similar dynamic has been created between himself and his father’s generation. In another example, compare Eva Hoffman’s description of the way she understood her parents’ history as a small child with Jenny Diski’s semi-autobiographical description of Frances’s feelings in Like Mother. Hoffman states that in childhood, the awareness of loss and death was not yet philosophy, instead, like all children, I took the character of the recent past entirely for granted; that is, I took the conditions of the war and the Holocaust as a kind of mythology and the norm.10 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬5 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Diski has described her sense of the war period, before her birth, as a time when ‘heroes, . . . villains . . . and great figures stalk[ed] the earth’ and there is an important similarity between the way that the children of both sets of survivors conceive of the period before their births.11 As Hoffman puts it, although we post war children were the closest to wartime events in time and in primal feeling, we were the furthest removed from their grounded, worldly – that is, political, social, historical – meanings . . . The generation [that comes after a period of violence] . . . receives its first knowledge of the terrible events with only childish instruments of perception, and as a kind of fable.12

Because the postwar generation came to consciousness of the war as children, their understanding of it was inevitably childish, couched in terms often reminiscent of fairy tales and based on mythic archetypes; Hoffman explains that she ‘knew [the war] as mythology and had no way of grasping it as actuality’.13 This had a significant effect on the way her understanding of the war evolved even after the end of her childhood. Growing up with family stories constantly told and re-told, or with an awareness of the silences and gaps left in the family by death, the events of the war become ‘[that generation’s] meaningful history, the history it is urgent to know because it belongs to one’s life, because it shapes ancestral fate and one’s own sensibility’.14 Compare this to Andrew Motion’s description of the ‘war flickering at the edge of [his] childhood’, or McEwan’s description of ‘your parents’ stories [as] . . . just sort of there, like the weather’.15 This generation are near to the war in terms of time, but also far removed in terms of first-hand knowledge, and have to think and empathise their way back into the history they missed, or, like Hoffman, ‘discover and put [her parents’ war’s] . . . real-life components together.’16 Haunted by the war, their knowledge of it is fragmentary and mythical, hence the need, in this generation, to go back to historical source material and research their way back into a factual understanding of the stories they grew up with. There is a striking similarity in the way that second-generation British writers and second-generation Holocaust survivors choose to write about ‫ ﱢﱡ‬6 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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the war. Unlike their parents, they cannot write about the war from their own memory; as Hoffman says, memories of the material and psychological reality of the war form the ‘brunt of survivor’s mostly realistic narratives’.17 Their children’s fiction is often about memory itself, foregrounding issues of veracity and the nature of narrative: In . . . literature by children of survivors, intimate history is not so much given as searched for; the processes of overcoming amnesia and uncovering family secrets, of reconstructing broken stories or constructing one’s own identity, are often the driving concerns and the predominant themes.18

Although Hoffman is referring to second-generation Holocaust fiction here, this analysis also describes precisely the concerns present in the fiction of the second-generation British writers I will examine in the following chapters, particularly the use of protagonists whose quest to understand or recreate the past mirrors the reader’s and the author’s, or of narrative forms which force the reader directly into the questing role. These narrative tropes, as Marianne Hirsch notes, are all typical of ‘postmemorial fictions’. Although she conceived of this model in relation to Holocaust fiction, it is possible to transfer Hirsch’s concept of postmemory – the term she coins for the second-hand knowledge of the past experienced by the children of survivors of traumatic events – to a postwar British context, in relation to the children of British combatants.19 These British authors are exploring what it means to write about a period which has overshadowed your life but which you yourself did not experience. The fascination with fragmented and forgotten narratives, and with storytelling and the transmission of truth and memory, that Hirsch argues characterise postmemory, fictions, when examined in texts by British ‘baby boom’ authors, allows us to modify and extend our definition of postmemory. This study argues that postmemory also works through sociocultural influences as well as through families. Through analysing the uses of the past in these texts, I ask how this sense of connection is fostered, how it manifests itself in a text and whether it can be called ‘postmemory’ or not. I further this discussion through my ‫ ﱢﱡ‬7 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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analysis of Sarah Waters’s novel The Night Watch.20 Waters’s fascination with recovering lost lesbian histories is, I show, also shaped by postmemory, that is, her position as one of the first writers to be able to write openly about a traumatic, repressed past that has to be imaginatively recovered and shapes contemporary lesbians’ sense of their heritage and identity. The potential of postmemory as a conceptual frame has, as yet, not been fully explored. Expanding our definition of generational transmission beyond a literal parent–child definition to encompass generations within social groups, forming and maintaining collective memory, illuminates the prevalence of this form of memory, as well as the key differences between postmemory and other forms of culturally mediated memory (such as Landsberg’s prosthetic memory).21 The effects of the postmemorial consciousness in fiction and in society, and the full potential of postmemory as a conceptual frame, thus become clearer. Looking at how secondgeneration authors use fiction to imaginatively re-enter the war years can tell us much about both the shadow the war has cast over the postwar period, about collective memory and the current state of historical fiction. Approaches to the discipline of history have developed radically during the postwar period, particularly in the wake of postmodernism. Hostility to history’s claim to offer an empirical and objective representation of the past has meant that much critical work has focused on how history functions as subjective narrative. Foremost amongst the theorists in this field is Hayden White, whose work since the 1970s has suggested that history is a subjective cultural construct that is affected by ideological, political and moral functions.22 As a result of this type of thought, much contemporary theoretically oriented history focuses on previously marginalised points of view, or self-consciously foregrounds its own subjectivity. Although this has had the effect of making history a more diverse and a broader, larger discipline, there are also widespread concerns about the tendency to relativism which a rejection of the concept of ontological certainty entails. As Laurence Lerner has argued, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬8 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction It has become a commonplace to argue that history cannot give us direct access to objective facts, since the ideology and the verbal strategies of the historian will determine what he chooses to notice and how he describes it, to say nothing of the connections between events that he then establishes.23

White, and theorists influenced by him, maintain that the truth about the past lies not in a rationally organised, empirically based sequence of static facts taken from a stable reality, but in the chaotic dialogue between competing narratives. The idea of historical fact becomes extremely slippery; although facts – such as historical dates – can be said to exist and not to be open to multiple interpretations, the interpreters themselves are ultimately caught in a relativistic trap where their own interpretation is only ever as valid as the other competing narratives. These issues are particularly relevant to the study of historical fiction because Hayden White’s belief that historians rely on emplotment as much as writers of fiction do inevitably raises the question of how works of literature reflect historical realities. Linda Hutcheon’s 1988 study, The Politics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, was an early and extremely influential analysis of recent novels which had self-consciously attempted to redefine the relationship between fiction and history. Drawing on the insights into the constructed, textual nature of historical narrative offered by poststructuralist historiography, she termed these novels ‘historiographic metafictions’: Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs (historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.24

This is in contrast to the traditional historical novel which, as Frederick Holmes defines it, Sustains throughout the pretence of supplying direct access to the past in all its fullness and particularity. Such novels employ the methods of formal realism, such as ‘solidity of specification’, to ‫ ﱢﱡ‬9 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines combine as seamlessly as possible wholly fictional ingredients with information garnered from actual historical sources.25

Holmes then goes on to contrast this type of historical fiction unfavourably with Hutcheon’s historiographic metafictions, whose ‘flaunting of the “seams” of [their] narrative’ he views to be superior, given that it shows its awareness of its own instability.26 The novels under discussion here are neither historiographic metafictions, nor naively unaware of the ontological significance of the truth claims they make; they utilise the aspects of postmodern narrative theory they find useful, but do not ascribe to historical relativism. This is where these authors’ use of historical source material becomes important. Revisions of Hutcheon’s theory, notably Amy J. Elias’s Sublime Desire: History and Post 1960s Fiction, have both updated the catalogue of historiographic metafictions Hutcheon provided and also pointed to developments and subtleties within the field.27 Elias’s most significant contribution is to show that there is a spectrum of ontological doubt within the genre of historiographic metafiction, ranging from the profound radicalism of novels by authors such as John Fowles to an apparent acceptance of the possibility of a verifiably historically accurate historical novel. Elias observes that the most ironic and deconstructive novels are very often by ‘first-world’ authors, while at the other end of her proposed spectrum, the novels using a ‘reconstructed “secularsacred” belief ’ are likelier to be by postcolonial writers. This, Elias suggests, is because postcolonial authors are often using the opportunities postmodernism affords to challenge existing grand narratives which exclude the perspectives of minorities or oppressed groups.28 The reason that the authors I discuss find new ways of using history and fiction is that, like the postcolonial authors Elias discusses, each of them has a strong personal and political commitment to a certain interpretation of one or more aspects of the war, springing, in their case, from their postmemorial relationship. J. J. Long, writing about second-generation Holocaust fiction, argued that a grounding in historical research was imperative to ensure that postmemorial writing kept its political, memorial function and ‫ ﱢﱡ‬10 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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did not become free-floating fantasy: ‘the mental constructions of postmemory must exist in some kind of dialogue with the empirical, must be open to confirmation or contestation by the real’.29 These authors use the fictional form to go beyond what they see as the limits of historical narrative, using their novels to reject relativism and assert their own interpretation of events not as one competing narrative amongst many, but as an accurate revisioning of a forgotten aspect of the war. Pat Barker writes about the persecution of a number of minority groups during the last year of the First World War, showing how a hysterical society turned on homosexuals, conscientious objectors and women. Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock explores the long-term results for the next generation of having a veteran as a father, while Sarah Waters illustrates – painfully – how the brief burst of relative freedom for lesbians in the Second World War was followed by a reassertion of heterosexual norms. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is perhaps the most personal of the three; in it, McEwan represents a hypocritical and morally bankrupt world on the brink of war, but also depicts, very vividly, aspects of the evacuation of the British from Dunkirk in 1940 which have not survived in the cultural memory of Dunkirk. This fits with the shift in the British novel, observed by Peter Childs, from a preoccupation with historiography towards a more ‘historical’ approach, focusing on the past itself, over the last decade; paradoxically, the form this shift takes, with these novels, is a development of historiographic metafiction.30 The novels I have selected – Atonement, the Regeneration trilogy, Shuttlecock and The Night Watch – because they are written by members of the second generation who are committed to bringing forgotten aspects of the wars which haunt them to light, focus on ways of retelling lost narratives (which could, of course, be said to be postmodern in itself) more than on exploring narrative subjectivity. Barker, Swift, Waters and McEwan emphatically do not believe in relativism and, as I will show from their use of source material, they all believe that using historically researched factual material can give their novels at the very least a strong underlying element of historical veracity, though they use this type of material in varying ways. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬11 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Steven Connor has described contemporary historical fiction as being either historical or historicised.31 A ‘historical’ novel, Connor argues, ‘seems to assert in its form and language the capacity of the present to extend itself to encompass the past . . . and enacts the possibility of a knowable, narratable and continuous history’.32 By contrast, ‘historicised’ fiction is more self-conscious about its claim to historical veracity. It ‘suggests a discontinuous history, or the potential for many, conflicting histories; unlike [the “historical” novel] it seems to disallow any perspective on history other than those contingently available within history’.33 I will argue that a detailed close reading of each text, closely analysing the authors’ use of material traces, or source material, demonstrates that these novels partake of both of Connor’s definitions and resist his binarised view. While the novels under consideration explore the nature of history, or the nature of writing about history, they also assert, simultaneously, their commitment to a particular view of an event, or series of events which their novels put forward as an accurate account. LaCapra describes this affect as ‘empathic unsettlement’; we are allowed, encouraged, to empathise with the characters in the text, but the structure of the text itself frustrates our attempt.34 It reminds us, in Levinas’s terms, of the otherness of these people, be they fictional or historical or (a distinction Levinas’s point renders somewhat redundant).The fragmentary nature of the historiographical metafiction, as we have seen, encourages the reader to identify with specific characters, places or events, but then deliberately withdraws from its side of the contract. The novels I discuss challenge popular myths about the wars in general, or about specific events, and it is in this commitment to retelling lost or misremembered stories from the wars that we see these novels’ departure from the norms of postmodern historical fiction. These novels do make a claim to know the past, and to depict it with a degree, at least, of the accuracy their research is designed to bring. They all offer an account of particular events which is intended to ‘put the record straight’, and is carefully grounded in detailed historical research, evident in the amount of historical material woven into each text, and which each author intends to give their account historical veracity. However, they also ‫ ﱢﱡ‬12 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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intend, through their use of historiographic metafiction, not to allow us to feel any uncomplicated sense of connection to the lost past they recreate, in case we forgot these people’s otherness and assimilate our emotional responses with their experience. The focus of this study is how, and why, these novelists return to the wars in their fiction, and what their treatment of the wars can tell us about both how and why we remember the wars as we do, and about how recent historical fiction attempts the paradoxical task of overcoming the limits of writing about the past. In order to explore these aspects, I will excavate beneath the texture of each novel, examining the deployment of source material. As yet, there has been no sustained scholarly analysis of the use of source material in any of these works. My interest lies in looking at what we can learn about the novelists’ conception of the capabilities of historical fiction at the present time by analysing the use of this type of material in a historical novel. Different analyses of the uses of the past in contemporary fiction have tended to concentrate on narrative form and choice of subject matter. I propose taking an archaeological approach, searching out the source material used in the novels and comparing the original texts with their fictional translations. This shows exactly how the novelists in question conceive of the past by showing how they actually use it. Novelists wishing to write about the wars – or indeed, any experience outside their own immediate sphere of reference – have two options, both of which involve relying on their imaginations to a lesser or greater extent. They can either research the period and place, or, alternatively, they can rely almost entirely on an imaginative, projected interpretation. Obviously this is the case with all fiction, and according to postmodernist theorists such as Hayden White, to all writing, but the inescapably apparent distance between subject and author in the case of historical fiction brings the issue to the fore. The solution for three of my four authors is to rely, often heavily, on researched source material for aspects of plot and of characterisation as well as for background detail. Pat Barker writes about well-known historical figures, which restricts her narrative in particular ways which I explore in my chapter on the Regeneration trilogy.35 Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan do not ‫ ﱢﱡ‬13 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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choose to write about real-life figures but, as I will show, each of them relies on source material to shape ‘authentic’ historical characters, places and situations. My analysis of the use of source material in each of the texts under discussion will illuminate how these writers see the relation of fictional and historical narratives; are they inherently different? What is the status of historical material in a work of literary fiction? What can looking at what material the authors use from their research, and what they choose to leave out, tell us about what fiction can do with the past that history cannot? I have chosen to look at these particular novels together for three related reasons. The first reason is that all of them were written by people born either during the Second World War or in the decade after it, or whose relationship to the war can be defined as ‘second generation’ in a less literal way (i.e. Barker was raised by a First World War veteran, while Waters’s recreation of lost lesbian history places her, as I will show, in a directly ‘generational’ sequence of lesbian and gay writers). Barker, Swift and McEwan were brought up by ex-combatants, and also had a larger number of ex-combatants in the family in their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, some who survived and some who did not, whose stories – or silences – they were familiar with from childhood. Secondly, McEwan, Barker and Swift’s novels feature a main protagonist whose quest to recapture or to understand a war experience they are at least one remove from exactly mirrors the author’s and the reader’s position, and thus offers a commentary on the process of reading and rewriting the past; Waters goes further by adopting a reversed narrative, placing the reader directly into this position. The third reason is that each of them relies heavily on source material of a variety of types in their recreation of the war years. The one exception to this is Graham Swift; my exploration of his approach to writing about his parents’ generation will act as a portal to investigating the function of the imagination in this generation’s writing about the wars. As yet there is no single study on the effects of growing up in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s on contemporary fiction in terms of ‘coming after’, to borrow George Steiner’s phrase.36 Yet the wars are ‫ ﱢﱡ‬14 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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everywhere in literature written by the children of the war generation; my choice of authors for this book, given the large numbers of novels about the First and Second World Wars published in the last ten years alone, could easily have been different. I have particularly chosen Barker, Swift, McEwan and Waters because they are all demonstrably obsessed with the wars, particularly with the previous generation’s wars, but in addition to this they are also all intrigued by the conceptual difficulties of writing ‘into’ a time at the edges of your experience. The Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, writing on the anniversary of D-Day in 2004, encapsulates both this obsession and also the resulting paradox, which Barker, Swift and McEwan are also fascinated by, of being shaped by an experience you can only know in a limited, second-hand way: Like everyone else born shortly after 1945, I saw the war flickering at the edge of my childhood. My father stayed in the Territorials, my TV screen was filled with soldiers, and so was my weekly comic (The Victor). But for all that, the fighting felt remote – and all the more so because my father very rarely talked about it. I used to think this was his modesty and reserve – and so it was. Now I realise that it was also because he didn’t want the shadow of what he’d been through to fall across my own life. I’ve always been grateful to him for this, but I’ve also wanted to know his story. It’s been one of the shaping paradoxes of my life.37

Graham Swift and Ian McEwan are both, like Motion, the sons of servicemen, and both of them have echoed Motion’s sentiments on growing up with ex-servicemen in postwar Britain. In an interview with the author, Swift explained: Everyone carries where they come from with them – I was born at the end of the forties, with this enormous thing [the war] behind me and its physical effects in front of me. For my generation, the war’s very obviousness and bigness was so undeniable that you clearly had a sense of history, how individual lives could be swept up in huge events. It was a sort of moral, complex drama on a huge scale – and all of these things are great fuel for the writing of literature. Someone born in the nineteen-eighties wouldn’t have that sense.38

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In his short biographical piece ‘Making an Elephant’, Swift describes his father’s war service as a naval pilot in the Fleet Air Arm.39 His father had a good – for which read relatively uneventful – war, and returned home to suburban life in south London and a long career in the civil service. As Swift was growing up, there were ‘several left-overs’ in their home, acting as reminders of Swift’s father’s mysterious and, to Swift, glamorous days as a pilot: ‘his flying jacket . . . [and] some canvas parachute bags, turned into innocent domestic articles’.40 Ian McEwan’s father stayed in the army as a non-commissioned officer (NCO), and his rise through the ranks precipitated McEwan’s educational and social progress from a state boarding school in England to Sussex University and then to the first creative writing Master’s course at the University of East Anglia. McEwan spent his early childhood with his parents on army bases, so ‘grew up with “the detritus of war” around him’; ‘my baby-sitters were corporals’ he observed in one interview.41 As a boy he lived mainly in Singapore and Tripoli with his parents, and was in Libya during the Suez Crisis in 1956. In the introduction to his political screenplay ‘The Ploughman’s Lunch’, which aligns the 1982 Falklands War with the Suez Crisis, McEwan explains that I had my own reasons for wanting to write about Suez. I was eight years old at the time and living in Libya where my father was an officer in the British Army. Anti-British feeling was naturally strong among the Libyans and Army families were herded into armed camps for protection . . . [because McEwan’s mother was away and his father was busy] for some weeks I lived in a tent with other children [,] not so very far from a machine-gun nest . . . suddenly everyday routines belonged to a distant past and I understood for the first time that political events were real and affected people’s lives . . .42

McEwan’s father had served at Dunkirk during the Second World War, and these experiences haunted him, particularly towards the end of his life, but also during McEwan’s childhood. Throughout his life, McEwan heard his father’s stories about the long, dangerous retreat to Dunkirk repeatedly, as he explained in an interview with Susan Chenery: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬16 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction My father was injured at Dunkirk, he was a dispatch rider, wounded in both legs by shrapnel. He found another man wounded in both arms and together they managed to ride a Harley-Davidson to safety. It was clearly a pivotal event and he spoke about it a great deal at the end of his life. So Dunkirk [one of the main settings of Atonement] was always a destination I was heading [to] in my writing. Now I have written it, it seems inevitable that I would sooner or later deal with it.43

Again, Andrew Motion’s comments on inheriting his father’s experiences chime with McEwan and Swift’s sentiments: I’ve always thought that it would be a mistake, and presumptuous, to try and possess that time in my poems. It doesn’t belong to me, however fascinating I might find it. But I’ve also wanted to map its effect on my father – to sympathise with him in my imagination, to measure the distance between his life and mine, to perform my own acts of remembrance. Perhaps some of my contemporaries – Ian McEwan and Andrea Levy . . . are two conspicuous examples – are driven by some of the same mixed feelings. We want to feel our inheritance on our pulses, and understand its power in our present.44 (My italics)

This inheritance can sometimes go back beyond the Second World War. Pat Barker’s novels set in the First World War memorialise members of her family and the experience of the generation who fought in 1914–18. Her ‘family inheritance’ of stories was slightly different from McEwan and Swift’s; while her parents had been involved in the Second World War, she grew up in an environment where she felt closer to the First World War. Although she was born in 1943, Pat Barker grew up in a household where the First World War was the war she heard most about, and the war where the man who looked after her, her stepgrandfather William Dunne, had fought and been injured. Brought up by her grandparents from the age of seven, Barker has attributed her sense of connection to the First World War to growing up with Dunne, whose physical and mental scars were apparent to Barker as a young child. There are clearly many reasons behind Barker’s interest in this war, as there are for each of my authors’ interest in ‫ ﱢﱡ‬17 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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both wars, but like them she traces her interest in the 1914–18 war back to her childhood environment, as is evident in this comment from a 2004 interview, where she refers to Dunne as her grandfather: ‘[I have] a long-standing interest in the First World War. My grandfather . . . fought in that war, and my stepfather . . . also fought in that war. He was in the trenches as a boy of fifteen. So for me, in a sense, that was the war in terms of the conversations I had on a day-to-day basis.’45 Like McEwan and Swift, Barker also studied the war poets – notably Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Robert Graves – at school. She thought that this had strengthened her interest in Sassoon and Owen in particular, although it hadn’t been enough, alone, to make her want to write about them. That had arisen more from her fascination with the way societies deal with conflict in general, and Siegfried Sassoon’s ambivalence about the war and about his war protest in particular. In her first novel to be set within living memory, Sarah Waters uses a variety of experimental metafictional techniques. Waters’s previous novels were neo-Victorian, highly playful reinventions of lesbian history. Grounded in her doctoral research on the homosexual subculture of Victorian London, they borrowed historical information on gay men and transposed it into a lesbian context, highlighting their own constructedness via a thematic emphasis on performance and truth-telling and narrative techniques such as pastiche and self-conscious appropriation of sensation novel tropes. In my examination of Waters as a lesbian author imaginatively recreating a lost lesbian history, I argue that we should similarly expand our understanding of what a generation is. Another lesbian historical novelist, Emma Donoghue, described her sense of the lack of a tangible gay past in explicitly familial terms: Imagine living in a city where there are no monuments, no buildings from before 1970, no proof that you had grandparents or parents, no history at all. Wouldn’t that make you feel like you were just a passing fad, that you could be blown away like leaves? ... For any community to feel substantial and able to change without losing themselves, a history is absolutely crucial.46 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬18 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Waters’s engagement with the Second World War is of a different order to my other authors’; it is part of her project to recover this lost past, which covers a broader historical sweep than the direct postmemorial engagement with the wars seen in the other works discussed. Waters’s interest in the war lies in the social change, and relative freedom for lesbians, that it briefly allowed, and in how in wartime, the previously private and secret can be laid open, offering both an analogy and an opportunity for the fictionalised uncovering of these hidden lives. Waters’s interest in the period came originally from reading Days of Mars, a memoir by a lesbian describing London during the bombing.47 She describes how the image of ‘London . . . literally blown apart by war so all the cellars and foundations were exposed’ had haunted and excited her: ‘walking round the city during the Blitz must have been very upsetting, but also fascinating; to get these glimpses inside other people’s houses. There was a huge opening up of everything, and that extended to gay life as well.’48 Waters shows us a variety of lesbian and heterosexual characters, but focuses on the after-effects of the war on a number of lesbian characters whom the postwar period has left in a kind of limbo, unable to dress or behave as they did as war workers without attracting hostility. Waters’s choice of a reversed narrative to tell this story has a number of effects. By starting in 1947, moving back through 1944 to 1941, she makes the reader a co-investigator. One of the lesbian characters writes detective fiction, and Waters’s novel dwells on the unpicking of the past and the coming to light – or not, in some cases – of truth in a way that echoes both the detective novelist and Waters’s projects. The question of whether it is possible to trace continuities in gay and lesbian identity through history, and whether those terms are meaningful in a non-contemporary context, tends to polarise opinion between those seeking continuity and those emphasising alterity. Waters’s fiction is careful not to take either side absolutely; her reinscription of a lesbian past in all of her novels is so selfconscious, and so deliberately theatrical or playful, that it becomes clear that what these novels do, in fact, is to create a version of the past that conflates contemporary lesbian issues with imagined lesbian history. Waters’s use of metafictional commentary within ‫ ﱢﱡ‬19 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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the text – such as the reversed narrative, or the dwelling on issues that would be recognisable to a contemporary lesbian readership as being current – prevents both readerships from taking the novel as a straightforward historical recreation. This is not to say that Waters’s research is any the less assiduous; like McEwan, she researches both literary and historical sources and models and then reshapes them to suit the purposes of her narrative. Her research into life in wartime London, and lesbian and gay life in particular, led her to archival research but more frequently to published memoirs, novels and studies. As I will show, she relies heavily on source material and is careful to be accurate within the bounds of the historical record, even while emphasising the constructedness of her narrative. When discussing specific bomb-damaged streets, for example, she consulted photos and maps of the damage from the London Metropolitan Archive; she spent a day at the Ambulance Museum, investigating what the ambulances Kay and Mickey drive were like.49 The lack of a heritage or collective memory can be troubling for LGBT people; as Halbwachs observed, collective memory is not simply a matter of preserving the past but of maintaining a sense of a group’s identity and cohesiveness.50 The desire to fit yourself into the narratives of your community thus prompts and informs Waters’s war fiction in much the same way as it does McEwan’s narrative about his father. While any postwar child, even those born today, will grow up with an awareness of what Michael Paris dubs the ‘pleasure culture of the war’, it will affect each author differently, for the reasons discussed.51 The straightforward sense of belatedness is, obviously, strongest in the generation growing up in the immediate aftermath of the war. Jenny Diski, born in 1947, deftly characterises the atmosphere the ‘955,000 new babies that Britain welcomed to its landmass in 1946’ grew up reading books, seeing films and playing games about: Frances [, having been born in 1946,] grew up in a post-war Britain where the reality of the word ‘austerity’ paced side by side with a sense of future born out of the immediate past. The air was filled with stories of history only just made: the heroic oratory of Churchill; villains defeated and, at Nuremberg, punished; heroes ‫ ﱢﱡ‬20 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction and heroines of the Resistance. The children received these stories along with – as part of – the creation myths of their culture and time, bedrock on which a sunny future would be built. They were simple tales of good and evil, as uncomplicated as their narrators . . . they had been born in the aftermath of history.52

These uncomplicated stories issued forth in comics such as The Victor, The Lion, The Eagle, Wizard and Rover. The Amalgamated Press ran a successful series of pocket-sized comic books called the War Picture Library, each containing a complete story of heroic deeds and victory against the odds. They were almost always peculiarly sanitised, devoid of political or historical content – no civilians, no women, no concentration camps and no home front – and concentrated on combat between the British heroes and their foe, usually set in the Second World War but sometimes in the First, and in later years in Korea, or part of the Empire such as Malaya.53 Graham Dawson’s study of changing conceptions of masculinity over the last century places these types of comics in the centre of his own childhood understanding of what war, and being a soldier, was about: Adventure comics provided me with a conception of historical events and of my own imaginative relation to them. I first encountered the term ‘Nazi’ in The Victor . . . for my generation of children, who grew up in the immediate post-war period, what was referred to simple as ‘the war’ remained perhaps the central motif in the national imaginary.54

These comics were immensely popular with schoolboys; books and films about the war were often aimed at a broader audience. McEwan and Waters borrow literary styles and techniques from novels of the periods they are recreating in order to heighten the reader’s awareness of the historical nature of the story and of the text itself, as I will demonstrate. They do not, on the whole, tend to borrow from the popular novels about the war which were extremely prevalent in the postwar years. This is chiefly because they are aiming to recreate a specific moment in time, so use novels written during that period rather than fiction depicting that same period written later. They would both have grown up reading such ‫ ﱢﱡ‬21 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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novels, though; as Michael Paris has noted, many novels, autobiographies and briefer memoirs by veterans were published from the late 1940s onwards, and although most of them proved ephemeral, they were read very widely at the time, and by a broad audience. The Wooden Horse, published in 1949, and The Colditz Story, published in 1952, were so popular that they were republished in abridged form for use in schools in the late 1950s. Other novels too, such as The Cruel Sea, published in 1951 and Ill-Met By Moonlight, published in 1950, found a receptive audience amongst adults and children of both genders.55 The same was true of films, and a look at the most popular films of the 1950s reveals immediately just how popular war stories were. Odette and The Wooden Horse were amongst the most successful films of 1950.56 The Cruel Sea was the most popular film of 1953, a position claimed by the war films The Dam Busters in 1955, Reach For The Sky in 1956 and Sink The Bismark in 1960.57 As with the comic books read by boys of the 1950s, these films, and the many others like them, almost always presented the audience with a sanitised version of events; the wounded would die quickly, disappear or valiantly overcome their injuries – there was no mental trauma, no aftermath. The Nazi atrocities were not shown, nor internecine conflicts and war crimes. In all the films, the British are clearly the forces of good, and are either the victors, as in the majority of cases, or else die bravely in the fight for justice. During the satire boom of the sixties, writers who had grown up with these films began to parody their excesses, exploiting all the clichés of plot and character they’d seen in the war films of their youth. Without a common knowledge of the war films of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, an audience would be unable to read the signs in parodies such as Kenneth Horne’s skit on the British film industry of the period: We in England have a great tradition in film-making, particularly during the war when we made those never to be forgotten epics of ‘Keep It Up’, ‘Stick It Out’, ‘Take It On The Chin’, ‘I Knew You’d All Volunteer’, ‘Good Heavens, An Orange’ [and] ‘Jack, Darling, What’s Happening To Us?’ school of film. Here’s an excerpt from one such naval drama . . . ‫ ﱢﱡ‬22 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction BETTY MARSDEN [playing the great actress Dame Celia Molestrangler]: What’s it like, Charles? HUGH PADDICK [as ‘ageing juvenile, Binky Hunckerback’]: At the front? BETTY MARSDEN: At the front. HUGH PADDICK: Not too bad. It’s not too bad at the back, either, but she’s done the sides beautifully.58

Horne’s fictitious list of film titles provides a succinct and acute catalogue of the aspects of the British character these films portrayed; courage in adversity – the ‘stiff upper lip’ – stoicism, the tendency to see the war in terms of a sporting event, and a love of disaster, or victory snatched from disaster at the last minute. Television parodies of the clichés of the First and the Second World Wars persisted through the 1970s and 1980s, and are still powerful today. Beyond the Fringe skewered ideals of insane devotion to duty in the face of certain death, and the television programme ’Allo ’Allo affectionately mocked the French Resistance and presented the German occupiers of France as bumbling idiots, easily outwitted by elderly women with radio transmitters hidden under their beds. More recently, the comedian Harry Enfield and the writers of the comedy series The Fast Show produced pastiche versions of the war films of the Second World War, again parodying the suicidal ‘devotion to duty’ trope, while the writers of Blackadder Goes Forth performed the same service for the First World War, particularly with regards to the Western Front. As with Kenneth Horne’s satire in Round The Horne, none of these parodies would work unless the writers of them could be sure that no one could hear the film titles ‘Keep It Up’, ‘I Knew You’d All Volunteer’ or ‘Good Heavens, An Orange’ without knowing instantly which clichés of the image of the war they were satirising. As the success of Blackadder Goes Forth and Enfield’s parodies of wartime broadcasting show, we are, to this day, still steeped in the language and imagery of the war. The converse of this parody was the feeling, particularly for men of the postwar generation, that they had missed the great event of their lifetime, that all the circumstances that had shaped their lives were already over before they had been born. Jenny Diski puts it thus in Like Mother: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬23 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines To Frances, in her earliest years, the story of how the world was now and how it had been was something of an abstraction, like . . . Sleeping Beauty . . . [Children of her generation] were comforted to find themselves in a world where good had already triumphed, as though they had moved into a new house that had been redecorated for their arrival. Frances and her contemporaries grew with the feeling that they had been born in the aftermath of history. History had happened for some years prior to their birth when great events had occurred and great figures stalked the earth.59

Although this generation is ‘comforted’ to have arrived after the triumph of good over evil, there is also a note of wistfulness, of having missed the excitement: [But these great figures] were all ghosts to the children of 1946. History was over, the deeds had been done; good and bad, war and genocide, statesmanship and pragmatism, danger and excitement. They had come after; their conception in such unprecedented numbers . . . a very signal that history had finished, and the world returned to . . . a march of uneventful days.60

For many, having been excluded from the most important experience their elders had had caused mixed feelings. On the one hand, there was relief at not having to fight, but on the other exists a common sense of frustrated connection with their fathers and grandfathers, who had fought, and a curiosity as to how they might have coped in the same circumstances. Adam Thorpe described this feeling as having a sense, throughout his lifetime, ‘of just piffling about in the wake of my predecessors’ grandiose historical roles . . . my parents and grandparents were in the World Wars and I wasn’t’.61 Mark Connelly puts it more strongly in his study of representation of the Second World War in postwar popular culture, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War.62 Explaining the development of his own fascination with the war, he writes that for him, what thrilled [me] about the British in World War Two was the incredible bravery, incredible devotion, incredible comradeship, incredible skill [of the fighting forces] . . . it makes me weep with sadness . . . and, it has to be admitted, [with] jealousy. For, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬24 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction ridiculous as I know it sounds given the fact that I know just how terrible, frightening, dreadful the experience must have been, I am jealous I wasn’t there. . . . I am jealous of them for having experienced such intense emotions, for taking part in something so much bigger than themselves but to which they were each integral.63

John Osborne’s ‘angry young man’ of the 1950s, Jimmy Porter, reiterates Connelly’s feelings about being too young to have fought as part of his general, less focused frustration: I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the Thirties and Forties, when we were still kids. (In his familiar, semi-serious mood) There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.64

Although as the stage directions make clear Jimmy Porter isn’t being entirely serious, he does identify the main aspects of the war which made it such a quasi-romantic prospect for many of the men, particularly, who came after: the bravery and the gloriousness, the knowledge that you were fighting for a just cause. The steady decline of Britain as a world power over the same period exacerbated these feelings. From 1947, when India was granted independence, to the handing over of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the British Empire steadily broke up over the second half of the twentieth century. Although the Empire had been re-named the Commonwealth of Nations in 1931, after the Second World War the rate of countries becoming truly independent and seeking and gaining self-governance gathered pace, and Britain’s role as an imperial power shrank to the point of disappearing altogether. At the same time, during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Britain’s manufacturing base shrank, before suffering the catastrophic policies of the Conservative government in the 1980s. Over forty years, Britain’s position as a economic superpower was dramatically eroded. Britain’s position as a world power was also profoundly undermined, reaching a nadir by the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the British government’s attempts to regain the Suez Canal failed in a ‫ ﱢﱡ‬25 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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drawn-out, humiliating defeat. Not only were our military forces unable to control the situation, but the American government’s criticism of Britain’s behaviour made the dubious morality of our actions extremely apparent, as well as the extent to which we were now dependent on America for military and financial assistance: our time as the leading world power was very clearly over. All of this, Mark Connelly suggests, prompted a nostalgia for the Second World War in particular, which led us to place it at the centre of our sense of national pride.65 Its position in the national consciousness was assured, and inevitably the group this had the strongest impact on was the generation born after the war, who came to political consciousness after the disaster of Suez, in the 1960s. I would argue that the prominence of the Second World War in the national imaginary also strengthened our remembrance of the First World War. As I will show in my chapter on Barker, there are many factors contributing towards our continuing remembrance of the First World War, and towards our attitude to various aspects of that war, but it is arguably the case that our valorisation of previous martial success in the face of national decline extended back to the First World War as well as the second. That we are still fascinated by the Second World War in particular, and proud of our role, is extremely evident. Even parodies of the worst clichés of the war are, almost inevitably, affectionate. Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, while it seeks to overturn popular myths surrounding the evacuation of Dunkirk and about the conditions in London in 1940, is still very careful to represent the soldiers as decent, brave men. The apparently sadistic matrons in the London training hospital he depicts are revealed as being, ultimately, kind and sympathetic – rather more so than is the case in the memoirs he draws on in this section, as I will show. The sheer number of television programmes, films and books devoted to the First and Second World Wars still being produced would alone be testament to our continuing fascination. In one of the most successful documentary series of recent years, The 1940s House, Channel 4 moved a family of five into a 1930s ‘semi’, having first restored it to the condition that it would have been in during the war. The family lived as though in the war, suffering food shortages, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬26 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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night-time bombing raids (simulated in sound), the lack of modern labour-saving devices and having to do ‘war work’ volunteering in the community. A 256-page, generously illustrated coffee-table book explaining every aspect of the family’s life in the house accompanied the series. The popularity of the series owed something to the family themselves, whose thoughtful responses to their new lives added to the programme’s success, but the main draw of the series was the house itself, and the way of life to which its occupants had to adjust. A special exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London also accompanied the series, including a fullsized replica of the house, decorated and furnished as it was in the programme. The exhibition drew a record number of visitors and was extended well beyond the original closing date. After the close of the exhibition the museum decided to keep the house, the most popular exhibit in its history, as a permanent exhibit. The house is still immensely popular, both as a stand-alone exhibit and having been incorporated into a number of subsequent exhibitions on the Second World War. The house appeals to our curiosity about what ordinary life was like at this time, but at a more basic level, it appeals to our wish to experience for ourselves – briefly, and in a safe way – what the lives we might have lived then would have been like. The sense that it is understandable for those born afterwards to desire to know what our lives might have been like had we lived then is apparent in the introduction to the book based on the television series. Norman Longmate begins the book by discussing the gulf between those who lived through the war and those born afterwards: The Second World War is one of the great dividing lines in our history. The people who lived through it feel different to those who did not. Those who experienced that unique mixture of expectation and disappointment, fear and relief, deprivation and satisfaction, excitement and boredom, still – if they are honest – consider themselves superior to those born too late to remember the strange, unique years from 1939 to 1945.66

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Jimmy Porter’s perception that those of us born after the war had missed the ‘good, brave causes’ – not to mention, we suspect, the excitement – persists, as part of the ‘myth’ of the war. Samuel Hynes first coined this phrase in relation to World War One, wanting to find a term to encapsulate the various popular stories and tropes which dominated public conceptions of that war. It is, of course, applicable in other situations. The myth of the First World War was famously defined by Hynes as: A generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them.67

The myth of the Second World War differs slightly in that this war is not seen as being futile in the same way as the First World War. The public revelation of the existence of the Nazi death camps at the end of the war (amongst other factors) has meant that the Second World War Allies cannot but appear to have moral reasons for opposing the Germans, even if, ironically, this perception is misleading at best, since liberating the death camps was not the Allies’ main purpose. There are certain basic facts about the Second World War which, however, a writer could reasonably expect not to need to explain to his readership: ‘Hitler, Nuremberg Rally, Chamberlain, Invasion of Poland, Dunkirk, Churchill, Blitz, Finest Hour, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, D-Day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima’.68 Holger Klein, arguing that collective nostalgia may be at the root of the continuing production of war novels, suggests that nostalgia can, as we know, be felt for something one has never experienced . . . [the nostalgia apparent in recent novels about the war is] for the sense of purpose, unity and achievement dominant during the Second World War, which has been frayed and frittered away in the humdrum decades since 1945, with their loss of empire, of power, of confidence in the country . . .69 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬28 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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The myth of the Second World War suggests that it was Britain’s ‘finest hour’, when the entire nation gathered together in spirit, cheerfully shouldering the burdens of fighting abroad and bombing at home, rationing and forced separation from loved ones, in a national show of ‘Blitz spirit’. The reality, as the work of the Mass Observation archives show, was unsurprisingly rather more complicated than this, but this narrative of the war, having developed over the last sixty years, is still the dominant ‘myth’.70 In this study, I will look at the myth of both of the wars, and how the novels I discuss emerge from them or fit into them, question them, and play with them. The authors often make self-conscious, deliberate reference to the myths which interest them, either to investigate narratives which already exist, and ways of telling them, or trying to challenge the prevailing myth, as Ian McEwan does in his depiction of the run-up to the evacuation of Dunkirk. These authors’ interest in how they, as second-generation writers, can narrate the stories of the previous generation, is mirrored in the growing critical interest in literary and historical studies in the ways that narratives are transmitted to, and evolve in, the responses of the next generation (see Kabir 2004, van Alphen 2006, Stanley 2006, Keizer 2008). As yet, while Elias has analysed how and why postcolonial historiographic metafictions eschew the radical openness of their predecessors in the genre, no one has looked beyond what these novels say about history to what they actually do with history. Examining the relevance of postmemory to these texts, alongside how their authors engage with the archive, illuminates how historiographic metafiction has developed since Hutcheon first identified the genre. It reveals how the form’s in-built potential for empathic unsettlement enables a new type of ontologically self-reflexive fiction, which flaunts its seams, but which also finds new ways to address and engage the reader in a politicised effort to remember. Finding out what father was made of: Graham Swift71 This brief discussion of Graham Swift, which concludes my introduction, looks at him as the second-generation writer par excellence of the baby boomer authors. Swift was born after the war, in 1949. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬29 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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His father had been a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, and Swift, growing up with rationing, and amongst bomb sites in postwar London, was inevitably very aware of the physical debris of the war around him as well as the material remnants of his father’s flying career – parachute bags, photos – in his home.72 In this section I will offer an analysis of Swift’s presentation of war, and of the Second World War in particular, in the novel which looks most closely at what it means to be the child of a serviceman, the early work Shuttlecock. I argue that as a writer who has described that war as his ‘great history lesson’, and who does not use historical source material in his fiction, Swift provides a useful contrast to the other, similarly obsessed, writers whose treatment of the world wars draws heavily on research.73 Throughout Swift’s fiction we can see the way that the Second World War in particular haunts his generation, always present in the background of his characters’ lives. Looking at the aesthetics and historical reasoning behind his imagination-driven approach to representing the war and its after-effects illuminates the ways and reasons that the other three authors I will discuss recreate them. Swift’s fascination with the Second World War grew out of growing up in the 1950s, amid what he has described as ‘all the physical evidence of war’, and with a father whose career as a pilot was made to seem even more glamorous by his deeply mundane postwar job as a civil servant in the National Debt Office.74 In ‘Making an Elephant’, a short autobiographical piece written for the 25th anniversary of Granta, Swift describes how, when he was a child, the momentos of his father’s war – his pilot’s log, sheepskin jacket and album of carefully labelled photographs – conjured up a vision of a more dramatic, more exciting time.75 His father had gone from being a messenger boy in the civil service to being a Naval Officer who had learnt to fly aeroplanes and travelled to America, South Africa and Malta, before coming home to a life of ‘drudgery’, as he himself described it.76 Like Hoffman and Diski, Swift’s childhood understanding of the war was unsurprisingly limited and framed in terms of myth – adventure stories and games in which, as in the contemporary boys’ war comics, the war was sanitised. Like most children, espe‫ ﱢﱡ‬30 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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cially of a postwar generation, Swift played war games at school: ‘My memory of [the games in] the school playground was [that they were] either English and German or Cowboys and Indians. I don’t remember feeling any compunction at playing games with guns, or playing at war.’77 But his unselfconscious playing at soldiers was tempered by his awareness, as he described it to the author, that there was more to his parents’ recent history than he understood, of the fact that his parents ‘didn’t invite [me to] talk about it; if you were a child, then one of the things you learned – you unconsciously understood – was that this was not a straightforward business’.78 Looking back as an adult, Swift identified this unease as an intuitive, but confused, understanding of ‘the power of the dead over the living. One reason that [my parent’s generation] don’t talk easily [about their war experiences] is that you have to resurrect those dead people, which is difficult. In the case of talking to your father at 5 or 6, you don’t think about the dead people.’79 In ‘Making An Elephant’, the adult Swift, reading his father’s flying logbook, comes across ‘one Focke-Wulf 190 shot down in sea in flames’, and ‘can’t help wondering what was going through [his] father’s head as he wrote that’.80 The adult wonders what that moment, so far outside his own experience, could possibly have felt like; ‘the son, of course, has the obvious thought . . . it might have been him. I wouldn’t be here to know.’81 As a grown man, then, Swift’s response is complicated, taking in both the difference between his father’s life and his own (itself a complex issue), and the idea that he himself could easily never have been born if his father had not survived the war. As a child, he simply didn’t understand, couldn’t imagine, the fact that it could have been his father who was killed: ‘with some of his comrades, it was them... The one who crashed into a mountainside in Ireland – when I was small, we used to see that one’s widow. Her son, named after his father, once came to stay . . . I can’t remember at the time really putting two and two together, really understanding. He had no father. Killed in the war.’82 Swift also devoured boys’ adventure stories and many of the war memoirs published in the postwar years; his investigation of the version of the war these types of book offered in the 1950s is a significant ‫ ﱢﱡ‬31 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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theme in his early novel Shuttlecock.83 Swift’s fiction investigates the ways the unimaginable dead, and the war itself, still haunt us now. The Second World War appears in every one of Swift’s nine novels to date, and his great-uncle’s war experience will feature in his next, as yet unpublished novel.84 Its prominence varies; in Last Orders the characters’ time as soldiers in Egypt forms a central part of the (recollected) narrative, while in The Light of Day there is only a fleeting reference to George Webb’s father working as a beach photographer: ‘Broadstairs, 1946, after he came out the army’.85 Swift is generally more interested in the impact of the war, rather than in the war itself; if his characters have taken part – many are bystanders – it will have been in the distant past. We are always at at least one remove from the conflict. Swift is also more interested in the effects of the war on ordinary people without grandiose historical roles, or, as he puts it, ‘of how little people lived through big things’.86 The novelist Kazuo Ishiguro described Swift as someone whose writing ‘doesn’t go for flashy things . . . he goes for depth of emotion . . . he goes into that drizzly, unglamorous region of human existence and tries to find there something universal. I think that he looks for the dignity and heroism of very ordinary, drab, almost defeated lives.’87 Swift’s ‘tea-tabling’ of big historical events, showing them through their effects on the individual lives of ordinary people, means that he never depicts the war directly and focuses instead on the aftermath.88 His novels are not historical fiction in the way that Barker’s, Waters’s and McEwan’s are, but concentrate instead on the haunting of the present by the war. This is the major difference between Swift and the other authors considered here, who all choose the explore similar issues in a wartime setting. In the body of this book, I will look at how their also being second-generation writers affects the way that each of them uses historical source material in their fiction; what sort of agenda they bring to their use of the past, and how they view the role of historical material in fiction. Obviously, setting his novels in the postwar period, in his own lifetime, frees Swift from doing historical research in the same way that setting a novel in a more distant past could necessitate. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬32 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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However, even allowing for this degree of freedom, Swift is, as Anthony Quinn put in it an interview with Swift following the publication of Last Orders, ‘famously casual about research’.89 Rather than being evidence of a lackadaisical approach to writing novels, this is an important aspect of his aesthetic; Swift proposes the truth-telling imagination, driven by the writer’s desire to be ‘fair to his characters’, as the source of truth in fiction, rather than strict historical veracity.90 His partner Candice Rodd explained to the Guardian that Swift doesn’t tend to use his own personal life in his fiction, or meticulously research every aspect of the fictional world he creates in each novel: ‘He doesn’t do much research before starting the book . . . he imagines and surmises and when he is finished he says “I [had] better just see if the place really exists or if it is possible to do this.’’’91 Swift admitted to Anthony Quinn that he wrote a description of Rochester for Last Orders without having been there or researched what it was like: ‘I found I’d described Rochester High Street and thought I’d better go and check. It turned out to be very different from the way I’d imagined.’92 Although Quinn does not press him as to whether he then rewrote the Rochester sequence in Last Orders, it seems likely, from comments he has made about trying to be accurate in comparable situations, that he did. What is more significant is his later comment on his frustration at the way that ‘there is a tremendous urge amongst certain people who read to see fiction as disguised fact, and of course, you write from experience . . . but if fiction isn’t the ability to produce something from almost nothing . . . then there’s no use for the term fiction’.93 Fiction, for Swift, is an act of the imagination which owes little or nothing to the factual basis it necessarily springs from, as he explained to E. Jane Dickson in 1992: ‘None of my characters is me,’ [Swift] insists. ‘I don’t go around looking for material from my life that will make a novel. Nor do I turn people I know into characters. Writing in the first person is a complete act of the imagination. Once I have invented characters, I find that I have immediate, internal access to them. I see through their eyes.’ ‫ ﱢﱡ‬33 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines The idea of ‘method-writing’ [,] building up a character from a pool of exhaustively researched historical data [,] is equally inimical to Swift, for whom writing is an instinctive, quasi-mystical experience. ‘The imagination takes you amazingly fast and amazingly authentically to things that you had no suspicion were going to involve you. One of the very early things that happens to a novelist is the almost magical feeling that you have this shape that has to be fulfilled, a story to be elicited.’94

Swift believes that truth-telling in novels is not a matter of ‘methodwriting’, as Dickson calls it, but is something one can only reach intuitively: Writers have an instinct about having it right with their characters. You know when your imagination is truthful and when it’s not. You may never make it entirely truthful, and there are moments when you go straight to the truth. You can tell this as a reader when it seems to enter you straight from the page, and later you wonder where it came from. It’s when it goes straight from the writer’s imagination to the page and then to the reader.95

Dickson comments that despite the obvious craft in Swift’s writing, ‘he clings to his curiously passive notion of authorship’, claiming that he has ‘always had the feeling that [his] stories are discovered as well as invented’.96 He also states that he sees ‘storytelling’ as ‘literally restorative’.97 By this he means that ‘story-telling is a basic human instinct, the instinct to come to terms with mystery, chaos and mess. It is a way of getting some kind of grip on experience, both personal and historical, which is otherwise horribly fluid.’98 This instinct to make sense of the world around us by forming it into manageable narratives is also, Swift contends, closely related to the way that we use narratives to make meaningful connections with the past. He suggests that the family is the ‘basic human context’ in which memories are passed down to successive generations, allowing a link between the present and the past to be made.99

‫ ﱢﱡ‬34 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction ‘It all comes back to memory,’ explains Swift. ‘If you write about different generations and the relationship between those generations, then you have clear access to a historical perspective. For example, a contemporary of mine at university had clear memories of his great-grandfather, who had memories of his own great-grandfather who was present when the fleet came back from the battle of Trafalgar. So a memory going right back to the beginning of the nineteenth century is still alive beyond the middle of the twentieth century. It’s uncanny.’100

It should not then come as a surprise that Swift often dramatises this connection between generations, without necessarily using his own experience, in his fiction. For example, in Waterland and Ever After the narratives of family history influence the narratives of the novel as Tom Crick’s and Bill Unwin’s exploration of their family histories show how an understanding of where you come from – the heritage you are handed on from previous generations – shapes your sense of who you are and how you live. The workings of genealogical narrative are something Swift’s particular generation has a heightened awareness of, because, as we have seen with Diski, Hoffman and Motion, to pick from a vast array of authors who have written on this topic, they are very conscious of the gap between their parents, with their memories of the most important event of the century, and themselves. As Hoffman put it, they are paradoxically both nearest and furthest away from the war; as Swift commented, ‘someone born in the nineteen-eighties would not have that sense [of how war sweeps individual lives into huge events]’.101 Shuttlecock, Swift’s second published novel, is his most sustained analysis of the postwar generation’s ‘inheritance’ from their parents. The novel is narrated by Prentis, who works in the archives of the police’s ‘dead crimes’ department. He is the son of a minor war hero whose memoir of spying with Special Operations in France in the Second World War, like Swift’s novel, also called Shuttlecock, obsesses Prentis and is quoted at length. Prentis is caught between two ‘father-figures’, his own father, referred to throughout as ‘Dad’, and his boss, Quinn. Following a nervous breakdown, Prentis’s father has been in a ‘language coma’ for two years at the start of the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬35 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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novel, and is in a home for the mentally handicapped.102 Quinn is an inscrutable and exacting boss generally, according to Prentis, but as the novel begins he has set Prentis the task of looking for possible connections between a number of files on a case known only as C9. Prentis increasingly comes to suspect that Quinn is withholding one of the files from him – for reasons he cannot guess – and his usual insecurity and self-consciousness begin to turn into paranoia. At home, at the same time, Prentis is trying to find out why his father had a breakdown. Because of his father’s inability, or unwillingness, to speak, Prentis resorts to reading and re-reading the volume of memoirs which his father published in the late 1950s, hoping that amongst the tales of heroic bravery, strength and cunning he will find some clue to his father’s personality. However, as the novel progresses, and he begins to understand the contents of file C9, Prentis realises that the case has something to do with his father. He soon guesses that the missing files from it almost certainly prove that his father’s memoir is a lie and that having been captured and tortured by the Gestapo, instead of escaping, his father broke down, betrayed four comrades and was then allowed to run away. Prentis’s re-reading of his father’s memoir changes, so that he is trying to read under the surface of the text looking for clues as to which parts of his father’s story are true and which made up. The root of the urgency of Prentis’s quest to understand his father’s war lies in the way that growing up with a war hero as a father has twisted him, leaving him embittered at his own perceived inadequacy, cruel to his wife and children and sinking into paranoia and self-loathing. As Prentis himself puts it, the irony of it was that I fell away from Dad after I read his book [as a child] . . . Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t find the book extraordinary, amazing – terrific stuff – that I didn’t admire Dad. But, having a hero as a father – even having a father who isn’t a hero but works in a plush office and plays golf on Sundays with a little retinue of worshippers – all this is bad news if you’re an only son.103

Prentis’s description of his father’s ‘little retinue of worshippers’ is revealing, showing how they, and his father, have shaped his view of masculinity and fed his sense of inadequacy: ‘they all had the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬36 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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confident, weathered looks of men who had had, as they used to say then, “good wars” and become well set-up afterwards’.104 His father encourages Prentis to develop the values he and his memoir personify; toughness, quick thinking, resourcefulness and above all, bravery. Although this model of the father–son relationship is not limited to this particular period, or to the children of servicemen, in Swift’s novel he uses it to explore the particular effect on children of the 1950s of growing up in a culture where the values Prentis’s father espouses dominated the public conception, or myth, of the war, and the war dominated young boys’ understanding of masculinity. Swift uses Prentis’s father’s memoir to depict the predominant public memory of the war as he experienced it. He challenges the idea of the so-called ‘good war’ and explores the effect of the myth of the ‘good war’ on the post-1945 generation, whose conception of what it meant to be a man was strongly influenced by the war-defined models of ideal masculine behaviour so prolific in popular culture – in memoirs such as Prentis’s father’s – of the 1940s onwards. Ingrid Gunby has pointed out that Swift is careful to situate Dad’s memoir’s place in what Mark Rawlinson refers to as ‘the history of the war’s remembrance.’105 Prentis introduces his father’s memoir thus: During the war my Dad was a spy. He used to be dropped into occupied France and liaise with resistance fighters, keep watch on German installations and help blow them up. He wrote a book about his exploits, in the fifties, and for a few years his name was wellknown, he was one of the war heroes. He isn’t so well known now – his book’s long been out of print – but if you mention his name to people of a certain age, it still rings a dim bell, they know who you mean . . . You remember in the early and mid-fifties, when the actual after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films.106

Gunby suggests that Swift deliberately dates the publication of Dad’s memoir in the mid-1950s to tie in with the rush of war memoirs around that time (which Prentis alludes to above). Dad’s memoir comes out at a time, as Prentis says, when the hardships of the war, such as rationing, were fading. As the realities of wartime ‫ ﱢﱡ‬37 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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life began to recede, Rawlinson suggests that the myth of the war began to change, translated into ‘a selective, legible and usable past’, which elided the historical or moral complexity that some wartime narratives (such as the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene) had included.107 Prentis’s father’s memoir is clearly identified as part of the ‘spate of war books and war films’ Prentis alludes to, most of which were adventure stories. This form was massively popular in the 1950s and 1960s in particular, with war stories aimed at boys and young men constituting a huge market. Swift has commented that he based Dad’s memoir on his ‘memor[ies] of war books I read as a kid’.108 According to Gunby, postwar escape narratives such as P.R. Reid’s The Colditz Story were at particular pains to distinguish their British protagonists from both the conquered peoples of Europe and their conquerors, and to emphasise the qualities of individual resourcefulness, courage and luck that enable the protagonists to escape their captors and rejoin the war effort.109

Dad’s memoir fits into this mould very well; he respects the French Resistance, but works largely alone and on his own initiative; he is very brave, particularly in the face of great danger, very resourceful and very lucky. He also tends to play down his successes, and only allude to failures in a self-mocking tone, such as when, in taking great risks to kill a German sentry at a factory he needs to get into, he risks his life to stab the man from behind: I struck – my left hand covering his mouth, fingers pinching the nose, the blade entering left of the spine: a text-book application of my close combat training. The only thing I had forgotten was the cigarette [the sentry had just lit]. My hand rammed most of it into the sentry’s mouth, but I was left with an angry burn in the centre of my palm . . .110

Prentis’s father’s story is told to impress his readers with his suicidal bravery (he is trapped and killing the sentry at that precise moment is his only hope of escape), and his calm – ‘a text-book application of my close combat training’. His laconic comment on having forgotten the cigarette adds to our impression of the lack of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬38 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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emotion in this passage, and of Dad’s complete military professionalism. The reader has no clue as to Dad’s feelings – was he frightened? How does killing a man in what he himself describes as close combat feel? His assessment of the risk is detailed but he does not record his feelings except to end the account with levity. Prentis’s stunned response – he does not know what to think of this emotionless account of his father killing a man, despite having read it at his own admission at least twelve times – is designed to emphasise that where Prentis senior appears to feel nothing about the killing, his son feels very differently: ‘My Dad. Cold steel. A man’s back.’111 Rawlinson identifies the use of this kind of tone as part of the evolution of the myth of the Second World War in the 1950s that elided the more critical interpretations of the war, which had featured in earlier accounts by prisoners of war such as Robert Key and Michael Burn.112 Prentis, as the child of the author of this memoir, naturally wonders how his father felt when he did this brave, but terrible thing, which is so utterly outside his own experience: Ever since Dad went into his silence I’ve been poring over [his book] . . . each time I read it, it seems to get not more familiar but more elusive and remote. There are a thousand questions I want to ask, about things that aren’t actually stated in the book. About how Dad felt at the time, about what was going on inside him. Because Dad doesn’t write about his feelings; he describes events, and where his feelings come into it he conveys them in a bluff, almost light-hearted way, as in some made-up adventure story; so that sometimes this book, which is all fact seems to me like fiction, like something that never really took place.113

With his father silent, Prentis has only the memoir to use to try to answer his questions, but it is just as unforthcoming: What really happened, Dad, at Auxonne? At Combe-les-Dames? What was it like to blow up railways? To hide in a water tank, in four feet of water all night, while the Gestapo hunted you? To be in constant danger? What was it like when the German-hired Cossacks captured one of your comrades and burned him alive? What was it like, what was it really like?114 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬39 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Prentis, though, is not reading the memoir to be reminded of his father’s ‘good war’, but to try to prise out of it anything to support his suspicion that it is less than perfectly truthful. This suspicion is fed by the information in case C9 that Quinn allows him to see, which Prentis begins to realise implicates his father not only in lying about what happened during his interrogation but also in betraying Prentis’s mother and having an affair in the years after the war. Prentis has come to suspect both of these betrayals from the partial information in the files he has seen, but at this point Quinn asks Prentis to come to his house, and then reveals that he has removed the file Prentis has been looking for. This file may or may not contain evidence proving that Prentis’s father’s war record was false and that he had also had an affair. Prentis, finally, chooses ignorance, and together they burn the file. Although these revelations are shocking, knowing they exist and the choosing not to pursue the truth, but to destroy the files, frees Prentis to approach a more adult understanding of his father not as a remote and godlike figure but as a fallible man. By extension, the version of the myth of the war – the ‘good war’ – which these types of memoirs proffered in the 1950s is undermined. Swift then reveals that Prentis’ other father figure, Quinn, has a very different war record. Quinn gives Prentis a drink, and then begins to talk in an intimate, personal manner Prentis has never known before: ‘I saw my bit of action, and it was all over in about a minute . . . The Germans . . . opened up [firing] and in ten seconds half my platoon were dead . . . I didn’t perform any of my much-rehearsed functions as a leader. I obeyed my instinct. I ran like bloody hell – like everyone else. I ran for my life. That’s no joke.’115

It might be enough for Prentis to hear that not all men exhibited the same superhuman courage his father’s memoir depicts, but there is more, as Quinn continues: ‘I would have killed any English soldier who got in my way, let alone a German. Now I don’t remember any of this except one thing . . . as I ran I had to jump over a bit of broken-down hedge. Lying face up in the ditch on the other side of it was a wounded man. I don’t know if I saw him beforehand or if I only realised he was there when I’d ‫ ﱢﱡ‬40 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction already jumped. All I know is that my right boot came down hard and firm on his face; and I had a good glimpse of his face because I was able to tell the poor fellow was still alive. I didn’t stop.’116

The next moment, Quinn was thrown into the air by an explosion; although he lived, he lost his right foot. He tells Prentis that he feels that, because he had run away, and jumped on the wounded man, perhaps this was some kind of punishment: ‘the fact I was wounded somehow obscured the possibility of my being charged for cowardice and dereliction of duty . . . I’m not necessarily superstitious, Prentis, but I can’t help believing my right foot was blown off because it was that foot that trod on that man’s face . . . When I brought my foot down – it was only a split second, but I remember this much – I thought: he’s had it, I can still save myself. I was glad.’117

Hearing this story from Quinn helps Prentis to come to terms with his life-long image of his father as an invulnerable hero, because Quinn shows him that other men reacted instinctively to save themselves; it also helps him come to terms with the new image of his father that C9 has opened up, as a man who betrayed his country and his family. Gunby suggests that in interrogating this myth of the war, ‘Shuttlecock can be read as a manifestation of the urge to interrogate the collective memory of the Second World War that gathered momentum amongst the children of the baby boom in the 1970s and 1980s . . . by recovering the doubts about the nature of the Second World War that were written out of the collective memory in the 1950s and subsequently.’118 Questioning the 1950s version of the war allows Prentis to stop trying to match up to an impossible ideal. Knowing that his father was fallible, he can relax, and his relationships with his own sons and his wife improve. After his meeting with Quinn, he has a sudden urge to get drunk; when he gets home, his wife assumes that something dramatic must have happened for him to drink so much, and is clearly wondering if his father has starting speaking again: ‘I realised what she might be thinking: Dad’s recovered, Dad’s spoken again. That’s why I’ve gone and got drunk. I thought: in a way that’s just what’s happened.’119 Prentis ‫ ﱢﱡ‬41 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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has not had his questions answered, he has chosen to stop asking them, no longer needing to hear the answers. A few months after this, Prentis finally stops reading Dad’s book: ‘I inquired no further. How much of a book is in the words and how much is behind or in between the lines?’120 Prentis has found peace by ceasing to ‘inquire’, now preferring not to know what really happened to his father. The novel’s structure, built on Prentis’s quest to find his father in the files of case C9 or in his memoir, comes to a natural ending point here. Although an ending in which the protagonist chooses to burn the very document he has been searching for is an unusual conclusion for such a novel, in every other respect Shuttlecock fits Suzanne Keen’s definition of the type of novel she calls a ‘romance of the archive’.121 Keen describes this genre of historical novel as containing ‘representations of archives in which scholarly and amateur characters seek information in collections of documents’.122 This is the simplest and most basic definition of the genre. Keen elaborates: They have scenes taking place in libraries or in other structures housing collections of papers and books; they feature the plot action of ‘doing research’ in documents. They designate a character or characters at least temporarily as archival researchers, as questers in the archive. They unabashedly interpret the past through its material traces; they build on a foundation on ‘documentarism,’ answering the postmodern critique of history with invented records full of hard facts.123

Shuttlecock unarguably meets Keen’s criteria. Because of his father’s linguistic coma, Prentis is forced, if he wants to learn anything about Dad, to turn to books and documents, namely Dad’s memoir and the files Quinn gradually releases to him at work. His work life consists of archival research, but in this instance, his private life and his work collide in his quest to understand his father. The significance of the romance of the archive is that the protagonists are using source material, or material traces, to try to discover the truth about a particular moment or person in the past. As I have shown, Swift’s approach to writing is imagina‫ ﱢﱡ‬42 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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tion-driven, and unlike the other three authors I explore here, he does not tend to mimic his characters and mine source material for his depiction of either the present or the past. However, he does use source material in certain cases, and looking at the instances in which Swift thinks it appropriate to use verifiable historical material tells us exactly where he draws the line between history and fiction, as well as why. Swift is wary of the effect of having too much historical detail in a novel, as well as sceptical about its usefulness for a writer of fiction. When writing his novels, he has described how he ‘writes a draft with holes in it, then goes back with the historical facts later’.124 He explains that for him, research can hinder the work of the imagination: Research can trap you. In order to make something live and do its work in the novel you might need some tiny side glimpse of some historical truth – which you can get from anywhere – and the danger is that you can go away and read lots of books, and in the end the novel is loaded with things that it doesn’t need.125

The type of facts which Swift does think it necessary to check are what Hayden White calls events, such as historical dates. In Out of This World, Swift has his protagonist Harry Beech meet his future wife in the grim setting of the Nuremberg trials. Swift, who wanted to ‘set up the irony of their lives just beginning’ against the horror of the war and the trials, felt that if he were to use this real event as a backdrop he needed to check who was on trial at the time that the characters were there: ‘it’s easy to check that and it would have been a lapse not to’.126 However, as a writer of fiction, Swift feels he has different obligations to the historian or the biographer, whom he describes as having ‘an exacting moral responsibility to the people [they’re] writing about’.127 Swift has what he calls ‘areas of discretion’: ‘it’s nice to get the weather right, but I wouldn’t research it’.128 His area of discretion is carefully circumscribed; he may not feel impelled to check the weather, but he does take care to create a historically plausible fictional world, despite not feeling that every detail has to be verifiable: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬43 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines One of the most vexing but inescapable things [about writing a novel] is chronology. When you develop a character, they’re quite quickly going to fall into a period, a lifetime, which has to be historically fixed . . . [those dates] can’t be in conflict with other things in their lives. Before you know it, all of that gets very entangled, and you know ‘this character would not have been there or done this thing’, and you have to rejig the whole thing.129

When writing novels such as Shuttlecock or Waterland, which refer to the course of European history, Swift reminds himself of events with a history primer left over from his school days, but does not research any more deeply than this allows. Yet when he was writing Last Orders, and one of his characters put a bet on a horse for a dying friend, which won enough to clear the dying man’s debts, Swift took great care to pick a real winning horse in a real race.130 The reason for his exactitude here is a clue to his conception of truth in fiction; Swift is driven not by a desire to recreate the past exactly, but to recreate it in a way that he thinks is fair to his characters. As he puts it, ‘I don’t research in terms of looking everything up, but I do feel responsible to the characters.’131 It was ‘oddly important’ to Swift for the details of the racing in Last Orders to be accurate, so he went through sporting papers for the relevant years, picking out names and races from them.132 But he states very clearly that his motivation for this was not to create a historically verifiable account, but to be ‘fair to [his] characters . . . [he] was more spurred on by getting inside the character’s head than by a general desire for factual accuracy’.133 Swift describes this type of truthfulness as ‘the human truth of the experience’, and it is not dependent on factual accuracy, but on the truth that Swift argues comes from the imagination of the writer: I stand by what I have done. [You have to have] sufficient faith in the imagination; one of its functions is to take you to the truth – it can be a fantastical thing. It can take you to the truth of the situation imaginatively – it has a moral force [of its own].134

In the next three chapters, I will look at three authors whose novels are also very similar to ‘romances of the archive’, as defined by Keen. Like Shuttlecock, each of these novels feature characters who ‫ ﱢﱡ‬44 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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are on a quest to understand the past. However, in the novels I examine next, the authors have relied heavily on historical source material to help them recreate the past: that is, they have undergone the same archival quest as their characters. In the following chapters, I will examine the difference that using source material makes to novels which either depict or are concerned with the past. Swift says that as a novelist he does not have the same type of responsibilities as a biographer; but what about Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, where real people and real events provide the backbone of each of the novels, or Atonement, where memoirs and letters by real people feed McEwan’s reinterpretation of the summer and autumn of 1940? What about cases where the historical material is used as the basis of a novel as compared to works of fiction where it plays a subsidiary role, providing a backdrop for a fictional drama? In the next chapter, I investigate Pat Barker’s trilogy of First World War novels, which are based on real, and well-known, events. I trace her use of source material throughout the trilogy, and show how her personal interests in class and gender conflict inform her reading of historical material, but how ultimately – and contrary to some of the criticism levelled at her – her depiction of the period is painstakingly researched, while at the same time she upholds the right of the novelist to venture beyond the limits of the historical record. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

Andrew Motion, ‘Forget-me-not’, Guardian 12 June 2004. Andrew Greig That Summer (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) vii–ix. Greig, That Summer, vii. Greig, That Summer, 258. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 51. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust (London: Vintage, 2005) xi. Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (New York: Penguin Books, 1979). Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬45 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 8 Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. 9 William West, ‘Living With My Father’s Second World War Stories’, The Friends Quarterly 35:1 (2006), 7. 10 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 16. 11 Jenny Diski, Like Mother (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1988), 35–6. 12 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 16. 13 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 16. 14 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 18. 15 Motion, ‘Forget-me-not’. Jeff Giles, ‘A Novel of (Bad) Manners’, Newsweek, 8 April 2002, 94. 16 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 16. 17 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 188. 18 Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 188. 19 Hirsch, Family Frames. 20 Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (London: Virago, 2006). 21 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 22 For a more detailed account of White’s ideas, see Hayden White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Angus Fletcher (ed.), The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 21–44; Tropics Of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) and The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987). 23 Laurence Lerner, The Frontiers of Literature (1988), reprinted in Dennis Walder (ed.), Literature in The Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 334. 24 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), 5. 25 Frederick M. Holmes, The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1997), 11. 26 Holmes, The Historical Imagination, 11. 27 Amy J. Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 28 Elias, Sublime Desire, 143. 29 Long, J.J. ‘History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s die Ausgewanderten’, Modern Language Review 98:1 (2003), 124. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬46 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Introduction 30 Peter Childs, ‘The English Heritage Industry and Other Trends in the Novel at the Millennium’, A Companion to the British and Irish Novel 1945 – 2000 in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 214. 31 Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London: Routledge, 1996), 142–3. 32 Connor, The English Novel, 142. 33 Connor, The English Novel, 142. 34 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 41. 35 Pat Barker, Regeneration (London: Viking, 1991), The Eye in The Door (London: Viking, 1993), The Ghost Road (London: Viking, 1995). 36 ‘We come after, and that is the nerve of our condition’ (italics in original). George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 4. 37 Motion, ‘Forget-me-not.’ 38 Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. 39 Graham Swift, ‘Making an Elephant: Good Manners in South London, Long Ago’, Jubilee ed. Ian Jack, Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 87 (2004), 301–316. 40 Swift, ‘Making an Elephant’, 310. 41 Kate Kellaway, ‘At Home With His Worries,’ Observer, 16 September 2001. 42 Ian McEwan, The Ploughman’s Lunch: An Original Screenplay by Ian McEwan (London: Methuen, 1985), v. 43 Susan Chenery, ‘Enduring McEwan’, Weekend Australian, 6 October 2001. 44 Motion, ‘Forget-me-not’. 45 Sheryl Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind: Talking about the Regeneration Trilogy with Pat Barker’, in Sharon Monteith, Margaretta Jolly, Nahem Yousaf and Roland Paul (eds), Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 175. 46 Emma Donoghue, quoted in Alice Lawlor, ‘Emma Donoghue’s Historical Novels’: www.xtra.ca (accessed 2 June 2009). 47 Bryher, The Days of Mars: A Memoir, 1940–1946 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972). 48 John O’Connell, ‘The Tipping Point’, Time Out, 8 February 2006, 54. 49 Sarah Waters, personal interview, 10 November 2009. 50 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). ‫ ﱢﱡ‬47 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 51 Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850-2000 (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 235. 52 Diski, Like Mother. 53 Paris, Warrior Nation, 232. 54 Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), 247. 55 Eric Williams, The Wooden Horse (London: Collins, 1949); P.R. Reid, The Colditz Story (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1952); Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea (London: Cassell, 1951); W. Stanley Moss, Ill-Met By Moonlight (London: Harrap, 1950). 56 Odette, dir. Herbert Wilcox, perf. Anna Neagle, Trevor Howard, Marius Goring, Bernard Lee and Peter Ustinov, British Lion Studios, 1950. The Wooden Horse, dir. Jack Lee, perf. Leo Genn, David Tomlinson and Anthony Steel, British Lion Studios, 1950. 57 The Dam Busters, dir. Michael Anderson, perf. Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Derek Farr, Ursula Jeans and Basil Sydney, Associated British Studios, 1955. Reach For The Sky, dir. Lewis Gilbert, perf. Kenneth More, Muriel Pavlov, Lyndon Brook, Lee Patterson and Alexander Knox, J. Arthur Rank Studios, 1956. Sink The Bismark, dir. Lewis Gilbert, perf. Kenneth More, Dana Wynter, Carl Mohner, Laurence Naismith, Karel Stepanek and Michael Hordern, Twentieth Century Fox Studios, 1960. 58 Kenneth Horne, Round The Horne, BBC Enterprises 1988, ZBBC 1010. 59 Diski, Like Mother, 36. 60 Diski, Like Mother, 36. 61 Thorpe, email to the author, 14 April 2004. 62 Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (London: Longman, 2004). 63 Connelly, We Can Take It!, 18. 64 John Osborne, Look Back In Anger (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 83. 65 Connelly, We Can Take It!, 11. 66 Norman Longmate, ‘Foreword’, Juliet Gardiner, The 1940s House, (London: Channel 4 Books, 2000), 7. 67 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992) x. 68 James Meek, ‘Nuremberg Rally, Invasion of Poland, Dunkirk . . .’, London Review of Books, 6 September 2001, 28–9. 69 Holger Klein, The Artistry of Political Literature: Essays on War, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬48 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94

Commitment and Criticism (Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), 222. For a more detailed analysis of the work of the Mass Observation teams during the war, and the contrast between the picture of daily life during the war and the prevailing myth of the war, particularly pertaining to the London Blitz, see Simon Garfield’s Private Battles: Our Intimate Diaries – How The War Nearly Defeated Us (London: Ebury Press, 2006). Graham Swift, Shuttlecock (London: Penguin, 1982), 24. John O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’, Guardian, 1 March 2003. O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’. O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’. Swift, ‘Making An Elephant’, 305–7, 310. Swift, ‘Making An Elephant’, 312. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Swift, ‘Making an Elephant’, 309. Swift, ‘Making an Elephant’, 309. Swift, ‘Making an Elephant’, 309–10. ‘A Long Day’s Journey into Life and Death’, Maclean’s, 6 May 1996. Graham Swift, letter to the author, 10 July 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, Last Orders (London: Picador, 1996); The Light of Day (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 79. ‘A Long Day’s Journey into Life and Death.’ O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’. ‘Tea-tabling’, a term coined by Christopher Isherwood, is defined by Peter Widdowson as being the practice of turning away from ‘grand narratives’ to look instead at the effect of major events on ordinary people. Peter Widdowson, ‘The Novels of Graham Swift’, The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and its Contexts, 1500–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 217. Anthony Quinn, ‘Voice of the People’, Observer, 14 January 1996. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. O’Mahony, ‘Triumph of the Common Man’. Quinn, ‘Voice of the People’. Quinn, ‘Voice of the People’. E. Jane Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’, Sunday Times, 16 February 1992. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬49 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

Graham Swift, personal interview 10 December 2004. Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’. Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’. Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’. Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’. Dickson, ‘Siding With Mystery’. Swift, personal interview 10 December 2004. Swift, Shuttlecock, 40. Swift, Shuttlecock, 50. Swift, Shuttlecock, 47. Ingrid Gunby, ‘Tales From the Crypt: Wartime London in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock’, in Lawrence Phillips (ed.), The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 102. Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000), 209. Swift, Shuttlecock, 49–50. Rawlinson, British Writing, 209. Graham Swift, letter to the author, 10 July 2004. Gunby, ‘Tales From the Crypt’, 103. Swift, Shuttlecock, 62. Swift, Shuttlecock, 62. Rawlinson, British Writing, 203. Swift, Shuttlecock, 52. Swift, Shuttlecock, 51–2. Swift, Shuttlecock, 191. Swift, Shuttlecock, 192. Swift, Shuttlecock, 192. Gunby, ‘Tales From the Crypt’, 103. Swift, Shuttlecock, 204. Swift, Shuttlecock, 214. Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Keen, Romances of the Archive, 3. Keen, Romances of the Archive, 3. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬50 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004.

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2

Regenerating the past: fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy

The way in which Pat Barker uses historical source material in her trilogy of First World War novels has fuelled a considerable amount of debate amongst historians and literary critics alike. As Barker herself says in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the first novel in the trilogy, Regeneration, ‘fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not’.1 In distinguishing between the fact and fiction in the novel, Barker acknowledges that the trilogy is a hybrid mixture of verifiable history and fictional interventions. This chapter addresses the question of what kind of fiction – specifically, what kind of historical fiction – Barker is writing by looking closely into ‘what is historical and what is not’ in Barker’s use of source material across the trilogy. Pat Barker was born in 1943, and might reasonably be expected to show a greater interest in the war which shaped her childhood rather than the war preceding it, as many authors born in the war and postwar period do. Her biography gives us a clue as to why Barker’s postmemory relates not to her parents’ war but her grandparents’; by Hirsch’s definition, postmemory differs from a simple engagement with any period not your own by being ‘distanced from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’.2 Barker’s first-hand – and thereby quasisecond-generation – experience of the First World War came from living with her grandparents, rather than her mother, from the age ‫ ﱢﱡ‬52 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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of seven. She has traced her fascination with the First World War to growing up with William Dunne, her step-grandfather, who had fought in that war and had been deeply affected by it. When asked what had originally drawn her to write about the First World War, Barker replied: A long-standing interest in the First World War. My grandfather . . . fought in that war, and my stepfather . . . also fought in that war. He was in the trenches as a boy of fifteen. So for me, in a sense, that was the war in terms of the conversations I had on a day-to-day basis. My father, of course, was involved in the Second World War, and my uncle, but these were not such salient people in my life, in my childhood. So the experience of the older war was paradoxically closer to me, in that sense. My grandfather had a bayonet wound that was something I noticed particularly as a small child, and he didn’t talk about it . . .3

On winning the Booker Prize in 1995 for the third novel in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, Barker’s acceptance speech made explicit the link between growing up with a veteran of the war and her later interest [My step-grandfather] was the one who made me interested in the war. He was cheerful, wily, very short-tempered, tight with money and a lifelong Tory who never questioned whether the war was just or not. In my work, of course, I continually pose that question.4

Barker acknowledges the link between her childhood and her adult interests while also drawing her audience’s attention to the difference between her point of view and her step-grandfather’s. While Dunne’s experiences clearly inform her view of the war (his bayonet wound, for example, is echoed in Geordie’s identical wound in Another World), her interpretation of the war is shaped by cultural and political issues of the late twentieth century rather than the early. One such issue which places Barker firmly in the last years of the century is her interest in trauma, particularly trauma arising from conflicts around gender and class. Her earlier novels, such as Union Street, Blow Your House Down and Liza’s England portray the lives of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬53 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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working-class women in the north and north-east of England across a period extending from the First World War to the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the 1980s.5 Barker depicts individual lives ruined by poverty and domestic conflict; men and women trying to survive both grand tragedy and the littler, longer tragedy of penury and disenfranchisement. Again, we can see the genesis of this in Barker’s own background; her novels are almost always set in the industrial north-east (Barker grew up in Teesside) and her characters’ lives, from Liza in Liza’s England, born in 1900, to the 1990s academic Nick in Another World, and influenced by the post-industrial decline of the region and the dispossession of the working classes. In terms of gender, Barker shows us how women in this world have to fight to survive – usually metaphorically, sometimes literally – against poverty, violence, and their powerlessness to escape their surroundings. In Blow Your House Down, one character, a prostitute who has taken the job in preference to a safer but much less lucrative one in a chicken factory, is told by the police not to try and cover up for anyone she might suspect of being the Yorkshire Ripper, because ‘the next girl he attacks might be somebody decent’, that is to say, not a prostitute like her.6 It is not a long step from an interest in this kind of trauma and powerlessness to the First World War. According to the prevailing view of that war as hugely wasteful of life, the war rendered large numbers of people passive, and caused extreme suffering. Barker is interested in the impact the war had on British society at the time, but, more particularly, in how that reaction resonates for us now: I chose the First World War because it’s come to stand in for other wars, [and] the sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England, it was a very idealistic response. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and pain that followed that. I think because of that it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars . . . what is still relevant today is the attitudes of people to the war and to the suffering the war costs, whereas the ideology of the time seems so dated. There were four Empires desperately trying to maintain their status in the world. And to go into the politics of that would not be of any interest ‫ ﱢﱡ‬54 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy for the people of today, when we all accept that imperialism is a bad idea anyway.7

Societies under stress feature repeatedly in Barker’s work. In the case of the Regeneration trilogy, a very particular example of societal conflict provided the genesis of the whole trilogy. The novels spring from Barker’s interest in the anthropologist and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers’s difficulties in reconciling his job as a military psychologist (dedicated to sending men with shellshock to recover so that they can rejoin the fighting), with his ambivalence about the justness of the war. Rivers himself is relatively well known due to his appearance in his most famous patient’s memoirs. That same patient, Siegfried Sassoon, intensified Rivers’s sense of conflict when the anti-war arguments he put forward in his therapy sessions with Rivers began to sway Rivers’s opinion. ‘It was the relationship between Rivers and Sassoon which was the genesis of Regeneration,’ says Barker. ‘I read the war poetry at school but that would not have been enough to make me want to write about the First World War. If anything it would have been a deterrent because obviously it’s been so powerfully written about . . . But I didn’t feel that the experience of shell shock had been written about in quite this way. I was interested in the dilemma of the doctors who had to send people back – which is only a dilemma, of course, if you are sensitive and compassionate.’8

Barker’s interest in Rivers came from two sources, one neurological and one literary: Her husband David, a professor of zoology at Durham University, had told her about neurological experiments Rivers had conducted: ‘But I didn’t realise the Rivers he was talking about was the Rivers Sassoon had met at Craiglockhart, and I didn’t connect that Rivers with the anthropologist. When I put the three of them together it started getting interesting. What fascinated me was the interaction between Rivers and Sassoon,’ – Rivers argued that the war was worth fighting, Sassoon that it was unnecessarily prolonged – ‘each tried to persuade the other, and each succeeded. It gave me the shape of the book.’9 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬55 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Regeneration, the first novel in the trilogy, is structured around Sassoon’s time at Craiglockhart Military Hospital for Officers, near Edinburgh, where he was treated by Rivers and met Wilfred Owen. Barker’s choice of these individuals, and this particular situation, is revealing of more than her interest in conflicts in society, though; to understand why Barker might have been aware of, and interested in, these people, it is helpful to look at Owen’s and Sassoon’s reception history, and their place in the war’s wider cultural history. Sassoon and Owen dominate the literary canon of the First World War, and their writing and biographies have come to represent, for many people, academics and the public alike, the typical experience of the war. Hynes defines the story Owen and Sassoon are seen to embody as the ‘Myth of the War’: idealistic young men went to fight in pointless and stupid battles planned by incompetent generals, and came back – if they came back at all – shell shocked and embittered.10 In his influential study, Hynes outlines the evolution of our current understanding of the war, tracing literary responses to it from 1919 until the 1930s. The ‘myth’ he argues, is a product of the 1930s war books such as Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Sassoon’s three volumes of memoirs, and Blunden’s Undertones of War, amongst others.11 Even if the authors of these books had not intended them to be read as anti-war novels (as in Graves’s case), the horror of the conditions they describe over-rode any ambivalence towards the war in the texts as received by the public. Recent scholarship on the reception history of the literature of the First World War has confirmed Hynes’s belief that the work of Sassoon, Owen and other war poets was increasingly neglected and unpopular until the post-1945 period, when their fortunes changed dramatically. Brian Bond, a military historian, suggests that ‘[current] popular notions of the First World War . . . were largely shaped in the 1960s, in part reflecting the very different concerns and political issues of that turbulent decade, but in part resurrecting “anti-war” beliefs of the 1930s’.12 This chapter examines how Barker’s work stands in relation to these received ideas about the First World War, and how she uses historical material to investigate both contemporary and modern themes. Any analysis of the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬56 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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historicity of the Regeneration trilogy must account for the prominence of issues such as gender, sexuality and class. What I argue is that Barker is not appropriating the past to explore modern concerns, but that what attracted her to Rivers’s and Sassoon’s meeting were the aspects of it which still resonate today; only by examining Barker’s use of source material can we fully understand the extent to which a historically verifiable version of events relating to the historical characters can sit alongside a retelling of the same story which dwells on more modern concerns. One critic of Barker’s use of history, Martin Löschnigg, partially excuses what he sees as Barker’s historical inaccuracy by saying that ‘fiction begins with the novelist’s freedom to invent a psyche for her characters’; this chapter examines how Barker uses this freedom in relation to the source material she uses, showing how she treats different historical characters differently according to how much is known about them.13 Rivers, for example, left very few personal documents after his death, and is a different kind of fictional creation to Barker’s Sassoon and Owen, about whom much more is known. My approach is therefore two-fold. I show how thematic interests shape Barker’s writing, and why. I also analyse Barker’s use of source material, exploring her research in detail, and showing how she uses her freedom as a novelist to ‘regenerate’ the historical record left to us in source material. Barker begins Regeneration by breaking a convention of the war novel; it is set away from the fighting, in Craiglockhart, a military hospital for shellshocked officers in Scotland. Barker does not show us the war itself, but takes us away from the Western Front, to a place where every character is trying to interpret past war experience. Her protagonist, Sassoon’s psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, has no first-hand experience of the war; Barker explains that he is thus deliberately aligned with the reader I didn’t want to write the kind of pseudo-combat book in which you soak yourself in the research and write as though you were in the trenches. If you put a psychiatrist in the foreground, and he has never been in a trench, and nor have you, the distance from your material is right.14 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬57 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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And again, in an interview with the author: [I wanted] to have as the dominant viewpoint a person like Rivers who had never been in a trench and who knew only what he had been told. His interest, sympathy and detachment are meant to approximate to the standpoint of a modern reader.15

Like the modern reader (or novelist, or historian), to get some picture of the war Rivers must interpret second-hand material. He is very useful for Barker here; she is interested in how we remember and interpret the war, both now and in the past, and Rivers’s occupation as a psychologist allows her to push this to the foreground of the novel. William Halse Rivers Rivers was born in 1864 and died, suddenly, in 1922. He was the son of an Anglican vicar who was also one of the major pioneers of speech therapy, treating C.L. Dodgson as well as running a residential school for boys with speech impediments. Rivers trained as a doctor before developing an interest in neurology and later anthropology, and later still combined these interests, becoming an early advocate of psychology, and a (qualified) admirer of Freudian analysis. As professor of anthropology at Cambridge, he made three trips to Melanesia, off the northern coast of Australia, and Barker includes accounts of these in the trilogy. He also took part in a famous experiment on the regeneration of nerves with Henry Head, in which they severed a nerve in Head’s arm and charted its regrowth. Rivers’s expertise in psychology led him to work at Maghull Military Hospital in 1915; he then moved on to Craiglockhart Hospital for Officers in October 1916 and to the Central Hospital at Hampstead in late 1917. Barker builds the trilogy around Rivers. The dilemma that his job as a military psychologist poses for him is its central theme: ‘normally a cure implies that the patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but positively suicidal.’16 In the novels, Rivers finds his position – as a physician charged with healing the shellshocked so they may return to the fighting which caused their illness – increasingly difficult from the arrival of Sassoon at ‫ ﱢﱡ‬58 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Craiglockhart at the beginning of Regeneration. Barker uses Rivers, and Prior’s and Sassoon’s relationships with him, to draw out different aspects of the historical situation which interest her: the role of the doctor in war, the effect of class, of gender boundaries and of sexuality. In drawing Rivers as a character in her novels, Barker uses a vast amount of source material, including his own case studies and books, Sassoon’s memoirs, letters and diaries, obituaries and other, shorter pieces such as the set of anonymous notes of the Craiglockhart staff found amongst Sassoon’s papers and now in the Imperial War Museum. In this chapter I will demonstrate that, contrary to critics who have suggested that Barker’s depiction of Rivers is ahistorical and inaccurate, the fictional Rivers is grounded in detailed research. His character and his actions, as presented by Barker, can be traced back to original source material, which Barker either presents as it is in the source, or from which she infers her own conclusions. I will show that Barker’s use of the historical Rivers is complex, and differs from the way that she uses source material to depict Owen and Sassoon. Rivers was a private man who destroyed letters and whose personal papers were burnt, at his wish, after his death. There is very little personal information about him left, in marked difference to Owen and Sassoon, both of whom wrote extensively about this period of their lives. The fictional Rivers we see in the Regeneration trilogy is something of a hybrid; because Barker only has a limited amount of source material relating to him, she is able to be more creative about Rivers’s inner life than she is about Owen and Sassoon. Asked what difficulties in writing about Rivers challenged or fascinated her, Barker explained that Rivers took good care that people didn’t know much about him, personally . . . He was an intensely private, intensely discreet man. And that is useful for a novelist, because you don’t want to know too much. You want that blank screen; you want to be able to project. Really, I knew too much about Sassoon and Owen . . .17

Barker is very careful not to stray from the historical record, but does feel with Rivers that she can infer from the material she has and explore – in a fictional form – possible motivations and ‫ ﱢﱡ‬59 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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emotions which aren’t recorded. Her ‘projection’, though, is always anchored in research. Barker does not only borrow source material describing people, events, and Rivers’s ideas. She also borrows aspects of the way Rivers writes. She investigates Rivers’s feelings about his position as a military doctor by borrowing his method of describing and analysing his own dreams. Rivers believed that dreams would often reveal unconscious feelings and recorded and analysed both his patients’ and his own; his book Conflict and Dream describes a number of his own dreams, which, he showed, represented mental conflicts he felt unable to resolve.18 This is especially useful for Barker when she wants to show Rivers’s anxiety about matters which he would not have discussed with others, or matters in which his own conscious feelings were unclear. The first of the dreams Barker invents for Rivers is used to establish Rivers’s sense of guilt about treating soldiers in order to return them to the front. Barker has taken descriptions of Rivers’s and Head’s experiment on nerve regeneration and written a dream for Rivers in which Head turns on Rivers, whose exploration of Head’s recovery of sensation is causing great pain, and says ‘why don’t you try it?’ (italics in original).19 Rivers’s sense of guilt is clear – ‘Every time I pricked him [with the needle] he cried out . . . I was distressed by this and didn’t want to go on, but I knew I had to. Head kept on crying out.’20 Head then cuts Rivers with a scalpel and Rivers wakes up. The dream itself is not based on any of the real dreams Rivers recorded, but its presentation and the way Rivers goes on to analyse it are written in the same style as Rivers’s own. Rejecting a sexual interpretation of the dream, as the historical Rivers rejected Freud’s insistence that hidden trauma of the kind revealed in dreams was almost inevitably sexual, Rivers sees the meaning of the dream as being ‘the conflict his dream self had experienced between the duty to continue the experiment and the reluctance to cause further pain’.21 Coming as this does just after Rivers’s first meeting with Sassoon, and their first exchange about the validity of the way the war was being fought, the reader is invited to draw a parallel between what Rivers is doing to Head in the dream and what he is doing to his patients in real life. Barker has Rivers’s analysis of the dream continue thus ‫ ﱢﱡ‬60 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy Rivers was aware, as a constant background to his work, of a conflict between his belief that the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations, and his horror that such events as those which had led to Burns’ breakdown should be allowed to continue.22

The three patients we have met at this point are Sassoon, the protester, Prior, who is mute, and Burns, whose trauma is so great that Rivers finds he can do nothing to help him. The reader can see why, then, Rivers’s anxiety over his role should be so profound as to manifest itself in a dream; if we had missed it, the dream also helpfully highlights it for the reader. Barker also uses this technique in reverse, taking details from Rivers’s own dream analysis and placing them into imagined conversations. Again, this is useful for showing Rivers at times of emotional difficulty; here, he is torn between staying at Craiglockhart and taking a job in London with Head: ‘. . . I’d like London.’ [Rivers says to Head] ‘There’s a job going if you want it.’ ‘You mean there’s a vacancy?’ ‘No, I mean there’s a job for you if you want it. I’ve been asked to sound you out. Psychologist with the Royal Flying Corps . . .’ . . . ‘I just don’t see how I can.’ ‘Why not? You’d be closer to your family, your friends, your research contacts, you’d be able to get back to Cambridge at the weekends. And . . . I don’t suppose it matters, but we’d be able to work together again.’ Rivers buried his face in his hands. ‘O-o-o-oh. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”’ ‘I am behind you. I was thinking of giving you a shove.’ ‘I couldn’t leave Bryce.’ Head looked incredulous. ‘You mean, your CO?’ ‘He’s in a difficult situation. We’re in for a general inspection, and . . . it all goes back a long way. Bryce is determined this time he’s not going to play their game. He’s not going to parade the patients, or polish the bottoms of the frying pans, or pretend to be anything other than just an extremely busy, overcrowded and I think bloody good hospital.’ ‫ ﱢﱡ‬61 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines ‘What do they want?’ ‘They want a barracks . . . I think I can be . . . of some use to [Bryce].’ 23

This conversation is built from Rivers’s analysis of a dream he had after he had been offered the London job Head describes. We do not know if Head and Rivers ever had such a conversation; this fictional exchange is built entirely from information in Rivers’s dream analysis. Rivers states in Conflict and Dream that a few days before this dream he had ‘heard that a project was on foot to give me an appointment in connection with the Royal Flying Corps, which would involve my living in London’; this becomes Head’s ‘there’s a job for you if you want it’. 24 Listing the aspects of the London job which tempted him, Rivers mentions the possibility of satisfying his academic interests, ‘which were being starved in Edinburgh’, working with Head again, and being able to visit Cambridge more often, just as he does in Barker’s version.25 On the other hand, in both cases he is worried about leaving Bryce, his CO at Craiglockhart, although in Conflict and Dream he doesn’t specify what the difficulty Bryce is facing is, just that he ‘might be of considerable service’ to him.26 Barker makes Rivers’s claim more modest – he might be of ‘some use’ – and also explains that Bryce’s problem is a clash with the military authorities, who wanted Craiglockhart run under stricter military rules. Bryce, whose chief concern was his patients’ welfare, disagreed and was disinclined to humour them. This is entirely in keeping with Barker’s vision of the clash between the duty of the doctor and the duty of the military, so she builds on the sketchy details in Rivers’s dream analysis with details taken from Sassoon’s fictional account of his time at Craiglockhart, Sherston’s Progress.27 Bryce, writes Sassoon, had his own ideas about eyewash, and he decided that the [inspecting] general should, just for once, see a war hospital as it really was. He did this as a matter of principal, since in his option a shell-shock hospital was not the same as a parade ground . . . [but the general] was genuinely shocked by what he inspected. He went into the kitchen and found he couldn’t see his face reflected in a single frying-pan . . . Worst of all, most of the medical staff were occupied ‫ ﱢﱡ‬62 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy with their patients, instead of standing around and wasting their time . . . while awaiting the arrival of the supreme therapeutic warlord.28

It is easy to see the details which Barker has taken from Sassoon and added to Rivers’ account of the same occasion; Bryce’s attitude, including his refusal to put his patients on parade, literally or metaphorically; the inappropriately opaque frying pan and the doctors who were too busy to ‘waste their time’ waiting to be inspected. This is a technique Barker uses very often in the trilogy selecting pieces of source material from various places and conflating them to create a fictional version of events which has some claim to historical veracity. Barker generally does this when she wants to amplify what we know of Rivers’s attitude towards the war from his and Sassoon’s writing. At the end of Rivers’s and Sassoon’s first meeting in Regeneration, their conversation is built from material from Conflict and Dream and Sassoon’s letters: ‘. . . I don’t even think you’ve got a war neurosis.’ Sassoon digested this. ‘What have I got, then?’ ‘You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neurosis.’ They looked at each other, and laughed. Rivers said, ‘You realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to . . . to try to change that? I can’t pretend to be neutral.’ Sassoon’s glance took in both their uniforms. ‘No, of course not.’29

Sassoon wrote to Ottoline Morrell in July 1917 that Rivers ‘doesn’t pretend that my nerves are wrong, but regards my attitude as abnormal’, and in October wrote to Robert Graves that Rivers had said that he ‘had a very strong “anti-war” complex, whatever that means’.30 In an analysis of a dream Rivers had concerning Sassoon and the conflict he felt about partially agreeing with Sassoon’s arguments yet being impelled to try to make him change his mind, Rivers argues that the fact that he could not be sure if he had been in uniform or not in this particular dream

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Reading behind the lines had a definite connection with the conflict which I suppose to underlie the dream, and especially with my relation to [Sassoon]. So long as I was an officer of the R.A.M.C., and of this my uniform was the obvious symbol, my discussions with [Sassoon] on his attitude towards the war were prejudiced by my sense that I was not a free agent in discussing the matter . . . I was fully aware of an element of constraint in my relations with [Sassoon] on this account. So long as I was in uniform I was not a free agent.31

Again, Barker has conflated Sassoon’s writing with Rivers’s; there is no record of what Rivers and Sassoon said at their first meeting, but it seems likely that they would have discussed Sassoon’s protest and his position at Craiglockhart. We know from Sassoon’s letter to Graves that Rivers made this humorous comment about Sassoon’s ‘anti-war complex’, and that he did not think Sassoon was shellshocked; we know from various sources, discussed below, that Rivers’s manner was warm and that he had a dry sense of humour. We cannot know if he would have made such a comment at his first meeting with Sassoon, but it establishes an aspect of his character while at the same time building up the dramatic tension of Rivers’s next comment. Rivers is bound by his position to try to change Sassoon’s mind, as he discusses in Conflict and Dream. Barker borrows this dream-device of the symbolic uniform, giving it to Sassoon, to heighten our awareness of the fact that although Sassoon’s exchange with Rivers may have been friendly, Rivers is still a military doctor and is employed to force Sassoon to abandon his protest. But Sassoon’s protest, as Barker has shown it from the start of the book, looks sane to the reader. The novel starts with Sassoon’s Declaration in which he argued that the war was prolonged by the military authorities for reasons which had shifted since war was declared from ‘defence and liberation’ to ‘aggression and conquest’.32 We are shown Sassoon and his friend the war poet Robert Graves arguing about Sassoon’s action; Graves agrees with Sassoon’s ideas but not with his protest, seeing it as futile. Sassoon describes his nightmares and hallucinations; Graves is a nervous wreck, and their descriptions of fighting are horrifying. The reader is thus inclined to agree with Sassoon from the outset. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬64 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Having introduced Rivers and Sassoon to each other, and established their relationship – and that it may well become problematic for Rivers and also for Sassoon – Barker moves straight on to her first long description of one of Rivers’s patients, taken from his paper ‘The Repression of War Experience’ (included in Conflict and Dream). Barker uses Rivers’s writings on shellshock as the basis of each of the soldiers she describes in Regeneration, but her choice of the case history of Burns, the first soldier we meet – immediately after Rivers and Sassoon have met for the first time – is significant. The historical soldier Barker christens Burns is based very closely on a case which Rivers cites in ‘Repression of War Experience’ to demonstrate that some patients are so deeply traumatised that they are beyond his help. This is not immediately apparent in Barker’s version of events; she shows us Rivers arriving at this conclusion gradually. As the historical Rivers says in ‘Repression of War Experience’, what happened to the soldier who becomes Burns is so terrible that Rivers’s usual method of encouraging the patient to stop repressing their memories of what had happened had the reverse of the intended effect: Sometimes the experience which a patient is striving to forget is so utterly horrible or disgusting, so wholly free from any redeeming feature which can be used as a means of readjusting the attention, that it is difficult or impossible to find an aspect which will make its contemplation endurable.33

This, then, is not a typical patient, nor a typical experience. But Barker positions Burns’s story so as to drive the reader from Rivers’s and Sassoon’s meeting, in which our sympathies are directed towards each man – but where, following his earlier discussions with Graves, we’re inclined to take Sassoon’s part – to this case history. Barker quotes in detail Rivers’s description of the events which had traumatised his patient. In Rivers’s own account, he describes a young officer who was flung down by the explosion of a shell so that his face struck the distended abdomen of a German several days dead, the impact of his fall rupturing the swollen corpse. Before he ‫ ﱢﱡ‬65 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines lost consciousness the patient had clearly realised his situation and knew that the substance which filled his mouth and produced the most horrible sensations of taste and smell were derived from the decomposed entrails of an enemy.34

Compare Barker’s version of this: Burns. Rivers had become adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences, but Burns defeated him. What had happened to him was so vile, so disgusting, that Rivers could find no redeeming feature. He’d been thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gasfilled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he’d had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh.35

Barker uses this case history to establish the horror of Rivers’s patients’ war experience. Burns, as the first shellshock victim we see, needs to make a strong impact on the reader. Barker selects a patient who was at Craiglockhart, and was treated by Rivers – so is historically accurate in this respect – but whereas Rivers includes his case in ‘Repression of War Experience’ because he was one of the few cases Rivers was unable to cure, by introducing Burns as the first patient we see after Sassoon, Barker invites the reader, who has no other terms of reference, to see him as a typical patient. This also affects our view of Rivers; by introducing Burns of all of the patients described in Rivers’s case histories, Barker makes the reader focus on the extraordinary difficulties of his job, particularly on the fact that he too is horrified by what the war has done to his patients. Barker is using the source material to set up the beginnings of Rivers’s conflict. Barker’s novel assembles different pieces of source material to create a historically based picture of Rivers’s personality. Rivers was not entirely comfortable with the working classes, as is evident from his frustration with the intellectual limitations of the private soldiers he treated at Maghull Hospital. Although Barker presents Rivers as an extremely likeable man, she does not shy away from bringing into her fiction the evidence of his social attitudes she finds in his writing. She is interested in Rivers’s (mild) snobbery ‫ ﱢﱡ‬66 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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because she has a broader interest in the impact of the war on the working class. Rivers, Sassoon and Owen were either upper class or middle class, so Barker creates a character, Prior, who is a workingclass officer promoted from the ranks. Part of Prior’s function is to draw out certain aspects of Rivers’s personality, as I will show later; here, it’s useful to note the way in which Barker transposes Rivers’s writing on the role of education on the type of war neurosis different classes develop into a conversation with Prior. Prior arrives at Craiglockhart mute, which, as Rivers explains, is unusual for an officer: ‘What you tend to get in officers is stammering. [Privates get] all the physical symptoms: [mutism], paralysis, blindness, deafness . . . it’s almost as if for the . . . labouring classes illness has to be physical . . . And there are other differences as well. Officers’ dreams tend to be more elaborate. The men’s dreams are much more a matter of simple wish fulfilment. You know, they dream they’ve been sent back to France, but on the day they arrive peace is declared. That sort of thing.’ . . . ‘You still haven’t said why.’ ‘I suppose it’s just a matter of officers having a more complex mental life.’ Prior reacted as though he’d been stung. ‘Are you serious? You honestly believe that that gaggle of noodle-brained half-wits down there has a complex mental life? Oh, Rivers.’ ‘I’m not saying it’s universally true, only that it’s generally true. Simply as a result of officers receiving a different and, for the most part, more prolonged education.’ ‘The public schools.’ ‘Yes. The public schools.’36

Barker crafts this conversation from two of Rivers’s books; the detail of the private soldier’s dream that peace is declared as soon as he returns to France is from Conflict and Dream, where Rivers is discussing Freud’s theory of wish fulfilment in dreams. He writes: dreams as were related by my [private soldier] patients [at Maghull] were usually of a very simple kind and, so far as they went, furnished confirmation of Freud’s view that dreams have the fulfilment of a wish as their motive. Thus, one soldier dreamt that he was sent back ‫ ﱢﱡ‬67 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines to the front, but directly he landed in France, peace was declared. In October 1916 I was transferred to a hospital for officers, where I soon began to obtain from my patients dreams of a less simple kind.37

Rivers expands this theory in Instinct and the Unconscious, where he specifically links the more developed mental life of the officers to their education: On the whole the officer is more widely educated than the private soldier; [and] his mental life is more complex and varied . . . [the type of education is also significant;] fear and its expression are especially abhorrent to the moral standards of the public schools at which the vast majority of officers have been educated.38

Barker includes this detail because it adds to our impression of Rivers as a product of his time, so we can see how he changes over the three books. Prior, the ‘temporary gentlemen’ who has been catapulted out of the working classes for the duration of the war, is one of the first working-class men Rivers has met. Barker uses Prior to provoke Rivers to rethink his attitudes – although at first all Prior does is irritate Rivers. By all accounts, this is an unusual reaction by Rivers to a patient. It’s possible that Barker sets up the antagonism between Rivers and Prior partly to counter any impression the reader might get that Rivers was wholly saint-like. The relationship between Rivers and his patients which Barker depicts shows him as kind, patient, generous and remarkably perceptive, with an astonishing ability to help his patients. This is entirely grounded in factual material. Barker has been criticised for extending her view of Rivers as being exceptionally perceptive but also exceptionally open-minded to depicting him as being an incipient postcolonialist. However, the episode which Barker uses to demonstrate that Rivers saw the aboriginal cultures he studied as having value is based on a paper by T.H. Pear. Pear describes Rivers’s discussion of sharing wealth with a group of natives; Rivers explained what he did with his money and found that ‘their attitude “towards my individualism was of just the same kind of that which we experience when we hear ‫ ﱢﱡ‬68 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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of a custom such as the couvade . . .”’39 Barker may also have drawn on a letter by Rivers in the newsletter of the Southern Cross Mission (the missionary organisation which ran the steam ships Rivers used to travel to the Solomon Islands), in which Rivers approvingly quotes another anthropologist as saying ‘we have almost as much to learn from [the Melanesians] as they have to learn from us’.40 The chief impression the reader gets of Rivers, though, is of an exemplary doctor and profoundly kind man. Barker draws principally on the obituaries written by Rivers’s friends for these details of his personality. Although one might reasonably expect an obituary to be laudatory, there is so much consistency in what Rivers’s obituaries say about him as to suggest that they are accurate. Rivers’s colleague L.E. Shore, writing in the St John’s College magazine The Eagle, describes Rivers as an inspirational teacher, whose students tended to be profoundly and lastingly influenced by him. ‘As to his patients,’ wrote Shore, ‘his transparent honesty of purpose, his sympathy, his insight, and his truthfulness, gained their confidence and so enabled him to unravel the cause of their mental distress.’41 Shore describes how Rivers treated his students as equals – something Sassoon also notes in Sherston’s Progress – and that he was extraordinarily gentle with those in need of guidance or help.42 Henry Head, who worked with Rivers from the 1890s, wrote that at Craiglockhart Rivers revealed his ‘remarkable power of gaining the confidence of young men’.43 Craiglockhart gave Rivers the chance to spend time with each patient, getting to know them: ‘his vivid interest in the personality of each individual under his care, and his determination to help, developed a latent capacity to influence deeply all those with whom he was brought into contact’.44 The trouble Rivers would go to for his patients is hinted at in Conflict and Dream, where he writes that The bedrooms of the hospital were small and most of them accommodated two or three patients. I was in the habit of giving much thought to the suitability to one another of patients who occupied the same room. I tried to arrange not only that they were men who could get on well together, but also that there was agreement in such points as their times of getting to sleep, their need for a light at night, and similar features of their cases.45 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬69 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Barker repeats this detail as it gives us a very revealing glimpse of Rivers, over-worked and horribly busy, but concerned enough about each patient to try and ensure they slept as well as they could. The historical Rivers, like his fictional counterpart, became deeply involved with his patients. In Shore’s obituary we are told that many of Rivers’s patients ‘simply worshipped him’.46 Rivers returned their friendship, and often asked them to stay with him in Cambridge or visited them on holiday, as he visits Burns in Regeneration. Barker’s purpose in ‘regenerating’ Rivers as a fictional character, and researching his personality in such depth, is to know as much as possible about the man so that she can imaginatively enter his dilemma, and see how someone like Rivers might have responded to the unique pressure the war put on him. The fictional Rivers’s ambivalence about his job increases throughout the book as his conversations with Sassoon, and his horror at the suffering of his patients, force him to consider the validity of Sassoon’s arguments. This ambivalence comes to a dramatic climax towards the end of Regeneration, when Rivers meets another shellshock doctor, Lewis Yealland, and observes him working on a mute patient. As far as is known, Yealland and Rivers never met, although as practitioners treating shellshock they would have been aware of each other’s work. Yealland’s book Hysterical Disorders of Warfare outlines his theory that shellshock only affected those with existing psychological problems, and his practice of using ‘faradisation’, or electrical shock therapy, to remove the symptoms.47 Barker bases her characterisation of Yealland, and the two case studies around which she draws an account of the ward round and treatment session which Rivers observes, on this study. As becomes obvious at once in Regeneration, Yealland’s theories, and methods, were almost diametrically opposed to Rivers’s. As soon as Rivers arrives on Yealland’s ward, he sees a creature – it hardly resembled a man – [who] crawled through the door . . . his head was twisted to one side, and drawn back, the spine bent so that the chest was parallel with the legs, which themselves were bent at the knees.48

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Because Craiglockhart was an officers’ hospital, and, as Rivers pointed out, officers tended not to present physical symptoms of neurosis, both Rivers and the reader are unused to this sort of horrifying physical deformity. Thus the reader is already unsettled when Yealland’s ward round begins. Rivers spots this patient again, in bed now; Yealland stops at his bedside and explains what had happened to him, in a description based almost exactly on a case study in Hysterical Disorders of Warfare. Yealland’s original account describes how A shell exploded close to this patient just as he was preparing to go over the top with a bombing party at Loos. Part of the trench fell in and he was buried by earth, his head alone escaping. For two or three days afterwards he was in a dazed condition, although he had a faint recollection of what had happened. Six weeks later he was sent to England; at first he was treated in a hospital in Eastbourne, where he was given ‘physical exercises’. He says he gradually became worse after these exercises and that his back was more bent and rigid.49

Barker repeats this account with one minor change; ‘buried by earth, his head alone escaping’ is made clearer and becomes ‘buried up to the neck’. Barker has already borrowed the next part of Yealland’s original description, in her depiction of the patient walking down the corridor: . . . the trunk of the patient was rigidly bent forward and the head drawn back. When he walked the trunk was flexed at right angles with the thighs and he supported himself by grasping the anterior surfaces of the thighs with his hands. His body was tilted slightly to the right and the head bent backwards.50

The ward round stops at this patient’s bed, where Barker creates a conversation between Yealland and the patient which, again, is based very closely on this case study. Yealland tells the patient that he will start treating him with electricity soon, and details what will happen, in a monologue taken directly from the case study. Barker repeats it verbatim because it gives a strong impression of how deeply alarming Yealland’s authoritarian attitude might have ‫ ﱢﱡ‬71 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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seemed to the patient. Here, Barker’s minor adaptations appear in italics after the original phrases. ‘I shall begin by making your back straight. This will be done by the application of electricity to your spine and back. You have the power to raise your head, indeed you can even extend it [normally]. You have pain in your back, and that I am sure has indicated to you long ago that the pain is due to the position you assume. [I am sure that you understand that the pain in your back is due to the position you assume.] The muscles are put at too great a stretch and there is no relief, because even when you rest the same position is maintained. The electricity may be strong, but it will be the means of restoring your lost powers – the power to straighten your back.’ 51

Yealland’s account continues: He then asked me if the electricity was painful, but I instantly interrupted him, saying, ‘I realise that you did not mean to ask me such a question and shall overlook it. When I first began to treat you I was aware of the fact that you understood the principles, which are: Attention first and foremost: tongue, last and least, questions, never’’.52

Barker repeats this verbatim, but between the two long quotations from Yealland, interjects Rivers’s thought that ‘if Yealland had appeared authoritative before, it was nothing compared to the Godlike tone he now assumed’.53 This chimes with the reaction of the modern reader, but Barker goes further, making us more aware of the feelings of the patient – who she describes as being ‘distinctly alarmed’ – that made him ask Yealland if it would hurt. Barker uses this case study to set the tone for the rest of Yealland and Rivers’s meeting, which climaxes in the treatment of the next patient we see, Callan. Callan is also based very closely on one of Yealland’s case studies, as is his treatment. Again, Barker uses Yealland’s own words to set up Callan’s case – he is mute – and to describe his treatment. Rivers is already ambivalent about silencing Sassoon’s protest and seeing Yealland’s brutal treatment of his patients intensifies his feelings of guilt. This episode is designed to show Rivers’s dismay as he realises ‫ ﱢﱡ‬72 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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with sudden clarity that although Yealland’s methods differ so much from his own, their intentions – to remove the symptoms of shellshock from their patients, silencing what Barker sees as bodily protest – are the same. Barker’s account of Callan’s treatment follows Yealland’s exactly, with some alterations of emphasis which I will discuss below. In both descriptions, the patient’s treatment begins in the dramatic setting of Yealland’s electrical room, where all natural light was blocked out, the lights turned off and the doors locked. Yealland gives the patient a series of electric shocks to the throat, which are so strong that he’s thrown back violently, pulling the wires out of the battery. Yealland straps the patient into a chair, and continues to shock him for an hour, when he is able to say ‘ah’ faintly. Yealland encourages the patient, but by now he is tired, and has to be walked around the room to keep him awake, despite the strength of the shocks he’s being given. The patient tries to break away and leave the room, but is prevented by Yealland. Perhaps hoping to hasten the end of the treatment, the patient points to the electrical equipment and to his throat, but Yealland tells him not to try to dictate his therapy. After the application of stronger shocks, the patient begins to be able to make other vowel sounds, then starts to cry and tries to leave again. Yealland encourages him, reminding him of his heroic battle record, and finally, after four continuous hours of shock treatment, the man is able to speak again. Although Barker’s version of events follows Yealland’s almost exactly, she makes some significant changes in the emphasis placed on Yealland’s attitude to the patient, and the patient’s attitude to Yealland. Yealland’s case studies, although they describe practices which even to modern readers sound cruel and counter-productive, were undeniably effective, at least in the short term. One historian of military psychiatry, discussing Yealland’s techniques, wrote that Some have described these methods as sadism. They certainly involved the ‘triumph of a strong mind over a weak one’. For a dim, confused person to be confronted in a darkened room by . . . Yealland in full cry must have been an experience which, in itself, bordered on the traumatic. But it seemed to work in that it could remove the symptoms.54 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬73 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Barker is unconvinced by Yealland’s insistence throughout Hysterical Disorders of Warfare that the men he looked after responded well to his use of his authority to bend their will to his and were grateful to be treated by him. The changes she makes to Yealland’s account come from this scepticism; she systematically removes any comments Yealland makes which show him having any sympathy, or empathy, for his patients, and makes his more draconian actions very prominent. For example, having described the electrical room in the terms Yealland himself used, Barker diverges from his account when he gives the patient such a strong shock that he is flung backwards. Yealland’s account describes how Placing the pad electrode on the lumbar springs and attaching the long pharyngeal electrode, I said to him, ‘You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you ever did; no, not before.’ The mouth was kept open by means of a tongue depressor; a strong faradic current was applied to the posterior wall of the pharynx, and with this stimulus he jumped backwards, detaching the wires from the battery.55

Barker shows more empathy with the patient in her account: Yealland put the pad electrode on the lumbar spines and began attaching the long pharyngeal electrode. ‘You will not leave me,’ he said, ‘until you are talking as well as you ever did. No, not a minute before.’ The straps on the chair were left unfastened. Yealland inserted a tongue depressor. Callan neither co-operated nor struggled, but simply sat with his mouth wide open and his head thrown back. Then the electrode was applied to the back of his throat. He was thrown back with such force that the leads were ripped out of the battery.56

Some of the medical terms are retained; ‘pad electrode’, ‘lumbar spines’ and ‘long pharyngeal electrode’ are not terms familiar to most readers and Barker’s use of them here serves to make Yealland seem more frightening. She does, however, move away from Yealland’s use of medical jargon when describing the patient being thrown back by the force of the electric shock applied to ‘the posterior wall of the pharynx’, or the throat, as she describes it, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬74 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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because she wants us to empathise with Callan. The way she rephrases Yealland’s description is also significant. Yealland’s patient merely ‘jumps’ backwards – although with such force that he pulls the wires out of Yealland’s machine – while the modern reader suspects that if Yealland is using such force, Barker’s more dramatic ‘thrown back with such force that the leads were ripped out of the battery’ (my emphasis) might be more accurate. We are invited to empathise with the patient by Barker, but not by Yealland. Given that Yealland’s book is a collection of medical case studies, this is not of itself surprising; these types of accounts are generally dispassionate. The problem with Yealland’s prose style, for a modern reader, is that it is very far from dispassionate; Shepherd describes his tone in the case studies as ‘fervent, sincere, overdramatic. This is not just a doctor in action, but an evangelist grappling with evil, driving the devils from his patient’s body.’57 The impression we get of Yealland in his writing is that of someone driven by egotism, whose method of curing trauma essentially consists of hectoring his patients until he overwhelms them by the force of his will. He certainly lacks any deep interest in his patients. Unlike Henry Head’s comparable case studies, Yealland does not follow his patients’ progress once they have been ‘cured’. Barker projects the lack of concern for the Callan that we see in Regeneration from the tone of Yealland’s writing as well as from the more concrete tokens of his lack of interest in each patient as an individual, arguing as he does that every soldier who breaks down is simply prey to ‘weakness of the will and of the intellect, hypersuggestibility and negativism’.58 So Barker feels justified in changing the emphasis of Yealland’s account, rewriting it so as to show how it might have seemed to an outsider – such as Rivers – as well as inventing Callan’s angry and frightened reactions from the brief remarks Yealland makes about his patient’s attempts to end the therapy or to escape from the room. Thus Yealland’s euphemistic ‘Remember, you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be,’ I said. ‘A man who has been through so many battles should have better control of himself.’ Then I placed him in a position from which he could not release himself, and repeated ‘You must talk before you leave me’.59 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬75 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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becomes ‘Remember, you must behave as becomes the hero I expect you to be,’ Yealland said. ‘A man who has been through so many battles should have a better control of himself.’ He fastened the straps round Callan’s wrists and feet. ‘Remember you must talk before you leave me’.60 (Italics in original)

Barker is not actually altering the event Yealland describes, but she is drawing out its more emotive aspects, increasing our discomfort with the scene, as it does Rivers’s. She does this again in her expanded description of the two attempts Yealland’s patient makes to leave the room. Yealland writes ‘at one time when [the patient] became sulky and discouraged he made an attempt to leave the room’; Yealland tells him that he will leave ‘when he is cured, remember, and not before’.61 The patient then ‘pointed to the electrical equipment and then to his throat’, but Yealland tells him that he, rather than the patient, will decide when to use electricity.62 In Barker this becomes: Rebellion came at last. Callan wrenched his arm out of Yealland’s grasp and ran to the door. Evidently he’d forgotten it was locked, though he remembered at once and turned on Yealland . . . for a second the thought of striking [Yealland] was clearly visible, but then Callan seemed to admit defeat. He pointed to the battery and then to his mouth, miming: Get on with it.63

The violence of the patient’s feelings and actions masked by Yealland’s description of his being ‘sulky and discouraged’ is brought out very carefully here, as is the fact that Callan is ‘defeated’, not helped, by Yealland. Yealland’s patient doesn’t threaten violence, but here Barker is reading his reaction into what Yealland tells us. It is not implausible, but it’s not accurate, either; Barker is guessing that this is the truth behind Yealland’s rather anodyne description of what to a modern reader sounds more like torture than medicine. Barker moves away from Yealland’s account of this case more significantly at the end, when she consolidates our impression that Yealland is behaving sadistically, and that Callan hates him, by ‫ ﱢﱡ‬76 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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adding part of another of Yealland’s case studies. In this study, cited by Eric Leed, Yealland is offended by the laugh of a patient he has just cured of mutism, and records himself as saying ‘You have not recovered yet; your laugh is most offensive to me; I dislike it very much indeed . . . you must be more rational.’64 Leed says that Yealland left the patient alone in the treatment room for five minutes, and found him calm on his return. This is significantly different from Yealland’s objection to Callan’s smile, which he removes by giving Callan shocks to his mouth in an entirely invented description. Barker ends the treatment by showing us Yealland forcing Callan to thank him, saluting, while in Yealland’s original account the soldier thanks him without being prompted. Barker clearly doesn’t think that these thanks are genuine – Callan has to realise what Yealland is waiting for before he thanks him and the impression Barker leaves Rivers with is that Yealland has broken Callan’s spirit so effectively that what he says is meaningless. Rivers – like most readers – is upset by what he’s seen. Barker gives him a nightmare in which he sees Yealland’s doubled-over patient crawling down the corridor again, but in the dream the man speaks, reciting the opening of Sassoon’s declaration. Then Rivers is in Yealland’s treatment room, giving a patient electric shocks, until he looks down and sees that the electrode has become a horse’s bit. Like the historical Rivers, Barker’s Rivers analyses his dreams, and finds this one easy to understand. Seeing Yealland’s treatment has brought his anxiety about forcing Sassoon to recant to the forefront of his mind, and the dream represents this in uncompromising terms. What is particularly interesting here is that the historical Rivers did have a dream about this conflict, which he records as ‘The Pacifism Dream’ in Conflict and Dream. This dream is too convoluted, though, to be useful in a novel; the imagery is opaque and undramatic, and also refers back to aspects of Rivers’s past (particularly his work in Germany) which Barker has not included and which would not be useful to her. So – possibly inspired by the nightmarish quality of many of Yealland’s accounts – having invented their meeting to push Rivers’s anxieties to their limits, she uses the imagery from Yealland to furnish Rivers with a more dramatic and more obviously symbolic nightmare. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬77 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Barker’s presentation of Yealland is an integral part of her treatment of the subject of shellshock, which has attracted more critical opprobrium than any other single aspect of the trilogy. In her ‘Author’s Note’ to Regeneration, Barker acknowledges the influence of the work of two historians, Eric J. Leed and Elaine Showalter, on her novel.65 Barker’s conception of shellshock is heavily indebted to their research. She takes the idea from Leed that the soldiers’ enforced passivity gave them shellshock. Showalter provides her with a link between the hysteria suffered by women trapped in passive roles by societal norms and the hysteria – shellshock – suffered by soldiers trapped in trench warfare. Ben Shepherd, in an influential article in the Times Literary Supplement, accused Barker of ‘faithfully recycl[ing] modern academic clichés’.66 By this he means both that Barker conceives of shellshock in a postFoucauldian gendered framework which would have been wholly alien to contemporary thinking, and that her choice of Rivers and Yealland as representatives of shellshock practitioners is also unrealistic. Shepherd’s second charge is harder to refute than his first. Unlike Showalter, Barker does not contextualise Yealland and Rivers in their field. They were opposites in terms of their theories of the causes of shellshock, in their attitudes to their patients and in their choice of treatment.67 Barker has been criticised for following Leed’s line in viewing Yealland as ‘the most extreme advocate of disciplinary therapy’, that is, therapy based on the assumption that the soldier is either consciously or unconsciously malingering and needing to be appealed to on the grounds of ‘proper’ behaviour.68 While Barker discovered Yealland’s book through Leed, it is apparent from the way that she conflates various case histories which Leed does not discuss, that she has read Yealland herself. What Leed, and Shepherd, correctly identify is that we find Yealland’s attitude and treatment of his patients unacceptable now, and this is partly why Barker includes Yealland in Regeneration. As I have shown, Barker uses Yealland’s own words and actions to create a picture which repels modern readers, for whom Rivers’s ‘talking cure’ has become the norm. The purpose of this is twofold. It works to throw Rivers – the kind, perceptive, gentle therapist – into ‫ ﱢﱡ‬78 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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sharper relief, and also intensifies his anxieties, which Barker needs to do in order to move the plot along. But it is problematic, because Barker implies, by not providing any detail of other types of therapies, that Rivers and Yealland are each typical, or at the least, not exceptional. In fact, as Shepherd says: The majority of shellshock patients were private soldiers, who . . . would be more likely to be lying neglected in a converted asylum in the depths of the country, or being given periodic baths and electric shock by a bored, unsympathetic hospital attendant [than being treated by anyone like Rivers or Yealland].69

There is an implicit risk in focusing on individuals in historical fiction that you will represent them as typical of their time by default. Barker certainly presents her readers with two psychiatrists who could not be more different from each other without sketching in the kind of background detail which would satisfy her critics. It is also undeniable that Barker takes a view of shellshock which owes much to Leed and Showalter in terms of gender. Leed emphasises the view – which was also Rivers’s view – that immobility and passivity in trench warfare caused shellshock in soldiers who could not bear not to be doing something to defend themselves (or attack the enemy). Showalter develops this insight, suggesting a link between the way women in peacetime developed hysterical symptoms because of their lack of agency, and the shellshock men developed when unable to act; this, she argued, showed that men could not bear to feel so powerless. To be reduced to a feminine state of powerlessness, frustration, and dependency led to a deprivation of speech . . . just as it had for [Freud and Breuer’s] patient Anna O.70

Showalter argues that trench warfare forced men into what their society decreed a feminised role – that is, a passive one – and that it is thus hardly surprising that men responded by developing the same type of neuroses women displayed more generally, such as mutism, hysterical paralysis and anxiety. Barker plays this argument out in the novel, particularly through Rivers’s analysis of his patients. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬79 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines Mobilization. The great adventure. [The soldiers] had been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, on a scale their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.71

It is likely that the origin of this idea is Sandra Gilbert’s theory, quoted by Showalter: That most masculine of enterprises, the Great War, the ‘apocalypse of masculinism,’ feminized its conscripts by taking away their sense of control. The constriction of the trenches, Sandra Gilbert suggests, was analogous to the tight domestic, vocational, and sexual spaces allowed to nineteenth-century women: ‘paradoxically, in fact, the war to which so many men had gone in hope of becoming heroes, ended up emasculating them . . . confining them as closely as any Victorian woman had been confined’.72

Shepherd finds Barker’s reiteration of these ideas problematic because contemporary shellshock practitioners did not view war neurosis in this way. In fact, as Barker has pointed out on a number of occasions, Rivers – most unusually – did make this link between men’s war-related hysteria and women’s peacetime hysteria, and also attributed shellshock in part to men’s inability to live up to societal expectations that they would repress fear. He did not make a direct link between the two factors, though, which means that Barker’s representation of him as thinking in gendered terms, while not actually inaccurate, is misleading. Barker shows Rivers as thinking very specifically in terms of gender, while the source material she draws on to create his fictional thoughts does not support this interpretation. For example, she conflates what he says about the fatherly behaviour of young officers to their men with a comment made by one of Rivers’s Cambridge students, later his patient, John Layard: What was it [Layard] had said? ‘I don’t see you as a father, you know . . . more of a male mother.’ . . . [Rivers] distrusted the implication ‫ ﱢﱡ‬80 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy that nurturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability was in some way borrowed, or even stolen from women . . . Though fathering, like mothering, takes many forms beyond the biological. Rivers had often been touched by the way in which young officers, some of them not yet twenty, spoke about their men . . . worrying about socks, boots, blisters, food, hot drinks.73

This odd – but for Barker, very useful – comment by Layard is taken from Layard’s unfinished, unpublished autobiography, and is conflated with an observation of Rivers’s about the care young officers often took of their men, taken from Instinct and the Unconscious: Anyone having much to do with those who have taken part in the fighting of the war must have been struck by the extraordinary manner in which an officer, perhaps only fresh from school, has come to stand in a relation to his men more nearly resembling that of father and son than any other kind of relationship.74

Barker takes Layard’s comment out of its autobiographical context; in his autobiography, it isn’t clear whether Layard ever told Rivers that he thought of him in this way or not. Barker found the comment in an article on Layard written by the anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy, and used the information on Layard and on Rivers she found in it to develop another aspect of her investigation of relationships between men, specifically between Rivers and his younger patients.75 Relations between men form an increasingly important part of the trilogy, particularly in terms of love and sexuality. As I will discuss in relation to Sassoon, Owen and Prior, Barker’s emphasis on sexuality, specifically homosexuality, has been heavily criticised by a number of critics, most notably Ben Shepherd in his hostile review of the trilogy in the Times Literary Supplement. I argue that contrary to Shepherd’s assertion that Barker’s depiction of the sexuality of her characters is too heavily influenced by modern notions of sex and gender, while Barker is, certainly, interested in contemporary aspects of those issues, her representation is meticulously researched and is, generally, historically accurate. The problem lies more in the fact that the books are not representative of the majority of heterosexual soldiers or ‫ ﱢﱡ‬81 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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civilians, and – as with Barker’s representation of Yealland and Rivers as normal examples of shellshock practitioners – that she does not make a point of telling the reader that they are not representative of the whole of society. Shepherd asserts, in part of his attack on Barker’s depiction of Rivers, that he ‘never consciously identified himself as a homosexual’.76 There is, in fact, one source which makes this claim, but it does not appear in the one biography of Rivers and as it was never published, is not widely known. Rivers may not ever have publicly identified his sexuality, but according to John Layard, who knew him well, he was almost certainly homosexual. While researching Rivers’s life, Barker came across Rivers’s link to Layard; researching Layard, she came across MacClancy’s article on him. This article furnishes Barker not only with the description of Layard that she quotes, or his remark describing Rivers as a male mother, but also gave her an insight into Rivers’s relationship with Layard which she later used as the basis of her depiction of Rivers and Prior’s relationship. Layard himself provides a number of Prior’s characteristics, as I will show. The section of Regeneration dealing with Layard is very short – only 14 lines – and is worth quoting in full: Prior was [not] the only patient to have found him . . . well. Rather less than opaque. He remembered John Layard, and as always the memory was painful, because his treatment of Layard had ended in failure. He told himself there was no real resemblance between Layard and Prior. What made Prior more difficult was the constant probing. Layard had never probed. But then Layard hadn’t thought he needed to probe. Layard had thought he knew. Lying with his eyes closed like this, Rivers could imagine himself back in St. John’s, hearing Layard’s footsteps coming across the court. What was it he’d said? ‘I don’t see you as a father, you know.’ Looking up from the rug in front of the fire. Laughing. ‘More a sort of . . . male mother.’ He was like Prior. The same immensely shrewd eyes. X-ray eyes. The same outrageous frankness . . . He could see why Layard might use the term [‘male mother’]. Layard’s own relationship with his father had been difficult, and he was a young man . . .77

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All of the details about Layard, and about his relationship with Rivers, are taken from MacClancy’s article. MacClancy relates details from Layard’s autobiography, telling us that Layard ‘had a difficult relationship’ with his father, and that after meeting Rivers, Layard was ‘“overwhelmed . . . by the aura of this marvellous man,” who “could do anything” – and who he soon “adored” and “worshipped” as a “kind of male mother”’.78 Layard was persuaded by Rivers to stay on at Cambridge and study anthropology with him for a year after he had finished his original degree in Modern Languages, and also accompanied Rivers on a research trip to the New Hebrides.79 Layard’s description of Rivers is in sympathy with other descriptions of his charm and kindness towards his students and patients. However, in Layard’s case the relationship ended badly, and it is his description of how this happened, quoted in MacClancy, that Barker uses as a basis for hinting, heavily, that Rivers was homosexual but found this so difficult that he chose to repress it. Layard had a serious nervous breakdown in 1916, and Rivers agreed to take him on as a patient. Their relationship reached a crisis point when Rivers would not ‘take the transference’: he would not respond emotionally to Layard’s statements. When Layard, during one of his crises, declared his love for his mentor, Rivers, ‘blanching’ and ‘almost trembling,’ left the room, never to return. ‘Rivers had obviously not recognized the whole homosexual content of our relationship, probably on both sides’. Layard, practically bedridden, spent the next few years being looked after by friends in Hertfordshire.80

We immediately recognise Rivers’s refusal to respond emotionally to Layard; Barker shows Rivers reacting in exactly the same way to Prior’s repeated attempts to get an emotional response from Rivers which Rivers, as his doctor, fights to avoid. Barker, following Layard, suggests that Rivers’s habit of hiding behind his medical persona is simply a method of deflecting emotion, possibly because he is refusing to acknowledge the sexual nature of his own feelings. Barker also quotes the details of Layard’s appearance MacClancy provides; compare Barker’s ‘immensely shrewd eyes. X-ray eyes. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬83 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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The same outrageous frankness’ with the comment by Christopher Isherwood MacClancy uses: ‘[Isherwood and his friend W.H. Auden] were for a time held spellbound by [Layard’s] “X-Ray eyes, his mocking amusement, his stunning frankness . . .”’.81 These are characteristics which, as Barker has Rivers note, Prior shares; Barker bases these aspects of Prior’s personality on Layard because she is interested in the elements of Rivers’s personality which Layard recorded. However, MacClancy suggests that Barker may be wrong to apply Isherwood’s description, which was made some years after Layard’s treatment with Rivers had ended, to the young Layard: Layard’s lack of probing because he thought he knew is, I think, a retrospective projection of Pat Barker’s based on what he was like to Auden and Isherwood. I strongly doubt that as Rivers’ patient in the late 1910s, a decade or so before, he was anything like as assured. 82

However, even if this reading is not strictly accurate, it performs its dramatic function for Barker, whose novel depicts how Rivers would respond not to Layard, but to Prior; Layard acts as the inspiration, but using a fictional character to explore the characteristics Barker finds in MacClancy’s article allows her to focus on Rivers’s ambivalent reaction towards this kind of behaviour. It is highly unlikely that the general reader would be familiar with Layard’s writing, particularly not his unpublished autobiography. It is possible, though, that some readers would know of Layard through his friendship with W.H. Auden and his circle of homosexual friends in Berlin in the late 1920s. Layard is perhaps most famous for having asked Auden to kill him after a suicide attempt failed – so anyone recognising Layard’s name would know that, as Rivers says, his attempts to help him had indeed failed. Auden refused and Layard recovered. Readers familiar with Auden might, then, recognise Layard; if so, Layard’s name acts as a cue to connect Rivers to a very well-known homosexual group and further reinforces Barker’s hints that Rivers may himself have been homosexual. She reinforces this impression, for the reader unfamiliar with Auden, by showing Layard and Prior both determinedly flirting with an increasingly uncomfortable Rivers; both approaches serve ‫ ﱢﱡ‬84 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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to deepen the reader’s understanding of Rivers’s relationships with other men, both as a friend and as a doctor. These roles are often confused, or take on another aspect. Rivers, being older than his patients (and too old to fight) finds himself in a fatherly role in relation to many of the men he treats. Sassoon in particular explicitly refers to Rivers as a father figure; in Sherston’s Progress he calls Rivers his ‘father-confessor’, while in his postwar poem ‘Revisitation: W.H.R.R.’ he calls him his ‘fathering-friend’.83 Barker links Rivers’s role as a father figure to his concerns about treating his patients only to send them back to the front. She expresses this in terms which she borrows from Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Young Man and the Old’, which connects Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with the older generations’ sacrifice of those young enough to fight in the war. Barker, having researched Rivers’s childhood, is aware that there was (and still is) a stained-glass window depicting Abraham and Isaac in St Faith’s Church in Maidstone, where Rivers’s father was vicar for most of Rivers’s childhood. So when she sends Rivers back to visit his family on leave from the hospital in Part Three of the novel, she uses the church window as a spur to Rivers’s thoughts on the war. While the rest of the congregation sing ‘God Moves in Mysterious Ways’, Rivers’s attention is drawn to the window depicting the crucifixion and Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac: Obvious choices for the East window; the two bloody bargains on which a civilisation claims to be based. The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac . . . on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young . . . will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life . . . you will peacefully inherit . . . only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over Northern France, at this very moment . . . the inheritors are dying, not one by one, while old men and women of all ages gathered together and sang hymns.84

The extract illustrates how far the historical and fictional Rivers have diverged. There is no record of Rivers thinking in these exact terms, but Barker is making the fictional Rivers think along the same lines as Sassoon, and in terms which are obviously derived ‫ ﱢﱡ‬85 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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from Owen, whom Rivers never treated. ‘Not one by one’, for example, is a clear echo of Owen’s . . . Behold A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one.85

Rivers thinks of himself here as a father, but one who is failing to look after the young. Fathering comes up again and again throughout the trilogy; Rivers sees Sassoon and Prior as surrogate sons, and we also see Rivers’s difficult relationship with his own father. Barker uses this link to depict Rivers’s childhood, a neat trope which allows her to use existing biographical material about it to show him as both a rebellious son and as a father figure. We are shown glimpses of Rivers’s Victorian childhood, but it is far from being a nostalgic account. His memories of the snake-infested woods near his family home are uncomfortable and hallucinatory, as are his memories of being taken on walks and boating trips with his siblings with C.L. Dodgson. Dodgson pointedly ignored Rivers and his brother, but doted on the Rivers daughters, to the boys’ annoyance: He’d never enjoyed those trips much, and neither, he thought, had [his brother] Charles, though probably that was no more than the slight pique of two Victorian schoolboys, finding themselves, for the first time, not of the preferred sex.86

Barker takes the detail of Rivers’s and his brother’s pique from a memoir written by their sister Katharine Rivers, where she comments on their annoyance but does not draw Barker’s link between this and Victorian society’s preference for men.87 She also adapts Katharine Rivers’s memories of watching the adults playing ‘mathematical croquet’ with Dodgson, imagining the scene with the Rivers children standing outside in the ‘apparently endless summer evenings’.88 Barker then links this memory to the fact that Dodgson was treated for his stammer by Rivers’s father, which in turn makes Rivers recall a significant act of defiance: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬86 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy Later that summer he’d given a talk to the speech therapy group [his father ran] on monkeys. M was to him what c was to Dodgson, but he was interested in monkeys and still more interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which by this time had achieved acceptance in some circles. [Rivers’s father’s vicarage] was not one of them.89

Barker has conflated Katharine Rivers’s account of Dodgson being a patient of her father’s with a detail taken from Myers’s obituary of Rivers. Myers tells us that ‘“young Rivers” gave his first lecture at the age of twelve, at a debating society of his father’s pupils. Its subject was monkeys.’90 There is no mention of Darwin in the original, but Barker connects Myers’s ‘monkeys’ with Darwin’s theory of evolution. She uses Darwin here to show Rivers as a rebel, and associate him with one of the death-knells of the Victorian age. Discussing her adaptation of Katharine Rivers’s memoir, Barker commented that A good deal is inferred. We know Rivers was in his father’s class [from Myers] – I took that to mean his speech therapy class since Rivers had a severe stammer. [Rivers] chose to read medical science – hard to do that without being aware of Darwin.91

Barker dramatically alters the significance of Katharine Rivers’s memories by conflating them with the advent of Darwinism. It is reasonable to assume that a medical student would have come across Darwin, but it seems less plausible, if not impossible, that a twelve-year-old would have. Barker singles these moments of Rivers’s childhood out for their symbolic potential – the end of old certainties – rather than basing them precisely on the historical Rivers’s childhood. In an interview in 1992, Barker was asked about her representation of Rivers’s understanding of the role of gender in shellshock, which, as the interviewer pointed out, went ‘against the grain of his age’s gender assumptions’ but also ‘achieves such a current resonance’: Barker: It’s the tension, isn’t it, between not representing what [the historical figures] were actually interested in and yet at the same time bringing out the things that are of interest to us.92 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬87 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Because there is so little source material about Rivers, especially about his personal life, to recreate him Barker has to pull together all the available material. This is necessarily more interpretative than the kind of recreation she is able to write of Owen, say, based on his letters and poetry, which are very clear both on events and his reaction to them. Barker’s Rivers is necessarily more complicated than her other ‘real’ characters, especially as, as we have seen, Barker finds a freedom in this lack of information, which allows her to project her own interpretations – of Rivers’s sexuality, for example – onto the facts we have. When she writes about Owen and Sassoon, however, Barker has none of this freedom; both men left very detailed records of this period of their lives, and Barker is scrupulous about not misrepresenting recorded facts. As I will show, Barker responds to this by inventing fictional characters, such as Prior, to whom she gives the situations or characteristics that interest her. Inventing new characters, who function as fictional doubles whom she can use as she wishes without compromising her fidelity to source material about the historical character, is a technique she uses more and more as the trilogy progresses. While Barker uses Rivers and Prior to explore themes which interest her, her recreation of Owen and Sassoon is much simpler than her recreation of Rivers, because she is able to write a detailed account of their lives based on their own writing. Barker only needs to fit the aspects of their lives which especially interest her into a narrative shape, going back to their own accounts to rewrite it in the form of conversations or description. In Regeneration, Barker depicts Siegfried Sassoon at one of the most difficult times of his life. In June 1917, his anger at the way the war was being fought reached such a point that he felt he could no longer take part, and launched a public protest, writing ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ which was read out in the House of Commons and reported in The Times. Sassoon’s dilemma presents both a hypothesis and a challenge to Barker. She uses his story and his source material to explore the issues which interest her in his story. Her use of the source material is therefore different from her use of it with Rivers, because she has on record the aspects of Sassoon’s dilemma which interest her, and ‫ ﱢﱡ‬88 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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which initially attracted her to his story, and thus has no need to invent. Sassoon denounced the unnecessary prolonging of the war in ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’, which he hoped would force the army to court martial him, giving him a chance to argue his case in public. However, he was also a decorated and courageous fighter – at one point Barker has Rivers comment on Sassoon’s real regimental nickname, ‘Mad Jack’ – and felt fiercely protective of the men under his command. Barker’s novel focuses on the period in which Sassoon tried to decide whether to maintain his protest, which would prevent him from returning to active service, or abandon his hopes of ending the suffering of the troops and return to his battalion. Sassoon’s personal and ethical quandary parallels Rivers’s (as well as the internal divisions suffered by Prior), and drives the plot of Regeneration. The question of whether he should return to the front or not was certainly a great challenge for Sassoon, and in her fictional version Barker closely follows his autobiographical accounts and poems. Barker is particularly faithful to the chronology and detail of Sassoon’s accounts: he is the only character whose actions all have traceable sources. Barker follows the outline of what happens at Craiglockhart from Sassoon’s diaries, poems and memoirs. She bases his character as well as the events of the book on a mixture of sources, with some editing. The majority of her editorial interventions are straightforward examples of streamlining, where she omits aspects of Sassoon’s life which don’t fit with her primary interest in his dilemma about the war. Although Barker is presenting us with a simplified version of Sassoon, focused on his relationship to Rivers and his inability to decide what to do, she is consistently careful not to invent new information, only interpreting what already exists. Like the other characters, though, the fictional Sassoon does diverge from the historical figure. Sassoon struggled all his life with internal divisions, which he only felt he resolved when he converted to Catholicism later in life. The dilemma of how best to support his men – by protesting or by returning to fight with them – was a terrible struggle for him. But this was a more practical problem than the deep internal division he saw between ‫ ﱢﱡ‬89 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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the two sides of his personality. In Regeneration, Sassoon explains it to Rivers by saying ‘there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the . . . the other side . . . that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to . . .’ He laced his fingers together. ‘Knot them together.’93

Barker only makes one reference to this problem, since she needs to concentrate on Sassoon’s protest against the war and its ramifications. But she takes this chance to alter the source material to bring in an issue she wants to concentrate on, Sassoon’s sexuality. In his poetry and in a number of letters Sassoon alludes to his sense that he had a ‘multiple personality’ (although he would not have intended the clinical definition that this term now carries).94 By this, he means that he had two distinct sides to his personality – as stated above – the sporty, hearty side and the artistic, spiritual side; for a long while he struggled to reconcile these. What Barker does, though, is to have Sassoon say to Rivers that he has three sides to his personality; he then backtracks when Rivers asks him what the third was. It is clear to a modern reader that Barker’s Sassoon is referring to his homosexuality. While this was a source of huge anxiety for Sassoon, and one which he discussed in letters which we have on record, he did not link it to his other anxiety about the two sides of his character. This is a good example of Barker deviating very slightly from the historical record, mainly for the sake of introducing the theme of Sassoon’s sexuality in a dramatically plausible and tactful way. It is not impossible that Sassoon and Rivers might have discussed these topics together, but he doesn’t in anything which survives on record. Barker is in good company in editing Sassoon’s mental life to fit the contours of her plot; when Sassoon wrote his first semibiographical memoirs as George Sherston, he also omitted his homosexuality and his anxiety over his sense of doubleness because it didn’t fit his purpose (and would have rendered the book unpublishable). Sherston bears the same relation to the historical Sassoon as Barker’s Sassoon does. Although Sassoon had very specific reasons for shaping his auto‫ ﱢﱡ‬90 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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biographical work as he did, he was also interested in the impossibility of writing a truthful account of the past, writing at the conclusion of Siegfried’s Journey that It needs no pointing out that there is an essential disparity between being alive and memoirizing it long afterwards . . . An eminent Victorian has told us that we read the past by the light of the present; concerning our means of interpreting the present he said nothing, so I infer that he found it unreadable . . .95

Barker is reading Sassoon’s memoirs by the light of her own particular interests. While she does include Sassoon’s deeper problems with the conflicting elements of his personality, her focus in this novel is on the conflict between duty and desire. In order to focus on this she makes more of Sassoon’s conflict of duty towards his battalion by underplaying his other characteristics. She edits his own life-story for dramatic ends. So, despite its basis in research, Barker’s narrative is indubitably fictional. Other examples of Barker’s alterations include her omission of Robert Nichols, who was as close a friend of Sassoon’s as Robert Graves was. Graves, though, serves Barker’s purpose better: he has historical resonance, is recognised as a major poet (unlike Nichols, who is now obscure), and during the period of the novel renounces homosexuality and marries, thus allowing for the most open discussion of homosexuality Sassoon and Rivers have. Because Barker does not wish to misrepresent facts on the historical record, when depicting the most ‘iconographic’, or most wellknown, moments in the narrative – Owen and Sassoon’s discussions of poetry – she is at pains to use as many sources as possible. Even though Barker is sometimes obviously extemporising on how intimate the men were, the actual detail of the encounter is as close to a synbook of the source materials as she can make it. A good example is the scene in which Owen plucks up the courage to introduce himself to Sassoon, a third of the way into the novel. Barker’s account is based on Sassoon’s description of this meeting, in one of his books of memoirs, Siegfried’s Journey (published in 1945) and on Owen’s letter to his cousin written on 22 August, a few days after the event. The first line – ‘a short, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬91 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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dark-haired man sidled round the door, blinking in the sudden blaze of sunlight’ – is a combination of Sassoon’s description (Owen as short and dark-haired), Owen’s (the bright light in the room) and Barker’s surmise (that Owen was ‘sidling’ and blinked in the strong light). Owen does not mention that his hero was cleaning his golf clubs, but in his more self-effacing account, Sassoon does. All the details of the encounter are taken directly from Owen or Sassoon. Sassoon’s assessment of Owen’s stammer is rephrased to sound like interior monologue, but is based closely on Siegfried’s Journey. Sassoon’s ‘He spoke with a slight stammer, which was no unusual thing in that neurosis-pervaded hospital’ becomes the terser, more natural ‘a stammer. Not as bad as some, but bad enough.’ The conversation between the two men follows the rough indication that Sassoon gives, that ‘my leisurely, commentative method of inscribing the books enabled him to feel more at home with me . . . [and I] felt I could talk freely’.96 However, Owen’s remark that he has been wanting to write Sassoon’s poem ‘The Redeemer’ for three years is another example of authorial licence: this line is actually from a letter that Owen wrote to his sister a week later, on 29 August. Barker is using the information from her sources to create a deliberately historically inaccurate picture. Although the conflation of different accounts would only be apparent to a small percentage of Barker’s readers, the fact remains that this is an imaginative recreation, based on solid historical foundation, but inescapably fictional. Barker takes up every detail from each account. She includes Sassoon’s wearing a purple dressing gown, creating a typically vivid visual sense. She picks up a clue from Owen’s original letter which mentions in passing that he thought ‘The Death Bed’ was Sassoon’s best poem, Barker includes this and then fleshes out the conversation with more detail from the later letter to his sister. Barker’s description of the last evening Owen and Sassoon spent together at the hospital is composed in a very similar way. Again, Barker begins by describing where her characters are, and what they are doing, and as usual the details are taken from the poets’ own accounts. The facts – that they are in the lounge of the Conservative Club, drinking Burgundy, alone but for one other man who is ‫ ﱢﱡ‬92 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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reading The Scotsman – are all taken from Siegfried’s Journey. Owen did not write about this evening in any detail, so the outline of events comes from Sassoon. Owen’s reaction to the comically bad poetry they read is taken both from Sassoon’s memoirs and from Owen’s letter to Sassoon of 5 November where it is mentioned in passing. Barker also takes the structure of their reading of Strong’s comically bad poetry from Sassoon, not word-for-word, but by unpicking Sassoon’s remarks on what had made Owen laugh first, and what most: It was, I think, the word ‘epopt’ . . . which caused the climax of our inextinguishable laughter, though the following couplet had already scored heavily. ‘O is it possible that I have become / this gourd, this gothic vacuum?’97

An unresolvable question about this section is whether or not Owen would have spoken as bluntly to Sassoon as he does when Sassoon gives him the book – ‘That’s absolutely typical . . . the only slightly demonstrative thing you’ve ever done and you do it in a way which makes it impossible to take seriously.’98 There is no real textual precedent in any of the traceable sources. However, from the fact that they had spent a lot of time together, and that Sassoon and Harold Owen, Wilfred’s brother, felt it necessary to burn a number of Owen’s letters (some of which Sassoon destroyed to prevent Harold Owen from reading them), it seems reasonable to assume, as Barker does, that this might have been the case. A more compelling hint that Sassoon and Owen had had intimate conversations, is that Sassoon gave Owen a letter of introduction to his friend Robert Ross, well known as Oscar Wilde’s friend and literary executor. As Barker remarks, it is difficult to see why Sassoon would have done that unless they had discussed their sexuality.99 If his main concern had been to introduce Owen to someone who might become an influential patron of his poetry, a more obvious choice would have been Eddie Marsh, the editor of the Georgian Poetry collections. This scene ends with Owen left alone in the club, holding the letter Sassoon has just given him, saying ‘This is a letter of introduction to Robert Ross. It’s sealed because there’s something else ‫ ﱢﱡ‬93 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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inside it.’ This letter is a good example of the novelist’s art overruling historical veracity: Owen’s letter of 5 November describes how he then opened the letter, and found a letter of introduction to Robert Ross and ten pounds, with a note from Sassoon telling him he might as well enjoy his leave. Clearly, Sassoon had not already told him what was in the letter in the original event. In his letter, Owen mocks himself for having hoped it might contain some ‘holy secret’ Sassoon was entrusting to him. Barker’s novel is not only about Owen, or this element of Owen and Sassoon’s relationship. Barker, having other plot strands to develop, chooses not to give Sassoon and Owen’s story enough room to contain that kind of detail or nuance. The reference to the letter to Ross is simply left hanging, having deftly introduced the possibility of Sassoon’s introducing Owen to his circle of homosexual friends, including Ross. Nowhere is Barker’s manipulation of her source material more apparent than in her use of language, and the real extent of her rewriting only emerges on comparing her sources with her rendering of them. The relation between history and fiction is well illustrated by the way Barker makes her characters speak. She often allows her subjects to express their sentiments in conversation, but she also adapts freely, and invents where she cannot usefully adapt. Robert Graves’s announcement to Sassoon that contrary to what he had previously said, he is not homosexual, is an exact quotation from a letter of Graves’s, not to Sassoon but to his friend Robert Nichols: It’s only fair to tell you that since the cataclysm of my friend Peter, my affections are running in the more normal channels and I correspond regularly and warmly with Nancy Nicholson, who is great fun. I only tell you this so that you should get out of your head any misconceptions of my temperament. I should hate you to think I was a confirmed homosexual even if it were only in thought and went no farther.100

Barker rewrites these sentences, creating an atmosphere which is filled with tension. Graves tells Sassoon about ‘the cataclysm of [his] friend Peter’ – that he has been arrested for soliciting a Canadian soldier – as he does Nichols, and then goes on: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬94 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy Graves hesitated. ‘It’s only fair to tell you that . . . since that happened my affections have been running in more normal channels. I’ve been writing to a girl called Nancy Nicholson. I really think you’ll like her. She’s great fun. The . . . the only reason I’m telling you this is . . . I’d hate you to think I was homosexual even in thought. Even if it went no further.’101

Barker shortens some sentences, to make them sound less like written words, and more like words spoken in an awkward situation. But, more importantly, she has turned the letter into part of a conversation with Sassoon, when, in fact, it was written in a letter to Robert Nichols. It is not inaccurate in that Graves did write these words and may well have had a similar conversation with Sassoon, but if he did, no record of it has survived. The effect of this conversation is to increase our awareness of Sassoon’s isolation; Graves knows that Sassoon is homosexual, and his egotism in saying this to him, in these terms, is breathtaking. However, although Graves was capable of egotism, the letter Barker adapts was written to a friend who was heterosexual, and this may explain why Graves is so emphatic about his sexuality not being in question; he might have expressed his feelings more tactfully to a homosexual friend such as Sassoon. But having Graves deliberately distance himself from Sassoon at this point is useful for Barker. Graves and Sassoon have already fallen out over Sassoon’s protest, increasing the pressure on Sassoon to decide whether to continue with it or not. In this example, Barker alters Graves’s language very little, simply appropriating his words from the context of a letter and adapting them for use in a conversation. In other instances, though, she has to be more careful about how she adapts the language of her sources, in order not to alienate her reader. Read without comparisons, there is very little in her dialogue that sounds anachronistic, other than Prior’s describing going over the top as ‘sexy’.102 But Barker has ‘updated’ the language of almost every quotation she uses, particularly from Sassoon’s published work. For example, compare Sassoon’s account of his being caught playing football with a hat, with Barker’s rewriting of it; in Sassoon’s words: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬95 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines On a pouring wet afternoon . . . I was in the entrance hall of the hospital, indulging in some horseplay with another young officer who happened to be feeling ‘dangerously well’ at the moment . . . my somewhat athletic sense of humour had focused itself on a very smug-looking brown felt hat, left to take care of itself while the owner convened with elaborate cheerfulness to some ‘poor fellow’ . . . I had just given this innocuous headgear a tremendous kick and was in the middle of a guffaw when I turned and saw Rivers . . . He was just back from leave . . . he remarked, ‘Go steady with that hat, Sherston,’ and went rapidly along the corridor to his workroom . . . I picked it up and returned its contours to their normal respectability . . .103

Barker’s account alters the number of people involved, so that Rivers speaking to Sassoon suggests his seeking him out, but the most important change she makes is to the vocabulary and tone of the anecdote. . . . Rivers . . . [struggled] into the hall. Where a football match seemed to be in progress. A knot of struggling backs and thighs gradually unravelled, as they became aware of him standing there. On the black and white tiled floor lay a mud-brown, pork-pie hat, evidently belonging to a visitor. Rivers looked around and saw Sassoon. ‘Careful with that hat, Sassoon,’ he said, and passed through on his way to his office. Behind him, a much subdued Sassoon picked up the hat and punched it into some semblance of its former shape . . .104

Barker remarked in an interview with Wera Reusch that although it is important to be ‘historically accurate’, she has to be ‘very very careful not to put people off by [using] any obviously archaic expression’ which makes the reader feel alienated from the character, when ‘the truth is he probably isn’t very different from you’.105 But she is inconsistent in this respect. When Barker is depicting a character whom she wants us to read as unsympathetic, Lewis Yealland, she takes his speech, unedited, from his written work. Unsurprisingly, Sassoon’s account sounds very dated in comparison to Barker’s. It contains enough self-mockery to avoid sounding pompous; but in the context of Barker’s novel, the fictional Sassoon cannot use words such as ‘guffaw’ or ‘horseplay’, or ‫ ﱢﱡ‬96 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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speak in that kind of jovial tone. To do so would have immediately hindered Barker’s attempt to show that Sassoon and the other characters are involved in a very human dilemma which could as easily arise now as then. Therefore the ‘thirties’ style has to be subtly altered. On the other hand, Barker is not concerned with making the fictional Yealland more sympathetic than he is in his own work. Barker dislikes him, as I have argued in relation to the way in which she brings out and expands the undertones of his egotism and lack of empathy in his writing. She is not concerned with him as a character but as a foil to Rivers’s emotional confusion. Barker also uses the characters she invents herself to explore elements of the historical characters’ psyche. Prior is the chief example of this. A large part of his function in the novel is to make explicit faultlines in other characters or situations. He does this by acting as a double, or projection of certain elements of the historical characters. Unlike the other invented characters in Regeneration, Prior is not developed from Sassoon’s biographies or Rivers’s case studies. He is entirely Pat Barker’s creation and this gives her a freedom to weave him into situations, or weave problems into him, which deepen the reader’s understanding of the historical characters’ experiences. But while his character, unlike the other residents of Craiglockhart, does not spring from either Sassoon’s memoirs or Rivers’s case studies, Prior’s psychiatric history is partly based on source material. The account of the traumatic event which triggered his breakdown and mutism is based very closely on an episode from Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden.106 a young and cheerful lance corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three firebays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought that all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer? At this moment . . . the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬97 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines He was sent to company headquarters in a kind of catalepsy. The bay had to be put right, and red-faced Sergeant Simmons, having helped himself and me to a share of rum . . . shovelled into the sandbag I held . . . 107

Compare this with the memory Prior recovers under hypnosis: In the third fire bay [Prior] found Sawdon and Towers crouched over a small fire . . . he stopped to chat . . . and Towers, blinking under the green mushroom helmet, looked up and offered him tea. A quiet day, he thought, walking on . . . he’d gone, perhaps, three bays along when he heard the whoop of a shell and, spinning round, saw the brown smoke already drifting away. He thought it’d gone clear over, but then he heard a cry and, feeling sick to his stomach, he ran back . . . A conical black hole, still smoking, had been driven into the side of the trench. Of the kettle, the frying-pan, the carefully tended fire, there was no sign, and not much of Sawdon and Towers either, or not much that was recognisable. There was a pile of sandbags . . . close by . . . he began shovelling soil, flesh, and splinters of blackened bone into the bag. . . He felt something jar against his teeth and saw that Logan was offering him a rum bottle. He forced down bile and rum together. They’d almost finished when Prior shifted his position on the duckboards, glanced down, and found himself staring into an eye . . . he put his thumb and forefinger down through the duckboards . . . he could see his hand was shaking, but the shaking didn’t seem to be anything to do with him. . . it was Logan who took him to the casualty clearing station.108

Prior is a ‘temporary gentleman’, a working-class officer and grammar school boy, whose father scornfully dismisses him as ‘neither fish nor fowl’.109 Barker aligns him with Owen, in that his education and indeterminate class status unsettle him. Their situations are also very similar: both men have broken down in 1917 after a series of events, both including a prolonged siege in No Man’s Land in which they held down a position for fifty hours. This allows Barker to explore elements of Owen’s experience and maintain her focus on Rivers without making Owen one of Rivers’s patients and thus contradicting the historical facts. Generally speaking, Barker tries to avoid anachronism in major events, only ‫ ﱢﱡ‬98 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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rewriting certain aspects of the narrative. Here, she has Prior act as a substitute for the elements of Owen’s story which she wishes to explore in closer relation to Rivers’s ideas. Prior plays a far more central role in the second novel in the trilogy, The Eye in The Door. Here, too, Barker places him in situations which allow her to examine the hysteria of a society under extreme pressures, through re-animating two real trials which took place in 1917. About five months have elapsed between the end of Regeneration and the beginning of The Eye in the Door, during which Prior – assigned permanent home service because of his asthma – has become a government spy for the Ministry of Munitions. This job is well suited to a ‘temporary gentleman’ like Prior, who adapts quickly to his surroundings, but in this case Barker intensifies the tension between Prior’s background and his position by building him into the ‘Poison Plot’ case investigated by the real Ministry in 1917. Barker almost certainly knew of this case from Sheila Rowbotham’s Friends of Alice Wheeldon, which argues convincingly that the entire case was made up by government spies.110 Alice Wheeldon was a left-wing, working-class woman whose involvement with the suffragette and anti-conscription movements had brought her to the attention of the authorities. In 1917, she was apparently entrapped by an undercover government agent into conspiring to murder Lloyd George with a poison dart. Her two daughters and son-in-law were also arrested, and after a short and well-publicised trial, Wheeldon, her daughter Winnie and son-inlaw Alfred were sent to prison, the judge concluding that any woman capable of using language as foul as Mrs Wheeldon’s was irrefutably morally corrupt. Wheeldon was certainly a pacifist and left-wing agitator, and did not help her case by refusing to deny that she had said that Lloyd George ought to be killed, but was probably guilty of nothing more than sheltering deserters. In The Eye in the Door, Barker explores her interest in a sentiment articulated by Rivers as he ponders this case and another concerning sexual morality ‫ ﱢﱡ‬99 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines any serious consideration of the terrible state of affairs in France was pushed into second place . . . people didn’t want reasons, they wanted scapegoats.111

The Eye in the Door is a scapegoat’s novel, in which Barker weaves fictional characters around two real court cases, trials in which individuals’ political and private beliefs are put under intense public scrutiny. Barker uses the Wheeldon case to investigate Prior’s character. While she is also driven by interest in the great injustice done to the Wheeldons, Barker’s overwhelming interest is in Prior’s reaction to a situation in which each of his loyalties is tested to such an extent that he unconsciously revives a trick he developed as a child to escape his parents’ arguments, developing a split personality and going into fugue states at moments of stress. Barker’s intention is to show the splits in society in 1917 embodied in an individual. As Barker explained in an interview with the author: In The Eye in The Door, [Prior] exemplifies the splits with which that book is concerned. The divisions of home/front; civilian/soldier; before the war/after the war; upper and lower class etc. are all echoed in the split in his mind.112

Barker inserts Prior into the skeleton of the case which she takes from Rowbotham and from the trial proceedings and official papers at the Public Record Office. The Wheeldons, renamed the Ropers, become Prior’s adoptive family, and Barker carefully parallels his memories of living with them (the only happy memories of Prior’s past we see in the whole trilogy) with his unremittingly grim memories of fearing and despising his own parents. The source material Barker utilises in this strand of the novel is selected to strengthen the contrast between Prior’s ambivalence towards the war, his job and his family, with these strikingly rare memories of intimacy. While Rowbotham’s account provides Barker with the background and outline of the Roper trial, she draws dialogue and characterisation directly from the papers held at the Public Record Office (including trial papers, doctors’ reports, prison reports and personal letters). The reader is provided with a clear explanation of events from a reworked version of one of the government agents’ ‫ ﱢﱡ‬100 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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court statements, into which Barker adds relevant details from various sources, such as earlier reports, the Wheeldons’ own statements, and Rowbotham’s outline of the women’s political activity. Events and characters who are dramatically extraneous are written out of Barker’s narrative. For example, the two government agents are made into one character, with some of the characteristics of both men, but also with some authorial additions; Barker makes her character, Spragge, resemble Prior’s father, to intensify our sense of the extent to which Prior’s emotional life is bound up with his intense ambivalence about his job and status. Chapter Seven is given entirely to the correspondence used as evidence in the Roper trial. This is closely based on the Wheeldon correspondence which was also read out at their trial, and again, it has been adapted to place greater emphasis on the Ropers’ intimate domestic life. Compare the original letter from Win Wheeldon to her mother with Barker’s adaptation of it: [no] exemption for him now that d-d buggering welsh sod’s got into power – Gott strafe his blasted iz. Aint the whole caboodle lovely eh? We’re breaking up today and we’re being fed up to the nostrils with ‘peace on earth’ cant – can only get peace by fighting etc – the English are showing ‘good will’ by helping smaller nations & so on + so on from the old boss the BF. We don’t break up till this afternoon wuss luck + its pouring soaking tumbling down rain hell’s hard = blowing a tornado all last night & this morning too.113 School again, dunno who’s more fed up, me or the kids. The hall roof sprang a leak during the holidays. No hope of getting it mended, of course, and it was blowing a gale. Absolutely streaming down the panes and no lights on and Weddell rabbiting on . . . still, it’s better than it was before Christmas. I really did think I was going to throw up then. Peace on earth to men of goodwill, and how we were all showing goodwill by blowing up the Jerries and saving gallant little Belgium. I tried to tell Standard Six what gallant little Belgium got up to in the Congo . . .114

It is immediately obvious that the character in Barker’s novel is more literate, and more politicised, than the writer of the original ‫ ﱢﱡ‬101 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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letter. Barker uses these letters to show us the domestic lives of the Ropers, but also to show them as politically engaged, intelligent and articulate people. Approximately three-quarters of the letters consist of invented personal details, such as gossip and glimpses of shopping trips, each written in distinct, idiosyncratic styles. The kernel of source material in these letters is selected either to provide further emotional depth, or to shed light on how the writer might have got involved in an assassination plot. These letters differ most significantly from the Wheeldon letters in that they are much less incriminating. Barker does not have space in the structure of this story to show the political intricacies involved in the Wheeldons’ lives and their prosecution, but more importantly, the real function of the Ropers in The Eye in the Door is to provide opportunities for Barker to show how people’s lives can be invaded and destroyed by surveillance. The main motif of the book, the eye in the door, comes from a description of Aylesbury prison, in which Alice Wheeldon and Beattie Roper are held. Built on the pancopticon model, the prison terrifies Prior when he visits Beattie because it is so like the trenches – an apparently empty space in which hundreds of people are hidden. Barker’s description of the oppressiveness of the buildings and the sense of forcibly contained desperation is drawn from two contemporary accounts by other women, Countess Markievicz and M.C. Sharpe. In Anne Marreco’s The Rebel Countess, she describes the most invidious feature of Aylesbury jail: a carved and painted eye in the centre of every cell door, realistic to the last detail – pupil, eyelashes, eyebrow – and provided with a sliding disc on the outside, so authority could substitute its real eye for the artificial one . . . [The prisoner] was now stripped of the last vestige of her last remaining prerogative: privacy.115

In the context of this atmosphere, Beattie’s maternal concern for Prior (contrasted with her less gentle words about the government) and her growing physical weakness intensify not only Prior’s but also the reader’s sense of injustice. The details of Beattie’s worsening health are drawn from the prison records held in the Public Record Office; again, Barker selectively takes from these ‫ ﱢﱡ‬102 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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accounts details which she fits into her characterisation. She omits, for example, part of one matron’s report which states that Alice Wheeldon ‘suborned’ other prisoners to carry messages to her daughters and to the Women’s Social and Political Union. There are two types of authorial editing taking place here: one concerned with characterisation, which filters out any character traits which don’t fit the author’s intention, and another, more concerned with the reader’s reaction, which systematically removes references to things the reader may be unfamiliar with. Beattie’s political connections are kept very unspecific, partly to make her appear more a worried, dissenting citizen than a ‘red-hot militant’, and partly because again Barker is careful not to include confusing or distracting detail. The detail Barker takes from her source material is always tailored to her story. For example, her description of the paranoid atmosphere at the Ministry of Munitions is drawn from the Notes on the Shop Stewards’ Movement and Notes on the Strike Movement in the Milner Collection.116 These are government memoranda detailing a wide range of left-wing resistance, and provided the raw material for Prior’s observation that the government appeared to believe that this rag-bag collection of Quakers, socialists, anarchists, suffragettes, syndicalists, Seventh Day Adventists and God knows who else was, [to the government,] merely an elaborate disguise, behind which lurked the real anti-war movement, a secret, highly efficient organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the state as surely and simply as [the Ministry of Munitions] was dedicated to its preservation.117

The government paranoia is as powerful as that of the prisoners in Aylesbury jail – both fear that they are watched by an invisible, hostile force, all the more powerful because of its psychological pervasiveness. Barker shows us the effect of this fear when it is felt about one’s private life in Prior – particularly the fugue states he begins to slip into – and in the invented character, Charles Manning. Manning’s fears are like Prior’s in that he is afraid of the exposure of his double life; although he is happily married, he is also homosexual and is part of Robert Ross’s largely homosexual social circle. Sexual guilt, fear and hypocrisy are frequent features of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬103 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Barker’s novels and here she displays how the fevered atmosphere of London in 1917–18 caused the persecution of – as Manning puts it – anyone who can not, or will not, conform. In June 1918, the second of the cases Barker features began. Noel Pemberton Billing, an Independent MP and proprietor, editor and chief correspondent of the journal The Imperialist, had for some months been running articles about an undercover German espionage plot to defeat the British by the ingenious means of converting notable people to homosexuality. State secrets would be divulged either in the intimacy of post-coital talk with secret German agents, or through the more direct means of blackmail. This plot, which he christened ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, alleged that the Germans had ‘propagated evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia . . . the sexual peculiarities of [47,000 of the most prominent people in Britain] were used as a leverage to open fruitful fields for espionage’.118 In April 1918 Pemberton Billing alleged that if the police seized the subscription lists for the current performances of Wilde’s Salome, they would ‘secure the names of several of the first 47,000’.119 He printed this in his journal, but also had it circulated to those who he thought might benefit; Barker has him send it to Manning. The producer and the lead actress, Maud Allen, sued for libel, but the trial quickly degenerated into farce, giving Pemberton Billing an exemplary chance to hold forth. He won the case easily. Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, was denounced as the ‘leader of all the Sodomites in London’ and he and his circle were spied upon and publicly harassed. As usual, Barker chooses to explore this contentious historical material through fictional invention rather than to portray real characters in historically inaccurate situations. Both Owen and Sassoon were connected to the group of people persecuted by Pemberton Billing, but Barker does not involve them in this situation, because they were both away from London during most of this period. By inventing the character of Charles Manning and placing him in the Ross–Sassoon social group, Barker can explore the implications of being a homosexual man in this circle, at this time. It also enables her to direct her exploration of surveillance and ‫ ﱢﱡ‬104 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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paranoia onto the intensely personal, private area of ‘deviant’ sexuality. As we have seen, Barker is fascinated by the effects of intense scrutiny, be it internal or external, on individuals, and this case presents her with a chance to explore another type of split life. While Manning is fictional, everything that has happened to him, (being sent the anonymous cutting, being harassed by Pemberton Billing’s journalists), did happen to Robert Ross and his friends. However, Manning, unlike Sassoon (in this period), is married and loves his wife and children. He leads a secret life, having casual sex with men, and is horrified when he is sent the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ cutting from Pemberton Billing’s paper. He is under a uniquely unpleasant pressure; someone – he has no idea who – knows his most intimate secret, someone he never sees is watching him. This directly parallels the eye in the prison door, and Prior’s fear of his unknown ‘other self ’ which takes over when he falls into a fugue state. Using the Pemberton Billing trial assists in furthering Barker’s exploration of hostile, anonymous security on the most private, and dangerous, elements of the lives of her characters. The most extreme manifestation of this fear of surveillance is Prior’s split personality. Prior’s paranoia about what he is capable of while ‘unconscious’ mirrors the other types of paranoia described in the novel, but in this case Prior is afraid of an unseen part of himself. The details of Prior’s fugue states are developed from Rivers’s account of fugue in Instinct and the Unconscious.120 Rivers describes how one particular patient found that he had gone for a walk, bought cigars he did not smoke and made an appointment with a friend, while unaware of his actions. Barker takes these details and the hint (in the man’s buying the cigars he never usually smokes) of the presence of a separate personality. She uses them to create in Prior a kind of internalised paranoia, which strips him of even the basic security of self-knowledge. The Ghost Road has the fewest protagonists of all the Regeneration novels, concentrating on Rivers’s and Prior’s experiences in the last five months of the war. Building on a variety of sources, Barker shows us more than we have seen before of both men’s pasts, and of their inner lives. As with her uniquely vivid ‫ ﱢﱡ‬105 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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description of one patient’s attempted suicide, Barker wants to direct our attention to the individuals involved in the war, more so now than in the earlier books because the facts of the last weeks of the war are so well known. Otherwise, we risk losing sight of the individual as the shaping weight of ‘history’ arises. The novel is divided roughly equally between Rivers, working in a London hospital, and Prior, who visits his parents and fiancée, Sarah, before returning to France, where he dies alongside Owen, in the battle at the Sambre-Oise Canal on 4 November 1918. Although Rivers is living and working in London, we see as much of his memories of Melanesia as we do of his current life. We were told in The Eye in the Door that Rivers’s visual memory was very poor and only returned to him when he was feverish, so when he begins to have extremely vivid recollections of his expedition to the Solomon Islands in Melanesia in 1908, it is apparent that something unusual is happening to him. Barker choreographs Rivers’s memories of Melanesia with the increasingly unbearable strains put on him in the hospital. She extemporises more freely from Rivers’s case studies than she did in the earlier novels, inventing patients whose characters and symptoms are useful plot devices and are suggested in general remarks Rivers makes, rather than arising from actual case histories. She can use these characters to elicit certain responses in Rivers. Moffet, for example, challenges Rivers; he aggressively denies that his paralysis is psychosomatic, forcing Rivers to try a kind of ‘witch-doctoring’ on him. In Instinct and the Unconscious, Rivers comments on the efficacy of such witchdoctoring, suggesting that for certain patients, this type of cure (which he believes is psychosomatic) could be effective. Convincing Moffet that drawing stocking lines on his legs will remove his paralysis effects a psychosomatic cure. When Moffet tries to kill himself a few days later, Rivers feels ashamed of inadvertently humiliating him, but cannot think of anything else he could have done to cure him. Moffet is not drawn from a case study, as every other patient Barker depicts is, but is instead made to dramatise the climax of Rivers’s anxieties. In treating Moffet, Rivers takes advantage of Moffet’s feeling that his hysteria is somehow ‘unmanly’, and his suggestiveness, by drawing the stockings on him ‫ ﱢﱡ‬106 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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and telling him, as authoritatively as Yealland might have done, that he will be able to feel as far as the line by the next day. It works, but Rivers can’t ignore his guilt at having resorted to manipulating Moffet. The point of Barker’s creating this is to show that, at this stage, Rivers is beginning to doubt not only his powers, but also the morality of his actions. Moffet’s suicide attempt is described in simple language, and has prosaic as well as humorous elements, but this makes it more striking, not least because this is the only description of a suicide in the entire trilogy. Suicide is mentioned at Craiglockhart and again in Aylesbury prison and at the front, but this is the first time we see it, and the first time we see Rivers actively saving someone’s life. Add to this the fact that Rivers’s lodgings were rather too close to the great gun on Hampstead Heath to allow for sleep, and the fraying of his nerves becomes very understandable. Particularly stressful moments begin to send him into reveries; he is so exhausted that tiny aural or visual details (the clicking of a blind, sunlight from a particular angle), transport him out of his immediate surroundings and, as far as the reader can see (these sections all being narrated in the present tense), directly into the past. The source material Barker uses in these memories is picked selectively, and with very clear aims. Rivers wrote extensively about Melanesia; in his History of Melanesia he discusses the mythology, customs and lineage of the people of the scattered islands, but his chief interest lay in totemism, family naming systems and the genealogy of the people of the Western Solomon Islands. Barker focuses very narrowly on one island, Eddystone, and on the months Rivers and his helper, A.M. Hocart, spent there in 1908. The narrative Barker relates about Eddystone is dominated by death. Drawing heavily on a long article by Hocart as well as papers by Rivers, she depicts a society in which death and the absence of new births informs everything Rivers sees and does.121 The parallel with Britain in 1918 does not need to be emphasised. Barker manages to make this point quite subtly through having Rivers analyse his dreams, a technique she has used throughout. In Conflict and Dream he explains that he analyses his own dreams regularly, and again, in The Ghost Road Barker takes advantage of this habit by ‫ ﱢﱡ‬107 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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furnishing him with fictional dreams which make her points for her. One such dream allows Barker to show the parallels between the widow Emele, sitting in a tiny enclosure to mourn her husband, and Rivers’s sister Kath, who was ‘frail’ (she suffered from an unspecified nervous problem), and became housebound while still young. The Melanesia sections also provide the narrative drive of Rivers’s part of the book. In Hocart’s article (the source for the majority of the material concerning death), there is no linear narrative structure, so Barker makes one from the details which inspire her. Shortly after their arrival, the native Mbuko dies of a wasting illness, which the islanders call Kita, a spirit. Ngea, a man with more social importance, sickens and dies shortly afterwards, leading to Njiru, the islander whom Rivers respects and spends most of his time with, taking Rivers to the caves where the dead are said to live. There is an extraordinary ceremony when the villagers seem to hear and talk to the dead, then on Rivers’s last day on Eddystone, Njiru teaches him the secret holy words of the exorcism of Ave. That Barker chooses Ave, the spirit of epidemic death, has a significance saved up to the very end of the book, as I will show. A concept from Rivers’s ethnology that appears in both Rivers’s and Prior’s sections of the narrative is the Melanesian idea of mate. The Melanesians did not have a binarised idea of life and death, Rivers found; instead their concepts corresponded roughly to ‘healthy, thus alive’, and ‘sick, and likely to die’. Thereby the oldest man on Eddystone, despite being healthy, was mate because he was so old he ought to be dead. The idea of death-in-life is also present, unsurprisingly, in Prior’s thoughts throughout the trilogy. In The Eye in the Door, while visiting his parents, Prior realised that he was a kind of ghost there already – ‘all that was missing was the wreath’ – he thinks, as he considers it later. Siegfried Sassoon also felt this while he was in France, and Barker expresses his feelings through Prior, having him quote Sassoon’s poem ‘Survivors’: ‘“cowed subjection to the ghosts of friends who died”. That was it exactly . . . ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making.’122 Barker also toys with the reader’s relationship with death. A major problem in using real historical figures in fiction is that the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬108 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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reader already knows the story; very few people will have started to read The Ghost Road without knowing that Owen was killed a week before the official Armistice. By putting Prior in Owen’s battalion, and making his last weeks follow his, Barker not only gains a chance to meditate on elements of Owen’s life and poetry, but adds the dramatic tension that would be lacking if she had Owen himself as her protagonist. Owen will die, we know, but we can hope that Prior will escape. Using as much detail from Owen’s letters home as Barker does serves this purpose but also creates a tremendously vivid sense of the place and of the people. Some of the material taken from Owen’s letters for Prior gives local detail, or humour – Owen’s comment The Colonel is a terrible old misanthrope in the morning. (He has lost two sons) but the evening soothes him, and it is only then that I have dealings with him.123

becomes the typically terse, Prior-esque: [The Colonel] had given them hell. Prior got him in the mornings when he was totally vile, Owen in the evenings when brandy had mellowed him slightly. – What do you expect? Prior said, when Owen complained. He’s lost two sons. And who shows up instead of them? Couple of twitching Nancy boys from a loony-bin in Scotland. Silence from Owen.124

As so often in the trilogy, Prior ventriloquises ideas and sentiments Barker reads in the historical record, but which cannot be expressed through the unmediated source material. However, she does mediate the material occasionally; she lifts Owen’s complaining about the mud in the camp in January 1917 to September 1918, when Prior is quite as unhappy as Owen is about having mud in his sleeping bag. Another conflation makes more significant changes; while the battalion was quartered in Amiens, Owen had what he described as a holiday from the war. He and another officer, Potts, were billeted in a large bomb-damaged house surrounded by overgrown gardens. On 10 September he wrote to his mother: ‘I had a strong poetical ‫ ﱢﱡ‬109 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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experience in a wrecked garden this afternoon, not an ordinary garden, but full of . . . fishponds, palms and so on.’ This moment appears in a slightly altered form in The Ghost Road, where it also has a strong sexual element. Owen (and Prior), exploring the gardens, find the young public school officer Hallet swimming naked in the fishponds. Owen and Prior acknowledge their mutual sexual interest in Hallet. This is not entirely an invention – as with her suggestion that Rivers might have been in love with Sassoon, Barker does have a source for her addition. On 1 September, Owen wrote to Sassoon that while he had been swimming at Folkestone Beach, ‘there issued from the sea distraction in the shape, shape I say, but lay no stress on that, of a Harrow boy, of superb intellect and refinement . . . the way he spoke . . .’ Owen also describes this meeting to his mother, with judicious cuts which Dominic Hibberd believes confirms the sexual meaning of ‘shape’.125 Barker’s rendering of history in the trilogy is, as Bernard Bergonzi points out, mythic rather than strictly historical.126 It is not historically accurate, but neither is it wildly inaccurate. Barker is aware that her perspective affects her reading of her sources, but at the same time, her writing lays claim to a truth independent of history, and even of the source material she uses. This is expressed in a more poetic form in the last page of the novel. The details of the attack in which Owen and Prior are killed are necessarily taken from a secondary source, Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: The Last Year.127 No one who saw Owen die survived, so Barker is free to have Prior watch Owen lifted into the air by bullets as his own consciousness ebbs away. Barker’s description of the sunlight moving over the dead soldiers in the aftermath of battle is strongly reminiscent of Owen’s poem ‘Futility’: Move him into the sun – Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields unsown. Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy Think how it wakes the seeds, – Woke, once, the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides, Full-nerved – still warm – too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all?

As she returns to Prior and Owen for the first time since their deaths, Barker abruptly moves into the present tense for the first time in the trilogy: The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps towards [the dead] along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.128

The power in her use of the present tense, and in her echoes of Owen’s bitterness, make this quite devastating, and convey their deadness with total clarity. The last paragraph of the book, however, returns the reader to Rivers in London; he has come to realise, after a year of confusion, that he does feel the cost of the war is beyond justification. This bleak mood and utter exhaustion lead into a waking dream: he sees Njiru in the ward, and hears him saying the exorcism of Ave’s spirit of epidemic death. The book ends with the words of the ritual appeasing the dead: ‘There is an end of men, and an end of chiefs, an end of chieftain’s wives, an end of chief ’s children – then go down and depart. Do not yearn for us, the fingerless, the crippled, the broken. Go down and depart, oh, oh, oh.’129

Njiru vanishes as the daylight advances on the ward, and the novel ends: the daylight pulls both Rivers and the reader on, but, for a time at least, there is silence.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Barker, Regeneration, 251. Hirsch, Family Frame, 22. Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, 175. ‘And the week they. . .’, Observer, 12 November 1995, 2. Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 1982); Blow Your House Down (London: Virago, 1984); Liza’s England (London: Virago, 1996). Barker, Blow Your House Down, 109. Pat Barker, interview with Wera Reusch: www.lolapress.org/elec1/ artenglish/reus_e.tm (accessed 23 February 2010). Eddie Gibb, ‘Minds Blown Apart by the Pity of War’, Sunday Times, 24 November 1996, 8. Anthony Quinn, ‘What Sassoon Could Never Resolve’, Telegraph, 2 September 1995, A4. Hynes, A War Imagined, x. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 1928, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, 1930, Sherston’s Progress, 1936; Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, 1928. Brian Bond, The Unquiet Western Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28. Martin Löschnigg, ‘. . . “The Novelist’s Responsibility to the Past”: History, Myth, and the Narratives of Crisis in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995)’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 47:3 (1999), 218. Jane Shilling, ‘Shaking Off the Ghosts of War’, Daily Telegraph, 24 October 1998, 05. Pat Barker, personal interview, 20 December 2005. Barker, Regeneration, 238. Stevenson, ‘With the Listener in Mind’, 176. W.H.R. Rivers, Conflict and Dream (London: Kegan Paul, 1923). Barker, Regeneration, 45. Barker, Regeneration, 45. Barker, Regeneration, 47. Barker, Regeneration, 47. Barker, Regeneration, 165–6. Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 84. Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 85, 87. Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 85. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬112 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy 27 Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1983). 28 Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 44. 29 Barker, Regeneration, 15. 30 Siegfried Sassoon, Diaries, 1915–1918, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 183, 192. 31 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 171. 32 Barker, Regeneration, 3. 33 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 98. 34 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 98. 35 Barker, Regeneration, 19. 36 Barker, Regeneration, 96–7. 37 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 6–7. 38 W.H.R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 209. 39 T.H. Pear, ‘Some Early Relations between English Ethnologists and Psychologists’; Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 90: 2 (1960), 235. 40 Melanesian Mission, The Southern Cross Log, December 1909, 567. 41 L.E. Shore, ‘W. H. R. Rivers’, The Eagle XLIII (1924), 9. 42 Shore, ‘W.H.R. Rivers’, 9–12. 43 Henry Head, ‘William Halse Rivers Rivers, 1864–1922’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 1923, xlvi. 44 Head, ‘William Halse Rivers Rivers’, xlvi. 45 Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 44–5. 46 Shore, ‘W.H.R. Rivers’, 9. 47 Lewis R. Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1918). Yealland’s theory that war neuroses occurred for the most part in the psychologically and intellectually deficient is most succinctly expressed in L.R. Yealland and E.D. Adrian, ‘The Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses’, The Lancet (1917), I, 868. 48 Barker, Regeneration, 223. 49 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 208. 50 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 208. 51 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 209. Barker, Regeneration, 226. 52 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 210. 53 Barker, Regeneration, 226. 54 Ben Shepherd, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994 (London: Pimlico, 2002), 77. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬113 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 55 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 9. 56 Barker, Regeneration, 230. 57 Shepherd, A War of Nerves, 77. 58 Yealland and Adrian, ‘The Treatment’, 868. 59 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 9. 60 Barker, Regeneration, 230. 61 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 10. 62 Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, 10. 63 Barker, Regeneration, 231. 64 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 175. 65 Barker, Regeneration, 251. 66 Ben Shepherd, ‘Digging up the Past’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 March 1996, 12. 67 Showalter claims that ‘If Yealland was the worst of the military psychiatrists, Sassoon’s therapist, William Halse Rivers Rivers, was unquestionably the best.’ Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987), 181. 68 Showalter, The Female Malady, 178. 69 Shepherd, A War Of Nerves, 89. 70 Showalter, The Female Malady, 175. 71 Barker, Regeneration, 108. 72 Showalter, The Female Malady, 174. 73 Barker, Regeneration, 107. 74 Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious, 217. 75 Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character and Disciplinary Convention: John Layard, Jungian and Anthropologist’, in George W. Stocking, Jr (ed.), Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 50–71. 76 Shepherd, ‘Digging Up the Past’, 13. 77 Barker, Regeneration, 106–7. 78 MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character’, 51. 79 MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character’, 51–2. MacClancy also mentions here that an Irish trader had recently been forced to flee the island Layard and Rivers went to, possibly providing Barker with the germ of her Irish trader Brennan, whose cynical exploitation of the islanders she uses as a contrast with Rivers’s respectful behaviour. 80 MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character’, 53. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬114 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Fact and fiction in the Regeneration trilogy 81 MacClancy, ‘Unconventional Character’, 54. 82 Jeremy MacClancy, email to the author, 15 September 2006. 83 Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 35. Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems, 1908–1956 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 221. 84 Barker, Regeneration, 149. 85 Wilfred Owen, ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, Collected Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 42. 86 Barker, Regeneration, 154. 87 Katharine Rivers, ‘Memories of Lewis Carroll’, with an introduction by Richard Slobodin, McMaster University Library Research News 3 (1976), 4. 88 Barker, Regeneration, 154. 89 Barker, Regeneration, 155. 90 Charles S. Myers, ‘The Influence of the late W.H.R. Rivers’, Psychology and Politics (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923), 150. 91 Pat Barker, personal interview, 20 December 2005. 92 Pat Barker, personal interview, 20 December 2005. 93 Barker, Regeneration 35. 94 Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 105. 95 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 223. 96 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 58. 97 Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 65. 98 Barker, Regeneration, 218. 99 Pat Barker, personal interview, 10 October 2005. 100 Robert Graves, In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914–1946, ed. Paul O’Prey (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 89. 101 Barker, Regeneration, 199. 102 A word which the OED cites as appearing in 1925, rather than the 1960s as a number of critics claimed. 103 Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 27–8. 104 Barker, Regeneration, 185. 105 Barker, Interview with Reusch. 106 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Penguin, 1982). 107 Blunden, Undertones of War, 67. 108 Barker, Regeneration, 102–3. 109 Barker, Regeneration, 57. 110 Sheila Rowbotham, Friends of Alice Wheeldon (London: Pluto Press, 1986). 111 Barker, The Eye in the Door, 160. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬115 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 112 Pat Barker, personal interview, 20 December 2005. 113 Winifred Wheeldon, letter to Alice Wheeldon, 21 December 1916, Ex. 24 Crim 1/166, Public Records Office, London. 114 Barker, The Eye in the Door, 84–5. 115 Anne Marreco, The Rebel Countess: The Life and Times of Constance Markievicz (London: Longmans, Green, 1967), 220. 116 Milner Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 117 Barker, The Eye in the Door, 43. 118 Noel Pemberton Billing, Verbatim report of the trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, M.P. : on a charge of criminal libel before Mr. Justice Darling at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey: with report of the preliminary proceedings at Bow Street Police Court, an appendix of documents referred to in the case, reference index. &c. (London: Vigilante Office, 1918), 452. 119 Pemberton Billing, Verbatim report, 452. 120 Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious. 121 Arthur Maurice, Hocart, ‘The Cult of the Dead on Eddystone Islands’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 52:3 (1922). 122 Barker, The Ghost Road, 46. 123 Wilfred Owen, Selected Letters, ed. John Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 298. 124 Barker, The Ghost Road, 8. 125 Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), 331–2. 126 Bernard Bergonzi, ‘Pat Barker’s Trilogy’, Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society 1:ii (December 1996): 221–33. 127 Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: The Last Year (London: Constable and Company Limited, 1992). 128 Barker, The Ghost Road, 126–7. 129 Barker, The Ghost Road, 127. Taken from Hocart, ‘The Cult of the Dead’, 107.

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3

‘In the beginning was the word; and to that it came back in the long run’: Briony Tallis and Atonement1

Atonement, published in 2001, is Ian McEwan’s ninth novel.2 Having established a reputation for sensational, viscerally shocking prose in the mid-1970s, he has gone on to write novels about ‘big events’; sudden tragedies, incomprehensible trauma. Atonement, then, is something of a change of direction: unlike Enduring Love or Black Dogs it doesn’t begin with abrupt disaster, and is also set in unfamiliar territory – a country house in Surrey, in the 1930s.3 The tone is also different, being mannered, even cloying at times, and lacking the sense of amorality and darkness with which McEwan is more frequently associated. McEwan’s writing moved away from the tightly restricted worlds of his early stories to a more social and political focus in the 1980s and 1990s. His novels The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love and Amsterdam all engage with public concerns as well as private lives.4 It would seem, initially, that Atonement continues this move towards a more open fictional world – the narrative moves between very different situations and narrators, and covers sixty years. However, in many ways Atonement is as closed, and claustrophobic, as The Cement Garden or The Comfort of Strangers; despite its range, at the end of the novel it becomes clear that we have seen the results of one person’s obsession, and have inhabited their minds, their obsession, without even knowing it.5 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬117 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Atonement is divided into four sections, one set in the mid1930s, two set in 1940 and one set in 1999. At the end of the final section, it is revealed that the previous chapters are all, apparently, written by Briony Tallis (the chief protagonist) who, by Part Three, we know to have been working on a series of drafts of a novel. Part One of Atonement begins in a large late-Victorian country house, in the heatwave in the summer of 1935. The house is home to the Tallis family, headed by Jack, a senior civil servant making mysterious plans for the possibly impending war. Jack is often absent (at work or with his long-term mistress), while his wife Emily spends much of her time isolated in a darkened room, dogged by migraines. Their oldest child Leon is something of a flaneur, likable and disinclined to take life seriously. As the novel begins, he is imminently expected home with his rich but stupid friend, the businessman Paul Marshall. Cecilia, the older daughter, is wondering what to do with herself now she has left Cambridge. Briony, the youngest child, is utterly unlike her siblings; formidably focused, her ‘controlling demon’ is a desire ‘to have the world just so’.6 This manifests itself not only in a military tidiness, but in a passion for writing. The family group is completed – uneasily – by Robbie Turner, who, like Cecilia, has just graduated from Cambridge. Robbie is the son of one of the servants of the Tallis family; his education has been a hobby of sorts for Jack. Robbie sits in uneasy relation to the household, neither family nor staff. The quiet of the household is disrupted by the arrival of Briony’s cousins, refugees from marital discord. The oldest cousin, Lola, resembles her near namesake Lolita in her precocious sexual awareness and gift for manipulation; her younger twin brothers Jackson and Pierrot are simply miserable and isolated. Briony, who has been writing (as well as directing and producing) a play to welcome Leon and Paul Marshall, forcibly recruits them into her cast. The play, however, is not performed. Less than twelve hours after the scenes at the start of the book, Lola has been sexually assaulted, Jackson and Pierrot have run away and Robbie and Cecilia have fallen violently in love. Having been friends as children, and – slightly more awkwardly – acquaintances at Cambridge, they begin to recognise that their feelings for each ‫ ﱢﱡ‬118 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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other have changed during a playful fight over who will fill a valuable vase with water from the fountain in the grounds. Cecilia refuses to let Robbie help her, and they tussle over it, resulting in its being dropped into the fountain and two triangular pieces being chipped off. This raises the tension to such a pitch that Robbie sends Cecilia a note of apology, but instead of the polite note he intended to send, he accidentally dispatches, via Briony, an earlier note that he hadn’t meant Cecilia to see, which explicitly describes his sexual desire for her. As she reads the note, Cecilia realises she feels the same way about him. Neither of them realise, though, that Briony witnessed the tussle for the vase, and has read Robbie’s note. In her imagination, Robbie is now ‘elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal’, ‘a maniac’; when Lola is raped, these thoughts make Briony claim that the figure she barely glimpsed running away from Lola was Robbie.7 On her word, he is arrested – and later, we learn, convicted. Part One ends with the police car taking Robbie away ‘vanishing into the whiteness’.8 Both the prose style and the plot of Part Two are very different from those of Part One. Where the style of Part One was unhurried, often dwelling on sensation, Part Two has a clipped style and contains a great deal more action. We have, we discover, moved forward in time to May 1940, and are following Robbie – freed from prison to join the army – on the disastrous retreat to Dunkirk. The chaos and devastation on the road to the ports is described in intense, vivid detail. Robbie and his two companions have been separated from their unit, and must make their own way to the comparative safety of the coast; Robbie also has a shrapnel wound in his stomach, and develops septicaemia as he nears Dunkirk. Although he and one of his comrades make it to the beaches, Robbie is so ill by this point that when he reappears in Part Three, the reader is relieved to find that he hasn’t died. Part Three, like Part Two, moves far more quickly than Part One. In this section, set at the same moment in 1940 as Part Two, Cecilia and Briony have both become nurses, although Cecilia, who never accepted Robbie’s guilt, is estranged from her family. Briony feels tremendously guilty about having caused Robbie to go to prison, and has written an impressionistic novella – greatly influenced by ‫ ﱢﱡ‬119 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf – describing the events of that day. During Part Two, Briony, having sent her novella to the literary magazine Horizon, receives a kind and lengthy rejection letter from its real editor, Cyril Connolly. Most of this section deals with the harshness of the conditions at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where Briony is a probationer nurse. This is Briony’s first experience of nursing seriously wounded men – ironically, from the Dunkirk evacuation. After some justifiable doubts about her reception, she goes to find Cecilia to ask her to forgive her for accusing Robbie and offer to retract her evidence. The final section jumps another fifty years, and contains a shock for the reader. Briony is now a renowned author, but has developed vascular dementia and is losing her memory. She returns to her family home where the novel began – it is now a hotel – for a big family party in honour of her seventy-seventh birthday. Then, three pages before the end, McEwan (and Briony) reveals that Atonement is itself the novel which Briony has been writing since 1940, drafting it eight times over fifty-nine years. Although there have been strong hints that all may not be as it seems throughout, particularly in the narrator’s description of the adult Briony’s success – and obsessions – as a published writer in Part One, at this moment McEwan makes us see that we have been reading Briony’s novel all along. Briony wanted it to set out the truth about who raped Lola – that it was Paul Marshall, and not Robbie, who attacked her – and that Lola and she had both known this, though to different degrees, all along. The boundaries between truth and fiction are given a mighty twist as the reader tries to distinguish the ‘real’ story as laid out by Briony, and McEwan’s manipulation of the narrative. The first part of the novel takes up half of the book as a whole – 187 pages – and follows the progress of the one day that changes Briony’s life forever. Despite this section being firmly set in 1935, it is much less dependent on source material than later parts of the novel. In an interview with John Sutherland in the Guardian, McEwan explained that ‘oddly enough’, there was no historical research that he could do which would add to the narrative without undermining the reader’s impression that Part One was an account by Briony: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬120 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement I thought that someone like Briony Tallis, my narrator, would not fall into the usual trap – to tell you what was in the top twenty that week [in 1935] . . . and I thought, well, this is her time, everything in it she takes entirely for granted. So she described virtually nothing that is specific to the time. It could therefore be done as an imaginative reconstruction, rather than something that had to be located in a library, as was the case with Dunkirk.9

Instead, literary models provide the main historical framework in this section. Set in an English country house in 1935, the first part of Atonement unavoidably places itself in a literary context, and it does so knowingly. While Atonement can be set against ‘country house’ fictions such as Agatha Christie’s novels, it is deliberately and painstakingly placed in relation to fiction of the period in terms of Briony’s prose style and subject matter. We see traces of the novels of Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf in this section, and Hemingway and Bowen in the second and third. The way Briony – or McEwan, writing as Briony – structures this first section is very original, though, and owes more to the multiple perspectives and shifting timescale of Paul Scott’s novel The Jewel in the Crown than the Lehmann and Bowen novels – Dusty Answer and The Heat of the Day – that influence Briony’s style the most.10 My analysis of McEwan’s structure of the novel as a whole and this section in particular is intended to show how the historical references and literary models drawn upon contribute to the development of the novel’s themes. The structure of Part One comments repeatedly on itself: the narration doubles back in time, is retold from different points of view and from different times. The first truly striking indication of the non-linear character of this section comes after Briony has witnessed Cecilia and Robbie at the fountain. The narrator suddenly, and jarringly, jumps sixty years into the future, describing how the adult Briony, apparently now a successful novelist, attributed the development of her ‘impartial psychological realism’ to her feelings on seeing Robbie and Cecilia at that moment.11 Before that, there are many more subtle metafictional touches – such as the quotations from Briony’s play, which Cyril Connolly, reading Briony’s novella in 1940, suggests she uses – that are ostensibly quite straightforward, so the reader only ‫ ﱢﱡ‬121 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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becomes aware of them as being parts of a rewriting of the original draft once they have read to the end of the book. The first example of prolepsis comes, barely noticeably, on the second page of the novel, when the narrator dryly comments that Briony’s mother’s commendation will be ‘the project’s highest point of fulfilment’.12 It recurs, very subtly, on page 19, when the narrator describes the Tallis home, as ‘barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat . . . to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team’. The lightness of touch here almost masks the co-existence of two times in one sentence – the house, forty years old now, but also, at some unspecified future point, to be (justifiably, it would seem) dismissed by Pevsner – or maybe by one of his assistants. The mocking tone is the adult narrator’s, not the child observer’s or the twenty-year-old’s. On pages 40–41, the narrative voice jumps into the future for the second time and with less levity. This happens again at crucial moments such as when Robbie walks to the Tallis house for supper, a moment he dwells on from prison, and when the older Briony considers her younger self ’s guilt and whether she meant to do, or understood, what she was doing. It is quite clear, from page 19 onwards, that this ‘present tense’ is not quite what it has appeared to be. McEwan’s references to historical events consistently point the reader beyond the present moment of the story, to the outbreak of war in 1939. Briony’s father Jack works in a ‘Whitehall ministry’ as an ‘Eventuality Planner’.13 At exactly the same time as Lola’s rape is discovered, Emily is remembering finding amongst Jack’s papers predictions of ‘five million casualties’ in the event of a bombing campaign. Emily, we are told, ‘had little interest in civic administration’ and decides to ignore this discomforting discovery – ‘these extravagant numbers were surely a form of self-aggrandisement, and reckless to the point of irresponsibility. Jack, the household protector . . . was relied on to take the long view. But this was silly.’14 McEwan uses Jack’s occupation to give the reader a ‘long view’ – one remembers these figures when Briony finally reveals that Cecilia was killed in one such raid in the first year of the war. Jack’s job is essentially to look ahead, and to try to plan some kind of order into an unpredictable situation. Briony shares this ability to marshal ‫ ﱢﱡ‬122 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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ideas and facts; her father’s occupation is an adult manifestation of the daughter’s habit of trying to order life into abstract concepts or patterned narratives. It also ironically counterpoints the plans Robbie makes for his own future, which are wholly undone by Briony’s lie. The obvious contrast to Jack’s attempts to limit the damage war might bring is Paul Marshall’s less than ethical attempt to harness his chocolate company’s profits to the outbreak of hostilities. Marshall, unabashed, confidently expounds his plan to Cecilia and Robbie. ‘The concept rested,’ McEwan paraphrases, ‘on the assumption that spending on the armed forces must go on increasing if Mr Hitler did not pipe down . . . [one of his colleagues even accused] Marshall of being a war monger; but . . . he would not be turned away from his purpose, his vision.’15 This vision is rather less grandiose than it sounds, as it is centred on the mass production of a rather unpleasant-sounding chocolate substitute. Marshall’s tremendous success as a businessman – which we see later in the novel – is built on chocolate that doesn’t contain any chocolate, which possibly mirrors, in an unsettlingly comic way, his marriage, begun with a rape and allowed to exist because of a lie. Marshall is in every sense a profiteer; McEwan’s decision to make him a chocolate ‘magnate’ and to tie his success to a cynical exploitation of the war provides an early hint in this section of the lack of poetic or natural justice in the consequences of the war. It is hard, reading this, not to be reminded of the assembly of less than honourable warriors in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.16 Waugh’s work displays a decidedly pessimistic view of human nature in general and of the system of preferment in the army in particular; his hero, Guy Crouchback, is consistently passed over and blamed for others’ mistakes, while those who succeed are often the unscrupulous and the indolent. Although McEwan does not share Waugh’s snobbishness about the upper classes’ right to govern, he does have a similar view of those – like Marshall – who, conscienceless, seek to capitalise on the war while others suffer. On a more practical level, Marshall’s business plans introduce the issue of rearmament to the novel, and the growing possibility of war, in a way that a child might plausibly engage with: Briony has already said, ‫ ﱢﱡ‬123 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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from her thirteen-year-old’s point of view, that ‘rearmament [,] the Abyssinian Question and gardening’ were ‘simply not . . . subject[s]’.17 Chocolate, on the other hand, captures the children’s attention rather more efficiently. This casual mention of the Abyssinian Question is another example of a very specific historical setting being established through the child’s point of view. Although Briony is clearly and unsurprisingly uninterested in Abyssinia, this throwaway reference establishes the year and reminds the reader that it was this crisis that showed that the League of Nations was unable to control its members. While this did not directly contribute towards the outbreak of war, it did demonstrate to the fascist states that they could act with a certain degree of impunity. This impunity is, in turn, related to the last historical reference McEwan makes in this section, to the First World War. The echo of the First World War comes in the heart of Part One. The vase that Robbie and Cecilia row over was given to the girls’ uncle after he had saved fifty people from shelling in a town near Verdun in 1918. Uncle Clem, as he is consistently referred to, was killed a week before the Armistice (a possible echo of the death of Wilfred Owen), but the vase was ‘returned to the Tallis home’ where Jack Tallis asks that it be used, ‘in honour of his brother’s memory’. The vase is made into an icon, of sorts, or a memorial, ‘respected not for Höroldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels . . . but for Uncle Clem, and the lives he had saved, the river he had crossed at midnight, and his death just a week before the Armistice’.18 It is thus doubly ironic that it is because of this vase being damaged, ultimately, that Robbie ends up in the British Expeditionary Force and dies in the retreat to Dunkirk. This irony is intensified by our awareness, once we have read all of Briony’s novel, that Uncle Clem’s death did not create an end to war – that even in this idyllic summer the young people are vulnerable to the same, distantseeming fate – and that even the vase is broken in the end. Once the reader has reached the list of corrections Cyril Connolly, and later the elderly Colonel of the Buffs, offer Briony, the extent to which Part One is a final draft (and a palimpsest of all the previous drafts, written over fifty-nine years) becomes ‫ ﱢﱡ‬124 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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apparent. The same viewpoint – the long future – allows McEwan to have Briony write a narrative in which she is simultaneously in the present of the text and outside it, in her future, shaping and commenting on the text as it develops. Presenting the novel in this way creates a dense and intricate fictional universe, as I will argue below. However, Part One is also a palimpsest of contemporaneous perception, that is to say, the same events as seen by each of the characters. McEwan uses a non-linear chronology to depict the characters’ interior lives – why they act as they do on that day – and how they develop. While the events of the day are presented in a roughly chronological order – they all converge at the dinner during which the twins go missing, people go out to search, Lola is attacked and Robbie accused – some of the early chapters are in the wrong order. The first two chapters are in the order in which events happen, and set up the plot for the remainder of the novel. (Incidentally, this is the only part of the book in which the sections are divided into numbered chapters – possibly a remnant of the young Briony’s determination to order events. It is certainly this which prompts her to structure her story so the calamity of her wrongly believing Robbie was the attacker falls in Chapter Thirteen). We are introduced to Briony by way of her play ‘The Trials of Arabella’. Briony’s character is sketched through the description of her industrious approach to the dramatic; before the novel begins she has already ‘designed the posters, programmes and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper’ as well as writing the play ‘in a two-day tempest of composition’, her absorption in which caused her ‘to miss a breakfast and a lunch’.19 The melodrama of the play conveys Briony’s taste for the intense and the didactic, as does her fantasising about her (apparently) glamorous, adored older brother’s admiration (’Yes, my younger sister, Briony Tallis the writer, you must surely have heard of her’).20 She is also ‘one of those children possessed by a desire to have the world just so . . . Briony’s [bedroom] was a shrine to her controlling demon’.21 Like another fictional would-be author, Leo in The GoBetween, Briony has a tin box full of treasures – ‘a mutant double ‫ ﱢﱡ‬125 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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acorn, fool’s gold . . . a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf ’ and a locked diary kept in her own code.22 The pleasure of writing is two-fold for Briony – ‘writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm.’23 McEwan extemporises further on Briony’s early development as a writer, mistress of her fictional world, but the most significant element of this characterisation is that it establishes both the side of Briony that will lead her to misread what she sees, not understanding the difference between the patterning she so enjoys in fiction and the haphazardness of real life, and also her compulsion to tell stories and to reorder life, which makes her write and rewrite this story. The next characters we meet are Briony’s cousins, Lola, at fifteen uneasily poised between girlhood and longed-for (and pretended) womanhood, and the twins Jackson and Pierrot. Their introduction stresses the horrible situation they are in as well as Briony’s failure to register it; they are ‘refugees from a bitter domestic civil war . . . [which] should have mattered more to Briony’.24 Because of their parents’ separation, they have effectively been exiled to the Tallises’, where no one looks after them (as Cecilia guiltily realises when she finds them fighting over their single pair of socks) and they are dragooned into Briony’s production. Chapter Two introduces Cecilia, Briony’s older sister. She is intense, and imaginative; her apprehension of ‘the fine ribbing of the oaks’ trunks, the high-ceilinged room, the geometry of light, the pulse in her ears subsiding in the stillness’ is reminiscent of the sensuality of Judith Earle’s relation to her surroundings in Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer.25 Like Judith, Cecilia has read English at Girton and is deeply romantic, albeit more self-aware and more cynical. When Cecilia takes Uncle Clem’s precious vase round to fill it at the fountain, and meets Robbie, the cast is assembled for the disaster that evening, 146 pages on. Chapter Two ends with Briony’s rehearsals beginning to fall apart, and Robbie and Cecilia breaking the vase as each refuses to let the other fill it. Cecilia strips to her underwear and gets into the fountain to retrieve the broken pieces, to Robbie’s horror and her furious triumph. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬126 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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In Chapter Three we have the first, and most crucial, proleptic retelling. Briony, watching from her nursery window, observes Robbie and Cecilia’s confrontation and is thrilled by it, sensing in its mysteriousness and intensity something straight out of a fairy tale, or one of her own stories. She has also, however, a strong feeling of ‘the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between . . . the ordinary people that she knew . . . and how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong’.26 This feeling – ironically, entirely correct – is forgotten as she is overtaken by excitement at the fact she can write about what she saw: ‘She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral.’27 The older Briony comments self-mockingly here that ‘six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935. She would be well-aware of the extent of her self-mythologizing, and she gave her account a self-mocking, or mock-heroic tone.’28 She is aware of how little her younger self understands the sentiments that so thrill her, and that her ‘instinct for order’ will have horrendous consequences for Robbie when she casts him as a villain, forgetting her impartiality altogether, not seeing how she is imposing an aesthetic pattern on real life. In giving the reader each chapter’s perspective on events individually, McEwan installs a sense of other people’s individuality, and otherness, at the heart of the narrative. It gives the reader the empathy with each individual that Briony thought she could create in her childish writing, but only succeeded in creating as an adult as she finally tried to inhabit Robbie’s and Cecilia’s minds. In this version, the narrative has the texture of having been compulsively handled and rehandled, returned to obsessively by Briony for almost sixty years. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬127 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh chapters begin at roughly the same moment in time, just after Briony has abandoned her rehearsals and disappeared into the gardens. Leon, Briony’s and Cecilia’s brother and his friend Paul Marshall arrive and Emily Tallis, Briony’s mother, retires to her bedroom with a migraine. Each chapter reveals another section, contributing to the growing sense of unease: the tremendous summer heat creates a sense of tension, but what makes it suffocating is that as the narrative unfolds, there is an underlying feeling that we are headed somewhere and that something is about to happen. This is a result of each different chapter being told from the perspective of a different character, so the same events are seen more than once. Everything of significance, and plenty of incidental detail, is observed at least twice. For example, Emily telling Cecilia to put a vase of flowers in Paul’s room before he arrives and the consequences of this are presented in a fragmented, non-linear manner. We see Cecilia dismissing her mother’s notion of arranging wild flowers on page 23 – ‘There really was no point’ – long before we actually hear the suggestion, as Emily remembers it, on page 70. We also hear about Briony’s thrashing the nettles before we know that the rehearsals have been abandoned, and see Briony going out into the garden in a rage.29 The perspective of the first four chapters is handed back and forth between Briony and Cecilia. Chapter Five switches away from them, and out of free indirect speech, to describe rather than report Paul Marshall’s first sexually loaded encounter with Lola in the nursery. Chapters Six, Seven, Eight and Nine lay out the feelings, soon to be motivations, of Emily, Briony, Robbie and Cecilia, showing how each of their actions and decisions lead up to the crash at the end of Part One. A subtle ‘intertextual’ difference here from what Briony seems to have written in the first draft is the changes she has made at Cyril Connolly’s suggestion. His point that the different consciousnesses the narrative inhabits should do more than convey impressions of light and stone has translated this material into what he calls ‘the backbone of a plot’.30 In this draft, the differences between what each character ‘sees’, and the psychological depiction of them in each sequence, provides the basis of the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬128 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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plot. Each chapter is written in free indirect speech, in interior monologues almost entirely free from authorial comment, or so the reader believes until discovering that these depictions of each character’s state of mind are Briony’s own creation, the significance of which I discuss below. Together, these four chapters build the momentum necessary for Briony’s mistake to be made. The ‘crime’ begins in Chapter Ten, when she consoles Lola, who has been attacked, supposedly by the twins, by sharing her secret about the contents of Robbie’s note to Cecilia. Lola, more worldly than Briony but equally determined to be dramatic, describes Robbie as a ‘maniac’.31 This word so impresses Briony – it ‘had refinement, and the weight of medical diagnosis’ – that it creates another moment of false epiphany: ‘all these years she had known him and this was what he had been . . . She had been alone with him many times . . . Now his condition was named she felt a certain consolation.’32 Briony allows her ‘ordering passion’ to override her more accurate but less compelling thoughts on ‘impartial psychological realism’.33 After Robbie’s conviction, and Briony’s recognition of her mistake, she is never able to leave the past alone. The way in which the plot doubles back on itself provides a commentary on this invasion of the present by the past, but there are also examples of the past reappearing in different contexts and in different, albeit smaller, ways. Emily’s projection of her resentment of her sister onto her sister’s children is one such example: ‘An old antagonism afflicted Emily. It was her sister Hermione she was soothing . . . stealer of scenes, little mistress of histrionics . . . And Lola, like her mother, would not be held back . . . She upstaged her runaway brothers with her own dramatic exit . . . How like Hermione Lola was, to remain guiltless while others destroyed themselves at her prompting.’34 The consequences of Emily’s long cherishing of her girlhood anger is that when Lola is attacked, her feelings of guilt, as well as her snobbery, lead her to pursue Robbie with particular ferocity. This ensures, in turn, that this present will never become the past for Briony, who remains unable to atone for having accused Robbie. Briony’s ordering passion, being a family trait, is itself another example of the same notes being sounded in different times. A ‫ ﱢﱡ‬129 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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desire to control and arrange also afflicts her father, with his job in ‘eventuality planning’, as well as her locksmith grandfather. The description of the solidity of the house is reminiscent of the tidiness and disciplined order of Briony’s dollshouses. Her grandfather’s acquisition of portraits hung to look like the old family portraits the Tallis family do not possess, as well as his changing the family name from Cartwright, also suggest that he shared Briony’s talent for ordering outward show. McEwan remarked in The Edmonton Journal that Atonement is ‘a very, very literary novel. It’s about writing; it’s full of writers like Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf and Auden and Housman . . . [it is] a writer’s book.’35 While this is in part because Briony, Robbie and Cecilia are all readers and writers, in Part One it is particularly the case because of the number of literary references and influences McEwan builds into the text. The book’s epigraph is from Northanger Abbey – ‘Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? . . . Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?’36 Bryony is a direct literary descendant of Catherine Morland. McEwan drew this parallel when he said that ‘a huge indulgence in literary models by Briony is partly what leads her to make her misjudgement’.37 Like Catherine, Briony’s taste for the gothic and grandiose results in her failing to distinguish between the facts in front of her and the overblown fantasies she so delights in reading.38 Briony’s indulgence in literary models finds expression in her prose style; Cyril Connolly berates her for being too influenced by Virginia Woolf ’s writing, and she herself attacks the ‘borrowed notions of modern writing’ in which she has tried to ‘drown her guilt in a stream – three streams! – of consciousness’.39 It is ironic that this accusation of ‘influence’ is made by a ‘real’ writer, Connolly, in a pastiche by McEwan. Briony’s development of the parallel narration of the same moment by each character in this first section has grown out of the three different consciousnesses she depicted in her first draft. From a sub-Woolfian prose she develops something ‘amoral’ – the ‘impartial psychological realism’ which is distinctively hers.40 The same is true of the relationship McEwan bestows on Briony’s ‫ ﱢﱡ‬130 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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writing to Rosamond Lehmann’s work, particularly Dusty Answer. This novel revolves around an intense, lonely girl, Judith Earle, and her romanticised attachment to the mysterious and glamorous children who spend their holidays next door. Judith and Briony are similar both in temperament and situation. Judith lives alone with her parents and seems to have no special friends while Briony suffers from ‘her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house’.41 Both girls live intense, imaginative lives, and although Briony has an outlet in her writing and is very much more confident than Judith, both tend to misread people and situations. Neither is good at seeing anything from a perspective other than their own.42 The intensity with which Judith apprehends everything around her is rendered in a lush, adjectiveladen prose, which describes her surroundings in minute detail. The sensuousness of Lehmann’s description of landscape and light is echoed in the early sections of Part One when Briony and Cecilia are moving around the house and the gardens alone, as Judith does in Dusty Answer. Lehmann’s description of Judith’s garden, for example, shares with Atonement attention to the effects of light as well as the self-dramatising element of the observer’s reaction: Night after sleepless night she jumped out of the kitchen window, into the garden, and crossed the lawn’s pattern of long-tree shadows, sharp-cut upon the blank, moon-blanched level of the grass. All the colours were drained away; only the white spring flowers in the border shone up with a glimmer of phosphorus, and the budding tree tops were picked out, line by cold line, in a thin and silvery wash of light.43

In this excerpt from the start of Chapter Two of Atonement, as Cecilia takes her bunch of wild flowers back into the house to fetch the vase, the narrator pays similar attention to colour and tone, and to their romantic potential: The cool high shade of the woods was a relief, the sculpted intricacies of the tree trunks enchanting. Once through the iron kissing gate, and past the rhododendrons beneath the ha-ha, she crossed the open parkland – sold off to a local farmer to graze his cows on – and came up behind the fountain and its retaining wall.44 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬131 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Here, as well as the similarities, we can see the largest difference between Lehmann’s and McEwan’s use of this kind of languid, lush language. In McEwan’s case, it is always self-conscious, and the narrator is always slightly detached. This is a trick of characterisation – it heightens our awareness that we are seeing the older Briony looking back both on her younger self and her writing, and finding both lacking. This is not to imply that the older Briony is entirely out of sympathy with her younger self. Although she is less indulgent of this self than Rosamond Lehmann is of Judith Earle, the narrator of the novel as a whole is making a plea for understanding, if not forgiveness. This technique – of presenting the narrative in a frame ostensibly created by the young protagonist when they are older – inevitably reminds one again of The Go-Between. McEwan remarked recently that ‘The Go-Between made a huge impression on me’ when he was Briony’s age, thirteen.45 In another interview he explained how Hartley’s novel had influenced Atonement: A novel that was very important in this, and that I wanted to fit in, was The Go-Between, so [in his rejection letter to Briony] Cyril Connolly says ‘I trust you’ve read The Go-Between’. I was very disappointed when the copy editor informed me that it was written in 1952 and I had to take it out. But what does remain from The GoBetween is the long hot summer.46

There do, however, seem to be other elements of The Go-Between that remain in Atonement, on some of which McEwan expands, and others of which are allowed simply to ‘sit in’, drawing the readers’ mind back to the earlier text. Both types of echoes allow us to see Atonement in a historical context. The similarities between Briony and Leo, the narrator of The Go-Between, are numerous: both (like Judith Earle) have powerful imaginations, and both are enthusiastic writers, who try to control their world through their writing (Leo through the spells and codes he creates to fight the school bullies, Briony by reading the world through her literary models). They both carry letters for a pair of lovers and, in both cases, doing something they shouldn’t have with the letter precipitates disaster. The lovers themselves are probably the element of The Go-Between ‫ ﱢﱡ‬132 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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that McEwan develops most. In Hartley’s novel, we are shown events only from Leo’s perspective. McEwan opens the narrative up; Robbie shares Leo’s anxiety about the social difference between himself and his hosts, but McEwan also expands on the wider class tensions in his novel. In The Go-Between this is almost entirely confined to Leo’s anxieties about the Maudsley family. Robbie is also a little like the Danby family in Bowen’s A World of Love, whose title to the house they live in is ambiguous, as is their social standing. McEwan’s observation of the class prejudices in Atonement are astute. Emily’s discomfort with ‘Robbie’s elevation’ is made very obvious – ‘[Robbie] was a hobby of Jack’s, living proof of some levelling principle’; ‘Nothing good [would] come of it’.47 It is partly this, we are led to suppose, that motivates Emily’s determination to have Robbie punished. Cecilia writes to Robbie some years later that ‘snobbery . . . lay behind their stupidity. My mother never forgave you your first.’48 Our ability to see Robbie and Cecilia as unimpeachable is undermined, however, by McEwan having them assume that it was young Hardman (a handyman), rather than the rich Paul Marshall, who raped Lola. This sort of evenhandedness contributes, again, to the sense not so much of amorality but of a reluctance to judge too harshly that marks Briony’s later prose (although it has to be noted that this is not extended, unsurprisingly, to Paul and Lola Marshall). The atmospheres of the novels are similar, not only because each is set in a heatwave, but because of the way that war looms over both of them. I have already discussed how McEwan hints at the outbreak of war in four years’ time; Hartley relies more heavily on the assumption that anyone reading his novel, knowing that Leo and his friend Marcus are thirteen in 1900, will also assume that they will be involved in the First World War (Marcus is killed). In this respect, Hartley places more faith in the war as a signifier itself, which doesn’t need much signposting. But in the depiction of life in the big house, and of the relationship of the Maudsleys to the villagers, we do get a sense of this being the last moments of a time that seemed inviolate. This idea is given emphasis by Leo’s millennial fervour and also by the constantly rising heat, which finally breaks at the novel’s crisis point. In Atonement, we have an atmos‫ ﱢﱡ‬133 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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phere akin to this – the heat provides a reference to The Go-Between which puts us on our guard, but the references McEwan uses to establish the date in the mid-1930s, are what make us aware that the war is in the future, and, as in The Go-Between, many of the characters are the right age to be directly affected. Another writer who portrays the terrible effect of war, and whose influence is visible in Atonement, is Elizabeth Bowen. McEwan, when describing the nature of Briony’s literary style, said that she had something of the ‘Elizabeth Bowen of The Heat of the Day’, Bowen’s novel set in London during the Blitz.49 Bowen’s influence on Atonement is wider than this suggests, though. Throughout Atonement, and not only in Part One, there are echoes of The Death of the Heart, A World of Love, The Last September and The House in Paris.50 The common thread connecting each of these with Atonement is Bowen’s treatment of the young. In her essay ‘Out of a Book’, Bowen writes: Probably children, if they said what they thought, would be much franker about the insufficiency of so-called real life to the requirements of those who demand to be really alive. Nothing but the story can meet the untried nature’s need and capacity for the whole.51

We recognise both Briony and Leo in this essay, which discusses how you can be consumed by books (as Briony and Leo are, and as the reader of Atonement unwittingly is). The motif of the young woman moving about the big house, lost in her thoughts, appears in The Last September and in A World of Love, and in a modified form in The Death of the Heart, as well as in the first four chapters of Atonement, where both Briony and Cecilia are shown wandering unsupervised in the Tallis mansion, entirely engrossed in their own musing – ‘away in [their] thoughts’ as McEwan puts it in a phrase which recurs with fitting frequency in a book which deals extensively with our interior worlds. Bowen frequently wrote about young people or children bewildered by adult behaviour, especially sexual behaviour. Leo in The House in Paris is too young to understand his parents’ real motivations while Portia in The Death of the Heart is hopelessly unequipped to understand Eddie. How she sees her relationship ‫ ﱢﱡ‬134 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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with him – her inability to understand his cynical behaviour and surprise at not being able to take him at face value – is very similar to the way Briony fantasises, near the start of the most intense part of her nursing, in Part Three, that one of the injured men whose faces she is washing will turn out to be Robbie. In her ego-driven, childish fantasy, she thinks ‘how she would dress his wounds without knowing who he was, and with cotton wool kindly rub his face until his familiar features emerged, and how he would turn to her with gratitude, realise who she was, and . . . forgive her’.52 Briony’s inexperience prevents her from seeing how self-serving this construction of hers is. Portia, like Briony, writes compulsively, and like Briony, she watches everything, and misinterprets most of it. In both novels, too, the child’s writing has unpredictable consequences for the adults around her. One adult tells Portia that ‘You do a most dangerous thing. All the time, you go making connexions – and that can be a vice.’53 The similarity between Portia and Briony is very strong, but this points to a historical difficulty for McEwan. Portia, with her dolls and chests of treasures, is sixteen. Briony is thirteen, ‘a young thirteen’ according to Cecilia.54 In her 1981 study of Bowen, Hermione Lee comments of Portia that ‘it is hard now to think of a sixteen year old as being quite so vulnerable. You might want to put her age back to thirteen or fourteen.’55 McEwan, in ageing Briony, has taken this contemporary view of the sixteenyear- old; Briony would seem very young for sixteen to us. But if we compare the descriptions of Portia’s and Briony’s bedrooms, we find matching lists of childhood treasures, locked diaries and secret papers, even dolls. So in terms of the 1930s, Briony could quite plausibly be sixteen. But this behaviour would seem bizarre for a sixteen-year-old today – as Portia’s behaviour does – so McEwan cannot follow Bowen and has to make Briony a little younger. McEwan, in the interests of not making Briony seem ludicrously immature to us, has chosen to portray this side of the 1930s child in late twentieth-century values. Children are not the only people who have difficulty communicating, or being understood, in Bowen’s novels. Bowen’s fascination with triangular relationships is well documented, and casts an interesting light on McEwan’s use of the triangle motif. Throughout ‫ ﱢﱡ‬135 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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the early chapters of Part One, there are a puzzling number of triangles – the scar on Pierrott’s ear, the piece of broken vase and Briony’s torn poster for ‘The Trials of Arabella’. If we look at the characters themselves, the cousins – the twins and Lola – have a triangular relationship, as Robbie, his mother and Cecilia are forced to after his arrest. Briony also facilitates the wedding of Lola and Paul Marshall. The most important triangular relationship, though, is between Cecilia, Robbie and Briony, who are tied together permanently by Briony’s lie. In The Heat of the Day, history is the third person ‘at their table’ with Stella and Robert; similarly, the dead (especially Robbie and Cecilia) haunt the older Briony.56 While they are alive, even though they are apart from her, Briony is an inescapable presence for Cecilia and Robbie (as we see from their references to her in their letters in Part Two). The hold of the dead on the living is another theme McEwan and Bowen have in common. Antonia’s feeling, in A World of Love, that her dead cousin Guy’s ‘lease on life’ had not run out, and that he was in some way still there, is closely related to Briony’s attempt to give Robbie and Cecilia their lost lives back.57 In both novels, the young men’s last words strike a falsely optimistic note as they both try to sound normal, emphasising how truly unexpected and wrong the fact of their dying seems to the living. After Robbie and Cecilia have died, the triangular relationship between the three of them continues to exist. Once they are dead, Briony is utterly incapable of atoning for what she has done and leaving her crime in the past. Her re-animation of Robbie and Cecilia in Atonement is only the latest manifestation of them and of her guilt. McEwan’s interest in the unexpected and the uncanny finds an echo in Bowen’s use of description of weather and place to feed a sense of atmosphere. While McEwan does not really try to mimic Bowen’s prose style (the unusual, confusing sentence structures or the peculiar language), he does borrow her technique of having the weather evoke emotion, as with the heatwave. His lyrical description of light and landscape owes more to Lehmann than Bowen, but unlike Lehmann’s writing, the characters’ surroundings in Atonement seem to be more than scenery, as is often the case in Bowen’s work. In The Heat of the Day, London swelters as Stella ‫ ﱢﱡ‬136 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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worries about Robert and Harrison; at the end of the book, the skies are open. In Atonement, during the invasion scares, Briony notices how ‘even at this hour, under a clear sky, there was a ferocious sparkle in [the river’s] tidal freshness as it slid past the hospital. Was it really possible that the Germans could own the Thames?’58 Her feelings of ‘horrible exhilaration’ and anticipation are mirrored in the weather. Houses and furniture also seem to have their own opinions in Bowen, and in Atonement. The description of Robert’s family home Holme Dene conveys the sense of a jumbled, profoundly uncomfortable and unwelcoming house with a pronounced dislike for its inhabitants: Upstairs, as elsewhere, [the house] had been planned with a sort of playful circumlocution – corridors, archways, recesses, halflandings, ledges, niches and balustrades combined to fuddle any sense of direction and check, so far as possible, progress from room to room.59

The Tallis house also quietly undermines the family, with its dour ugliness and rooms full of jostling furniture. The atmosphere in both places is heavy and oppressive, and creates a backdrop of unease the characters cannot escape from. The mannered, deliberately dated language McEwan uses to create a Bowen-esque landscape in Part One demonstrates that in this adaptation of literary history, most of the historic details McEwan lifts are not factual but stylistic. McEwan explained that in this section he uses ‘a slightly mannered prose, slightly held in, a little formal, tiny bit archaic . . . [because this] evokes the period best’.60 The reverse is true of Parts Two and Three, where McEwan uses very particular historical details of events taken from contemporary sources, but writes them up in a style very different from the original. While Part One has ‘grown’ out of novels in the 1930s and 1940s, Parts Two and Three, which are more heavily dependent on source material, are stylistically unlike their sources. The attitudes expressed in the source material (especially patriotism and stoicism) have often been changed or muted, and the language has a contemporary ring. As Pat Barker does in her novel Regeneration, McEwan uses more ‫ ﱢﱡ‬137 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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archaic language for the least sympathetic characters, Leon and Paul Marshall in particular. This tactic makes these characters sound either slightly ridiculous, or pompous, or both. The most obviously dated vocabulary is reserved for Paul Marshall, with Leon second; during the last meal before Lola’s rape, Marshall says the single most dated (almost farcically so) thing in Part One – ‘I say, are we still on for tennis tomorrow?’61 A few minutes later Leon’s ‘Good old Cee. Top form’ links him with Marshall’s insensitivity, cleverly suggesting, on a second reading, the way that his lack of moral strength will ruin Robbie and Cecilia.62 Using this sort of language unfailingly creates a distance between the reader and these individuals, but McEwan chooses not to create such distance between the reader and Briony, Cecilia or Robbie (particularly in Parts Two and Three). Their language is sometimes old-fashioned, but never as alienatingly so as Marshall or Leon’s. There is an asperity to Briony’s language which sounds entirely contemporary, and an affectionate and understanding note in the more flowery parts of Cecilia’s and Robbie’s internal monologues, such as Robbie’s thoughts at he walks over to the Tallis’ house for supper: he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men towards ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between! Rise and fall – this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too . . . his kind of doctor would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate . . . he would reflect . . . on the puniness and nobility of mankind.63

When he writes each major interior monologue, each taking up a chapter, McEwan uses a language which, while not contemporary, is much less mannered than the language he gives to the characters he wishes to seem unsympathetic (particularly Leon and Marshall, neither of whose inner lives we see in any detail). McEwan is deliberately exploiting elements of his conception of the historical to aid characterisation; when discussing his view of how fiction can represent the past, he has explained that fiction ‫ ﱢﱡ‬138 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement doesn’t condescend, it doesn’t have [photography’s] in-built posthumous irony . . . Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient of everything that informs the present. When we read Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch, we’re not tempted to believe that because the characters wear funny hats, get about by horse, and don’t talk explicitly about sex, that they’re innocents. This is because we’re allowed full access, or carefully arranged partial access, to their feelings and thoughts, their dilemmas. Assuming we’ve been carried along by the narrative, they appear before us, these characters, as contemporaries, unscarred by unintended ironies.64

What McEwan does to Marshall and Leon is to deliberately ‘scar’ them with this irony, for his present-day readers. Their ‘P.G. Wodehouse-ian’ language sets them apart from the other characters, making Leon like a lampoon of himself and deepening our sense of Marshall’s bluster. McEwan is actually creating anachronism within a pseudo-historical text in order to turn on its head the potential to mediate the past with truth and empathy he has observed in Austen and Eliot’s fiction. On the whole, however, McEwan is generally very careful not to allow anachronism of this kind – a striking example of this occurs when Paul Marshall first meets Lola and the twins. Lola, in a childishly flirtatious way, tells Marshall that she likes his shoes. He lifted his foot to examine the craftsmanship. ‘Yes. Duckers’ in The Turl. They make a wooden thingy of your foot and keep it on a shelf for ever. Thousands of them down in a basement room, and most of the people long dead.’65

Apart from the spookiness of this image, conjuring up images of catacombs full of feet, and hinting at Marshall’s less than sunny mind, the chief interest in this sentence is Marshall’s use of the word ‘thingy’.66 The name for these models of feet is a last. However, very few people born after 1960 would know this; because imported shoes made overseas are so very much cheaper, and more readily available, very few people now have their shoes made for them, a trend which began (according to the current proprietor of Duckers) after the Second World War and has increased ever since. The word ‫ ﱢﱡ‬139 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘last’ has almost dropped out of the language; by replacing it with ‘thingy’ McEwan avoids having to use the almost obsolete term and alienate his reader from the world Briony is recreating. This happens on a larger scale in Parts Two and Three, where the language of the sources is frequently updated. The change in the prose style between Parts One and Two signals an abrupt shift in time, place and narrator (or so it seems). Although the terser authorial comments in both sections provide some continuity, the change in the language and narration is so marked as to wrong-foot the reader immediately. McEwan explained to Michael Silverblatt that ‘on the battlefield the subordinate clause has no place’. The mannered, languorous tone of Part One has given way to ‘a choppier prose with shorter, simpler sentences’.67 The most obvious literary influence here is Ernest Hemingway, who also uses short sentences and paragraphs, and whose technique of reporting speech directly is very like McEwan’s here. (McEwan nods to A Farewell to Arms in particular in terms of the unremitting grimness of the novel’s conclusion). The pace of Part Two is also different from that of Part One. Part Two is also divided into sections, but there is no slow build-up of tension. The first sentence indicates that the anonymous protagonists are in the very middle of something terrible – ‘There were horrors enough, but it was the unexpected details that threw him and afterwards would not let him go.’68 Soon afterwards ‘he’ and the two corporals with him come across a bombed cottage, and nearby a severed leg caught in a tree. Even before we know that ‘he’ is Robbie, we know that this is a place where, as Leon said earlier of the heatwave, all of the rules have changed. The pace of this section continues at a brisk, compulsive rate as Robbie and the corporals Nettle and Mace join the convoys of soldiers and refugees on the retreat to Dunkirk. McEwan’s decision to use this particular event of the Second World War is interesting. Perhaps more than any other moment of the war, this retreat has been mythologised and assimilated into the popular narrative of the war in a form which heavily distorts actual events, making it especially appealing to an author like McEwan, so interested in unpicking apparent truths and self-deceptions. As ‫ ﱢﱡ‬140 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Walter Lord comments in the introduction to his revealingly named history of the evacuation, The Miracle of Dunkirk, this episode has come to stand for ‘a generosity of spirit’, ‘a willingness to sacrifice for the common good’, ‘Mrs Miniver, little ships, The Snow Goose, escape by sea’.69 In his account, based partly on Lord’s book, McEwan focuses much more on what happened before the ‘little ships’, a part of the narrative considerably less well known than the evacuation itself. By doing this, he begins to worry away at the myth of Dunkirk; he then he goes much further by dwelling on the chaos and confusion on the roads to Dunkirk, constantly presenting random and terrifying moments of violence amidst the carnage of previous attacks. The narrative of this section is straightforward in itself. Robbie, Mace and Nettle, separated from their unit, are making for Dunkirk through the countryside and then along the main road with the majority of the retreating troops. We see the horrors of the retreat – the civilian refugees, the machine-gun and stuka attacks, the breakdown of the last semblance of order. The men finally reach Dunkirk but Mace becomes separated from Robbie and Nettle and is lost in the chaos of the unordered beach. At the same time, Robbie’s infected shrapnel wound worsens, and he becomes delirious. McEwan’s depiction of the constant fear and presence of danger on the journey to the sea is very deliberately manipulated so as to heighten our understanding of how appalling this obscure part of history was, how pointless and inglorious the violence. Another good reason for setting this narrative in a retreat is its essentially unheroic character; Robbie, Mace and Nettle are invited to join a last valiant attempt to delay the German advance but pragmatically refuse to do so. McEwan makes it clear that these three characters who, like the elderly Briony, want to stay alive, are the sane ones. They very sensibly evade various attempts to recruit them by officers who are either clearly deranged, doomed, or both. Again, there are echoes of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. This section reminds the reader of the retreat Guy Crouchback and his battalion attempt in Crete; Waugh depicts a chaotic, undisciplined rout in which Guy is left to fend for himself as best he can, while all around him try to save themselves. The only man to come out of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬141 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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the retreat with any public honour is Ludovic, whose amoral approach to his own survival has prompted him to kill the inept, officious Major Hound. There is no glory, and absolutely no honour, in this messy, unnecessary disaster. There is no glory at Dunkirk, either; the only thing worth risking death for is to try to help one another and the refugees as much as possible. This is not done out of military or national pride, but simply because of a very basic sense of humanity and a common desire to survive. At a certain point, McEwan demonstrates, the instinct for self-preservation kicks in, as when Robbie leaves a Belgian woman and a child exposed to a bomb and runs for cover. Any attempt at a sentimental reading of this behaviour is undermined by the nihilism of the corporals’ humour (they are very like Shakespeare’s gravediggers in this respect) and the strength of our impression of the randomness and senselessness of the entire event. This is further reinforced by the fact that the fighting is occurring on territory fought over in the First World War. Robbie is doubly aware of this senselessness because this public disaster exactly mirrors his private one: ‘First his own life ruined, then everybody else’s.’70 In his earlier historical novel The Innocent, McEwan creates parallels between the private dilemmas of his characters and the public events of their period, and he does so again in Atonement.71 Robbie instinctively links the ‘vanished boy’ whose leg he saw hanging in a tree with his own younger self, ‘another vanished boy, another vanished life that was once his own’.72 Robbie is able to reflect with greater experience and at greater length on the effect of having your life requisitioned, as Briony does later in her nursing and later still in her fifty-nine year attempt to atone. McEwan’s choice of this episode of the war has, as we have seen, particular significance; he strips away the veneer provided by popular memory and emphasises only the chaos of the now (largely forgotten) retreat. By doing so, he reveals the retreat in its unheroic, terrible form. But in examining why he chooses this moment, and this place, we must also bear in mind McEwan’s process of selection in what he chooses to show, what he alters, and what he omits. McEwan’s afterword acknowledges Destination Dunkirk by the military historian Gregory Blaxland and The Miracle of Dunkirk by ‫ ﱢﱡ‬142 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Walter Lord.73 Blaxland’s study is based on the official regimental histories and records, and is indisputably dryer and more factual than Lord’s, which is built around many interviews with veterans and features many more anecdotes and quotations from the ranks than Blaxland’s. While both contain a factual account of events, Lord’s book is much more concerned with the details of what happened as a result of the commands Blaxland tends to concentrate on. As such, it is not surprising that McEwan has taken much more material from Lord than from Blaxland – details of men’s reactions to the order to retreat and to the chaos that ensued being foremost. McEwan also has a personal interest in Dunkirk; his father was present at the retreat with the Highland Light Infantry, and became increasingly obsessed with what had happened there in the last years of his life. His son’s clear view of the myths surrounding Dunkirk comes in part from this familiarity with parts of the story which have not been translated into myth, as McEwan explained in an interview at the time of Atonement’s publication: ‘65,000 [men] died there. Dunkirk is not simply the miracle of the little boats. Before that there was a war crime. The Germans bombed and shelled the civilians packing the roads in order to block the military traffic. It was a great atrocity.’74 By concentrating on this forgotten atrocity, and ending this section of the novel before the famous ‘little boats’ appear, McEwan foregrounds the extent to which Dunkirk has come to stand for sentiments aroused by the ‘little boats’ which are remembered so partially, and out of context, that the myth bears little relation to the reality. McEwan elides the most famous part of the story altogether; the next section moves to the arrival of the wounded at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. This works to McEwan’s advantage; as with the hints of approaching war in Part One, the reader’s (assumed) knowledge of the actual evacuation builds the tension independently of McEwan’s narrative. We know what happened at the beaches, but Robbie, Mace and Nettle don’t. This is a form of prolepsis which inevitably comes into play when an author uses a historical episode, especially a well-known one such as this. (There are no examples of prolepsis in Part Two, in contrast to the plethora in Part One, other than this and the glimpses of the future Robbie ‫ ﱢﱡ‬143 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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fantasises. This in itself warns us that Robbie’s future may remain a fantasy). Reading about Dunkirk, we expect the sea evacuation, and are surprised when Part Two ends as abruptly as it began, the night before the troops are due to be lifted. Once we know that Robbie dies during the night, after Briony’s final postscript, the reason for this abrupt ending becomes clearer; McEwan has to leave Robbie’s fate open to allow the reader to hope that he might have survived, so that Briony can write a plausible account of meeting him to try to atone later. This allows Briony to finally claim that everything she has written, except the account of her later meeting with Robbie and Cecilia, is true, and sets up the twist of the novel’s ending. Robbie dies, undramatically, of septicaemia, in a crowded cellar. There is a horrible irony in his dying in such a way at this point; his is a quiet, futile death – probably in his sleep – just before the ‘little boats’ appear and the myth takes hold. McEwan’s description of the journey to Dunkirk works very hard to be as concrete, and un-mythical, as possible. The vast amount of descriptive detail evokes a very real, prosaic countryside, with equally real, but surreal, horrors. McEwan draws some of this detail from source material. There is no one particular source he relies on; details are taken from The Miracle of Dunkirk and also from the letters, journals and memoirs held in The Imperial War Museum. The narrative of Robbie, Mace and Nettle’s long walk to the sea is not, as far as I have been able to discover, built on any single source, and seems to be McEwan’s own creation (although it is possible that the stories his father told him about the three-day walk he undertook himself shaped the narrative). McEwan splits Robbie from his regiment, and gives him two companions – the likeable corporals Mace and Nettle – as well as a map. (Robbie is unusual in having a map – Lord states that all the maps of the area had been recalled at the start of the campaign. However, S.H. Leech, a soldier who was also separated from his regiment and whose papers are in the Imperial War Museum collection, also had a map, and it may be that McEwan has been influenced by this source. In any case, McEwan’s interest in the massacre on the roads to Dunkirk would not have been served by Robbie’s being lost, so the map becomes necessary.) The separation of the three men from ‫ ﱢﱡ‬144 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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their unit is useful to McEwan in three major ways. First, the breakdown of any kind of military order is constantly apparent, and the independence the men gain thus gives them much more selfdirection, an important theme in this novel. Second, there is also greater scope for incident, as they travel cautiously through the countryside and through the crowds on the road. Third, the scale of the story is much smaller and more intimate in the first section, when the soldiers meet the French brothers who unexpectedly welcome them and treat them with kindness. When we move out of the quieter paths onto the roads, filled with soldiers and refugees, this early intimacy, as well as McEwan’s attention to individual suffering, reminds us that public disasters are made up of many smaller private disasters, each one as enormous and terrible to each person as Robbie’s conviction was to him. Most of the details of the destruction on the road are taken from Walter Lord and sources in the Imperial War Museum. McEwan fashions them into a simple narrative – as Robbie puts it, ‘He walked / across / the land / until / he came / to the sea’.75 The source material details flesh out the utter strangeness of the place, and the events; McEwan repeatedly selects details from his sources which emphasise the insanity of what is happening. Perhaps the most striking example of this is his description of the soldiers having to destroy anything that might conceivably be useful to the Germans. Lord explains that ‘the paraphernalia of a whole army was going up in flames’, and McEwan seizes upon the incredible variety of things being destroyed to deepen our sense of the surreal nature of the situation.76 He chooses to concentrate most of the details he takes from Lord in one part of the journey, when Robbie, Mace and Nettle reach the Bergues–Furnes canal. In Lord’s account, the details McEwan appropriates describe a variety of times and places, but by concentrating them in this particular place, towards the end of the walk when the men are exhausted and have seen some terrible things, McEwan strengthens their impact. In one paragraph, McEwan draws a picture of total chaos, entirely adapted from Lord’s longer description. Lord relates a light-hearted, if rather sardonic, anecdote about Corporal W.J. Ingham, who ‘passing one clothing dump about to be blown up . . . raced in . . . ‫ ﱢﱡ‬145 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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found his size, changed, and within a few minutes rejoined his unit – “the only well-dressed soldier in our mob”’.77 McEwan is more interested in the sensory qualities of blowing up uniforms: ‘It began to snow tiny pieces of dark green serge.’78 Changing the emphasis here makes this description sound even more like a vision of hell, where even the elements are changed, different and hostile. McEwan takes from Lord the description of typewriters and mimeograph machines being destroyed, piles of slaughtered cavalry horses, burning piles of uniforms, guns being smashed up, rifles and prayer books being burnt, soldiers plundering the burning stores for shoes and gorging on marshmallows, and lorries being neatly parked and disabled. The cumulative effect of this is a depiction of total chaos, with the only order left – such as the tidy parking of the lorries – being farcical rather than reassuring. The piling of detail on detail, and the bizarre range of things being destroyed, give the account a Brueghel-esque dimension. McEwan alters minor factual details to intensify this, such as changing the location of something that helps him create this atmosphere. On the road Robbie sees ‘an ambulance, half in the ditch with one wheel removed. A brass plaque on the door said, “This ambulance is a gift of the British residents of Brazil”’.79 The source for this is in Captain N.C. Stother Smith’s diary for May and June 1940, now in the Imperial War Museum. On Tuesday 28 May, in Malo-les-Bains, Stother Smith notes passing ‘ambulances jettisoned. One was a gift from the British residents of Brazil or so it said on the car itself.’ In McEwan’s version, the imagined damage to the ambulance is dwelt on, and it is moved to an unspecified point on the road some distance outside of Dunkirk, where it can add to the build-up of military carnage the protagonists wander through. McEwan plays strongly on the farcical side of this destruction – the detail of the ambulance being a Brazilian gift is worthy of Spike Milligan. He often alters some details of the descriptions he takes from Lord and the Imperial War Museum records – as with the ambulance – to make them fit his narrative as well as add to his description. The soldier ‘with crammed cheeks’ who pushes ‘past Turner with a box of pink and white marshmallows’ is adapted from Lord’s description of Corporal P.G. Ackrell’s discovery of a ‫ ﱢﱡ‬146 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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large cardboard box, which he hoped might contain ‘wristwatches or cameras’. Instead, ‘it was full of marshmallows, [but] making the best of things, Ackrell took a carton . . . back to the dock, where they proved an instant hit’.80 But Ackrell is also the original of the man Robbie sees sitting ‘by a farm gate, trying on new shoes’ at the same time as he passes Robbie with his mouth full of marshmallows. McEwan has entered Lord’s history imaginatively rather than historically (precisely what he has Briony try to do to Robbie using the second-hand source material she gets from Nettle in the 1990s). By changing the emphasis Lord places on some details, McEwan can also harness the anecdote to his own purpose – compare Lord and McEwan’s accounts of army vehicles being collected together to be destroyed: Thousands of lorries, half-tracks, vans, heavy-duty trucks, motorcycles, Bren gun carriers, mobile kitchens, pick-ups, and staff cars were lined up in fields, drained of oil and water, with motors left running till they seized.81 Military police were organising the parking, lining up the POWS, like stewards at a county show. The lorries were joining half-tracks, motorbikes, Bren-gun carriers and mobile kitchens. The disabling methods were, as always, simple.82

While Lord, the historian, is interested in the facts – hence his longer list of vehicles – McEwan is fascinated by this almost comic attempt at order in the middle of utter disorder, likening it to a county show to strengthen our feeling of the nightmarish wrongness of what is happening. We have a strong sense of this throughout – from the start of Part Two, Robbie is haunted by the memory of the boy’s leg caught in a tree, which symbolises ‘a whole civilization . . . about to fall . . . where a child’s limb in a tree was something that ordinary men could ignore’.83 This terrible image comes not from the Second World War, but from the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. McEwan saw it in ‘a picture a photojournalist took in Bosnia. It was just a picture of a leg in a tree, and refugees flooding underneath it.’84 Farce is never innocent in Atonement, especially not in this section, where it is constantly linked to death. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬147 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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The source material McEwan appropriates always emphasises the brutal, the horrible, the farcical. He will alter the tone of the material quite radically if he needs to. The germ of the pig-hunt Robbie and Nettle embark on may be an account of a similar chase in very different circumstances, written by Lt. Colonel G.S. McKellar, now in the Imperial War Museum archives. McKellar relates that ‘a sudden stir was caused in the Brigade mess by the news that one of Madame Roehaur’s pigs had escaped from the pig farm . . . Everybody joined in the hunt, including the beautiful and charming owner of the pig farm, but without success.’85 In Atonement, the chase takes place in the bombed-out streets of Dunkirk, not in the grounds of a chateau, and the pig owner is not notably charming. The oddness of the situation clearly might have appealed to McEwan’s sense of the ridiculous, so, arguably, he borrowed the idea, but re-wrote it in decidedly less Wodehousian language. Similarly, C.H.P. Crawfurd’s description of the men who had dug themselves in on the beach comes to sound very different from Robbie’s point of view. Crawfurd, an officer who was evacuated from Dunkirk, writes admiringly of the ‘British soldiers nearly all dug in on the beach – many had no tools to dig with but their tin hats, but their discipline and saluting were admirable. The French soldiers were too frightened to do anything.’86 Robbie’s opprobrium is reserved for the British, not the French – ‘In the dunes . . . men had already dug themselves holes from which they peeped out, proprietorial and smug. Like marmosets, he thought.’87 Military pride is not something that Robbie and the corporals trouble themselves over, a significant difference between this narrative and contemporary accounts such as Return Via Dunkirk (1940) Dunkirk Sportsmen (1943), The Story of Dunkirk (1955) and Dunkirk (1945).88 In these accounts, there is a pride in military achievement and the ‘stiff upper lip’ – the discipline in adversity which is apparently what prevents these authors from criticising the conduct of the campaign, or describing the worst elements of the allied collapse. In marked contrast to this – and very much more like the register of Atonement – is the tone of the letters written by S.H. Leech and Herbert Barwick, both of whom were members of the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬148 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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ranks rather than officers. In the Dunkirk files, at least in those in the Imperial War Museum, there is a very clear distinction between the officers and the other ranks in terms of their attitudes to the retreat. McEwan firmly takes the side of the other ranks, ventriloquising their cynicism as well as their desire to survive and get home to their normal lives. The final impression this section leaves us with is that of ‘the collective insanity of war’.89 Attempts to behave well – the corporals’ frequent attempts to help the refugees, and Nettle’s attempt to save Robbie – are performed in a moral vacuum; order has collapsed, everyone is guilty of wishing only their own survival. Robbie’s final thoughts, as he becomes increasingly delirious, are of the scale of the crimes and the scale of the guilt – everyone is guilty, even the witnesses: ‘What was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there weren’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts. The witnesses were guilty too’.90 These thoughts give us a hint of what is eventually to come; on a second reading we realise that Robbie’s thoughts, invented and ventriloquised by the adult Briony, are running on Briony’s ‘old themes’ – the questions of guilt and responsibility.91 The very writing of this is motivated by the ‘repeated question’ in Briony’s novels of these same issues.92 This section prepares us very directly for the moment in Part Three when Briony recognises her themes, and sees how they will haunt her, for the first time. Part Three, like Part Two, begins very abruptly: ‘The unease was not confined to the hospital.’ We wonder in the first paragraph if we might still be with Robbie, till the paragraph ends ‘it might even have consoled Briony to hear again that line of theirs she so despised – Cheer up love, it might never happen’.93 Thus this section begins bracketed with past regret and with the anticipation of more to come. It is the last section in the novel before Briony is revealed as the author. It relies most heavily on source material of all the sections, and is the last to do so. It describes Briony’s life as a probationer nurse in the regimented Florence Nightingale School of Nursing in St Thomas’ hospital in London, in the late summer of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬149 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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1940. The narrative, which follows Briony’s point of view, relates her training, and her first encounter with real horror when the wounded from Dunkirk are brought in. She has her first draft of Atonement, the Woolfian ‘Two Figures At a Fountain’ rejected (admiringly) from Horizon by Cyril Connolly in unusually prolix mood. We follow Briony as, uninvited, she observes Lola and Paul Marshall’s wedding, then walks to Balham where she confronts Cecilia and Robbie for the first time since Robbie’s conviction. She explains that she wants to change her evidence, to clear Robbie’s name, and Robbie and Cecilia (who do not forgive her) instruct her to make a statement in which she will explain what she did wrong, and how she is now ‘retracting her evidence’.94 The second part of Part Three, when Briony leaves the hospital, and sees the other protagonists from the disaster in Part One again, does not build on source material in any detail. However, the earlier part, describing the discipline of Briony’s training, and particularly the terrible injuries of soldiers from Dunkirk, is based very closely on two memoirs. The first, No Time for Romance by Lucilla Andrews, describes Andrews’s training at St Thomas’ in the late summer and early autumn of 1940.95 (As McEwan needs Briony to be in London in order to see Lola, Marshall, Robbie and Cecilia, as well as to create tension by harnessing the reader’s awareness of the imminence of the start of the Blitz in September, he has Briony become one of the very last probationer nurses to be trained in London before the hospital was evacuated to the countryside.) This memoir was published in 1977, Andrews having established a career as a romantic novelist after the war. There are a number of episodes which McEwan appropriates in which Andrews describes the difficulties of keeping up her writing with so little spare time, and of needing to be careful of what she wrote, because she had nowhere to lock her notebooks. Andrews also wrote a fictional account of these events in her 1951 novel A Hospital Summer, which I discuss below.96 In 2006, McEwan’s use of Andrews’s autobiography made unexpected headlines as he was accused of plagiarism. Although an extended discussion of the nature of literary plagiarism is outside the scope of this book, it is interesting to note that the accusations ‫ ﱢﱡ‬150 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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of plagiarism levelled by the Mail on Sunday at McEwan, once the scale of his use of Lucilla Andrews’s work had become apparent, created a world-wide media debate on the topic. As an indication of the strength of feeling aroused on the issue of who can tell whose story, how, and what responsibility the novelist carries to the author of his source material, it could not be clearer. The two main issues raised in the debate were what the acceptable limits of someone else’s work are, when writing historical fiction, and what ethical limitations there might be in using the work of individuals without their knowledge. One upshot of the debate was that the rules on these two issues are far from clear-cut; while my focus in this study is on the effect of being part of the ‘second generation’ on the way that you use historical material in fiction, wider debates on the ethics of historical fiction can be found in Middleton and Woods, 2000, de Groot, 2009, 2010 and Southgate, 2009; specific discussion of plagiarism and Atonement can be found in Alden, ‘Words of War, War of Words: Atonement and the Question of Plagiarism’ in Groes, 2009. Unlike Andrews’s work, the second main source that McEwan used was never published; entitled ‘The Memoir of Mrs A. Radloff ’, it exists as a typescript in the Imperial War Museum.97 This memoir describes the author’s training at St Thomas’ in London and then in Basingstoke, where, like Andrews, she looked after casualties from Dunkirk and from the Lancastria, a Cunard Liner which was sunk on 17 June 1940 whilst attempting to evacuate British soldiers from France. At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, Andrews and Radloff were both working in the sector hospitals the majority of St Thomas’ staff had been evacuated to, Andrews near Salisbury Plain and Radloff in Basingstoke. Both women are slightly older than Briony, but they both write in a pithy, clear-sighted manner that resembles the older Briony’s prose style. The timescale of the first four sections of Part Three is based almost exactly on Andrews’s biography; it begins shortly after Briony has begun her training, and demonstrates the hardness of the work and the intensity of the discipline. The steady build-up to the evacuation of Dunkirk is remarked upon in both memoirs; for example, the details of the wards being cleared and extra supplies ‫ ﱢﱡ‬151 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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being delivered are taken from Andrews. The jaundiced sailors are the last patients before the arrival of the waves of casualties in both, and both Andrews and Briony finally realise what is happening in France by reading between the lines in newspaper reports. But while McEwan is faithful to the chronology of Andrews’s experience of nursing the wounded from Dunkirk, he does not hesitate to include details of the wounded from the Lancastria provided by both Radloff and Andrews, in his descriptions of the Dunkirk casualties, and sets his action in London whereas Radloff and Andrews were in the outlying bases; in reality, none of the wounded from the evacuation of France were sent to St Thomas’.98 Although Briony, having been revealed as the author of Parts One, Two and Three, explains that in writing Part Three she had merged her experiences of working at Alder Hey and the Royal East Sussex as well as St Thomas’ in order ‘to concentrate all my experiences into one place’, McEwan’s chronology is simply impossible here.99 If Briony had been one of the few nurses left in St Thomas’ in the late summer and early autumn of 1940, she could not have had the experiences McEwan gives her of nursing the wounded from the Lancastria for the simple reason that none of them were sent to St Thomas’. We are told that Briony did set off to see Cecilia, as she describes in Part Three, but that ‘I never saw [Cecilia and Robbie] in that year . . . my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common [and] . . . a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister.’100 This places Briony in London after Robbie’s death on 1 June and before Cecilia is killed in the Blitz in September; it is therefore impossible that Briony could be conflating her own memories when she describes the men from Dunkirk and the Lancastria. McEwan’s regard for historical veracity is secondary to his desire to create a very particular, detailed description as he did when describing Robbie’s journey to Dunkirk. The atmosphere in the hospital – the depersonalisation, the relentless hard work, the incomprehensible rules – is created from details taken from the two memoirs. The ‘stripping away of identity’ Briony experiences is illustrated by a story taken directly from Radloff: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬152 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement The dragon who met us (sister) thrust a tray of labels disdainfully at my front and without looking at me . . . [I picked up my name badge.] It was marked N. Reeves. Naively, for I didn’t realise that I now had no identity, I protested that my initial was A. ‘Stupid girl, don’t you know that N stands for Nurse?’101

The Sister’s reply to Briony’s making the same mistake is more polite, but no less alarming: This was how it was going to be. She had gone up to the Sister to point out courteously that a mistake had been made with her name badge. She was B. Tallis, not, as it said, on the little rectangular brooch, N. Tallis. The reply was calm, ‘You are, and will remain, as you have been designated. Your Christian name is of no interest to me. Now kindly sit down, Nurse Tallis.’102

The senior nurses are a source of terror to Briony, Andrews and Radloff, but whereas the writers of the memoirs describe a number of ward sisters, and work with a variety of other staff, whom they often know only slightly: ‘Briony often thought that her only relationship was with Sister Drummond’,103 McEwan describes Briony’s life on the wards as being ‘largely dependent on how she stood in the Ward Sister’s opinion’.104 Sister Drummond is apparently the only senior nurse on the ward; McEwan uses her to personalise the discipline depicted by Andrews and Radloff, and thus concentrates the account of Briony’s life down to a very small, very intense set of contacts. Briony’s daily routine is similarly curtailed, and is also drawn from selected parts of Andrews’s and Radloff ’s memoirs. After listing the huge number of menial tasks Briony is expected to undertake, McEwan juxtaposes the very short, limited list of Briony’s medical experiences – ‘[she had] dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise’.105 This list is a direct quotation from Andrews, who continues this list as follows: ‘very occasionally doing a minor surgical dressing, or removing a few stitches, sticking on and removing strapping plaster, and handing out doses of Gee’s Linctus by the gallons, M. and B. tablets by the dozen, and the troops’ beloved A.P.C. tablets by the gross’.106 McEwan truncates this list for two apparent reasons; first, the shorter version gives a stronger ‫ ﱢﱡ‬153 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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impression of the lack of interest or variety in Briony’s work, and of the extent to which she is at this point little more than a skivvy, and second, because McEwan cannot assume, as Andrews does, that his readers will know what all these curious abbreviations mean. Like the shoemaker’s lasts, these details are simply too historically specific, too obscure now, to be included without losing some of the narrative’s immediacy. Ann Radloff noted that ‘there are various inaccuracies [in this section of Atonement] which need correcting’; having read the novel she was ‘surprised to read various versions of what I had written and which I would have corrected had I been consulted’.107 For example, Radloff points out that although McEwan claims that Briony’s shoes ‘fiercely pinched her toes’, nurses at St Thomas’ wore rubber-soled shoes (so as to make the minimum of noise), which did not pinch.108 McEwan also describes the nurses as working twelve-hour shifts, which Radloff denies; she also points out that nurses were not allowed out of hospital wearing uniform, a fact that McEwan, who describes Briony doing exactly this, appears unaware of.109 Some of the details of hospital life in Atonement are also inaccurate; Radloff did not call her ward sister ‘Sister’ followed by her surname, as Briony does, but ‘Sister’ followed by the name of the ward. This convention was particular to St. Thomas’ – Radloff called her ward sister at Basingstoke ‘Miss Brody’ rather than ‘Sister Brody’, or by her ward name; again, the details are wrong because McEwan has based his depiction on his reading of source material only, without having it checked by a contemporary witness as Briony does. The inaccuracies Radloff notes are minor, but point to the fact that McEwan’s imaginative reinterpretation of life at St Thomas’ during these months is imaginative rather than historical, and that unlike his protagonist, he did not feel the need to have his narrative checked by someone who witnessed the events he describes. McEwan’s overriding concern when selecting and altering his source material appears to be that it emphasise the hardship Briony experiences as a nurse, and the horror of the injuries she sees in the wounded from Dunkirk. Historical accuracy is frequently sacrificed to create an emotionally coherent image. Details in the sources that ‫ ﱢﱡ‬154 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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illustrate the harsher, more disciplined and difficult side of nursing life as presented by Andrews and Radloff are invariably chosen, or altered to fit McEwan’s picture, while the concerts Radloff enjoyed, or the camaraderie and humour evident in Andrews’s account, are omitted or downplayed. McEwan picks up on details of the privations of the nurses’ routine scattered throughout Andrews’s and Radloff ’s accounts and concentrates them together in three major sections in which he establishes the atmosphere, the longest being the start of the third section of Part Three (page 232 onwards). McEwan describes how the nurses’ lives are regulated by the chimes of nearby Big Ben, and borrows this detail from Radloff: ‘Big Ben dictated our routine, we dreaded his frequent reminders that we were late.’110 In Atonement, McEwan builds on this idea, using it to exacerbate the feeling of tension: ‘The chimes of Big Ben marked every change of the day and there were times when the solemn single note of the quarter hour prompted moans of suppressed panic as the girls realised they were supposed to be elsewhere.’111 Bedpans feature heavily in Briony’s life, and McEwan borrows details from Andrews and Radloff that emphasise not only how disgusting the task of fetching and emptying them is, but also the bizarre attitude the nurses are expected to have towards this task as they adapt to hospital discipline. Thus McEwan borrows the following from Radloff: ‘[Nurse], don’t carry your bedpans like tennis rackets – carry them to the glory of God! But God just wasn’t on my side.’112 In Briony’s account this appears as ‘The day therefore began with bedpans. Sister did not approve of them being carried down the ward “like tennis rackets’”. They were to be carried “to the glory of God,” and emptied, sluiced, cleaned and stowed by half past seven, when it was time to start the morning drinks’. This is followed by a long list of the girls’ tasks, and a description of how tired they become – ‘the backache from bed-making, and fiery sensations in their feet from standing all day’.113 Bedpans dominate, however: after McEwan has described Briony being told off for running in the corridor (with a wonderfully insane phrase from Andrews, ‘Only haemorrhages and fires were permissible reasons for a nurse to run’), the focus returns to ‘the principal domain of the junior probationers . . . the sluice ‫ ﱢﱡ‬155 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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room’.114 Briony’s technique for dealing with the task of emptying bedpans is based on Andrews’s, who describes herself addressing the bottles: ‘Either I have to empty you with my eyes shut and holding my breath or I can’t empty you at all.’115 Briony discovers ‘The trick of emptying them, in fact the only way it was possible for her, was to close her eyes, hold her breath and avert her head.’116 Again, the element of humour is missing in McEwan’s version; his desire to show this world as being almost unrelentingly harsh, incomprehensibly disciplined and demanding, means that he will adapt, or edit, his sources to fit this picture. As in Part Two, McEwan seems to delight in picking up particularly odd pieces of information from his sources and using them to sustain the underlying tone of strangeness, as though Briony were in a surreal waking nightmare. He adapts Andrews’s description of the models used to teach bed-bath techniques so as to emphasise a strange, occluded sexuality hinted at but never made explicit. Andrews describes the models called ‘Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and George, a baby boy of convenient physique to allow him to double as a baby girl.’117 Briony sees them thus: ‘Mrs Mackintosh, Lady Chase, and baby George, whose blandly impaired physique allowed him to double as a baby girl.’118 The change from ‘convenient’ to ‘blandly impaired’ introduces a note of damaged, or sublimated, sexuality not present in the original, adding to the atmosphere of muffled hysteria. Other quotations from the sources are altered for atmospheric effect. Both Andrews and Radloff complain of the ‘tepid’ water they have to wash their chilblained hands in, but in Atonement the water is ‘freezing’. The account of Briony’s realisation that there has been a disaster in France is based very closely on Andrews’s account of how she realised this – both realise what must be happening while looking through newspapers. The signal difference is that Briony is still working, tidying up the men’s lockers, and surreptiously glances through the papers, while Andrews is in the nurses’ mess, on a break. The one single break McEwan describes Briony having is most notable for an exhausted nurse being badly scalded when she falls asleep holding her cup of tea. Radloff describes her daily routine – working from seven in the morning till eight at night ‫ ﱢﱡ‬156 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘with a few hours off duty, usually between ten and twelve. We had an hour for afternoon tea when ancient customs still prevailed . . . Then back to more bedpans, drawing the blackout – no easy task in a large ward with large windows.’119 McEwan picks up on the difficulty the blackout blinds present, and they reappear in the litany of jobs presented on page 283: ‘An extra nursing duty was drawing the blackout over the huge ward windows.’ Note that McEwan wants to emphasise the extra difficulty the nurses have with these. He is trying to display the range of tasks the nurses face, and that they involve hard, physical work. The beginning of the third section of Part Three is made up of quotations from Radloff and Andrews, and McEwan’s own interventions, in roughly equal porportions. Looking at the original passages, though, because of the closeness of this passage of Atonement to the sources, the parts McEwan leaves out become much more noticeable. A particularly significant element of Radloff ’s memoir is omitted because it would fracture the concentration on the unrelenting, mindless discipline Briony feels now dominates her life. Having quoted almost without change Radloff ’s comments on drawing the blackout, McEwan also takes her next sentence ‘emptying sputum mugs and a round of cocoa’ and turns it into ‘Towards the end of the day, more bedpans, the emptying of sputum mugs, the making of cocoa.’120 But Radloff goes on – ‘a round of cocoa before we dragged our aching limbs unwillingly to chapel. Did they want to destroy any sense of religion by forcing us, after that fiendish day, to kneel through Compline?’121 Radloff is simply grateful for the chance to sit down but McEwan is keen to keep our focus on the constant pressure of the work, reducing Briony’s life to the single point of the hospital as Robbie’s was earlier reduced to ‘the small hard point of his own survival’.122 Thus McEwan also omits the next part of Radloff ’s memoir, which remarks on the ‘occasional flashes of insight’ and kindness from the senior nurses, when they were offered tickets for the National Gallery concerts started by Myra Hess ‘where for a blissful hour one could regain the tattered remnants of one’s personality’.123 Precisely because McEwan wants to show how Briony’s personality undergoes a vital change in these few days, he does not have space ‫ ﱢﱡ‬157 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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in the story – the pace has to be maintained – or the desire to show Briony off-duty. Briony’s experience of nursing the dying from Dunkirk prompts a change in her that is as important as the development of her conception of realism that comes from watching Robbie and Cecilia at the fountain in Part One, but in order for it to be dramatically plausible McEwan has to keep a constant and building pressure on her, which peaks with the death of the young French soldier Luc Cornet. None of Radloff ’s concerts, fur coats or camaraderie for Briony; the only free time she does get is ruined by the arrival of the wounded from Dunkirk. This is not to say that Radloff and Andrews would not recognise The Nightingale School of Nursing that McEwan recreates, but there is a stoicism, and a comradeship, that McEwan does not want to introduce into Briony’s experience until a certain point after the death of Luc, discussed below. Up till this point, McEwan heaps on borrowed details of the lonelier, harder parts of the nurses’ lives, because the reader’s focus is meant to be wholly on Briony and her inner life. This presumably explains why, unlike Andrews and Radloff, she has only one friend and is not part of a ‘set’, and why McEwan focuses all the details of the senior nurses onto Sister Drummond alone, creating a ‘spotlight’ on Briony’s circumscribed world. Once the atmosphere has been worked to a sufficient pitch, McEwan introduces the event all this training has been building up to – the arrival of the first seriously wounded men Briony encounters. McEwan is still following the chronology of Andrews’s account at this point, making occasional changes. For example, Briony endures another loss of innocence – or induction into adult experience – when she has to look after these horribly wounded men, and McEwan emphasises the difference between the two states by basing her first sight of them on a similar moment in Andrews’s memoir: This morning was horrible. M and I had to walk . . . but it was lovely and sunny and the walk rather fun. M was on terrific form . . . We got to the hospital by twenty past and there was a queue of ambulances waiting outside the arch. When we got through the arch we just stood still. The square was covered in stretchers, rows and rows of stretchers, loaded with men lying so still that at first we thought they were dead.124 ‫ ﱢﱡ‬158 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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These men are in fact the wounded from the Lancastria, so McEwan’s use of this anecdote, and of the descriptions of Private Latimer and Corporal MacIntyre, is deliberately historically inaccurate. A more significant change, though, is McEwan’s rewriting of Radloff ’s and Andrews’s descriptions of the soldiers’ wounds and behaviour. This is more intriguing than simply reassigning wounded men from one part of the evacuation of France to another, because McEwan presents these soldiers in a very different way from his sources, adopting personal details of soldiers and nurses but having them behave in diametrically opposing ways to the originals. His changes always emphasise the brutality of the fighting in France, as well as its eventual futility. The soldiers are presented as being far less stoical about their experiences, much more bitter, and less willing to hide pain or distress. As such, they seem to be very much more contemporary than they do in Radloff ’s memoir, or in Andrews’s autobiographical and fictional accounts, particularly to readers with late-twentieth or early twenty-firstcentury views of war filtered through the end of the British Empire, the Cold War, the Balkan and African conflicts and two Gulf Wars. Briony’s patients do not have stiff upper lips. In the fourth section of Part Three, Briony’s responsibilities increase because the ward is swamped with casualties. While washing a man’s face, Briony fantasises about doing the same to Robbie, and receiving his forgiveness: ‘then he would let her settle him down into sleep’.125 This is the last example of this kind of adolescent, innocent but self-indulgent fantasising we see from Briony. Over the course of the next eight pages, Briony deals with three soldiers, all based on actual patients of Radloff and Andrews, as McEwan continues to increase the tension she is under and the horrors she is facing. This cumulates in Briony’s one love scene in the novel, after which she is, as melodramatically as one of her early heroines might have wished, never the same again. The soldiers she has to treat, although based on real individuals taken from McEwan’s sources, behave very differently from their originals. Briony’s first patient was injured building runways in northern France. The description of what happened to him in Atonement is changed to emphasise his helplessness. He is much less cheerful and ‫ ﱢﱡ‬159 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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much more passive than the real soldier upon whom he is based. McEwan shortens the soldier’s description of how ‘Jerry kept bombing them every time they had the runway half built’ but adds phrases such as ‘all over’, the repetition of which emphasises the soldier’s exhaustion and powerlessness. In Andrews’s account, the original soldier concludes ‘we got shoved so far back we ran out of fields, and seeing as you can’t build runways on the sea, here we are. What you got to say to that, eh nurse?’126 Andrews also depicts this man in her novel A Hospital Summer, where, after this exchange, a listening soldier adds, ‘It don’t sound as if we done much good, miss, when we tells it, like. But we did what we could. Only it weren’t enough. So we had to pack it in.’127 Although they are exhausted and have had to retreat, these soldiers do not seem defeated in the same way that McEwan’s do; they care about the failure of the operation and appear much more engaged with being soldiers than McEwan’s characters. In Atonement, McEwan’s version of this soldier is far less forthcoming than his source in Andrews: ‘We drops back . . . then it’s Jerry again and we’re falling back again. Till we fell in the sea.’128 McEwan then conflates the soldier with bad shrapnel wounds with another from the next page of Andrews’s memoir, and has Briony take shrapnel fragments out of the composite soldier’s leg. McEwan’s description of the pain this causes the soldier is shocking, even after all we have already read, possibly because McEwan has the soldier shout and swear in pain as Briony rips out the first fragment. Sister Drummond’s reaction is contemptuous: ‘How dare you speak that way in front of one of my nurses?’ ‘I beg your pardon, sister. It just came out.’ Sister Drummond looked with disdain into the bowl. ‘Compared to what we’ve admitted these past few hours, Airman Young, your injuries are superficial. So you’ll consider yourself lucky. And you’ll show some courage worthy of your uniform. Carry on, Nurse Tallis.’129

Briony’s reaction is entirely inadequate, as she and the reader realise: ‘Briony said brightly, “We’ll get on, shall we?”’ She continues, the soldier’s body shaking in pain as he holds on to the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬160 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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bed head, although he does not make another sound. This part of the description is directly taken from Andrews’s memoir, but in the original the soldier does not swear and behaves as stoically as Sister Drummond could possibly wish. Nowhere in any of the sources do any of the nurses speak with such harshness to a patient, and nowhere do any of the soldiers behave as McEwan’s do. Andrews’s patient stays silent until the end of the procedure when the biggest fragment is removed ‘and then he said “I’m thanking you very much, nurse”.’130 In Atonement, Briony’s patient staring at a similar fragment says ‘‘Run him under the tap, Nurse. I’ll take him home.” Then he turned into the pillow. It may have been the word home, as well as the pain.’131 Although McEwan is drawing his source material in this episode from No Time For Romance, a comparison of his treatment of this situation with Andrews’s own fictional version is illuminating. In A Hospital Summer, Andrews is clearly writing about her own experiences; the airman with shrapnel in his leg appears in both her autobiography and her novel. In the fictional account, Andrews describes how she treated the airman in more detail than we are given in No Time For Romance; the pace is slower partly because, like McEwan, she is able to tailor her sources (in this case her own memories) to the needs of the narrative. In her autobiography, Andrews cannot describe every surgical procedure in detail; here, we see how long, as well as how unpleasant, the removal of the shrapnel was for both nurse and patient. The resulting account is even more different from McEwan’s than that in No Time For Romance; the differences in tone and behaviour I have discussed are even more pronounced. While there are no details in this later account which suggest that McEwan used the novel for source material, and no mention of it in McEwan’s afterword, the differences between McEwan’s and Andrews’s views of the same event are telling: both Briony and her patient appear more self-conscious, and more selfish, than Andrews’s characters. The difference between Briony’s approach to her patient, and the nurse Clare Dillon’s in A Hospital Summer is unmistakable, and, as with many of McEwan’s manipulations of his sources, serves to strip away any perception of the situation as being anything other ‫ ﱢﱡ‬161 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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than ugly and unpleasant. Unlike both of Andrews’ accounts, in Atonement Briony has to invent horrible (and physically impossible) consequences before the airman will let her remove the shrapnel, telling him that it will float to his brain if not removed. In No Time For Romance and A Hospital Summer, the soldiers are willing to let the nurses do what they have to without being threatened or lied to. Whereas Briony and Clare and both frightened by taking the shrapnel out, Briony – who has far less training and experience than Clare does – is more struck by ‘how easily it came to her, the brisk voice of the no-nonsense nurse’.132 Clare’s thoughts are far less self-conscious; insofar as she is particularly introspective at this point, she is worried about how much pain she will have to cause the airman. The difference here emphasises Briony’s immaturity. She is still caught up in the idea of playing a role; later, when Luc Cornet dies, she moves beyond this kind of play-acting for the first time. The biggest single difference between this episode as it appears in Atonement and A Hospital Summer is the behaviour of the wounded airman. As in No Time For Romance, in A Hospital Summer he shows concern for the nurse, and tries to bear the pain without crying out. His manner and language are unfailingly polite in both of Andrews’s accounts; in direct contrast to McEwan’s version, where Sister Drummond berates the airman for swearing, this man replies to Clare’s ‘do curse if it helps you. I won’t mind at all’ by smiling, and saying ‘I will just be spitting teeth, Nurse. You do what has to be done.’133 This squares with Andrews’s comments throughout A Hospital Summer on the soldier’s aversion to using bad language in front of the nurses. Clare remarks that ‘the men would not countenance even the mildest oath being used in the presence of a Sister or a Nurse. As [another nurse] said, “really, dear, they are such a strain, as I have to watch my language all the time.”’134 From this exchange, it’s clear that Andrews is not romanticising the soldiers’ behaviour for the readers of her hospital romance; the nurses’ language is described as being robust, and while Andrews describes her patients with respect and tenderness, she is never sentimental. While it is entirely possible that anyone in the kind of pain Briony’s patient is in would swear, that in both of Andrews’s ‫ ﱢﱡ‬162 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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accounts the man expressly tries very hard to be as quiet as possible (despite being told that he can swear if it helps him in A Hospital Summer) is a clear illustration of McEwan’s intention of drawing the reader’s attention wholly to the intensity, and horror, of what those involved are going through. The historical wounded soldiers McEwan takes from Andrews provide another arresting example of a less well-remembered aspect of the Dunkirk evacuation, the wounded. However, McEwan does not find it expressed clearly or immediately enough for his purposes, and reworks his sources until they emphasise the points he wants to foreground. A clear example of McEwan reading something not in the original into his use of the source is each man’s description of how much pain they are in. In all three accounts, the men downplay how much the shrapnel is hurting, in apparently similar terms. In Atonement, the airman says ‘[the shrapnel’s] not bothering me or anything . . . I don’t mind them, Nurse’.135 But this stoicism is undermined by his next sentence – ‘I’d be happy leaving them where they are’ – and by McEwan’s description of him as being anxious, and laughing ‘without conviction’. Here, the patient is hoping that by hiding his pain, he can avoid the pain being treated will cause. The soldier in A Hospital Summer begins in a similar way, telling Clare that she can wash him less gently, as it won’t hurt him. ‘Have you any pain anywhere?’ I scrubbed his chest. ‘Sure?’ ‘I am only sure that I am having a very pleasant wash and that I am very comfortable.’136

Clare isn’t sure; washing him further, she finds ‘thirteen large flesh wounds on his thighs and legs . . . his right thigh [had been] flayed from hip to knee’.137 She finds the large fragment of shrapnel, and asks if the soldier had not felt it: ‘“only a wee bit,” was all he would allow. “It was paining me when I was walking”’138 When Clare tells him she will have to take the fragment out, ‘his blue eyes were untroubled. “If it will not be troubling you, Nurse, I will be very grateful for you to pull it out.”’139 Andrews herself does not mute the description of how much pulling the shrapnel out hurts the airman – her description of his newly washed face blackening with the sweated-out engine oil which had seeped into his skin is, if ‫ ﱢﱡ‬163 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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anything, more shocking than McEwan’s description of the man’s pain. In A Hospital Summer, Andrews takes two pages, rather than McEwan’s two (long) sentences, to describe the procedure of taking the metal out. Andrews’s accounts do not stint on showing how much pain the airmen are in, but McEwan cannot agree with – and radically rewrites – the soldiers’ reaction to it, specifically how they behave towards the nurses. McEwan’s soldier, having unsuccessfully tried to evade being treated, submits miserably. This does not alienate the reader – it’s hard to imagine reacting differently – but a more significant alteration is McEwan’s decision to leave out the exchange between the nurse and patient which occurs at the end of both of Andrews’s accounts, when he is brought a measure of brandy. McEwan is faithful to Andrews’s description of what happens: the nurse goes to fetch the brandy, but is so shaken by what she’s just done that she has to stop to be sick. In both of Andrews’s accounts, the soldier notices that the nurse is upset, and tries to get her to drink the brandy herself, while in Atonement, McEwan rushes us straight on to Briony’s next patient, omitting the conversation. This piece of editing has the same function as Briony’s invented lie about the shrapnel floating to the airman’s brain; it lessens our sense of there being a personal connection between nurse and patient to an extent which puts it at serious variance with its source. Whereas Andrews dwells on the mutual respect and concern between patients and nursing staff, McEwan is inviting his reader to condemn the rigid hospital rules which prevent any real personal connection developing. Briony sees her patient as a problem which she needs to solve, and quickly. (This is also due to her immaturity at this point – she is still unable to imaginatively appreciate someone else’s feelings until Luc Cornet’s death; at this stage, she is still responding to her training without understanding.) Sister Drummond’s furious response to the soldier swearing in pain is similarly lacking in sympathy. Here, McEwan is modifying the source material to criticise the rigid social protocols which regulate the behaviour – and lives – of both soldiers and nurses to such an extent that normal human behaviour is warped into this example, where a man in great pain is told to live up to the standards of behaviour his uniform ‫ ﱢﱡ‬164 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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embodies. Earlier, in Part Two, McEwan showed Robbie thinking bitterly about how war requisitions the lives of those it sweeps up, robbing them of self-determination, individuality and finally life. With his descriptions of the soldiers Briony is nursing, McEwan is providing the antibook of Jack Tallis’s overly detached estimation of ‘multipliers’ and ‘casualties’ in aerial bombing.140 In Parts Two and Three, McEwan uses his source material to condemn the social mores and protocols which allow people’s violent deaths to become factors of a calculation. His condemnation spreads from here to encompass the suicidal military discipline various officers on the roads to Dunkirk are trying to impose, and the ludicrously strict, depersonalising hospital discipline in Part Three. The description of the death of the next soldier Briony treats, Luc Cornet, reveals the purpose of McEwan’s skewed emphasis on the misery of Briony’s hospital life, bringing us – and Briony – back into a domestic, intimate sphere with sudden and unexpected power. The outline details of this episode are taken from Andrews’s memoir, but McEwan makes more significant changes to this event than to any other sources he uses in the novel. McEwan begins this episode by firmly emphasising its place within the tiny world encompassed by Briony’s relationship with Sister Drummond; Andrews was told to go and sit with the dying soldier by ‘a very senior QA’ whom she didn’t know personally, whereas in Atonement, it’s Drummond again.141 Both Briony and Andrews are told that the soldier is ‘acute surgical, but there’s no need to wear a mask’.142 McEwan shifts the emphasis here – unlike Briony, Andrews understands that this means he’s dying, while McEwan also leaves out what Andrew’s QA explains about masks being frightening. This may be because this would prevent him from getting straight into his description of Briony and Luc’s meeting, and also because at this point, McEwan doesn’t want that obvious a token of Sister Drummond’s compassion. The description of Luc in Atonement is far more romanticised than it is in Andrews’s memoir. McEwan explained in an interview with John Sutherland that he altered this scene to allow us to see ‘some eruption of feeling from Briony’; ‘I saw it as a love scene, even though it’s a dying scene – [without this glimpse of her emotional ‫ ﱢﱡ‬165 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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life] there would be something too unreliable about her account of love.’143 McEwan follows Andrews’s account, so Briony makes the same mistake as Andrews, and take the soldier’s gauze dressing off. Both Briony and Andrews are so horrified by his injuries that they recoil and the dressing begins to fall. The details of what happens then are taken from Andrews, though McEwan has to change Luc’s injuries slightly, as he wants him still to have both eyes, while in Andrews, the soldier has lost one. McEwan also adds the detail of Briony catching the bloody sterile towel before it hits the floor, furthering our sense of horror and mess. The most immediately apparent difference between the two passages is that in Andrews the soldier is English, whereas in McEwan’s version he is French. This has one simple, functional advantage for McEwan in that Briony’s schoolgirl grasp of French forces her to translate nurse as ‘sister’, leading on to a discussion of Cecilia which in turn leads to their talking about love. The original, English soldier (whose name is John), seems very like the model of a public schoolboy. His language is much more dated than Luc’s – at one point he says ‘I say – jolly decent of her’.144 John talks about his school, and the army, which Luc doesn’t, and when Andrews asks him his name, he gives his surname and army number. Luc seems just as young, but doesn’t refer to any military conventions. When Briony first meets him he is already quite a lot more delirious than John is; this allows Briony to have a more normal, intimate conversation, which gestures more obviously towards the family life he’s lost. ‘It was hard to think of him as a soldier’, Briony decides when she first sees him.145 He is, in fact, another vanished boy, in Robbie’s terms; like the dead French boy whose leg Robbie sees in a tree, and like Robbie himself, someone whose life has been requisitioned by public events. McEwan follows events as Andrews describes them – Luc becomes more delirious, like John, although the details of Luc’s ramblings are different, concentrating more on his sister, and then on Briony. He thinks he knows her from his home, and they have a stilted conversation about his bakery and his family, while Briony weakly protests that she doesn’t know him, trying to tell him that he ‫ ﱢﱡ‬166 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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is in London and in hospital. While this is all McEwan’s invention, the detail of the ‘grating sound at the back of his throat’ (which signals that more is wrong than Briony has noticed) and the description of his tight grip on her hand are both from Andrews.146 As Luc gets worse, he thinks they are a couple, and the encounter takes on a very personal intensity which Andrews’s account doesn’t have. Briony’s reaction is different from what it would have been a few minutes before, because she has realised that he is about to die. Like John, Luc asks her to loosen his bandages, and like Andrews, Briony is not expecting what she sees – that half of his head and face have been shot away. This is the moment at which Briony reaches adulthood. Shortly afterwards, Luc and John die, suddenly sitting bolt upright, meaning that Briony and Andrews both have to catch them in their arms, and are both unaware for a moment that the boys have died. The ending of this episode is significant as while McEwan follows Andrews’s narrative, even taking the basis of the dialogue from her, he reverses his usual tactic and makes the Ward Sister much more sympathetic than she is in the original. As the next section will show, the horror of this shift has propelled Briony into adulthood extremely quickly. We can see this in McEwan’s brief comment about Briony having to empty used bedpans, a task she had resented so much before; now, having been wholly absorbed in looking after her patients for the first time, ‘she had never minded it less’.147 As I have argued, McEwan has selectively taken details from Radloff and Andrews in order to create a dramatically coherent atmosphere. This atmosphere is not wholly historically inaccurate; as Radloff comments, ‘much of it is true and focused on the Nightingale School’.148 Both Radloff and Andrews, when interviewed, made the point that they had never minded changing bedpans, although it was a horrible job, because the patients were so humiliated by having to use them that they felt it would have been self-indulgent at best to complain.149 After the shift McEwan shows us, Briony’s new maturity is signalled by her adopting this attitude, and it becomes clear that McEwan altered Radloff ’s account of changing bedpans in order to set up this change in Briony’s feelings now. This depiction is therefore historically inac‫ ﱢﱡ‬167 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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curate in that it deliberately deviates from the source material, but it has what Graham Swift defines as ‘human truth’ in that although it did not happen, it could plausibly have happened to a person with Briony’s temperament. McEwan has now shown us enough of Briony’s nursing career for his purposes and wants to move on from this moment of change in Briony – growing up – to the changes in her writing that the letter from Cyril Connolly (the next thing we see) conveniently flagposts for us. The letter Briony receives from Cyril Connolly is odd in a number of ways. For one, it is written by a real, historical figure to an invented, fictional one and purports to say what other famous historical figures made of the piece of fiction the fictional character wrote. By the end of the letter, the reader’s confusion is compounded by the fact that Connolly’s remarks make it obvious that the novella Briony sent him is actually an early draft of Part One of Atonement. Another oddity is that the historical Cyril Connolly tended not to write letters of this length to unknown authors whose work he was rejecting (earlier in the novel Robbie receives a much more typical ‘printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialled by Mr Eliot himself ’.150 So the reader is prompted to ask, what is the point of this letter – what does it do, and why does McEwan choose to use this form? It appears to work in the same way as the sudden revelations in the final section ‘London 1999’, where McEwan reveals that Briony is the author of Parts One, Two and Three, and has her explain the changes she made to her drafts over fifty-nine years of composition. The Connolly letter also shows us changes that Briony makes; Connolly corrects factual errors, such as the statue in the fountain being in the Piazza Barberini rather than the Piazza Navona, but more importantly, he tells Briony that although she writes well on ‘the crystalline present moment’, her reader’s ‘attention would have been held even more effectively had there been an underlying pull of simple narrative – development is required’.151 The fact that the letter mentions Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf provides a kind of literary family tree for Briony’s writing, and, as such, is an effective tool for characterising Briony. Even in this supposedly final draft, the influence of these writers is ‫ ﱢﱡ‬168 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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apparent, suggesting that Briony’s childhood habit of embracing fictional models survives to adulthood. The timing of this letter is important – Briony receives it in the evening after the hellish day McEwan describes in such detail. She is unable to feel emotion – ‘She would have liked to cry for [Luc], and for his family in Millau who would be waiting to hear news from him . . . but she was empty.’152 We do not see Briony’s reaction to the letter for five pages, when she has already decided to go to Lola and Paul’s wedding, and possibly to see Cecilia. Thus the effect her nursing experience and the letter have had on her is very apparent: ‘She had come to see that, without intending to, [the letter] delivered a significant personal indictment.’153 After Luc’s death has finally closed off Briony’s romanticised, adolescent view of life, Connolly’s criticisms of her ‘borrowed notions of modern writing’ provoke a new awareness of the ethics of her evasions, in life as well as in art. The letter establishes a breaking point between her early prose style and conception of literature and the one she begins to grow into in Part Three, as she sets herself the task of atoning for what she did to Robbie and Cecilia. Only the penultimate paragraph of Connolly’s letter contains his own words; he mentions a ‘relevant editorial’ in ‘our most recent issue’, which McEwan is in fact quoting in the paragraph which follows.154 In the May 1940 issue of Horizon, Connolly remarks that ‘The war is the enemy of creative activity, and writers and painters are wise and right to ignore it and to concentrate on other subjects. Since [artists] are politically impotent, they can use this time to develop at deeper emotional levels.’155 McEwan quotes this verbatim, then rewrites the next lines ‘or [they should] improve their weapons by technical experiment’ as ‘Your work, your war work, is to cultivate your talent, and go in the direction it demands.’156 This is more directly applicable to Briony at this stage, but it is also fitting for the novel as a whole, as Briony’s atonement. In his Horizon editorial, Connolly goes on to suggest that writers should ‘pursue the truth wherever it may lead, and the belief in the human mind as the supreme organ through which life can be apprehended, improved and intensified’.157 For Briony, politics will never be separable from private concerns, because in killing Robbie and Cecilia, the war ‫ ﱢﱡ‬169 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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compounded her sin, and made fiction the only realm in which any form of atonement was possible. The war effectively binds private and public history. All Briony can do is attempt to follow Connolly’s suggestion that writers continue to ‘pursue the truth’ and find new technical ways of depicting life. Atonement is, principally, McEwan’s response to Connolly’s challenge; it is a character study of a single woman over sixty years, executed in a singularly innovative, thought-provoking manner. It is apparent throughout that McEwan is chiefly interested in the concepts of narration and history which allow him to depict Briony from childhood to the onset of senility rather than with strict historical accuracy. While he is obviously much occupied with how war can inscribe public conflict into individual lives, his focus is always on how his historical positioning of the story (as well as use of source material) can further the development of Briony’s character. In this respect he is very much like Pat Barker, or any writer who chooses to focus on war, because the setting is so rich. Barker’s use of source material is similar in purpose to McEwan’s – while she is generally very careful not to write anything about historical figures that she knows to be false, she also sometimes embraces ahistorical or deliberately inaccurate readings of sources to make them fit her plot better. McEwan does this most notably in his very contemporary rewriting of the source material describing the soldiers in St Thomas’ after Dunkirk; but the narrative techniques he has used throughout – prolepsis, multiple points of view and looping backwards and forwards in time – demonstrate that this is a novel interested in the concept, not the fact, of historical accuracy. Nor is it concerned to stick to the rules it establishes. Briony’s concerns about relating the past truthfully are not very different from McEwan’s because what they are both trying to achieve through their writing is essentially the same. While Briony does want to establish the facts of who really attacked Lola in 1935, the main body of her atonement is her recreation of Robbie and Cecilia. Her final success is recognising ‘the simple truth that other people are as real as you . . . That was the only moral a story need have.’158 In the cause of showing Robbie and Cecilia to be as real as herself, Briony also bends the rules of historical accuracy; she says ‫ ﱢﱡ‬170 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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that she is amalgamating details of her nursing experience in different hospitals, and imagining Robbie and Cecilia’s flat in Balham. She is concerned with getting historical details right, as the reader can see from the fact that every one of the corrections Cyril Connolly, Nettle (who presumably tells her what happened to Robbie), and the Colonel of the Buffs (who advises her on matters of fact) offer her are implemented. However, her chief concern is ‘to make a tidy finish’.159 Who, she asks, would prefer the brutal truth of Robbie’s and Cecilia’s deaths to the comforting last image of them Briony conjures up, ‘standing side by side on a South London pavement. ‘Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn’t do it to them. I’m too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining.’160 Briony’s last story loops back not to her resolve to write the truth, with the ‘backbone’ Connolly suggests, but to her earliest stories: ‘As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.’161 There are other symmetries closing the book down, as though McEwan were conspiring with the young Briony, tidying events to fit a pattern. Having used her power as a novelist to atone in the only – fruitless – way she can, Briony ends the novel tired, looking out of the window of Auntie Venus’s room in her childhood home, where a family party for her has culminated in the long-delayed performance of ‘The Trials of Arabella’. At the start of this section, McEwan reveals that Briony has vascular dementia, which will gradually erase her memory until she finally has no idea of who she is. One senses that for Briony this will be, in some respects, a relief – she will finally be free of her guilt. But that she still holds on to life, even in her exhausted state in the last paragraph of the novel, is evident from the symmetry of this ending. In the room stands a vase of hothouse flowers, in ironic contrast to the vase of wild flowers Cecilia placed in the same room sixty years before, indirectly precipitating the events that so affected them all. The fact that soon Briony will be free from trying to atone is subtly emphasised by a further symmetry: Briony ends the novel standing by the window, staring out, as she did sixty years before. The difference is that this time she is looking out to the front of the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬171 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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house, rather than the back, out to ‘the long narrow driveway down which they drove Robbie away into the whiteness’.162 As Briony concludes, ‘But now I must sleep’, McEwan’s plot and Briony’s quest merge, and end. Notes 1 Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of The Day (London: Vintage, 1998), 151. 2 Ian McEwan, Atonement (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). 3 Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), Black Dogs (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992). 4 Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), The Innocent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), Amsterdam (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998). 5 Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), The Comfort of Strangers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). 6 McEwan, Atonement, 4–5. 7 McEwan, Atonement, 113, 119. 8 McEwan, Atonement, 187. 9 John Sutherland, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War: An Interview With Ian McEwan,’ Guardian, 3 January 2002: http://books/guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,600 0,627239,00.html. 10 Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (London: Arrow, 2001), Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927). 11 McEwan, Atonement, 41. 12 McEwan, Atonement, 4. 13 McEwan, Atonement, 47. 14 McEwan, Atonement, 149–50. 15 McEwan, Atonement, 50. 16 Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964): originally published as Men at Arms (London: Chapman and Hall 1952), Officers and Gentlemen (London: Chapman and Hall, 1955) and Unconditional Surrender (London: Chapman and Hall 1961). 17 McEwan, Atonement, 9. 18 McEwan, Atonement, 24. 19 McEwan, Atonement, 3. 20 McEwan, Atonement, 4. 21 McEwan, Atonement, 4–5. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬172 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement 22 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Penguin, 1998), McEwan, Atonement, 5. 23 McEwan, Atonement, 7. 24 McEwan, Atonement, 8. 25 McEwan, Atonement, 20. 26 McEwan, Atonement, 39. 27 McEwan, Atonement, 40. 28 McEwan, Atonement, 41. 29 McEwan, Atonement, 43, 73. 30 McEwan, Atonement, 314. 31 McEwan, Atonement, 119. 32 McEwan, Atonement, 119. 33 McEwan, Atonement, 41. 34 McEwan, Atonement, 147. 35 John Mark Eberhart, ‘When Reality and Perception Part Ways’, Edmonton Journal 27 June 2003, E13. 36 McEwan, Atonement, Epigraph (unpaginated). 37 Sutherland, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting’. 38 Elements of the plot of Mansfield Park also appear in Atonement. The Tallis parents resemble Lord and Lady Bertram; the father is frequently away on business and is absent at a crucial moment, and the mother is a detached invalid with no authority. Between them, the fallible parents fail the adopted, lower-class child, Fanny in Mansfield Park and Robbie in Atonement. However, in Atonement the damage cannot be undone; McEwan presents us with an Austen-style marriage ending, only to reveal that it is fantasy. 39 McEwan, Atonement, 320. 40 McEwan, Atonement, 41. 41 McEwan, Atonement, 5. 42 In The Ballad and the Source, a later Lehmann novel, there is another similar situation in which young Rebecca Landon becomes engrossed in the romanticised life story she is told by Sybil Jardine – Sybil, though, provides a more serious model for Briony in that, like Briony after the end of Part One, she spends almost her entire life trying to repair or recapture damaged family relationships. 43 Lehmann, Dusty Answer, 48. 44 McEwan, Atonement, 18. 45 Adam Begley, ‘The Art of Fiction CLXXIII’, Paris Review 162 (2002), 34. 46 Another, slyer reference appears in the biographical note on Briony which McEwan wrote for the end of the book, but then removed: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬173 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

‘Tallis’ sixth novel, The Ducking Stool, was made into a successful film starring Julie Christie.’ Christie was the leading actress in the wellknown film of The Go-Between. Begley, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 56–7. McEwan, Atonement, 151, 152. McEwan, Atonement, 209. Begley, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 56. Elizabeth Bowen, A World Of Love (London: Virago, 1999), The Last September (London: Virago, 1998), The House in Paris (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949). Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Out of a Book’, in Hermione Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree (London: Vintage, 1986), 49. McEwan, Atonement, 298. McEwan, Atonement, 249. McEwan, Atonement, 209. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), 121. Bowen, The Heat of The Day, 194. McEwan, Atonement, 45. McEwan, Atonement, 316. Bowen, The Heat of the Day, 256. Interview with Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW, Santa Monica, California, 11 July 2003. McEwan, Atonement, 127. McEwan, Atonement, 129. McEwan, Atonement, 93. Begley, ‘The Art of Fiction’, 50. McEwan, Atonement, 61. Duckers’s shoeshop in The Turl in Oxford is still open at the time of writing and still keeps these wooden models in the cellar. Brian Finney, ‘Briony’s Stand Against Oblivion: Ian McEwan’s Atonement’: www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/McEwan.html (accessed 17 August 2005). McEwan, Atonement, 191. Walter Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 7. McEwan, Atonement, 217. McEwan, The Innocent. McEwan, Atonement, 202. Gregory Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk (London: Kimer, 1973). Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk. Andrew Billen, ‘Ian McEwan’, Sunday Herald, 30 September 2001, Review, 3. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬174 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

McEwan, Atonement, 219. Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk, 54. Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk, 54. McEwan, Atonement, 242. McEwan, Atonement, 218. Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk, 55. Lord, The Miracle of Dunkirk, 54. McEwan, Atonement, 243. McEwan, Atonement, 202. Billen, ‘Ian McEwan’, 3. Lt. Colonel G.S. McKellar, Diary, August 1940. Ts. P233. Imperial War Museum, London. C.H.P. Crawfurd, Untitled Account of the Evacuation of Dunkirk, Ts. 9813511, Imperial War Museum, London. McEwan, Atonement, 248. ‘Gun Buster’, Return Via Dunkirk (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940); Alec Adrian, Dunkirk Sportsmen (Ilfracombe, 1943); Ewan Butler and J. Selby Bradford, The Story of Dunkirk (London: Hutchinson, 1955); A.D. Divine, Dunkirk (London: Faber and Faber, 1945). McEwan, Atonement, 353. McEwan, Atonement, 261. McEwan, Atonement, 204. McEwan, Atonement, 41. McEwan, Atonement, 269. McEwan, Atonement, 345. Lucilla Andrews, No Time For Romance (London: George Harrap and Co Ltd., 1977). Lucilla Andrews, A Hospital Summer (London: Corgi Books, 1958). Ann Radloff, The Memoir of Mrs. A. Radloff, Ms. 89/19/1, Imperial War Museum, London. This was confirmed by Mr. Alex Attewell, the director of the Florence Nightingale Museum, also the museum of St Thomas’ Hospital. McEwan, Atonement, 356. McEwan, Atonement, 370–1. Radloff, Memoir, 1. McEwan, Atonement, 275. McEwan, Atonement, 274. McEwan, Atonement, 274–5. McEwan, Atonement, 277. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬175 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 106 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 67. 107 Ann Radloff, letter to the author, 2 October 2005. 108 McEwan, Atonement, 276. Radloff, personal interview, 11 November 2005. 109 Radloff, personal interview, 11 November 2005. 110 Radloff, Memoir, 2. 111 McEwan, Atonement, 283. 112 Radloff, Memoir, 2,3. 113 McEwan, Atonement, 283. 114 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 161. McEwan, Atonement, 283. 115 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 155. 116 McEwan, Atonement, 283. 117 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 151. 118 McEwan, Atonement, 275. 119 Radloff, Memoir, 3. 120 McEwan, Atonement, 283. 121 Radloff, Memoir, 3. 122 McEwan, Atonement, 217. 123 Radloff, Memoir, 3. 124 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 82–3. 125 McEwan, Atonement, 298. 126 Andrews, No Time for Romance, 78. 127 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 64. 128 McEwan, Atonement, 298. 129 McEwan, Atonement, 300. 130 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 82. 131 McEwan, Atonement, 300. 132 McEwan, Atonement, 298. 133 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 95. 134 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 82. 135 McEwan, Atonement, 299. 136 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 94. 137 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 94. 138 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 94. 139 Andrews, A Hospital Summer, 95. 140 McEwan, Atonement 149. 141 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 98. McEwan, Atonement, 305. 142 McEwan, Atonement, 305. Andrews, No Time For Romance, 98. 143 Sutherland, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting’. 144 Andrews, No Time For Romance, 99. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬176 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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‘In the beginning was the word . . .’: Atonement 145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

McEwan, Atonement, 305. Andrews, No Time For Romance, 99, 100. McEwan, Atonement, 297. Radloff, letter to the author, 2 October 2005. Lucilla Andrews, interview with the author, 11 December 2005. Radloff, interview with the author, 11 November 2005. McEwan, Atonement, 82. In an interview in the Guardian, McEwan describes this letter as ‘very untypical’ of Connolly: see Sutherland, ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting’, 7. McEwan, Atonement, 312. McEwan, Atonement, 311. McEwan, Atonement, 320. McEwan, Atonement, 314. Horizon, May 1940, 314. McEwan, Atonement, 315. Horizon, May 1940, 314. McEwan, Atonement, 40. McEwan, Atonement, 353. McEwan, Atonement, 370. McEwan, Atonement, 371. McEwan, Atonement, 317.

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4

Lesbian postmemory: haunted ‘history’ in The Night Watch

In her afterword to Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler remarks that she has recently noticed the development of an academic field concerned with ‘the loss of loss itself: somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it; a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full “recovery” is impossible, one for whom the irrecoverable becomes, paradoxically, the condition of a new political agency’.1 In this chapter, I will argue that it is precisely this loss which gives historiographic metafiction back the political agency it has lost, as authors with a postmemorial engagement with the past adopt the form and reinvigorate it. This loss drives the agency that lies behind lesbian postmemory, and which gives it a political impetus; it engenders a new literary form in which the (qualified) radical openness of historiographic metafiction is allied with the personally and politically committed re-imagining of postmemory. Hirsch’s original definition of postmemory can, and should, be expanded, both away from the literal second generation – as I have already shown – and away from the idea of transmission between two directly linked generations. Here, I seek to establish that living memory need not exist for postmemory to come into existence; on the contrary, the lack of it can be the grounds of postmemory. The Night Watch is an excellent example of the way in which Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory – ‘memory’ of events that, while overshadowing an individual’s life, occurred outside ‫ ﱢﱡ‬178 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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their own lifetime – can illuminate recent lesbian historical fiction. Sarah Waters’s text shows that the scope of this model of generational transmission can be broadened. Looking at the narrative techniques and thematic obsessions Hirsch observes as marking the postmemory text, it becomes clear that these characteristics can be seen in a far wider range of fictions dealing with past trauma, including all Waters’s works to date. It thus seems possible to expand the reach of postmemory as an critical way of reading, with lesbian fiction as a test case: my theory suggests that there is a potentially unlimited scope for postmemorial identification between the affective community of lesbians now and at any point in history, albeit with the significant proviso that this is aware of its own limitations of current preconceptions and conceptions of identity categories. This is potentially tricky, as it raises the question of whether extending the term so far might make it meaningless; how are such connections different from ‘prosthetic memories’ or ‘cultural memories’? There are, in fact, significant differences between the two forms, which reaffirm the importance of the one of the two original conditions of postmemory; the deep personal connection and the lack of personal experience of that period. The personal connection – or the desire for it – distinguishes the affective community of contemporary lesbian women’s relationship with a reconstructed historical past from, say, other forms of neo-Victorian fiction where the ties between reader, or author, and the characters and situation of the novel are less politicised or less directly personal. Prosthetic memory, say an individual’s understanding and sense of connection to an event such as the sinking of the Titanic, which comes from films and novels, is still different in that the source of that identification is not related to that individual’s sense of personal identity within a community. In Waters’s 1996 article ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Mare’s The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’, she identifies an intense need amongst lesbian authors and readers for representations of a lesbian past.2 She and Laura Doan had previously argued that the roots of this desire lay in a sense of historical disconnection, or lack of continuity: ‘If, as Foucault suggests, the ‫ ﱢﱡ‬179 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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homosexual was “born” out of the conjunction of particular cultural factors, at a distinct historical moment, then s/he was born yearning for a genealogy with which to transcend that moment’.3 Thus the model of transmission between generations is useful here because this is, arguably, the first time that it’s been possible to narrate lesbian history so openly, and for writers to publicly draw connections between themselves and gay women in the past. Self-conscious, reflexive historical fictions such as The Night Watch suggest that lesbians writing historical fiction now are in effect a ‘second generation’, inheriting not the trauma of a preceding generation but the dual trauma of the relative silence where lesbian history might, perhaps, have been, and of the knowledge of oppression of individuals. This ‘second generation’ seeks to reinscribe its place in a narrative that has elided them, but that also demonstrates the further potential of postmemory, beyond the literal second generation. Lesbian and gay fiction is now in a position to present the ‘happy ever after’ ‘greenwood’ ending that E.M. Forster did not dare publish in his lifetime.4 But authors such as Waters, Emma Donoghue and Patricia Duncker go beyond this, problematising and dramatising the historiographic and literary conventions they rely on, placing the project of recovery itself at the centre of their work. Reading texts such as The Night Watch as postmemory novels can help us to identify how lesbian historical novels have developed the genre Linda Hutcheon labelled ‘historiographic metafiction’, showing how the genre has evolved in the years since Hutcheon coined the term in A Poetics of Postmodernism. This form – the fusion of the postmemory novel and the historiographic novel – is a perfect vehicle for discussing and dramatising the specific problems of writing about lesbian history prior to the present day. By creating a novel which, through its fragmentary form and complex, incomplete narrative structure, stands as an extended metonymic fragment, Waters is able to circumvent what Halperin describes as ‘cultural chauvinism’ leading to ‘homosexual essentialism’, that is, assuming a simple continuity of lesbian identity from the 1940s until today, while not relinquishing her attempt to offer some kind of glimpse into a potential lesbian past.5 This is not a recovery of a lost past, nor a ‫ ﱢﱡ‬180 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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straightforward attempt at one. Instead, as Waters’s narrative structure suggests, historiographic metafiction, when inflected by postmemory, allows us to look back with an awareness of the restraints of the historical novel and of the project of historical recovery, and an awareness of historical difference. The structure of the novel, for example, means that we understand more of the characters’ lives than they do in some respects – reading from 1947 back to 1941, we know their futures. We also don’t have access to some key pieces of information either until late in the narrative, or not at all. We are not told that Julia was in love with Kay, not vice versa, until Helen finds out, too late to admit to herself that this changes how she feels about Julia. Nor do we see how Kay and Helen’s relationship developed after their first meeting, for example, and thus miss out on that staple of the lesbian love story, a coming out story – a dominant element of much lesbian fiction, yet entirely missing from this novel. There may also be a metafictional joke in Julia’s profession; as an author of detective fiction, she could be read as a stand-in for Waters herself, as she pieces her narrative together, or as the reader, picking their way through the fragments of the chronology as well as of the bombed-out streets of the setting.6 Waters’s use of historical and literary source material also indicates that this is an exercise in creating a possible past, conditioned absolutely by our contemporary concerns. It respects the historical record but is also able to playfully subvert some of the more conservative mores of the time, to offer a (qualifiedly) more utopian view than contemporary fiction does, while never allowing us to forget the constructed nature of that view. Waters’s choice of wartime as a setting is different from the other authors in this study in that there is another almost equally important aspect of these characters’ lives, their sexuality. As well as being interested in wartime in itself, Waters is specifically interested in what wartime was like for lesbian women. She remarked in a commentary piece on the writing of The Night Watch that the 40s was a fantastically exciting period for many lesbians and gay men. The mix of servicemen in London, and the blacked-out streets, provided new opportunities for gay male cruising. The uncertainties of the time, and the horrors of air-raids, gave many people ‘whose ‫ ﱢﱡ‬181 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines only problem was a slight deviation of the sex urge’ – as Renault rather waspishly put it – a new determination to enjoy themselves while they could.7

Waters’s use of historical source material is thus different from McEwan’s and Barker’s, because unlike them, her focus is not on a specific place or event (such as Craiglockhart in 1917, or the evacuation of Dunkirk) but is instead on the more general effect on a particular section of society of being in a bombed city during wartime and beyond. She draws on a large amount of historical research to recreate the atmosphere and setting against which she sets her action, but, in a departure from her neo-Victorian work, she uses this material without subverting it in any way (as she did, say, with her annexing of Victorian gay male subculture in Tipping the Velvet). Here, unlike Barker and McEwan, her purpose not to recreate a specific moment in time, and draw attention to forgotten or misremembered aspects of it, but to recreate a very well-remembered time and project a lost history onto it. Historical source material allows her to create a backdrop against which her characters’ lives develop in reaction to specific aspects of living in and after wartime. Thus it’s closer in kind to McEwan’s use of Radloff and Andrews in the nursing sections of Atonement – where the sources provide a series of situations for Briony to react to so she develops and we gain further insight into her character – than to his use of source material in his depiction of Robbie’s journey to Dunkirk, which is designed, very specifically, to reveal the reality behind the myth of Dunkirk. Waters’s postmemorial engagement, in bringing back an obscured past, wishes for but cannot access the kinds of historical records McEwan needs for his; her depiction of the war is carefully researched so as to be as historically accurate as she can make it, but with the addition of imagined lesbian lives projected onto it. Waters was able to access some material on lesbian women during this period, primarily recent studies on lesbian life, such as From the Closet to the Screen: Women of the Gateways 1945–85, a history of the famous lesbian club, and Barbara Bell’s autobiography, Just Take Your Frock Off.8 Bell’s autobiography provides a detailed account of the opportunities wartime offered her. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬182 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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As Waters observes, although gay novels of the period make ‘conducting a same-sex relationship seem like a grave and daunting business’, Barbara Bell’s autobiography suggests that ‘the war gave many lesbians a licence to do things they had always enjoyed doing but which, until then, they’d had to do more or less illicitly – such as cutting their hair, wearing ties and trousers, driving cars’.9 Bell, as Waters notes, was able to take advantage of being a police officer to approach women who were on their own, and to enter ‘London’s sexual underworlds’, which welcomed her.10 Bell also notes the sense of freedom she felt, and excitement at the possibilities the war had opened up for her You were living on another plane. I can’t say it wasn’t exciting . . . It was the whirl and swarm of wartime. The immediate future was unknown.11

Bell was able to have numerous relationships, and shorter flings with other policewomen, and women she met on the beat (one chapter on her wartime experience is gleefully entitled ‘On the Prowl’). She met women in clubs in Mayfair, on the underground and on the streets, and although she had to be discreet, and pass herself and her partner off as flatmates, they were able to live together without being asked the kind of questions two apparently single women might have faced in peacetime. Waters has commented that she ‘situate[s] [her] lesbian stories in something bigger, like an echo chamber. There are hints at other lesbian texts or traditions of representation – but that’s something that most of [her] readers won’t necessarily pick up on.’12 Two such ‘hints’ are possible references to friends of Radclyffe Hall’s – Naomi Jacob, who was known, as Kay’s mechanic friend is, as Mickie, and Marion Barbara Carstairs, known as Joe, who started an all-women chauffeuring service called ‘The X Garage’ after returning from driving ambulances in the First World War. These glancing allusions are easily missed – the reader would have to know a reasonable amount about the circle of lesbian friends Hall moved in to recognise them – but to a reader who does recognise them, the effect is, indeed, to situate this story in a bigger context of lesbian history, and to give it added weight as a re-imagining of what might have been. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬183 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Another useful source on lesbian life in wartime was the diary of Joan Wyndham, published in the 1980s.13 Although Wyndham was heterosexual, her observations, first of gay men and women in London clubs, and later of lesbians in the WAAF, provide a useful insight into how openly gay people could behave in the late 1930s and war years, but also of the censure they still faced. Wyndham, extremely open-minded herself, had to report lesbian relationships to her superiors as an officer in the WAAF, with the effect that the women were split up: despite the relaxation in sexual mores wartime brought, as we see in The Night Watch, caution was still necessary. Waters’s emphasis in The Night Watch is not so much on caution during wartime as afterwards; in 1947, Kay and Mickey make no attempt to hide their sexuality (and suffer for it), but the more conventional Julia and Helen are paranoid about their neighbours realising they are a couple, going to great lengths to put on a facade of a ‘normal’ relationship, even after it is clear that the neighbours have guessed. Wartime offers a contrast here; Kay and Mickey are often mistaken for boys or men while on shift driving ambulances, but no one much cares, in the circumstances accepting them as ‘honorary men’ in much the same way that Prior becomes a ‘temporary gentleman’ in the Regeneration trilogy. The relaxation of sexual mores that is so apparent in Wyndham’s account of her own sex life, and the relaxed attitude to taking drugs (especially Benzedrine), is at odds with the fear and shame that runs through much gay fiction of the time. Thus Waters does what she does in her earlier fiction, and appropriates a highly researched, intensely detailed landscape for a re-visioning of the gay past. Writing about the more recent past was a new challenge for Waters, who was used to using the Victorian period as her backdrop. The big change for me with this book was the volume and variety of materials I could potentially consult: film, photos, sound recordings, as well as all the wartime ephemera which is still floating around. (None of this sort of thing, apart from photos, had been available to me for the Victorian-set novels, where I relied almost exclusively on books from and about the nineteenth century.) I used the [London Metropolitan Archives] to call up photographs of specific bomb‫ ﱢﱡ‬184 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Lesbian postmemory: The Night Watch damaged streets, and to look at maps of the damage. I visited Westminster and Camden local archives to look at a few things: civil defence pamphlets at Westminster, and info on Hampstead Heath in wartime at Camden. I spent a day or two in the Imperial War Museum reading room looking at call-up papers and pocket diaries and one or two other things. I also spent a day at the Ambulance Museum, looking at vintage ambulances and first-aid stuff. As far as archives go, I think that was about it . . . My biggest resources were diaries, novels and films . . .14

Like the other authors under discussion, even Graham Swift (for whom ‘emotional truth’ is primary, as discussed in the Introduction), Waters felt that she had a responsibility to get ‘concrete’ details right, according to the historical record. Unlike those other authors, however, Waters is less interested in the details of specific events in themselves than in the fictional events she projects onto them; the historical details she researches serve merely as a backdrop to the main drama of the characters’ lives at various moments of the war. Her use of this material is, therefore, generally unremarkable in itself. It is thus unsurprising that while Waters feels a responsibility to represent the details of the places and events accurately, the inaccuracy – or to be less pejorative, the re-imagining – we find comes in relation to the characters’ personal lives, specifically their language and their understanding and (generally) relaxed acceptance of their sexuality. These are, systematically, updated to various degrees. Waters’s characters may live against a backdrop which any 1940s lesbian might recognise, but their emotional and sex lives are conducted in a way which is significantly different to the way in which gay and lesbian lives were depicted in the fiction of the period – which forms the other part of the source material Waters used. While it seems from Barbara Bell’s memoir, at least, that some gay women were unblighted by crippling self-hatred and fear, in the very few novels depicting gay life of the time, this seems to be a universal condition. Why does the way in which fiction of the period depicts gayness matter in relation to this? Mainly because it helps us understand what this text is – pastiche? Homage? Metafictional intervention ‫ ﱢﱡ‬185 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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into the historical record? The significant differences between literary representations of lesbian life from the time, and Waters’s, suggest that this is certainly not pastiche. Having gone to some trouble to recreate the tone of 1940s fiction, the atmosphere in general and specifically in relation to certain passages of the war, she deviates significantly from her literary source material. Waters does not want to echo the apparent misery that gay life – tragic, unliveable – seems to bring in fiction of the period; she wants to show an alternative which, while not always happy, does allow her characters the possibility of not ending up dead, alone or married to a man, which are the options on offer in fiction of the time. Literary source material thus provides a richer and more complicated of material for Waters. While she uses details of the physical landscape of wartime London found through careful research, these details are all selected to build an atmosphere which is heavily influenced by Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green. The literature of the time that Waters has read provides the model, or template, into which the physical detail she takes from diaries, historical accounts, memoirs and films is fitted. Rod Mengham, writing on Green, suggests that the narrative complexity of Caught could function as a way of resisting tidying wartime experience into a readily understandable ‘package’; this is arguably what Waters is doing with her reverse chronology and partial withholding of key information.15 As Patrick Deer suggests, Mengham follows Eric Fromm in arguing that ‘glossification, or rationalising, is the terminus of a process in which the self is governed by the promise of meaning after the event’.16 It’s this kind of narrative ‘rounding-off ’ which Waters pointedly withholds at the end of her novel, as both the reader and the characters are left, not with the beginnings of a happy resolution, but in the limbo they have inhabited since the end of the war. Waters, like Green, sees the opportunities for illicit eroticism that the war, especially the blackout, provided. Like him, Waters uses the blackout as a plot device: Julia and Helen’s affair begins during a walk in a blacked-out city. Her depiction of the highly charged sexual encounter which begins Helen’s relationship with Julia reminds us of the kissing couple that Roe, the fireman, comes across ‫ ﱢﱡ‬186 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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in a shelter in the aftermath of a raid, whose embrace has somehow locked them away from the rest of the world. In the near corner a girl stood between a soldier’s legs. He had been kissing her mouth, so that it was now a blotch of red. He held on to her hips, had leant his head back across the white painted brick. Hair came down and trembled over his closed eyes with the trembling of the wall. Man and girl were motionless, forgotten, as though they had been drugged in order to forget, as though he had turned over a stone and climbed down stairs revealed in the echoing desert, those two were so alone.17

This passage bears a clear resemblance to the tone, setting and events of Julia and Helen’s night-time walk: their sense of being totally alone, in this unheimlich landscape, empty yet full of the living and the homes of the dead, their sense of freedom and the shrinking of their world to awareness only of the other. This focus allows Helen to finally confess her feelings for Julia, and to act on them, but it is clear that she is able to do so in part because of the frenzy in her that she has caught from the contagious frenzy and unreality of their situation. Waters’s description of the bombed city as a surreal, otherworldly and entirely new and familiar-yet-unfamiliar place owes much to both Bowen and Green. As Bowen puts it, ‘Walking in the darkness of the nights of six years (darkness which transformed a capital city into a network of inscrutable canyons) one developed new bare alert senses, with their own savage warnings and notations. And by day one was always making one’s own new maps of a landscape always convulsed by some new change.’18 In her short story ‘Mysterious Kor’, she creates a similar conflation of place and mood, as a young couple wander through the streets in bright moonlight. The girl suggests that the bombing has blown something uncanny and wild open, made it available once more, now civilisation has faltered. Bowen creates a similar effect in The Heat of The Day in her description of London as a living city, which sighs, and where the sense of unease, of being watched, that the characters feel is deepened and echoed by their new awareness of the fragility of solid buildings, which might be there when one went ‫ ﱢﱡ‬187 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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into a bomb shelter but vanished when one emerged. In The Night Watch, we see the same conflation of place and mood, as though things having been blown apart by the bombing opens possibilities in people’s emotional lives as much as it does in the fabric of their houses. The boy Helen and Julia see capering wildly in the excitement of the bombing raid is simply unlucky not to be Helen and Julia’s age; they are possessed by the same sense of wild excitement, but are able to ignore the warden’s instructions, and slip behind a baffle wall covering the entrance to a public building, now abandoned and pitch dark. Waters directly links the darkness to Helen’s ability to confess her feelings to Julia, and their refuge in the war landscape of baffle walls is mirrored in her description of their clothes: the darkness and chaos of the raid, paradoxically, enfold and protect them, so far as to allow the transgression of Helen’s infidelity to Kay. The conflation and collapse of interior and interior boundaries is borrowed directly from Bowen, as Waters explained in an interview with Lucie Armitt: Elizabeth Bowen [wrote] amazing short stories about how the city is transformed by darkness and transformed by the moon. Just imagine a full moon in a blacked out city! People talked about the new details you saw because of the blackout, the silhouettes that you didn’t notice by day. I just got excited about that and, yes, did use the landscape in this way. It’s a city in which all sorts of clandestine things could go on in the shadows. People did seem to be having sex in the blackout all the time: gay sex, straight sex. It was a city newly born through darkness, really . . .19

Waters’s text owes much to Green, Bowen, Neville Shute and other novelists and film-makers of the time in terms of its subdued, emotionally restrained tone and use of language. It uses a prose style that, unlike Waters’s other works, uses the third person, popular in the period, to evoke a slightly drier, more detached tone than the first-person narrators of Waters’s earlier works created. There is a sadness, a bleakness – often, a bitterness – to many of the novels of the period; think of Bowen’s moody The Heat of the Day, Greene’s furious The End of the Affair. I had not guessed, when I first took the 1940s on, how much the feel of these novels would begin to ‫ ﱢﱡ‬188 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Lesbian postmemory: The Night Watch dictate the mood and shape of my own book. I was used to writing in a lush, gothic style, and somehow thought that I could import all those wonderful Victorian flourishes into the wartime setting, without a jar. Instead I found it more natural, more apt, and more interesting to let the lushness slip away. I submitted to the ‘drying out’ that had so troubled me at the start, and watched my prose become slightly pared down, my tone more quiet, my focus more interior. The 40s . . . emerged increasingly for me as a time of bleak passions tucked firmly away behind façades of understatement and good manners. The challenge, then, was to absorb its own restrained style and suggest a depth of feeling behind the apparently lightly placed word.20

As this suggests, Waters deliberately mimics the language and literary conventions of the time; she is particularly indebted to Neville Shute’s Requiem For A Wren.21 This text is also about a woman left bereft of purpose and of her lover after the end of the war, and also has a reverse chronology, albeit a less obviously experimental one. The main character, Alan Duncan, returns from Europe to his parents’ Australian sheep farm a few years after the war, but arrives just after their housekeeper, a young English woman, has committed suicide. Alan tries to find out more about her, but no one knows much more than her name; it’s not until he finds a suitcase full of her things that he realises that she was in fact the girlfriend of his dead brother, Bill, who was killed in the war. Alan had tried at length to trace her, to offer to take her back to start again in Australia with his family, after the war ended, but found that she had vanished. We discover her identity at the same time as he does, but are then taken through Janet’s life story through her diaries, learning, in chronological order, about her ‘good war’, her love for Bill, her guilt at possibly having killed allied soldiers in error and – most importantly for Waters – her deep sense of loss, loneliness and hopelessness after Bill’s death and the end of her career in the Wrens. The tone of the novel is unsurprisingly subdued and the language controlled and muted; Alan’s attempts to build a new life after injury in the war, placed alongside the unfolding tragedy of Bill and Janet, colouring the narrative with regret. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬189 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Waters’s new, hybrid form merges elements of contemporary war fiction with literary conventions (such as the reverse narration) which are very much of the early twenty-first century. This form is – unsurprisingly – able to do much that contemporary fiction can’t in its depiction of gay life and gay sexuality. It also owes much to gay fiction of the period. However, the novel should not be read as straightforward pastiche; Waters’s concern that the ‘battered’ design of the UK book jacket would make it appear to be uncomplicated pastiche attests to her desire that we should read this self-conscious recreation of the period critically and with an awareness of what it tells us about our contemporary concerns. This is most evident when considering what the novel does that gay and lesbian texts of the period were not able to do, in print, at least (compare E.M. Forster’s Maurice). Echoes of other lesbian stories place The Night Watch in a continuum of lesbian experience. For example, Radclyffe Hall’s short story ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself ’ features a woman, older than Kay but otherwise very similar, who spends the First World War as an ambulance driver, finally ‘set free’ to live an active, useful life.22 The war, Hall observes, has set many ‘Miss Ogilvies’ free to cut their hair, to dress mannishly and to take up active, traditionally male roles. The beginning of The Night Watch, where Kay is standing, passively, simply watching from her bedsit window, exactly mirrors the beginning of Hall’s story, where Miss Ogilvy stands, equally passively and mutely, watching as her army car is hoisted back to make the sea journey to England. Her unit is being disbanded and she is, suddenly, not only without occupation but without purpose and company, returned to suspicion and isolation in a female world that neither understands nor much likes her. She simply has no place in this new postwar world, and the story ends in a quasi-mystical slip into a (perhaps unintentionally comic, if tragic) Stone Age past-life regression, or dream, in which Miss Ogilvy is the strong man she wishes she was. We never find out whether Miss Ogilvy is truly in her own past, dreaming or hallucinating; but she is found dead at the end of the story, at the edge of the cave in which she made love to her girlfriend – as a man – for the first time. Waters steers clear of fantasy and whimsy in The ‫ ﱢﱡ‬190 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Night Watch, and Kay’s fate is more prosaic: she is simply left over, suffering both from the loss of Helen and the loss of her place in wartime society. Loss and regret also feature strongly in another lesbian text which Waters has described as playing a role in inspiring The Night Watch, Han Suyin’s 1962 novel Winter Love.23 Suyin, a bisexual who had wartime affairs with men and women, describes a wartime lesbian relationship between two trainee nurses, told from the point of view of the woman, Red, who ended the relationship. Looking back from her middle age, where she is married with a child, she describes with regret how she drove her lover Mara away, never quite acknowledging to herself that she did this deliberately, nor acknowledging why. There are a number of structural and plot echoes of Winter Love in The Night Watch, which shares its setting, London during the 1944 Blitz, and similarly links the emotional intensity of enduring those very severe raids to the breaking apart of social norms and the subsequent possibility of sexual relationships between women. Love between two women starts, in both texts, after a bombing raid in which one woman looks suddenly and with great attention at the face of the other. The difference is that Kay is romantic and is stunned by Helen’s beauty, despite their situation, whereas Red, a very pragmatic woman, thinks that Mara looks almost ridiculous with her thick covering of dust: it is Mara who is affected enough by their close escape to declare her feelings to a desiring, but frightened Red. It begins when Red and Mara, who have become very close friends very quickly, are having coffee together rather than going their separate ways one evening, when the café they are in is hit by a bomb, and their waitress killed: Though the memory of that moment of terror is precise enough, I don’t remember any particular, overwhelming fear at the instant when the buzz-bomb fell; only a stunned, nearly surprised joy that I was still alive afterwards. Then Mara’s face, thick with dust, featureless like one of those weather-worn statues in an old square. In the bronze blob the eyes began to move, ludicrously. I wanted to laugh with relief. We were both still alive.24

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This somewhat unromantic description has been re-remembered, though, by the end of the novel, where Red describes wandering the streets looking for Mara in the years after she had abandoned her for her husband Andy: ‘I wander the streets looking for her face, like a pearl in the darkness, luminous as I remembered it’.25 This regretful description, freighted with loss, reminds us of Kay’s first falling in love with Helen as she lies amid the debris of a bombed-out house: [Wiping the dirt off Helen’s face,] the dust fell away. The skin was pink, plump, astonishingly smooth. Kay brushed a little longer, then moved her hand to the curve of Helen’s jaw and cupped it with her palm – not wanting to leave her, after all; gazing at her in a sort of wonder; unable to believe that something so fresh and so unmarked could have emerged from so much chaos.26

Kay and Red’s initial reactions are entirely typical of them; Red is pragmatic to a fault, and ultimately entirely self-serving, while Kay is generous to a fault and vastly more able to see the beauty in another, in such a situation. It is only when it is too late, and Red has rejected Mara for fear of defying convention, that she can allow herself to see what Kay saw at that moment, and the memory torments her. It’s hard not to read the poignancy of The Night Watch ending with Kay’s vision of Helen’s face as an echo of this moment; a memory which will torment, a love gone badly wrong. This echo serves two purposes – firstly, it will signal Waters’s place in the line, or community of lesbian writers, to an informed readership, but it also serves to deepen our understanding of Kay, and of her tragedy – that she begins with hope but is crushed by her faith in that hope. Thus a reader who does not recognise the allusion loses something very specific, but the reference, adding to the general atmosphere and to Waters’s characterisation, still adds something for the general reader. What is more significant, however, is what Waters leaves out that we might find in the original texts. The omissions here tell us a great deal about social change between the periods of the setting and the composition, but they also make the informed reader very much more aware of the ways in which this novel is dramatically different to its wartime predecessors, as a gay text. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬192 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Waters herself observed that gay novels of the 1940s and 1950s ‘make conducting a same-sex relationship seem like a grave and daunting business . . . and yet the 1940s was a fantastically exciting period for many lesbians and gay men’.27 In fact, what Waters does in The Night Watch is to emphasise the excitement and possibilities found by gay people in this period; she takes much of her characters’ experiences of opened possibilities, and glee at them, from historical works on gay history (such as You, You and You and From The Closet to the Screen: A History of the Gateways Club) and from memoirs, such as Barbara Bell’s, to illustrate just how life changed for gay people. As Radclyffe Hall showed, and Barbara Bell delightedly relates, life in wartime could be extremely enjoyable for gay women, who were able to wear mannish clothes, mix freely in allwomen environments and take on active, physical and useful jobs that were otherwise denied to them. Such women could enjoy a sense of romantic, personal and professional fulfilment not available to them in peacetime. But beyond this, Waters also deliberately edits out some of the most frequent and powerful elements of contemporary gay fiction, chiefly the need to depict the abjection of gay people, the misery of having to live in secret, the shame and self-loathing many gay characters in contemporary fiction were shown to feel, and the frequent recourse to sexology or Freudian analysis of how they had been ‘warped’ into perversity. There is no free and easy acceptance of sexual orientation, particularly not amongst characters such as Red in Winter Love or Laurie Odell in Mary Renault’s The Charioteer. While Waters has spoken of her desire to ‘appropriate’ the landscape of films about erotic longing, loss and desire, such as Brief Encounter, she also brings a wholly modern consciousness to her appropriation. As Neil Bartlett remarks of the 1950s novel The Heart In Exile, there is a great deal of ‘barely digested sociological and psychological “theory” concerning the “problem” in this book, and in many others on the same theme: the gay character needs special pleading, to be excused their “fault”.28 They do not choose this life, but cannot live it publicly or, on the whole, happily, as it places such stringent limits on when they can be themselves, and who with. Alec, the sympathetic character who is defiant of ‫ ﱢﱡ‬193 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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society’s disapproval in The Charioteer, and says he will not accept being labelled a criminal, cannot escape from the seedier element of the wartime gay world in London, despite loathing it, simply because it is the only gay world there is.29 He is repeatedly drawn back by needing to be among people he can be himself with, even though he despises them. Waters’s novel exhibits far more recent sexual mores, and this is in part an effort by Waters to encourage her readers to recognise that this is a metafictional text – she is trying to encourage a double-consciousness in her readers. Rachel Carroll has argued that she does this with her emphatic use of the word ‘queer’ in this and other texts: to remind us of the difference between then and now, and to see how this period setting is shaped by our contemporary concerns.30 It is, obviously, possible for Waters to be far more sexually explicit than it is for Suyin or Françoise Mallet-Joris, writing before the Stonewall era or gay liberation. Mallet-Jorris, whose novel The Illusionist (1951) depicts an obsessive relationship between a girl and her father’s mistress, does not dare to go far beyond Radclyffe Hall’s famously elliptical sex scene. Waters does take this opportunity – as in her fairly graphic description of the beginning of Helen and Julia’s love-making in the bombing raid, in the 1944 section – but this is a far more restrained account than the joyful, carnivalesque scenes of Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith. The Night Watch is designed to resemble the fiction of the period, in terms of tone; it does so here, but in a qualified way which again reminds the reader of the constructed, hybrid nature of what they are reading. Waters also omits the hand-wringing and careful ‘excusing away’ that forms an inevitable part of published gay texts of the time. Kay is very like Miss Ogilvy, in her physical mannishness, her alienation from wider society, her delight in having an active, purposeful role in wartime, and her despair in losing it. But while she is clearly a close relation of Miss Ogilvy in these respects, her conception of her sexuality and gender, and their relation to each other, is wholly different. As has been discussed elsewhere, Hall’s lesbian fiction is strongly influenced by models taken from contemporary sexology, particularly the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing and Havelock Ellis’s model of sexual inversion.31 Miss Ogilvy is a typological ‫ ﱢﱡ‬194 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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prefiguration of Stephen Gordon, the tragic protagonist of The Well of Loneliness. She voices her wish that she had been born a man, and her sense that having a woman’s body leaves her ‘deeply defrauded’, explicitly.32 In a current theoretical gender framework, Miss Ogilvy might be seen as being transgendered. Hall’s model of inversion, now superseded, no longer shapes conceptions of homosexuality. Therefore Kay, although she dresses in men’s clothes, can pass as a man, wishes to have the kind of active job traditionally restricted to men and sleeps with women, does not view herself as inverted, and never alludes to such a model. Kay, and most of the other lesbian characters in The Night Watch are, however, more like Miss Ogilvy in their emotional restraint; with the exception of Helen, whose emotional volatility threatens to wreck her relationship with Julia. This is an interesting move away from the extreme emotional intensity of the characters and drama of lesbian novels such as The Illusionist and Winter Love, which feature histrionic protagonists wreaking emotional havoc on each other. Waters is more interested in the littler, more prosaic daily lives of her characters, and focuses more on how they react to wartime conditions, or the effect of the bleakness of life after the war. In this respect the text owes far more to Shute and Green than to the lesbian tradition. Similarly, the discourse of intense shame, self-loathing and theorising about psychological retardation which dominated psychoanalytical thinking about homosexuality in this period is particularly notable by its absence. As discussed above, Bartlett’s introductory essay on The Heart in Exile notes the large volume of pseudo-scientific musing on the causes of homosexuality, pointing out that in providing this, Garland is hoping to offer a pre-emptive defence of the hapless gender-normative homosexual, who cannot help his condition, would wish to change, and recoils from the more deviant parts of gay identity. Male effeminacy is reviled in both The Heart in Exile and The Charioteer, and in both our heroes are seen in gay social settings – parties and gay pubs – where their difference from the effete, histrionic homosexual men, and their horror at them (which, it is strongly implied, the reader surely shares) is extremely strongly emphasised. Duncan, the gay male character in The Night Watch, does not analyse his feelings explicitly, but is overwhelmed ‫ ﱢﱡ‬195 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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by a sense of shame linked to his having been in prison as well as to his unverbalised sexual difference. He feels his physical inferiority to the men he hero-worships keenly, and has retreated from the world into a job created for the war-handicapped and a quasipaedophilic relationship with his former prison warder, Mr Mundy. Duncan’s sense of distance, difference and inferiority find an echo in Laurie Odell’s anguish in The Charioteer. Renault is very careful to offer a detailed defence of the happy ending Laurie and his partner Ralph reach; the novel begins with Laurie’s father walking out on him and his mother, and depicts the intense relationship that then forms between the sensitive son and overbearing, needy mother. In Winter Love, Suyin’s narrator explains that she was seduced into lesbianism by an emotionally unstable older woman, but once ‘converted’ cannot go back, no matter how much she wishes she could. Ralph too believes that his sexuality is a direct result of an incident in his childhood, but nonetheless has tried hard to have relationships with women and abstain from gay sex; Renault presents him as someone who is both blameless and heroic. In Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories, Julie Abraham suggests that Renault’s repeated association of Laurie, and to a lesser extent, Ralph, with the boys’ adventure stories Coral Island and Treasure Island is an attempt to emphasise their boyishness. However, it seems equally possible that what Renault seeks to emphasise here is a very particular aspect of boyishness, which owes much to the tradition of muscular Christianity espoused by Arnold. Ralph and Laurie are hardy, brave, resourceful and tough: they are, Renault clearly implies, the opposite of the effeminate, deviant gay men she shows as being manipulative, selfish and childish. Laurie does not fit into this group, and clearly does not want to: his longing to be accepted by society prevents him from accepting his sexuality for nearly the entire duration of the book. He does not question that he cannot expect to be accepted if he is known to be gay, concentrating instead on his anguish at how the world would see him if he joined ‘nous autres’.33 His distaste for deviance and fear of marginalisation is most clearly expressed when he is comforting a teenage boy, Mervyn, who is in hospital with him. While holding Mervyn, who is crying, he suddenly becomes aware that if anyone ‫ ﱢﱡ‬196 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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who knew he was gay were to see him, they might potentially see a very different situation than someone who did not, and assume there was something sexual in Laurie’s motivation. To be reduced to the sum of his deviant sexuality, and the loss of innocence and respect that goes with this, propels Laurie into rejecting the idea of trying to live happily as a gay man: ‘we sign the warrant for our own exile. Self pity and alibis come after.’34 Waters’s text is entirely free of this type of anguish; the sadness and alienation felt by the characters is because of what has happened in their relationships, rather than the fact that they are homosexual. The first draft of The Night Watch featured a party scene which ‘recalled the horrible gay party in Renault’s novel’.35 The omission of this scene from the final version is significant, as it means that we never see the characters in the context of a wider gay community, only in small groups of close friends, or couples. The party scene in The Charioteer is a pivotal moment for Laurie, as his first tentative attempt to publicly acknowledge and explore his sexuality. The seediness, the overt sexuality and high campness of some of the men there both frighten and disgust him; Renault uses the party, in fact, to further establish a distinction between the ‘good gays’, the otherwise ‘normal’ Laurie and Ralph, and the ‘bad gays’, who far from trying to correct their deviance, express and enjoy it. Waters’s depiction of her version of the ‘horrible party’ might, perhaps, have resembled Diana Lethaby’s parties for her less than likeable circle of lesbian friends, but this novel, focused so tightly on the interior lives of its main characters, doesn’t extend our view of the gay subculture of the time beyond its reach into their individual lives. As a modern-day author, Waters does not need to construct the kind of elaborate defences of her gay characters that Renault does. Her focus can lie on individual characters, and their lives: Waters writes about lesbian women because, as she has said, she wants to appropriate this landscape and reclaim this section of an obscured lesbian past, but she is able to focus on individual women’s emotional experiences in their private lives and in reaction to the war, without having to focus on the issue of their sexuality in the way that Renault does. The Charioteer is the story of Laurie’s progress towards entering a relationship with a man; The Night ‫ ﱢﱡ‬197 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Watch is the story of individual women for whom sexual orientation is only one part of their identity. In this text, then, the use of source material demonstrates something very significant about the way that historical material is used when the author’s concern is still – even broadly – postmemorial, but when the boundaries of what postmemory is are explored and expanded. In The Night Watch, we see a fictional world that attempts to recapture a history that has been vigorously suppressed, but also a world that we can recognise as being related to our own. We are prevented from simplified over-identifications, but not protected from understanding the true harm done to people such as Kay and Duncan, who are forced to live in the shadows because of their sexuality and inability to ‘fight back’ when in situations they either cannot, or choose not to, control. Like Atonement, this text is a palimpsest of different literary forms, different literary sources and different times: like Barker and McEwan, Waters seeks to reclaim lost or silenced history, and like them, she uses history, self-consciously and often humorously, to teasingly reassemble a literary simulacrum of a lost archive. Notes 1 Judith Butler, ‘Afterword’, in David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 467. 2 Sarah Waters, ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Mare’s The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’, Women: A Cultural Review 7:2, 1996. 3 Sarah Waters and Laura Doan, ‘Making Up Lost Time: Contemporary Lesbian Writing and the Invention of History’, in David Alderson and Linda Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 12. 4 The ‘greenwood’ is the idyllic, rural setting Forster allows his heroes a somewhat fairy-tale escape to at the ending of Maurice (London: Edward Arnold, 1971). 5 David M. Halperin, How To Do The History Of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 14, 16. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬198 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Lesbian postmemory: The Night Watch 6 There may be a further wry comment here too about the recent popularity of detective fiction with a lesbian readership, as well as a comment on the proliferation of detective novels by lesbian authors. 7 Sarah Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’, Guardian, 28 January 2006: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jan/28/fiction.sarahwaters (accessed 11 May 2009). 8 Jill Gardiner, From the Closet to the Screen: Women of the Gateways 1945–85 (London: Pandora Press, 2003). Barbara Bell, Just Take Your Frock Off: A Lesbian Life (Brighton: Ourstory Books, 1999). 9 Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’. 10 Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’. 11 Bell, Just Take Your Frock Off, 79. 12 Lucie Armitt, ‘An Interview with Sarah Waters’, Feminist Review 85, 117. 13 Joan Wyndham, Love Lessons (London: Heinemann, 1985) and Love is Blue (London: Heinemann, 1986). 14 Sarah Waters, email to the author, 10 March 2010. 15 Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 96–8. Henry Green, Caught (London: Harvill, 1991). 16 Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 268. 17 Green, Caught, 95–6. 18 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Postscript to The Demon Lover’ (1945), in Hermoine Lee (ed.), The Mulberry Tree: The Writings of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), 99. 19 Armitt, ‘Interview’, 123. 20 Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’. 21 Neville Shute, Requiem For A Wren (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1955). 22 Radclyffe Hall, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1934). 23 Han Suyin, Winter Love (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962). 24 Suyin, Winter Love, 37. 25 Suyin, Winter Love, 134. 26 Waters, The Night Watch, 503. 27 Waters, ‘Romance Among the Ruins’. 28 Rodney Garland, The Heart in Exile, foreword by Neil Bartlett (Brighton: Millivres-Prowler Group Ltd, 1995). 29 Mary Renault, The Charioteer (New York: Vintage, 2003). ‫ ﱢﱡ‬199 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines 30 Rachel Carroll, ‘Rethinking Generational History: Queer Histories of Sexuality in Neo-Victorian Fiction’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 39:2 (2006), 145. 31 See, for example, Heike Bauer’s English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 32 Hall, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, 7, 10. Leo, the butch lesbian character in Mary Renault’s novel The Friendly Young Ladies (London: Virago, 2005) feels similarly, that she contains both a man and a woman; the man part of her has to die, metaphorically, at the end of the book when she unexpectedly falls in love with her male friend Joe, and leaves her girlfriend for him. 33 Renault, The Charioteer, 305. 34 Renault, The Charioteer, 308. 35 Sarah Waters, email to the author, 10 March 2010.

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5

Conclusion

‘it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not’1 Hervey Allen suggests that because the historical novelist must ‘give his readers as complete an illusion as possible of having lived in the past, he is under obligation to alter facts, circumstances, people and even dates’.2 This verdict seems particularly salutary in relation to the four authors whose work I have considered in this book. Not because it can be applied to them equally, but because it brings to the fore the issues they have in common, of what the historical novelist is able to alter, and how their own perspective affects their view of the past; by extension, it also begs the same questions of the historian. In this book I have sought to demonstrate, through close readings of individual texts and the source material they are based on, the ways in which the tension between historical and fictional narratives lies at the very heart of these novels: what can fiction do with the past that history cannot? The novels I have examined stake a claim to historical truth, but simultaneously assert that their truth is different in kind to the truth offered by a historical work. Graham Swift locates the truth of his fiction in its ability to create empathy for others – ‘ultimately, writing is about compassion, feeling compassion yourself and establishing compassion in the reader’.3 Each of the novelists treated in this book share Swift’s objective, although as I have shown, they all use historical material differently in this cause. In each case, however, the novelists’ use of source material would not meet the approval of a historian, because ‫ ﱢﱡ‬201 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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of the burden of imaginative work – the writer’s extrapolation and invention – placed on it. Swift suggests that the truth fiction offers about the past is ‘the human truth of the situation’, allowing the reader to have a glimpse of what it might have been like to have been that person, in that situation, in that time. This is why, for example, Ian McEwan concentrates so many sources and incidents into a single narrative when describing Briony’s experience as a nurse in Atonement. His depiction is unarguably historically inaccurate, but by distilling the details of hospital life and the horrors of treating the wounded from two much longer accounts into a very short, intense fictional version, he is able to propel Briony out of childhood and into an adult understanding of the effects of what she did to Robbie and Cecilia as a child. Similarly, by inventing Billy Prior, Pat Barker is able to depict certain responses from her fictional version of Rivers in the Regeneration trilogy which she has found in the historical man, described in obituaries and memoirs. She can then go further, deviating from the historical record and guessing at his responses in certain situations; when she wants to look at something about which there is nothing on record, or which she feels would be an invasion of a real person’s privacy, she creates a ‘double’ character who shares these characteristics, and uses them to imagine her way into the situation. The historical novelist presents their truths differently from a historian, or, as Swift commented, they risk finding their work burdened with historical detail which the novel doesn’t need, and which impedes it as a story.4 Therefore strict historical accuracy is not expected in a historical novel, because the emphasis on entering the past imaginatively is more important to the writer than offering a wider historical narrative looking at, say, the military campaigns Siegfried Sassoon participated in during 1917 and 1918; this detail is extraneous to Barker’s interests so she simply focuses elsewhere, something a biographer or historian would find hard to justify doing. Martha Nussbaum offers a similar argument in her study of the moral agency of fiction, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life.5 Although not specifically focusing on the historical ‫ ﱢﱡ‬202 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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novel, her argument that the realist novel deliberately prompts its reader ‘to notice this and not this, to be active in these and not these ways’ is highly relevant to this book.6 Each of the novels I have discussed has, as I have argued, a design on its reader: because these are second-generation fictions, written by people with a profound emotional and ethical commitment to the version of events they present, these novels all intend to exert moral authority and correct our view of the past. In answer to the hypothetical question of why she has chosen to examine the moral agency of fiction, rather than of history or biography, Nussbaum suggests that she is interested in the freedom fiction offers to ‘imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be oneself or one’s loved ones’.7 Empathy is the keystone of her moral imagining, as it is in the novels I have discussed, all of which intend to elicit an emotional and ethical response in their readership. However, this still leaves the question of how such narratives may be distinguished from historical narratives, many of which might also be written by authors with vested interests and the desire to engender an emotional, ethical response in their readers. Recent historiography has dwelt long on this issue, and much recent fiction has taken up the concepts of relativity which have dominated this discourse, self-consciously playing with competing narratives and the idea of truthful representation, deliberately highlighting their fictive nature by drawing attention to the ‘seams’ of their narrative.8 David Lowenthal argues that what marks out a fictional narrative from a historical one is not its content – as argued above – but the purpose of its author in writing it.9 He argues that narrative inevitably shapes historical accounts, and also that fictional accounts must, of necessity, be based in the real world, even if they are not representing real-life events, because we simply cannot conceive of anything genuinely outside our experience. ‘All accounts of the past tell stories about it, and hence are partly invented; . . . story telling also imposes its exigencies on history.’10 Lowenthal’s definition of what makes a fictional account different from a historical one refers us not to an absolute standard of proof, but to the conventions which govern each discipline, notwithstanding postmodernism’s attempts to undermine them: ‫ ﱢﱡ‬203 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Reading behind the lines The history-fiction difference is more one of purpose than of content. Whatever rhetorical devices the historian deploys, the tenets of his craft forbid him knowingly to invent or to exclude things that affect his conclusions; in terming himself an historian and his work a history, he chooses to have it judged for accuracy, internal consistency, and congruence with the surviving record.11

Unlike the historical novelist, he dares not fabricate a character, ascribe unknown traits or incidents to real ones, or ignore incompatible traits so as to make his tale more intelligible, because he could not hide such inventions from others with access to the public record nor justify them when found out.12

The historical novelist, on the other hand, does have this freedom, although if they choose to exercise it they may well find themselves the target of the type of critical opprobrium Pat Barker’s focus on gender in the Regeneration trilogy won her. Having said that the novelists under discussion utilise their ability to play with the historical record, to deviate from it and to embroider it, each of them rejects postmodern relativism: by relying on source material they are all asserting its power to bring us to truth, either of a fictional kind in the novel, or, used another way, in historical writing. The novelists’ truth is distinguished from the historians’ truth, despite their shared reliance on source material; the historical novelists discussed in this book claim their ability to use source material as a basis from which to invent, and go beyond the record, which history cannot. But, as Graham Swift says, the truth fiction tells is compassionate, ‘a human truth’, the usefulness of which is acknowledged by historians even while they repudiate its use in their own field, as Dan Todman does here: It would . . . be possible for the lay reader to finish [the Regeneration trilogy] with their preconceptions [about the war] challenged [despite Barker’s anachronisms] and with a new set of ideas about the First World War which were more historically accurate. Many historians are frustrated at the strength of the popular mythology of the war in contemporary Britain – that it was a stupid, muddy, futile mess which turned its victors into victims. When we confront these ‫ ﱢﱡ‬204 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Conclusion myths head on, we often find them hard to dispel. By taking a less direct route – the literary historical version of the indirect approach? – Barker may have opened more minds than we shall ever do.13

Fiction’s ability to pry into the murkier, unrecorded corners of history does not, according to Swift, Barker, Waters and McEwan, mean that all history is reduced to competing narrative, nor that there is a unitary grand narrative. These historical fictions depict the past with truth. It is truth of a different order to historical truth, but does not seek to destroy or even undermine its historically oriented relative, which it regards as having a separate integrity. This is evident from the authors’ afterwords in each novel, in which Waters, Barker and McEwan all acknowledge the use of various historical sources. As Waters puts it, ‘I don’t see the point of historical fiction if it hasn’t got something “true”-ish to “say” about the period it’s set in – unless you’re being obviously playful or revisionist (which still implies some sort of foundation of accuracy, anyway – doesn’t it?).’14 Overall, what this book is primarily intended to illustrate is the intricate nature of the connection between history and fiction in the writing of these four authors, and also to demonstrate that Hirsch’s model of postmemory can usefully be applied to British authors, as well as widened out to encompass cultural transmission of memory as well as transmission through the family, illuminating our understanding of both why the world wars still haunt us, and how their transmission has shaped recent fiction. I would thus argue that without paying due attention to the operation of postmemory in these texts, as well as to the way in which each author manipulates source material in their writing, it is impossible to understand either how historical fiction has developed in the last twenty years, or how we are engaging with the perennial human problem of understanding experience outside our own lives. These novels function as extended metonymic fragments: impasses in representation and historical understanding do not thwart postmemorial fiction, they create it. Simon Schama offers one type of resolution – to accept the impossibility of reaching full knowledge of the past – which Swift, Barker, Waters and McEwan would perhaps find congenial: ‘if our flickering glimpses of dead worlds ‫ ﱢﱡ‬205 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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fall far short of ghostly immersion, that perhaps is still enough to be going on with.’15 Notes 1 Barker, Regeneration, 251. 2 Quoted in David Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), 228. 3 Graham Swift, personal interview, 10 December 2004. 4 Graham Swift, personal interview 10 December 2004. 5 Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 6 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 2. 7 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 5. 8 A.S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000) and Christopher Priest’s The Separation (London: Scribner, 2002) are two such examples. 9 David Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country. 10 Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country, 229. 11 Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country, 229. 12 Lowenthal, The Past Is A Foreign Country, 229. 13 Todman, ‘Historians Need Creative Imagination as Much as Imaginative Writers Need Historical Information’, Telescope and Periscope Conference, Wolfson College, Oxford, 1 June 2005. 14 Sarah Waters, email to the author, 10 March 2003. 15 Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Knopf, 1991), 326.

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Bibliography

Primary sources Barker, Pat. Union Street. London: Virago, 1982. —— Blow Your House Down. London: Virago, 1984. —— The Century’s Daughter. London: Virago, 1986. (Reprinted as Liza’s England, 1996.) —— The Man Who Wasn’t There. London: Virago, 1989. —— Regeneration. London: Viking, 1991. —— The Eye In The Door. London: Viking, 1993. —— The Ghost Road. London: Viking, 1995. —— Liza’s England. London: Virago, 1996. (originally published as The Century’s Daughter, 1986.) —— Another World. London: Viking, 1998 McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. —— The Comfort of Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. —— The Ploughman’s Lunch: An Original Screenplay by Ian McEwan. London: Methuen, 1985. —— The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. —— The Innocent. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. —— Black Dogs. London: Jonathan Cape, 1992. —— Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. —— Amsterdam. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. —— Atonement. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Swift, Graham. Shuttlecock (1981). London: Penguin, 1982. —— Learning to Swim and Other Stories (1982). London: Picador, 1985. —— Waterland (1983). London: Picador, 1992. —— Ever After. London: Picador, 1992. —— Last Orders. London: Picador, 1996. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬207 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Bibliography —— Out of This World (1988). London: Picador, 1997. —— The Sweet Shop Owner (1980). London: Picador, 1997. —— The Light of Day. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. —— ‘Making an Elephant: Good Manners in South London, Long Ago’, Jubilee ed. Ian Jack, Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 87 (2004): 301–16. Waters, Sarah. The Night Watch. London: Virago, 2006.

Secondary sources Unpublished source material and interviews Andrews, Lucilla. Personal interview. 11 December 2005. Barker, Pat. Personal interview. 20 December 2005. Cornwell, Harry J. Dunkirk 1940 – Bray Dunes – The Lorry Jetty. Ts. 82/33/1. Imperial War Museum, London. Crawfurd, C.H.P. Untitled Account of the Evacuation of Dunkirk. Ts. 98/35/1. Imperial War Museum, London. Hooker, A.J. Letters from Flanders describing the activities of 208 (Sussex Field Company, Royal Engineers (Territorial Army) during April and May 1940, with the British Expeditionary Force in France. Ms. 86/37/1. Imperial War Museum, London. MacClancy, Jeremy. Personal interview. 10 September 2006. —— Email to the author. 15 September 2006. Mace, Patrick B. Dunkirk. Ts. 95/15/1. Imperial War Museum, London. Matthew, J.E. Ms. 86/3/1. Imperial War Museum, London. McKellar, G.S. Diary, August 1940. Ts. P233. Imperial War Museum, London. Nettle, S.A. Recollections of a Beachmaster. Ts. 87/42/1. Imperial War Museum, London. Radloff, Ann. The Memoir of Mrs. A. Radloff. Ms. 89/19/1. Imperial War Museum, London. —— Letter to the author. 2 October 2005. —— Personal interview. 11 November 2005. Rivers, W.H.R. Siegfried Sassoon’s Medical Case Sheet. Ts. P44 & Con Shelf. Imperial War Museum, London. Strother-Smith. Diary, May–June 1940. Ts. 97/1/1. Imperial War Museum, London. Swift, Graham. Letter to the author. 10 July 2004. —— Personal interview. 10 December 2004. Waters, Sarah. Email to the author. 10 March 2009. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬208 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Bibliography Wheeldon, Winifred. Letter to Alice Wheeldon, 21 December 1916. Ex. 24 Crim. 1/166, Public Records Office, London. Wright, S.L. In The Green Howards. Ts. 84/26/1. Imperial War Museum, London.

Published reviews and interviews Armitt, Lucie. ‘An Interview with Sarah Waters’, Feminist Review 85: 116–27. Bergonzi, Bernard. ‘Pat Barker’s Trilogy’, Gravesiana: The Journal of the Robert Graves Society 1:ii (December 1996): 221–33. Billen, Andrew. ‘Ian McEwan’, Sunday Herald, 30 September 2001: Review 3. Hopkin, James. ‘A War of Words’, Guardian, 14 July 2001: 10. Monteith, Sharon. ‘Pat Barker’, in Sharon Monteith, Jenny Newman and Pat Wheeler (eds), Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction through Interviews. London: Arnold, 2004: 19–35. Perry, Donna. ‘Pat Barker’ in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993: 43–61. Piette, Adam. ‘The Year of Writing Dangerously’, Evening Standard, 11 June 2001: 50. Quinn, Anthony. ‘What Sassoon Could Never Resolve’, Telegraph, 2 September 1995: A4. —— ‘Voice of the People’, Observer, 14 January 1996. Reusch, Wera. ‘Pat Barker’: www.lolapress.org/elec1/artenglish/reus_e.tm (accessed 20 January 2006). Sharp, Iain. ‘Swift’s Award Sends Critics Harking Back’, Sunday Star Times (Auckland), 22 December 1996. Shepherd, Ben. ‘Digging up the Past’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 March 1996: 12–13. Shilling, Jane. ‘Shaking Off the Ghosts of War’, Daily Telegraph, 24 October 1998: 05. Stevenson, Sheryl. ‘With the Listener in Mind: Talking about the Regeneration Trilogy with Pat Barker’ in Sharon Monteith et al., Critical Perspectives on Pat Barker: 175–86. Sutherland, John. ‘Life Was Clearly Too Interesting in the War: An Interview with Ian McEwan’ Guardian, 3 January 2002: http://books/guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000, 627239,00.html (accessed 20 October 2004). Urquhart, James. ‘To the Inferno and Back’, Financial Times, 23 June 2001: 4. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬209 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Bibliography Wells, Lynn. Allegories of Telling: Self-Referential Narrative in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Wesseling, Elisabeth. Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991. West, John L. (ed.). The Loss of ‘Lancastria’. Rossendale: Millgate, 1988. West, William. ‘Living With My Father’s Second World War Stories’, The Friends Quarterly 35:1 (2006): 7–10. Westman, Karin. Pat Barker’s Regeneration: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001. White, Hayden.‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’, in Angus Fletcher (ed.), The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976: 21–44. —— Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. —— The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Whitehead, Anne. ‘Open to Suggestion: Hypnosis and History in Pat Barker’s Regeneration’, Modern Fiction Studies 44:3 (1998): 674–94. —— Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Widdowson, Peter. The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and its Contexts, 1500 to 2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. —— Graham Swift. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006. Wilfred Owen Association. Wilfred Owen: Poet of the Trenches. Shrewsbury: Shrewsbury Circular Printers, 1995. Williams, Eric. The Wooden Horse. London: Collins, 1949. Wilson, Trevor. The Myriad Faces of War. Cambridge: Polity, 1986. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. —— Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. —— and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. ‘Headhunters and Victims of War: W. H. R. Rivers and Pat Barker’, Literature and Psychoanalysis: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis (Boston, July 1996), ed. Frederico Pereira. Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, 1997: 53–9. Wylly, H.C. History of the Manchester Regiment. Vol. 2. Manchester: Foster Groom and Co. Ltd., 1925. ‫ ﱢﱡ‬222 ‫ﱡﱣ‬

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Bibliography Wyndham, Joan. Love Lessons. London: Heinemann, 1985. —— Love is Blue. London: Heinemann, 1986. Yealland, Lewis R. Hysterical Disorders of Warfare. London: Macmillan, 1918. —— and E.D. Adrian, ‘The Treatment of Some Common War Neuroses’, The Lancet (1917), I: 867–72. Young, A. ‘Rivers and the War Neuroses’, Journal of the History of Behavioural Sciences 35 (1991): 359–78. Yuknavitch, Lidia. Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Late Twentieth-century Fiction. London: Routledge, 2001.

Films and television programmes The Cruel Sea. Dir. Charles Friend. Perf. Jack Hawkins, Donald Sinden, Denholm Elliott, John Stratton, Stanley Baker and Virginia McKenna. Ealing Studios, 1953. The Dam Busters. Dir. Michael Anderson. Perf. Richard Todd, Michael Redgrave, Derek Farr, Ursula Jeans and Basil Sydney. Associated British Studios, 1955. Odette. Dir. Herbert Wilcox. Perf. Anna Neagle, Trevor Howard, Marius Goring, Bernard Lee and Peter Ustinov. British Lion, 1950. Reach For The Sky. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Kenneth More, Muriel Pavlov, Lyndon Brook, Lee Patterson and Alexander Knox. J. Arthur Rank, 1956. Sink The Bismark. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Kenneth More, Dana Wynter, Carl Mohner, Karel Stepanek and Michael Hordern. Twentieth Century Fox, 1960. The Wooden Horse. Dir. Jack Lee. Perf. Leo Genn, David Tomlinson and Anthony Steel. British Lion, 1950.

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Index Note: Literary works can be found under authors’ names.

Abraham, Julie 196 Ackrell, P.G. 146–7 Allen, Hervey 201 Allen, Maud 104 Andrews, Lucilla A Hospital Summer 150, 160–4 No Time for Romance 150–67, 182 Auden, W.H. 84 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park 173n.38 Northanger Abbey 130 Aylesbury Prison 102 Barker, Pat 17–18 Another World 53, 54 Blow Your House Down 54 Liza’s England 54 Regeneration 57–98, use of historical research 57, passim, use of literary sources 90–8 Regeneration trilogy 55–111 The Eye in the Door 99–105, use of historical research 100–5 The Ghost Road 105–11, use of historical research 106–10, use of literary sources 108, 109–10 Bartlett, Neil 193, 195

Barwick, Herbert 148 Bell, Barbara 182, 185, 193 Bergonzi, Bernard 110 Blaxland, Gregory Destination Dunkirk 142, 143 Blunden, Edmund 56, 97–8 Bond, Brian 56 Bosnia 147 Bowen, Elizabeth 121, 134, 186–8 A World of Love 133, 136 ‘Mysterious Kor’ 187 The Death of the Heart 135 The Heat of the Day 121, 136–7, 187 Brief Encounter 193 Bryce, William 61–2 Burn, Michael 39 Butler, Judith 178 Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale 206n.8 Carroll, Rachel 194 Carstairs, Marion Barbara 183 Chenery, Susan 16 Childs, Peter 11 Connelly, Mark 24, 26 Connolly, Cyril 120, 121, 128, 130, 150, 168–70 Connor, Steven 12

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Index Crawfurd, C.H.P. 148 Darwin, Charles 87 Dawson, Graham 21 Deer, Patrick 186 Dickson, E. Jane 33, 34 Diski, Jenny 5, 20, 23 Dodgson, C.L./Lewis Carroll 86 Donoghue, Emma 18, 180 Duncker, Patricia 180 Dunne, William 17, 53 Elias, Amy J. 10, 29 Ellis, Havelock 194 empathic unsettlement 12, 29 empathy 6, 12, 74–5, 97, 127, 139, 201, 203 Epstein, Helen 4 Forster, E.M. 180, 190 Fowles, John 10 Fromm, Eric 186

Hemingway, Ernest 121, 140 Hibberd, Dominic 110 Hirsch, Marianne 4, 7–8, 52, 178–9, 205 see also postmemory historical source material 3–4, 11–14, 20 see also under individual texts historiographic metafiction 9–13, 29, 178, 180–1 Hocart, Arthur 107–8 Hoffman, Eva 4–5, 6–7 Holmes, Frederick 9–10 homosexuality 8, 11, 14, 18–20, 81–4, 90–1, 94, 95, 103–4, 178–98 Horne, Kenneth 22–3 Hutcheon, Linda 9–10, 180 Hynes, Samuel 28, 56 Imperial War Museum 27 Ingham, W.J. 145 Isherwood, Christopher 49n.88, 84 Ishiguro, Kazuo 32

Garland, Rodney The Heart in Exile 193, 195 Gilbert, Sandra 80 Graves, Robert 56, 63, 91, 94–5 Green, Henry 186–7 Greig, Andrew 1–3 Gunby, Ingrid 37, 38, 41

Jacob, Naomi 183 Keen, Suzanne 42 Key, Robert 39 Klein, Holger 28

Hall, Radclyffe 183, 193 ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself ’ 190–1, 194–5 The Well of Loneliness 195 Halperin, David M. 180 Hartley, L.P. The Go-Between 125, 132–4, 174n.46 Head, Henry 58, 60–2, 69, 75

LaCapra, Dominick 12 Lancastria, The 151, 152, 159 Landsberg, Alison 8 language adapted from source material 71–2, 74–6, 94–7, 137–40, 148–62, 166, 186, 188–9 Layard, John 80–5 Leech, S.H. 144, 148 Leed, Eric 77, 78, 79 Lehmann, Rosamond 121

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Index Dusty Answer 121, 126, 131 The Ballad and the Source 173n.42 Lerner, Lawrence 8 lesbianism see homosexuality Levinas, Emanuel 12 Long, J.J. 10 Longmate, Norman 27 Lord, Walter The Miracle of Dunkirk 141, 142–7 Löschnigg, Martin 57 Lowenthal, David 203–4 MacClancy, Jeremy 81–4 McEwan, Ian 6, 16–17 Atonement 117–72; 172; Part 1 120–40; Part 2 140–9; Part 3 149–68; historical sources used 142–9, 149–68, 169–71; literary models used 121, 123, 125–6, 130–7, 141–2, 173n.46, plagiarism row 150–1 The Innocent 142 ‘The Ploughman’s Lunch’ 16 McKellar, G.S. 148 Mallet-Joris, Françoise The Illusionist 194–5 Markievicz, Countess Constance 102 Marreco, Anne 102 Mass Observation 29, 49n.70 Melanesia 69, 106–8, 111 Mengham, Rod 186 Morrell, Ottoline 63 Motion, Andrew 6, 15, 17 Myers, Charles 87 Nichols, Robert 91, 94 Nussbaum, Martha 202–3 Osborne, John 25 Owen, Harold 93

Owen, Wilfred 56, 85–6, 98, 106, 109–11 Paris, Michael 20, 22 Pear, T.H. 68 Pemberton Billing, Noel 104–5 Pevsner, Nikolaus 122 postmemory 4, 7– 8, 11, 29, 52, 178–82, 198, 205–6 see also Hirsch, Marianne, secondgeneration postmemory, British context 4, 6–8, 10–11, 14–20, 29, 30–1, 41, 52–3, 143, 206 postmemory, LGBT context 19, 178–82 Priest, Christopher The Separation 206n.8 prosthetic memory 8, 179 Quinn, Anthony 33 Radloff, Ann 151–67, 182 Rawlinson, Mark 37, 38, 39 Reid, P.R. 38 Renault, Mary The Charioteer 193–4, 195–7 The Friendly Young Ladies 200n.32 Reusch, Wera 96 Rivers, Katharine 86–7, 108 Rivers, W.H.R. 55, 57–98 Conflict and Dream 60, 62–4, 67, 69, 77, 107 Instinct and the Unconscious 68, 81, 105, 106 ‘Repression of War Experience’ 65–6 sexuality 83–5 Rodd, Candice 33 Ross, Robert 93, 103–5 Rowbotham, Sheila 99, 100

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Index St Thomas’ Hospital see McEwan, Ian: Atonement, Part 3 Sassoon, Siegfried 55–6, 88–97, 108, 202 Sherston’s Progress 69, 85, 90, 96 Siegfried’s Journey 91, 92–3 Schama, Simon 205 Scott, Paul 121 second-generation 4–7, 10–11, 14, 29, 32, 52, 151, 178, 180, 203 see also postmemory Second World War represented in post-war culture 20–9 comic books 21 film 22 television 23 Sharpe, M.C. 102 Shepherd, Ben 78, 81 Shore, L.E. 69, 70 Showalter, Elaine 78, 79–80 Shute, Neville 188–9 Silverblatt, Michael 140 source material 3–4, 11–14, 18, 20, 201, 202–6 see also under individual texts Southern Cross Mission 69 Steiner, George 14 Stother Smith, N.C. 146 Suez 26 Sutherland, John 120, 165 Suyin, Han Winter Love 191–2, 195–6 Swift, Graham 15–16, 29–45, 185, 201 factual/historical research, 33–4, 43–4

Last Orders 32, 44 ‘Making an Elephant’ 16, 30, 31 Shuttlecock 32, 35–43 The Light of Day 32 Waterland 44 The 1940s House 26 Thorpe, Adam 24 Todman, Dan 204–5 von Krafft-Ebbing, Richard 194 Waters, Sarah 18–20 Tipping the Velvet 182 The Night Watch 178–98, historical sources used, 181–6; literary models used 181, 186–98 ‘Wolfskins and Togas: Maude Mare’s The Green Scamander and the Lesbian Historical Novel’ 179 Waugh, Evelyn Sword of Honour trilogy 123, 141–2 West, William 5 Wheeldon, Alice 99 Wheeldon, Winnie 101 White, Hayden 8–9, 13, 43 Whitehead, Anne 3 Widdowson, Peter 49n.88 Women’s Social and Political Union, The 103 Woolf, Virginia 121, 130 Wyndham, Joan 184 Yealland, Lewis 70–9, 96, 113n.47

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